Friday, April 22, 2011
Guest David Aaronovitch, author of "Voodoo Histories"
I had to look this up first because I wanted to know who the author was, since I missed his name in the intro.
He's rather interesting, and it would be very nice to silence all the people shrieking "conspiracy! conspiracy!" Yes, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Yes, he sure was a big fat nothing, and for this one big nothing to change history by killing John Kennedy is a bit appalling a thought, but it was the case. This half-wit, failure of a man wanted to impress the KGB so he could get a job with them and become important. That's all there was to it, period.
I do believe in a couple of conspiracies. I don't know whether Vince Foster committed suicide or not, but I do believe the evidence was tampered with and that that his office had evidence removed from it and probably destroyed. His briefcase was on tape being emptied, searched, and even turned upside down on two? occasions before the thirty-two separate pieces of the putative "suicide note" (with one piece missing, very conveniently the one containing his signature) fluttered out of it, which I believe is utterly impossible. The handwriting experts declared that note to be a rather sad forgery. What do I think really happened? I have no idea, but wherever he died, he left no blood or brain spatter in Ft. Marcy Park, and his hand had no powder residue on it.
A fuller version from the documents.
The other conspiracy theory is much more significant. It involves the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. The Soviet government and Armand Hammer and Hammer's little puppetboi doctor, Robert Gale, all conspired to vastly diminish the body count to one or two percent of the actual number. I have it on good authority from the real head of the oncology team, that the dead must have numbered in the four digits as was originally reported by ham radio operators on the scene the first night after the release happened. "Considering that I was doing transplants on truck drivers who had spent just an hour in the area and then driven straight back out again," he said, "the ham reports had to have been much closer to the actual number of dead than the offical number" which claims only 32 dead.
Our press has never questioned the official Soviet statemtent, never delved into the mystery, but our press was then (and still is) full of overgrown hippies who honestly LIKED the Soviet Union and never once suspected its officials of wishing to hide something like a huge body count.
My disclaimer: I am not generally a conspiracy adherent. Rather, I believe in little conspiracies, a couple of people destroying evidence shouldn't stretch your imagination too far. The Foster conspiracy wouldn't have involved more than three or four people, all of them political buddies with much to lose. Apparently someone wanted to protect the Clintons from too careful a scrutiny, of the few people involved, most of the involvement would have been over politics. The left wingers would have been highly motivated to keep silence.
As for the Chernobyl incident, I will say first that I am not a nuclear power opponent; far from it. In fact I pretty much agree with Prager when he says "I would volunteer to store nuclear waste in my back yard." I do believe the Soviet government was unbelievably shoddy in their health and safety practices (we have seen how they will dump toxic waste into rivers, for example) because they didn't care a bit about the safety of their citizens, nor or their workers, any more than they cared about the deaths of six to twelve million Ukrainians during the thirties. The safety measures on that power plant were inadequate and the plant was not kept in good repair. When people died, who cared? Certainly not America. Not enough to expose their shoddiness, anyway, but just enough to halt the construction of more nuclear plants in our own country and across the Third World as well. Very smart.
I'm hearing Aaronovitch list a couple of real conspiracies. Michael Medved believes there are NO conspiracies. Maybe he defines "conspiracy" differently than I do.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Prager: "You don't get lied to by the media, you get filtered news."
Well, yes, that's probably their favorite way to lie to you, by not telling you a big chunk of the news. Want an example? The Clinton Administration decided they could juggle the numbers of unemployed. They quit counting anyone who was still looking for a job after 18 months, later 2 years. The administration shifted its unemployment count from the inner cities, where unemployment was very high, to the suburbs, where it was relatively quite low. They phased in the new numbers over several months so that the unemployment rate would appear to decline. And lazy newspeople just went along with it. So sure, it's the media going along with democrats and presenting only the favorable side of most issues.
But Prager then added, "When the media quote a statistic like 'four million Americans are out of work,' I believe that statistic."
Well, maybe you should reconsider that, then, Prager. They told us, as you mentioned, that thirty thousand women a year DIE of anorexia, when the true number is "perhaps as many as five" given by the Department of Health. Not five thousand, just ... five. Or the other statistic they love to quote, that "women are still earning only seventy cents for every dollar that men earn." Which is only true when read with very narrow definitions. In all other senses, women are doing better than men. Deliberate misconception.
Further, the Old Stream Media will tell you all sorts of b.s., from "Bill Clinton has created 12 million jobs" (one of his campaign themes for 1996) to "Over a hundred murders in the football stadium in the aftermath of Katrina." Sometimes it's just neglect and laziness, but those are still false numbers and if you trust them, you're being fooled.
I'm sure any sentient American who has been reading the papers for more than six months can come up with dozens more examples.
But Prager then added, "When the media quote a statistic like 'four million Americans are out of work,' I believe that statistic."
Well, maybe you should reconsider that, then, Prager. They told us, as you mentioned, that thirty thousand women a year DIE of anorexia, when the true number is "perhaps as many as five" given by the Department of Health. Not five thousand, just ... five. Or the other statistic they love to quote, that "women are still earning only seventy cents for every dollar that men earn." Which is only true when read with very narrow definitions. In all other senses, women are doing better than men. Deliberate misconception.
Further, the Old Stream Media will tell you all sorts of b.s., from "Bill Clinton has created 12 million jobs" (one of his campaign themes for 1996) to "Over a hundred murders in the football stadium in the aftermath of Katrina." Sometimes it's just neglect and laziness, but those are still false numbers and if you trust them, you're being fooled.
I'm sure any sentient American who has been reading the papers for more than six months can come up with dozens more examples.
Why wasn't the war against Ho Chi Minh noble?
Because North Vietnam was communist. Anything anti-communist was bad here in Sixties America.
I haven't heard Prager use the term "anti anti-communist" in a couple of years. It's a very useful term, he should start using it again.
But as I started to say, anything anti-communist was bad here in Sixties America; the hippies redefined our language and took over the goods and bads and evils in our culture, so that eventually even a simple phrase was sufficient to eviscerate the argument, the position, the arguer, all in one two-word phrase. "You're so middle class" would shoot down everything the person had said, was then saying, and ever would say in the entire remainder of his existence. "Don't be so judgemental" would shut them up forever, at least in the presence of the judging anti-judger, who forever owned all arguments and all righteousness.
The judges of righteousness also dismissed capitalism forever as "evil" and "selfish". Discrimination, including discriminating against evil, was bad, though it was certainly okay to discriminate against conservatives and Republicans and against white men (and soon after, against white boys).
They used the same rhetoric to eliminate majority positions all across Western civilization. It became embarrassing to believe in God (Flying Spaghetti Monster or sky fairies) though it was okay to believe in Buddha, Vishnu, Khali, engrams, Allah, chakras, your horoscope, and all sorts of other stupidities. Patriotism was mocked, making money became filthy, opposing high taxes was "racism" (if you don't remember that, you shouldn't vote)--because they assumed in a most racist manner that the beneficiaries of the redistribution of wealth were all black.
I haven't heard Prager use the term "anti anti-communist" in a couple of years. It's a very useful term, he should start using it again.
But as I started to say, anything anti-communist was bad here in Sixties America; the hippies redefined our language and took over the goods and bads and evils in our culture, so that eventually even a simple phrase was sufficient to eviscerate the argument, the position, the arguer, all in one two-word phrase. "You're so middle class" would shoot down everything the person had said, was then saying, and ever would say in the entire remainder of his existence. "Don't be so judgemental" would shut them up forever, at least in the presence of the judging anti-judger, who forever owned all arguments and all righteousness.
The judges of righteousness also dismissed capitalism forever as "evil" and "selfish". Discrimination, including discriminating against evil, was bad, though it was certainly okay to discriminate against conservatives and Republicans and against white men (and soon after, against white boys).
They used the same rhetoric to eliminate majority positions all across Western civilization. It became embarrassing to believe in God (Flying Spaghetti Monster or sky fairies) though it was okay to believe in Buddha, Vishnu, Khali, engrams, Allah, chakras, your horoscope, and all sorts of other stupidities. Patriotism was mocked, making money became filthy, opposing high taxes was "racism" (if you don't remember that, you shouldn't vote)--because they assumed in a most racist manner that the beneficiaries of the redistribution of wealth were all black.
Prager to caller: "YOU called the HUGH HEWITT show?!?!"
Oh, shut up. I don't like you belittling other talk show hosts, even if you imagine that he's your friend. Yes, his audience is down; is this a lame attempt by you to drive it down further?
There ya go again, interrupting the caller and stealing the call.
Welp, I complain when Prager interrupts a caller, pounces in the call, and takes it away from them. It's especially bad when he only does it to gloat, "Oh! I know! I've been saying this for twenty years!"
Prager, we already know you're God's gift to intellectual life.
This particular caller was about to tell us when a certain situation (I can't even remember what the issue was because you pounced on it before she could finish her sentence) when a certain situation was especially acute. I wanted to hear her thought because it seemed to be some bad kind of thinking or behavior we have control over and which I could work on if I had that problem too.
You kept me from hearing it, thanks a lot.
Prager, we already know you're God's gift to intellectual life.
This particular caller was about to tell us when a certain situation (I can't even remember what the issue was because you pounced on it before she could finish her sentence) when a certain situation was especially acute. I wanted to hear her thought because it seemed to be some bad kind of thinking or behavior we have control over and which I could work on if I had that problem too.
You kept me from hearing it, thanks a lot.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Oh, the domestic bliss
I am watching "Footsteps in the Dark" on TCM.
This movie was made in 1941. The hero is a banker, therefore he's rich. He's Errol Flynn, in fact. He's sitting downstairs first thing in the morning, at the breakfast table, which is in the morning room and not in the dining room. The morning room is a nice, cheery, bright room, just perfect for sitting at the cloth-covered table and enjoying your morning paper before the wife and mother(-in-law?) arrive for their breakfast. He's wearing a suit.
Here come the ladies. The wife is beautifully dressed in a day dress with a sweater over it, and the mother is similarly dressed for her day. Flynn jumps up and holds the chair for his mother(-in-law?) and then seats his wife as well.
Life is beautiful.
Do I think this is view of living is unrealistic? No, not for their class (clearly upper middle). I think it's unrealistic for the rest of the country but they would have loved to have been thus blessed.
May it be so for me, some day.
This movie was made in 1941. The hero is a banker, therefore he's rich. He's Errol Flynn, in fact. He's sitting downstairs first thing in the morning, at the breakfast table, which is in the morning room and not in the dining room. The morning room is a nice, cheery, bright room, just perfect for sitting at the cloth-covered table and enjoying your morning paper before the wife and mother(-in-law?) arrive for their breakfast. He's wearing a suit.
Here come the ladies. The wife is beautifully dressed in a day dress with a sweater over it, and the mother is similarly dressed for her day. Flynn jumps up and holds the chair for his mother(-in-law?) and then seats his wife as well.
Life is beautiful.
Do I think this is view of living is unrealistic? No, not for their class (clearly upper middle). I think it's unrealistic for the rest of the country but they would have loved to have been thus blessed.
May it be so for me, some day.
Accidentally rich
Fairness, blessings, luck, birth, who knows what makes people rich? It couldn't be hard work. Or planning for your future. Or saving your money. Or investing in yourself. Or investing in an idea you had. Or doing extensive reading outside school. Or training any skill, especially if it takes study or practice. Those are all evil phrases.
I hate to tell you this, Dennis, but all of this is the watchword of the redneck community. There is very little "invest in yourself" or "get an education" or "save for the future" or ANYthing that would make a future for a family richer and better. The rednecks I know either dropped out of high school and made up for their lack of a degree with a GED, or they just shuffled their feet through high school, reading only Harry Potter or vampire stories to feed their minds. They know they're unemployable and are content to get minimum-wage menial jobs at Burger King of Walmart. They don't like the work and they don't care about the income so they quit (without notice) when they tire of the job, usually in just two to six months. They live in trailers provided by their parents on land owned by their parents, but at least they're not paying mortgages. They buy a six-year-old car from that lady they know from church, and then bitch for the rest of the vehicle's life that that rotten woman sold them a rotten car.
They used to vote in a solid block for Democrats, because of the promise of handouts. Most of them are still getting handouts anyway. But they switched to Republican based on conservative values. They hate the "teach a man to fish" message but underneath all their laziness and lack of worrying about their future, there is the knowledge that the republican life plan (get an education, start a business) has a better future possibility for them than the Democrat life plan (put out your hand and we'll put something very small in it). Even though the majority of them have no idea how to live that plan.
An aside quote: The Left love bumper stickers like "War is not the answer". Actually they like to say, "War is never the answer." This bumper sticker fully demonstrates the shallowness of Leftist thinking. Try asking one of them (as Prager frequently does), "So how should we have dealt with Adolf Hitler?"
They have no answer, but they will soon figure out something flippant and shallow, generally attacking the person who asked them that question. "You're on the oil companies' payroll" if nothing else comes to mind.
I hate to tell you this, Dennis, but all of this is the watchword of the redneck community. There is very little "invest in yourself" or "get an education" or "save for the future" or ANYthing that would make a future for a family richer and better. The rednecks I know either dropped out of high school and made up for their lack of a degree with a GED, or they just shuffled their feet through high school, reading only Harry Potter or vampire stories to feed their minds. They know they're unemployable and are content to get minimum-wage menial jobs at Burger King of Walmart. They don't like the work and they don't care about the income so they quit (without notice) when they tire of the job, usually in just two to six months. They live in trailers provided by their parents on land owned by their parents, but at least they're not paying mortgages. They buy a six-year-old car from that lady they know from church, and then bitch for the rest of the vehicle's life that that rotten woman sold them a rotten car.
They used to vote in a solid block for Democrats, because of the promise of handouts. Most of them are still getting handouts anyway. But they switched to Republican based on conservative values. They hate the "teach a man to fish" message but underneath all their laziness and lack of worrying about their future, there is the knowledge that the republican life plan (get an education, start a business) has a better future possibility for them than the Democrat life plan (put out your hand and we'll put something very small in it). Even though the majority of them have no idea how to live that plan.
An aside quote: The Left love bumper stickers like "War is not the answer". Actually they like to say, "War is never the answer." This bumper sticker fully demonstrates the shallowness of Leftist thinking. Try asking one of them (as Prager frequently does), "So how should we have dealt with Adolf Hitler?"
They have no answer, but they will soon figure out something flippant and shallow, generally attacking the person who asked them that question. "You're on the oil companies' payroll" if nothing else comes to mind.
"[Obama] wrote two autobiographies that earned him millions of dollars..."
I'm pretty sure Obama didn't write these. Wasn't there a statement from one of his friends, Chillsomething, Billsomething? that said Ayers had written the books. In fact, I was reading "Dreams" when I heard someone from somebody's radio audience assert that the style of "Dreams" was so radically different that Obama could not possibly have written both books.
Frankly, I don't see Obama as a writer. Or as an anything. His writing style is illiterate, and his handlers would never trust him with such a task.
Frankly, I don't see Obama as a writer. Or as an anything. His writing style is illiterate, and his handlers would never trust him with such a task.
"The Left honors graffiti-ers"
It was the Left who saw the graffitists as poor, oppressed, underprivileged KIDS just trying to express themselves in a way that "society" ("the Man", the oppressors) won't "allow" them to do. Then we romanticized their collective "free spirits" for breaking out of the bondage of "societal rules" * and demanded no punishment for their vandalism and soon we were demanding that our cities set aside legitimate places for the eyesores they liked to put on public places.
Never mind that most of what they spraypainted in plain sight on public walls was full of obscenities and was meant to set apart gang territories, thus giving a new rationale for even more crime. What mattered most was simply that the leftist had given the criminal what he wanted, and more societal chaos had resulted, which made the Leftist feel very good about himself as an "original thinker" and "free spirit".
*(I believe their apologists found high validation in thinking they had "recognized" nobility in their souls whereas society had only seen crime, vandalism, and evil before)
Never mind that most of what they spraypainted in plain sight on public walls was full of obscenities and was meant to set apart gang territories, thus giving a new rationale for even more crime. What mattered most was simply that the leftist had given the criminal what he wanted, and more societal chaos had resulted, which made the Leftist feel very good about himself as an "original thinker" and "free spirit".
*(I believe their apologists found high validation in thinking they had "recognized" nobility in their souls whereas society had only seen crime, vandalism, and evil before)
"Uh, how am I going to make money?"--It's a pretty damn noble thing, how am i going to make money.
"Manliness was, when I was growing up, supporting a family."
How can I argue with this? He's right. When we were growing up, manliness was supporting a family. By the time I got to college, at the great advanced age of 21, and found my way into the Computer Club at the great advanced age of 25, manliness had become focusing on yourself, not worrying about anyone but yourself, if it feels good do it, why should these two people who can't make each other happy any more stay in an unhappy marriage. A man who put other people before himself was a wuss, a giver, a weakling. The bible of righteous human rights included only one commandment: take care of Number One, because if you don't love yourself first, you can't love anyone else.
That's why capitalism is so horrible in post-modern America. Capitalism is all about human needs and wants (in that order) driving supply and demand. Horrible! And I don't understand how our hippies, who were ALL leftists, could make the demand to love yourself first, and on the other hand make the claim that loving one's own needs and wants was an evil thing. I suspect the only difference, that the former is an ideal and the latter is physical, material, based in the real world.
How can I argue with this? He's right. When we were growing up, manliness was supporting a family. By the time I got to college, at the great advanced age of 21, and found my way into the Computer Club at the great advanced age of 25, manliness had become focusing on yourself, not worrying about anyone but yourself, if it feels good do it, why should these two people who can't make each other happy any more stay in an unhappy marriage. A man who put other people before himself was a wuss, a giver, a weakling. The bible of righteous human rights included only one commandment: take care of Number One, because if you don't love yourself first, you can't love anyone else.
That's why capitalism is so horrible in post-modern America. Capitalism is all about human needs and wants (in that order) driving supply and demand. Horrible! And I don't understand how our hippies, who were ALL leftists, could make the demand to love yourself first, and on the other hand make the claim that loving one's own needs and wants was an evil thing. I suspect the only difference, that the former is an ideal and the latter is physical, material, based in the real world.
Guest: Allison Armstrong
I caught the last half of this show when it was live. I regretted missing it. Today I should have known she would be among his "best of" shows, and yet I still managed to miss the first half. She's a magnificent speaker. Both sexes should listen to what she says because she speaks truth to ignorance.
Among the ignorant I count every American woman who has ever listened to her feminist foremothers, and every American male who doesn't know that his wife has been heavily influenced by these harpies posing as women posing as men-without-penises. Man haters. Their battle cry: "We want to be like you but only after we destroy you and everything you are." That is why we have the war on masculinity.
Okay, I caught the repeat broadcast on KHNR.
Just the notes:
Issue one: The eighteen minutes. That's "a quickie" to the rest of us.
Men do this all the time, and women do not understand it at all.
(Well, I do.) I love having a quickie with the man I love, if there's a man to love. I was married 23 years to a piece of garbage who didn't want to get divorced but he still wanted to treat me like crap. He'd ignore me for months at a time, and then out of the blue want a quickie. That was horrible. Had he been affectionate and or attentive during those intervening weeks and months, I'd have been delighted to rush to the bedroom for some fun and some man-pleasing, but since his primary mode was humiliation and hatred and distancing himself from both me and the children, it felt far more abusive than anything else. Yes, I showed him often that I was "on his side". Unfortunately that merely served as a malicious opportunity to kick me and crap on me emotionally.
Problem: the man who is out for days at a time. Her tearful delivery: You don't call, you don't ask, you never want to know how I'm doing, you're not interested, you think I'm nothing, cry cry cry.
Prager's solution: Pick up the damn phone and call, once a day and ask how she is.
Armstrong's advice: Learn ahead of time what she wants to be asked about, even if that means asking her directly. Prager's cautionary: Isn't that like the "what do you want for your birthday" question, that is so often rebuffed with, "you should know without my telling you."
Armstrong: Women have diffuse awareness. We have this enormous data base of preferences. This is how we know what you put in your coffee. This is how we know whether it's a yogurt day or a banana day. Men don't do this. So when YOU don't know whether I like cream in my coffee, we begin with, "you don't love me." Meanwhile, you're focused on catching that deer for the dinner table.
Caller: How do you strengthen your marriage if you're resentful of your husband because he's too busy?
I missed the answer. Something about pride. I would also ask if it's about the power struggle. That's what everything was attributed to by my husband's counselor.
After I got to sit down and talk to that counselor, though, the counselor found herself again and again looking at my husband and asking him, "did you really do that???" After the usual pause, he would give a very unexpected, "she deserved it." Counselor's response, "But Steve, that's abusive!"
Nuff said.
Among the ignorant I count every American woman who has ever listened to her feminist foremothers, and every American male who doesn't know that his wife has been heavily influenced by these harpies posing as women posing as men-without-penises. Man haters. Their battle cry: "We want to be like you but only after we destroy you and everything you are." That is why we have the war on masculinity.
Okay, I caught the repeat broadcast on KHNR.
Just the notes:
Issue one: The eighteen minutes. That's "a quickie" to the rest of us.
Men do this all the time, and women do not understand it at all.
(Well, I do.) I love having a quickie with the man I love, if there's a man to love. I was married 23 years to a piece of garbage who didn't want to get divorced but he still wanted to treat me like crap. He'd ignore me for months at a time, and then out of the blue want a quickie. That was horrible. Had he been affectionate and or attentive during those intervening weeks and months, I'd have been delighted to rush to the bedroom for some fun and some man-pleasing, but since his primary mode was humiliation and hatred and distancing himself from both me and the children, it felt far more abusive than anything else. Yes, I showed him often that I was "on his side". Unfortunately that merely served as a malicious opportunity to kick me and crap on me emotionally.
Problem: the man who is out for days at a time. Her tearful delivery: You don't call, you don't ask, you never want to know how I'm doing, you're not interested, you think I'm nothing, cry cry cry.
Prager's solution: Pick up the damn phone and call, once a day and ask how she is.
Armstrong's advice: Learn ahead of time what she wants to be asked about, even if that means asking her directly. Prager's cautionary: Isn't that like the "what do you want for your birthday" question, that is so often rebuffed with, "you should know without my telling you."
Armstrong: Women have diffuse awareness. We have this enormous data base of preferences. This is how we know what you put in your coffee. This is how we know whether it's a yogurt day or a banana day. Men don't do this. So when YOU don't know whether I like cream in my coffee, we begin with, "you don't love me." Meanwhile, you're focused on catching that deer for the dinner table.
Caller: How do you strengthen your marriage if you're resentful of your husband because he's too busy?
I missed the answer. Something about pride. I would also ask if it's about the power struggle. That's what everything was attributed to by my husband's counselor.
After I got to sit down and talk to that counselor, though, the counselor found herself again and again looking at my husband and asking him, "did you really do that???" After the usual pause, he would give a very unexpected, "she deserved it." Counselor's response, "But Steve, that's abusive!"
Nuff said.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Ultimate Issues Hour. Book: In Defense of Faith, by David Brog
Prager: "This is a desert-island book."
"If you read this, I benefit. Yes, if you read this, the world becomes a better place, so I benefit."
This is on my wish list now.
"If you read this, I benefit. Yes, if you read this, the world becomes a better place, so I benefit."
This is on my wish list now.
Global Warming hysteria
Roy W. Spencer is the principal climate researcher at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.
Spencer: "Of the billions that the U.S. Government has poured into climate research, absolutely none has gone into studying the possibility that the warming we have observed over the last hundred years might be natural."
Here is Spencer's most recent book. If you've been stucked in by Al "The Debate is over!!!!" Gore and his ilk, I strongly suggest you read it:
And this one is just awesome:
AND you should go to your Netflix account and search for The Great Global Warming Swindle (or failing that, it's on YouTube) which was made in response to the shoddy science and outright lies contained in "An Inconvenient Truth". I cannot give you a link because whoever posts it, it gets taken down again on copyright violations.
Of course the planet is warming. We're coming out of a great Ice Age that ended less than ten thousand years ago. Earth's average temperature is higher than our average temperature today, and the standard temp is trying to make its way back up to where it belongs. And you want to spend trillions of dollars and sacrifice the standard of living worldwide so that we can keep the globe's temperature artificially low? Even if we could do it, you would be on the wrong side of the issue.
I hope you'll watch that movie all the way to the end. You'll see a mother, her baby on her back, stoking a crappy wood-burning fire to cook the family's dinner. And you'll look into the eyes of a small child who may or may not die from breathing problems from living in that crappy hut while breathing that crappy air. You'll see the country doctor whose village has been forced to go without electricity because their stupid solar panels aren't sufficient to run both the clinic refrigerator and anything else.
That's YOUR doing, you're a fat juicy comfortable overfed American and in spite of your teachers constantly bellyaching about "understanding other societies" you've never been exposed to anything outside your fat, happy society besides teenage sitcoms and funny cartoons. You're content with your life and if you bothered, you could heat ten fat, happy American houses with the solar panels you could afford, but because you know absolutely nothing about science, economics, social science, history, other societies, other ways of life, or anything else, you think it's just fine to make these unwashed, dirty little jungle dwellers live the live you would lead by choice. Only you don't realize you'd be putting all your little greenie energy savings on your nice, insulated airy little American home, instead of on the extremely un-nice, un-airy, uninsulated little third world hovel, and making life fiercely miserable for them. And all in the name of some phony feel-good mission to "save the world", which you actually are arrogant enough to believe you can do.
SHAME ON YOU
Me, I want to stop throwing millions and billions of dollars to crappy dictators who slaughter Hutus, Ethiopians, and anyone else they want to slaughter, and start sending soldiers with construction crews over there to build power plants, nuclear plants, hydroelectric plants, and anything else they need.
Spencer: "Of the billions that the U.S. Government has poured into climate research, absolutely none has gone into studying the possibility that the warming we have observed over the last hundred years might be natural."
Here is Spencer's most recent book. If you've been stucked in by Al "The Debate is over!!!!" Gore and his ilk, I strongly suggest you read it:
And this one is just awesome:
AND you should go to your Netflix account and search for The Great Global Warming Swindle (or failing that, it's on YouTube) which was made in response to the shoddy science and outright lies contained in "An Inconvenient Truth". I cannot give you a link because whoever posts it, it gets taken down again on copyright violations.
Of course the planet is warming. We're coming out of a great Ice Age that ended less than ten thousand years ago. Earth's average temperature is higher than our average temperature today, and the standard temp is trying to make its way back up to where it belongs. And you want to spend trillions of dollars and sacrifice the standard of living worldwide so that we can keep the globe's temperature artificially low? Even if we could do it, you would be on the wrong side of the issue.
I hope you'll watch that movie all the way to the end. You'll see a mother, her baby on her back, stoking a crappy wood-burning fire to cook the family's dinner. And you'll look into the eyes of a small child who may or may not die from breathing problems from living in that crappy hut while breathing that crappy air. You'll see the country doctor whose village has been forced to go without electricity because their stupid solar panels aren't sufficient to run both the clinic refrigerator and anything else.
That's YOUR doing, you're a fat juicy comfortable overfed American and in spite of your teachers constantly bellyaching about "understanding other societies" you've never been exposed to anything outside your fat, happy society besides teenage sitcoms and funny cartoons. You're content with your life and if you bothered, you could heat ten fat, happy American houses with the solar panels you could afford, but because you know absolutely nothing about science, economics, social science, history, other societies, other ways of life, or anything else, you think it's just fine to make these unwashed, dirty little jungle dwellers live the live you would lead by choice. Only you don't realize you'd be putting all your little greenie energy savings on your nice, insulated airy little American home, instead of on the extremely un-nice, un-airy, uninsulated little third world hovel, and making life fiercely miserable for them. And all in the name of some phony feel-good mission to "save the world", which you actually are arrogant enough to believe you can do.
SHAME ON YOU
Me, I want to stop throwing millions and billions of dollars to crappy dictators who slaughter Hutus, Ethiopians, and anyone else they want to slaughter, and start sending soldiers with construction crews over there to build power plants, nuclear plants, hydroelectric plants, and anything else they need.
Friday, April 15, 2011
"And they still say the death penalty isn't a deterrent"
Yes, well, it is just stunning what the Left will say. And that means they will say anything they damn well please, all they have to do is like what they're saying.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Well, my headphones have crashed
I knew it was going to happen sooner or later. My headphones have given out. I hope to get a replacement pair soon. Till then I can't hear Prager's show. Sorry.
"People don't send their kids to college to learn ..."
"...They send their kids to college to have a B.A." Or a B.S., of course.
Holding a bachelor's degree used to be meaningful. It is no longer and that's why holding that degree is also worth so little, and I'm saying "little" in practical terms, not in terms of income.
I entered UCLA at the age of 21 in 1974. As a lover of learning and an avid pursuer of knowledge, I was eagerly looking forward to any and all the classes I could take from such a huge place with fifty thousand students and a catalogue several hundred pages thick, full of classes.
At that university, I found students who were terribly dulled and jaded, just as those in my high school classes had been. Information was to be acquired only for the sake of passing the final exam. The classes meant nothing. Learning interfered with the events of real life, like partying and having fun. And the real goal of taking classes was to get training in a very narrow field, the one you had chosen as your major. Thus, whatever would make you useful as a chem lab tech, those were the only classes you wanted. Or engineering classes or librarian classes. Taking a foreign language was foolish, learning math if you were going to be an English teacher was such a waste of time. Who needed to know history? only the fools who took those useless classes, and on and on.
I took a class I thought would be really exciting, "The history of science." When I arrived in the lecture on the first day, I saw that almost every single student was an Asian male, and was to learn that just about every one of them was a computer major. There was no attempt to teach anything historic about the history of science; rather he wrote formulae on the board. This was a history class and satisfied the breadth requirements for "social sciences" but never did the prof try to tie in any history, thus guaranteeing that these poor ignorant students got NO information outside their majors.
It seemed that eighty percent of the school population was that way. "Just teach me what I have to know for my profession, and then I'm out of here." The liberal arts students were somewhat less restricted in their outlook, but only because they were interested in the liberal arts, which covers a larger range of subjects and fields.
Dorothy Sayers in 1948 delivered a monograph on this problem, titled "The Lost Tools of Learning?" in which she describes how students do not and will not understand how all knowledge is interconnected and why a chemistry major just might be interested in art, an idea which apparently in her day was just as lost as it was in my day, and indeed I believe it still is today, forty years later.
It has to do with critical thinking. But my generation did away with every vestige of respect that Americans had for critical thinking. We told our teachers we didn't want them to tell us what to think, but how to think. And yet our idea of "how to think" was mere leftist propaganda. We bashed American society and the American economic system. We bashed everything that the "old thinkers", like our parents or their parents, had ever believed. We "questioned authority", which invariably meant anything any authority had to say, we dismissed as evil before we ever bothered questioning it. We taught our children that learning history was stupid because it was "past" and "irrelevant to today". We encouraged each other to understand that rules were bad, breaking them was much smarter; that discipline was just a phantom of the old regime (that would be everything America respected that came before rock 'n roll) trying to keep everyone down.
Get Sayers' essay, I have been recommending it to friends for thirty years.
or this version which includes several of her essays:
Creed or Chaos? Including the Lost Tools of Learning
This book, a follow-up to Sayers's theme, has made a big hit among the classical-education advocates:
Holding a bachelor's degree used to be meaningful. It is no longer and that's why holding that degree is also worth so little, and I'm saying "little" in practical terms, not in terms of income.
I entered UCLA at the age of 21 in 1974. As a lover of learning and an avid pursuer of knowledge, I was eagerly looking forward to any and all the classes I could take from such a huge place with fifty thousand students and a catalogue several hundred pages thick, full of classes.
At that university, I found students who were terribly dulled and jaded, just as those in my high school classes had been. Information was to be acquired only for the sake of passing the final exam. The classes meant nothing. Learning interfered with the events of real life, like partying and having fun. And the real goal of taking classes was to get training in a very narrow field, the one you had chosen as your major. Thus, whatever would make you useful as a chem lab tech, those were the only classes you wanted. Or engineering classes or librarian classes. Taking a foreign language was foolish, learning math if you were going to be an English teacher was such a waste of time. Who needed to know history? only the fools who took those useless classes, and on and on.
I took a class I thought would be really exciting, "The history of science." When I arrived in the lecture on the first day, I saw that almost every single student was an Asian male, and was to learn that just about every one of them was a computer major. There was no attempt to teach anything historic about the history of science; rather he wrote formulae on the board. This was a history class and satisfied the breadth requirements for "social sciences" but never did the prof try to tie in any history, thus guaranteeing that these poor ignorant students got NO information outside their majors.
It seemed that eighty percent of the school population was that way. "Just teach me what I have to know for my profession, and then I'm out of here." The liberal arts students were somewhat less restricted in their outlook, but only because they were interested in the liberal arts, which covers a larger range of subjects and fields.
Dorothy Sayers in 1948 delivered a monograph on this problem, titled "The Lost Tools of Learning?" in which she describes how students do not and will not understand how all knowledge is interconnected and why a chemistry major just might be interested in art, an idea which apparently in her day was just as lost as it was in my day, and indeed I believe it still is today, forty years later.
It has to do with critical thinking. But my generation did away with every vestige of respect that Americans had for critical thinking. We told our teachers we didn't want them to tell us what to think, but how to think. And yet our idea of "how to think" was mere leftist propaganda. We bashed American society and the American economic system. We bashed everything that the "old thinkers", like our parents or their parents, had ever believed. We "questioned authority", which invariably meant anything any authority had to say, we dismissed as evil before we ever bothered questioning it. We taught our children that learning history was stupid because it was "past" and "irrelevant to today". We encouraged each other to understand that rules were bad, breaking them was much smarter; that discipline was just a phantom of the old regime (that would be everything America respected that came before rock 'n roll) trying to keep everyone down.
Get Sayers' essay, I have been recommending it to friends for thirty years.
or this version which includes several of her essays:
Creed or Chaos? Including the Lost Tools of Learning
This book, a follow-up to Sayers's theme, has made a big hit among the classical-education advocates:
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
"Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America"
I couldn't take notes from this interview but this guy knows what he's talking about. This book is now on my Amazon wish list.
"The Right has no desire to tell a woman what she can do with her body."
First off, both sides have equal guilt in this area. You can only consider it bad if you think NO ONE should tell anyone what to do with their body but in fact no one minds when we tell MEN what to do with their bodies, unless you belong to that fair sized fraction of people who think drugs should be legal.
At any rate, we want to tell both men and women not to stick drugs in their bodies. We restrict prescription drugs. We try to keep people from committing suicide. We tell people they can't sell their body parts. We try to ban them from collecting money for having sex. No one is allowed to sell his body into slavery.
So the claim that no one has any right to tell a woman what she can do with her own body is hogwash.
But Prager's assertion that the Right has no desire to tell a woman what she can do with her body is also not true. The distinction is that the Left also wants to tell her what to do with her body, but they don't demonize the things the Left want to impose, only what the Right want to impose.
Thus, the Leftist claim is only to want normative things, which aren't worth worrying about and aren't worth demonizing. Those are things from the Right. Thus it's possible, even easy, for the Left to claim that they don't want to tell a woman what she can and can't do with her body, but the Right *cuss mumble* sure do!
At any rate, we want to tell both men and women not to stick drugs in their bodies. We restrict prescription drugs. We try to keep people from committing suicide. We tell people they can't sell their body parts. We try to ban them from collecting money for having sex. No one is allowed to sell his body into slavery.
So the claim that no one has any right to tell a woman what she can do with her own body is hogwash.
But Prager's assertion that the Right has no desire to tell a woman what she can do with her body is also not true. The distinction is that the Left also wants to tell her what to do with her body, but they don't demonize the things the Left want to impose, only what the Right want to impose.
Thus, the Leftist claim is only to want normative things, which aren't worth worrying about and aren't worth demonizing. Those are things from the Right. Thus it's possible, even easy, for the Left to claim that they don't want to tell a woman what she can and can't do with her body, but the Right *cuss mumble* sure do!
"The Left is always angry"
They would dispute this. The Left doesn't know itself.
"The further (you mean 'farther') Left you go the more anger there is."
They thrive on being more ready to spot a problem than the more moderate people in this country, and more ready than anyone on the Right, who are so damn stupid they can't recognize a problem to save their souls. Thus, "Left is smart, smarter than centrists, way smarter than conservatives (who are all imbeciles, of course)."
It goes back to the heirarchy of goodness, on top of which all leftists live and from which all leftists draw their meaning.
"The further (you mean 'farther') Left you go the more anger there is."
They thrive on being more ready to spot a problem than the more moderate people in this country, and more ready than anyone on the Right, who are so damn stupid they can't recognize a problem to save their souls. Thus, "Left is smart, smarter than centrists, way smarter than conservatives (who are all imbeciles, of course)."
It goes back to the heirarchy of goodness, on top of which all leftists live and from which all leftists draw their meaning.
Monday, April 11, 2011
14,000 Votes uncounted
I'm listening to Charlie Sykes's podcast from Friday, 2011-04-08 (yymmdd, always!).
Apparently the leftist judge claimed a clear victory with only 206 votes' margin ahead of her opponent.
Then Kathy Nicholas, a competence-challenged voting official, realized that a clerical error had misreported the number of votes for the more conservative candidate. No "found ballots", no "uh oh, this voting machine had a short in it and the republican gets more votes", it was purely a number that had been written down and relayed incorrectly to the central voting committee.
Needless to say, the left has gone unhinged. Oh, by the way, the seven thousand vote gap in the other direction is now "too close to call." What is the matter with our left, that reality can change so quickly with them? It was not so when I was a liberal back in the Sixties. We were maybe a little nutty but in no way did we alter reality like that.
Want any other examples? Conservative talk radio hosts, back when Clinton was president, used to get a steady stream of callers (they didn't put all of them on air, of course, but it amounted to several a day) demanding that the host "Show respct to the office of the President. I don't care how you feel about Clinton himself, you dis him and you dis the office and you gotta stop that, now!"
They were, of course, seminar callers, or people who had heard other seminar callers and picked it up from them. The goal was to stifle all criticism of the democrat.
And then came G.W. Bush and the democrats who were so harshly demanding "respect for the office" totally vanished and left behind "well, he deserves it."
Totally gone was any idea that "respect for the office" meant anything. Totally gone was the underlying assumption that we're all better off when there's civil discourse instead of criticism.
Gag me with a spoon!
Addendum: Search for Wisconsin Kathy Nicholas election and read the hatred and the spitting and fuming and the calls for lynching and impeachment from places like HuffPo. Do you think these jackasses called for impeachments when Al Franken and his lawyers found four hundred new votes? (I always wondered how they assumed that the fourth count was more accurate than the first count. Answer: because they found more votes for a democrat.)
Apparently the leftist judge claimed a clear victory with only 206 votes' margin ahead of her opponent.
Then Kathy Nicholas, a competence-challenged voting official, realized that a clerical error had misreported the number of votes for the more conservative candidate. No "found ballots", no "uh oh, this voting machine had a short in it and the republican gets more votes", it was purely a number that had been written down and relayed incorrectly to the central voting committee.
Needless to say, the left has gone unhinged. Oh, by the way, the seven thousand vote gap in the other direction is now "too close to call." What is the matter with our left, that reality can change so quickly with them? It was not so when I was a liberal back in the Sixties. We were maybe a little nutty but in no way did we alter reality like that.
Want any other examples? Conservative talk radio hosts, back when Clinton was president, used to get a steady stream of callers (they didn't put all of them on air, of course, but it amounted to several a day) demanding that the host "Show respct to the office of the President. I don't care how you feel about Clinton himself, you dis him and you dis the office and you gotta stop that, now!"
They were, of course, seminar callers, or people who had heard other seminar callers and picked it up from them. The goal was to stifle all criticism of the democrat.
And then came G.W. Bush and the democrats who were so harshly demanding "respect for the office" totally vanished and left behind "well, he deserves it."
Totally gone was any idea that "respect for the office" meant anything. Totally gone was the underlying assumption that we're all better off when there's civil discourse instead of criticism.
Gag me with a spoon!
Addendum: Search for Wisconsin Kathy Nicholas election and read the hatred and the spitting and fuming and the calls for lynching and impeachment from places like HuffPo. Do you think these jackasses called for impeachments when Al Franken and his lawyers found four hundred new votes? (I always wondered how they assumed that the fourth count was more accurate than the first count. Answer: because they found more votes for a democrat.)
The only place to get clarity about America ...
...was in a foreign country that had experienced it.
Poles, Czechs, Cambodians, know about evil, they know what to avoid. They know that "America establishes bases on foreign soil" isn't the most horrific act on earth. France, Germany, England, Canada don't have a clue and that's why they can crap on us for our "evil" and ignore Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao.
And once they have that achievement under their belts, our own "college-educated", self-styled "intelligentsia" start digging in and label us evil. Sadly they carry a lot of weight, because we're so enamored of their certificates and degrees, and the unintelligent middle of this country latch onto "liberalism" to borrow status from the illuminated ones and thus climb the intellectual ladder.
Don't tell me I'm lying. I used to be one of them and I, too, borrowed status from the self-labeled "intelligent" position. "I'm smarter than you and my heart is better than yours: I'm a socialist." Credit by association. It's vacuous.
Poles, Czechs, Cambodians, know about evil, they know what to avoid. They know that "America establishes bases on foreign soil" isn't the most horrific act on earth. France, Germany, England, Canada don't have a clue and that's why they can crap on us for our "evil" and ignore Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao.
And once they have that achievement under their belts, our own "college-educated", self-styled "intelligentsia" start digging in and label us evil. Sadly they carry a lot of weight, because we're so enamored of their certificates and degrees, and the unintelligent middle of this country latch onto "liberalism" to borrow status from the illuminated ones and thus climb the intellectual ladder.
Don't tell me I'm lying. I used to be one of them and I, too, borrowed status from the self-labeled "intelligent" position. "I'm smarter than you and my heart is better than yours: I'm a socialist." Credit by association. It's vacuous.
Bruce Herschensohn
This is important enough to put at the top:
Bruce Herschensohn is no rabid conservative, he's just your everyday conservative. He has put together a book we all need to read, recalling what our then-leftwing Congress did, the part they played, in fluffing up our enemies and abandoning our friends.
Why would any foreign leader want to align with us, given our track record?
As Herschensohn says, "They wouldn't, they would fare much better and get more support by opposing us."
Bruce Herschensohn is no rabid conservative, he's just your everyday conservative. He has put together a book we all need to read, recalling what our then-leftwing Congress did, the part they played, in fluffing up our enemies and abandoning our friends.
Why would any foreign leader want to align with us, given our track record?
As Herschensohn says, "They wouldn't, they would fare much better and get more support by opposing us."
"My Opinion of Great Significance"
This is Prager's label for the opinion he is offering today. Calm down, he is saying it tongue in cheek, a slightly self-deprecating and slightly ironic statement.
You should be so humble.
Yes, yes, I know, he's not particularly humble in other things he's said. I get sick and tired, myself, of him bragging that he's probably one of eleven people in the nation who would be interested in this or that thing. Sorry, Prager, you're not such a rare bird. I admit that where I am now, there are no people within my acquaintance who are interested in things like that. But there are plenty of us anyway, I just don't happen to know any of them any more.
It's more to your shame that you don't, either. If your wife falls asleep when you start to tell her why and when peanuts sprout, that's your problem, and you must have married the wrong woman. But some of us really are interested in such matters and there are a helluvalot more than eleven of us.
Me, I find it fascinating that some of the people here in Kentucky STILL say "hit" when we would say "it", and that that's straight out of Middle English of approximately Chaucer's time. It amazes me that an accent could have survived so long and so far. I'm sure you're intrigued too. And there are a lot more than eleven of us.
So stop it. I know you're joking, the underestimation is deliberate for the sake of humor, but it's annoying.
You should be so humble.
Yes, yes, I know, he's not particularly humble in other things he's said. I get sick and tired, myself, of him bragging that he's probably one of eleven people in the nation who would be interested in this or that thing. Sorry, Prager, you're not such a rare bird. I admit that where I am now, there are no people within my acquaintance who are interested in things like that. But there are plenty of us anyway, I just don't happen to know any of them any more.
It's more to your shame that you don't, either. If your wife falls asleep when you start to tell her why and when peanuts sprout, that's your problem, and you must have married the wrong woman. But some of us really are interested in such matters and there are a helluvalot more than eleven of us.
Me, I find it fascinating that some of the people here in Kentucky STILL say "hit" when we would say "it", and that that's straight out of Middle English of approximately Chaucer's time. It amazes me that an accent could have survived so long and so far. I'm sure you're intrigued too. And there are a lot more than eleven of us.
So stop it. I know you're joking, the underestimation is deliberate for the sake of humor, but it's annoying.
Guest: Charlie Sykes of WTMJ
Charlie Sykes. I had never heard of him till today.
He has been with WTMJ Newsradio AM620 for almost 20 years. His show airs from 8:30 AM till 12:00 noon, Central time (9:30 AM to 1:00 PM Eastern, 6:30 AM to 10:00 AM Pacific).
There is also a podcast available on his page at WTMJ. Link to the podcast.
Sykes was on today to make the point: It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Supreme Court election in Wisconsin last week, yet it slid past the Old Stream Media* with barely a whisper.
(*My term, I cannot refer to them as the Mainstream Media because that would be a lie.)
He has been with WTMJ Newsradio AM620 for almost 20 years. His show airs from 8:30 AM till 12:00 noon, Central time (9:30 AM to 1:00 PM Eastern, 6:30 AM to 10:00 AM Pacific).
There is also a podcast available on his page at WTMJ. Link to the podcast.
Sykes was on today to make the point: It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Supreme Court election in Wisconsin last week, yet it slid past the Old Stream Media* with barely a whisper.
(*My term, I cannot refer to them as the Mainstream Media because that would be a lie.)
Friday, April 8, 2011
Caller: "Why do you object to abortion?"
The guy seemed utterly without a clue, completely unable to understand why the hell anyone would think the fetus was worth anything or had any value or ought to get any consideration when the mother had decided against it.
To caller: "Your son started to live with his best friend's mother???"
I'm wondering which has shocked you more, the fact that she was related to his best friend (and not as a sister) or the fact that she was undoubtedly a generation older than he was.
I agree, the close-family-and-not-a-sister relationship is somewhat weird. That would leave daughter, mother, or maybe grandmother. All of those are weird.
But I think you're just as weirded out because she's twenty to thirty years his senior. At least it struck me that way from listening to the mother's voice.
I have a friend who is now in her sixties. For the thirty years I've known her, she has consistently dated men in their twenties. I don't see anything wrong with that, I'm sorry you'll all faint over this. She's highly intelligent, well connected, she has a little money, and if any man wanted to benefit from having a mentor with connections and mature wisdom, they would have a tough time finding a better one than my friend. Trust me, if that son were a daughter aged 25 and the older partner were a man aged 52, there might be a few arched eyebrows but no one would be sobbing constantly like that dumb mother.
I agree, the close-family-and-not-a-sister relationship is somewhat weird. That would leave daughter, mother, or maybe grandmother. All of those are weird.
But I think you're just as weirded out because she's twenty to thirty years his senior. At least it struck me that way from listening to the mother's voice.
I have a friend who is now in her sixties. For the thirty years I've known her, she has consistently dated men in their twenties. I don't see anything wrong with that, I'm sorry you'll all faint over this. She's highly intelligent, well connected, she has a little money, and if any man wanted to benefit from having a mentor with connections and mature wisdom, they would have a tough time finding a better one than my friend. Trust me, if that son were a daughter aged 25 and the older partner were a man aged 52, there might be a few arched eyebrows but no one would be sobbing constantly like that dumb mother.
"The Hebrew Bible has absolutely no suggestion of female inferiority"
That depends on your definition of superiority.
Women are not allowed to be priests. That perfectly fits the definition of "female inferiority" as delivered by Sixties feminists. Nuff said.
Women are not allowed to be priests. That perfectly fits the definition of "female inferiority" as delivered by Sixties feminists. Nuff said.
"Differ"
Differ, differ, differ,
Prager, we DISAGREE. DISAGREE, DISAGREE, DISAGREE!!! Differing is something you do and it tends to be out of your control. It is not having a well-reasoned conclusion that contradicts someone else's well-reasoned conclusion. JUST STOP IT.
Prager, we DISAGREE. DISAGREE, DISAGREE, DISAGREE!!! Differing is something you do and it tends to be out of your control. It is not having a well-reasoned conclusion that contradicts someone else's well-reasoned conclusion. JUST STOP IT.
"Do you realise what our culture has become?"
I certainly do.
I was born in the Fifties, which generally means I was a product of the Sixties. But I got my cultural education from TV reruns, which I watched avidly as late as the Seventies. That means I Love Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet, Burns and Allen, Mr. Ed, Green Acres, Leave it to Beaver, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, My Favorite Martian, December Bride, Roy Rogers, Sugarfoot, Maverick, Bat Masterson, Have Gun Will Travel, the Lone Ranger, Zorro, Fury, Lassie, Captain Kangaroo, Romper Room, Dragnet, the Untouchables, Perry Mason, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
People said witty things in comedies back then. Today they just say stupid or insulting things. And they say them often. Fathers really did know best and no one portrayed them as idiots. Except for Ozzie, who was somewhat of a bumbler.
Neighbors helped one another. Husbands and wives respected each other and they didn't think cheating was a really hawt idea. Most children respected their parents and mostly did what they were told. There was no cultural push to try to get away with as much as you could. Families ate together. Stay-at-home moms had a job: take care of my family, raise my kids to be good people, make my husband happy. Husbands tried to be good fathers, make their wives happy, and hold honest work to support the family.
Children played in the front yard without the terror that at any moment a total stranger would drive up, drag them into the car, and take them off to torture and death. They knew that if they broke a window with the baseball, they would have to pay for it. Come evenings, America sat in their living rooms in peace and security and didn't take cover when a car backfired. You could go for a walk without the terror of being mugged.
People followed the rules of good behavior. Most people donated time to their church or the Boy Scouts and besides being the right thing to do, it was honored as a good thing.
Then along came my generation. Baby Boomers. Smarter than any other collection of human beings that had ever existed in the history of the universe. Comprehending great profundities and thinking deep thoughts like no philosophers had ever thought before. They hit the colleges in 1964, full of their own importance and, like a plague of locusts, ready to destroy anything in their path. Tune in, turn on, drop out. If it feels good, do it. You can't love anyone else unless you love yourself first. Question authority. The Man is out to get you. That's so typically middle-class of you. Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. Have you seen the little piggies in their starched-white shirts. Tear down the walls.
When they said "the walls" they were thinking of the walls of "the empire", the American government that was oppressing them and limiting their freedoms so awfully. But though most of them didn't say so, they were also thinking of any rules of good conduct that hemmed them in and limited their hedonistic behavior. Make love not war. Have as many sexual partners as possible; sex has nothing to do with bonding or mating or reproduction. To hell with the consequences of your actions, there is no tomorrow because *whimper* we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust.
One of the favorite adages of the age was, "There is no such thing as truth." Every fact was now to be called an opinion. What's true for you isn't true for me.
"What if you lived before Columbus, when you'd be burnt at the stake for believing anything but 'the world is flat'. Were you wrong when you said the world was round? Should you be burnt at the stake for saying it?"
"You think it's wrong to steal from JCPenney, but I think it's just fine because they're oppressing me and you and especially black people because they exploit us for our money and take what we have and they don't give anything back." And what's good for you isn't what's good for me.
We destroyed the idea of American society. First we denied there was such a thing, then we labeled it evil. We did away with the rules of decent behavior and with the notion that any individual owed anything to anyone else. Everyone should look after Number One always. Unless that individual owned a company, of course. And in a society where there was now no such thing as good and evil, there were many, many things we labeled "evil", because all our banning of judgements and standards only meant that conservatives weren't allowed to judge while we liberals would re-label the entire world. What was bad in the past is now good. What was good became first ridiculous, then contemptible, and is now evil. Part of a lengthy but obvious process of ruining society.
I don't think the kids who played a part in this had a clue what they were doing. They just thought they were being more clever than anyone before them had been. They were of course the first generation ever to question the existence of Jesus, ever to doubt that racism was a good thing, ever to challenge the rules of the society around them, ever to think about the meaning of life, ever to wonder what was the purpose of life, the first generation ever to understand the profundity of Catcher in the Rye, the first generation ever to understand how to enjoy life, ever to eat healthy foods, ever to think there was deep meaning to existence.
This also meant that their thoughts and judgements were not to be challenged. The rules of logic and reason did not apply; only the relativism of sentiment was to be used. And of course, since their sentiment was nobler than your sentiment, that meant you were wrong from the outset, before you even offered your challenge. But notice all the language I'm using--better, worse, judgement, noble, evil. These are the same distinctions our Sixties liberals were in the habit of making, and 90% of them have yet to realize the problem with their language.
"Thou shalt not make judgements" is in itself a judgement that judgement-making is bad, that the speaker has the right to make such a rule and expects you to agree to behave by it, that there is in fact such a thing as a right, and that this right has been established by the speaker, and that there is also such a thing as good and bad. The speaker is in a twenty-car pile-up and should bail out of thise mess, but has never ever seen the contradiction.
Try this on a Sixties liberal. He says, "There is no such thing as truth." You immediately respond with, "Is that true?"
Silence in the room for a second. He cannot say "yes, it's true" because he would be making your point. He is left with "it is not true" but he doesn't LIKE that sentence so he dodges into another universe. Either it's true for me and not for you or it doesn't mean anything in this universe or maybe since all assertions are only opinions then it's okay for one opiner to believe it and no one else is forced to and blah blah. Quite simply, in anyone's thinking, if they're practiced at thinking clearly, the sentence refutes itself and must be abandoned because you can't live by a self-referentially incoherent law.
I remember once when I was listening to Stand To Reason (str.org), which I strongly recommend to everyone who has a computer as it is broadcast over the internet (and over the radio if you're anywhere near Catalina, CA) Sunday afternoons. Greg Koukl, the host and one of the best-spoken clear thinkers in the U.S., took a call from a woman listener whom I'll call Donna. Donna opened with, "You shouldn't make judgements." Koukl came back with, "So making judgements is wrong?" Poor Donna, she should have curled up into a ball right there, apologizing profusely to Koukl, and dumped her stupid philosophy. She didn't. She couldn't, in fact, because she had lived by this stupidity for thirty years. "Of course," she replied, and went on to tell us how bad judgemental people were making the world. Koukl waited for her to take a breath, and then asked, "So why are you judging me?" Donna now did what all these fuzzy thinkers do, she replied according not to what she thought but by what feeling made her feel good. "I'm not judging you." There it was! Good people don't judge, therefore Donna wasn't judging! Koukl went on to explain how she had made some standards, lined him up against those standards, and decided that he had failed.
But believing something that is self-referentially incoherent poses no problems for liberals.
I was born in the Fifties, which generally means I was a product of the Sixties. But I got my cultural education from TV reruns, which I watched avidly as late as the Seventies. That means I Love Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet, Burns and Allen, Mr. Ed, Green Acres, Leave it to Beaver, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, My Favorite Martian, December Bride, Roy Rogers, Sugarfoot, Maverick, Bat Masterson, Have Gun Will Travel, the Lone Ranger, Zorro, Fury, Lassie, Captain Kangaroo, Romper Room, Dragnet, the Untouchables, Perry Mason, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
People said witty things in comedies back then. Today they just say stupid or insulting things. And they say them often. Fathers really did know best and no one portrayed them as idiots. Except for Ozzie, who was somewhat of a bumbler.
Neighbors helped one another. Husbands and wives respected each other and they didn't think cheating was a really hawt idea. Most children respected their parents and mostly did what they were told. There was no cultural push to try to get away with as much as you could. Families ate together. Stay-at-home moms had a job: take care of my family, raise my kids to be good people, make my husband happy. Husbands tried to be good fathers, make their wives happy, and hold honest work to support the family.
Children played in the front yard without the terror that at any moment a total stranger would drive up, drag them into the car, and take them off to torture and death. They knew that if they broke a window with the baseball, they would have to pay for it. Come evenings, America sat in their living rooms in peace and security and didn't take cover when a car backfired. You could go for a walk without the terror of being mugged.
People followed the rules of good behavior. Most people donated time to their church or the Boy Scouts and besides being the right thing to do, it was honored as a good thing.
Then along came my generation. Baby Boomers. Smarter than any other collection of human beings that had ever existed in the history of the universe. Comprehending great profundities and thinking deep thoughts like no philosophers had ever thought before. They hit the colleges in 1964, full of their own importance and, like a plague of locusts, ready to destroy anything in their path. Tune in, turn on, drop out. If it feels good, do it. You can't love anyone else unless you love yourself first. Question authority. The Man is out to get you. That's so typically middle-class of you. Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. Have you seen the little piggies in their starched-white shirts. Tear down the walls.
When they said "the walls" they were thinking of the walls of "the empire", the American government that was oppressing them and limiting their freedoms so awfully. But though most of them didn't say so, they were also thinking of any rules of good conduct that hemmed them in and limited their hedonistic behavior. Make love not war. Have as many sexual partners as possible; sex has nothing to do with bonding or mating or reproduction. To hell with the consequences of your actions, there is no tomorrow because *whimper* we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust.
One of the favorite adages of the age was, "There is no such thing as truth." Every fact was now to be called an opinion. What's true for you isn't true for me.
"What if you lived before Columbus, when you'd be burnt at the stake for believing anything but 'the world is flat'. Were you wrong when you said the world was round? Should you be burnt at the stake for saying it?"
"You think it's wrong to steal from JCPenney, but I think it's just fine because they're oppressing me and you and especially black people because they exploit us for our money and take what we have and they don't give anything back." And what's good for you isn't what's good for me.
We destroyed the idea of American society. First we denied there was such a thing, then we labeled it evil. We did away with the rules of decent behavior and with the notion that any individual owed anything to anyone else. Everyone should look after Number One always. Unless that individual owned a company, of course. And in a society where there was now no such thing as good and evil, there were many, many things we labeled "evil", because all our banning of judgements and standards only meant that conservatives weren't allowed to judge while we liberals would re-label the entire world. What was bad in the past is now good. What was good became first ridiculous, then contemptible, and is now evil. Part of a lengthy but obvious process of ruining society.
I don't think the kids who played a part in this had a clue what they were doing. They just thought they were being more clever than anyone before them had been. They were of course the first generation ever to question the existence of Jesus, ever to doubt that racism was a good thing, ever to challenge the rules of the society around them, ever to think about the meaning of life, ever to wonder what was the purpose of life, the first generation ever to understand the profundity of Catcher in the Rye, the first generation ever to understand how to enjoy life, ever to eat healthy foods, ever to think there was deep meaning to existence.
This also meant that their thoughts and judgements were not to be challenged. The rules of logic and reason did not apply; only the relativism of sentiment was to be used. And of course, since their sentiment was nobler than your sentiment, that meant you were wrong from the outset, before you even offered your challenge. But notice all the language I'm using--better, worse, judgement, noble, evil. These are the same distinctions our Sixties liberals were in the habit of making, and 90% of them have yet to realize the problem with their language.
"Thou shalt not make judgements" is in itself a judgement that judgement-making is bad, that the speaker has the right to make such a rule and expects you to agree to behave by it, that there is in fact such a thing as a right, and that this right has been established by the speaker, and that there is also such a thing as good and bad. The speaker is in a twenty-car pile-up and should bail out of thise mess, but has never ever seen the contradiction.
Try this on a Sixties liberal. He says, "There is no such thing as truth." You immediately respond with, "Is that true?"
Silence in the room for a second. He cannot say "yes, it's true" because he would be making your point. He is left with "it is not true" but he doesn't LIKE that sentence so he dodges into another universe. Either it's true for me and not for you or it doesn't mean anything in this universe or maybe since all assertions are only opinions then it's okay for one opiner to believe it and no one else is forced to and blah blah. Quite simply, in anyone's thinking, if they're practiced at thinking clearly, the sentence refutes itself and must be abandoned because you can't live by a self-referentially incoherent law.
I remember once when I was listening to Stand To Reason (str.org), which I strongly recommend to everyone who has a computer as it is broadcast over the internet (and over the radio if you're anywhere near Catalina, CA) Sunday afternoons. Greg Koukl, the host and one of the best-spoken clear thinkers in the U.S., took a call from a woman listener whom I'll call Donna. Donna opened with, "You shouldn't make judgements." Koukl came back with, "So making judgements is wrong?" Poor Donna, she should have curled up into a ball right there, apologizing profusely to Koukl, and dumped her stupid philosophy. She didn't. She couldn't, in fact, because she had lived by this stupidity for thirty years. "Of course," she replied, and went on to tell us how bad judgemental people were making the world. Koukl waited for her to take a breath, and then asked, "So why are you judging me?" Donna now did what all these fuzzy thinkers do, she replied according not to what she thought but by what feeling made her feel good. "I'm not judging you." There it was! Good people don't judge, therefore Donna wasn't judging! Koukl went on to explain how she had made some standards, lined him up against those standards, and decided that he had failed.
But believing something that is self-referentially incoherent poses no problems for liberals.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
"Why is God faring so poorly in Europe and America?"
Very simple explanation: Because it's so easy to paint belief in God as "anti-intellectual" and "hysterical" and "emotional" and "irrational". Sneering at people who "believe" in God is the cheap and easy way to paint yourself as an "intellectual", which is essential to the leftie ego.
You know, I'm constantly in the presence of such people. Their favorite sneer line is, "I don't believe in anything I can't see."
I immediately come back with, "Of course you do. You believe in your great-grandmother, you believe in your husband when he goes around the corner, you believe in polar bears and penguins, you believe in Cleopatra and Abraham Lincoln. You believe in DNA and x-rays. You believe in anger, love, kindness, and charity. You believe in pain and you believe in loneliness. Tell me, how much does a mile of justice weigh?"
Any one of these statements disproves their silly assertion that they don't believe in anything they can't see. You'd think that in the interest of intellectual honesty they would feel obliged to alter their tag line to fit the truth, but what usually happens is they deny that I've disproved their assertion and start calling me names or try to attack me from some other direction. Being a liberal means never having to say you're sorry. Yes, I know there are conservative atheists, but you know this is largely a liberal/conservative issue; that's why you believe all conservatives are Bible-thumping jingoists who cling to their Bibles and their guns, and that to be liberal is to be intelligent, logical, and atheistic.
Prager gave four reasons why he thinks God is faring so poorly. I missed them. I will conclude by saying only that I think it all boils down to that one answer: "I'm an atheist because I'm so smart." Every time I have had a debate or even an argument on this issue, my wonderful reasoning has flummoxed the opposition and they always, ALWAYS fall back on that answer. "I'm too smart to believe in sky fairies," or "You worship some Flying Spaghetti Monster" or some variation thereupon.
Prager once again offered a statement that "sure, of course it's all based on faith" which just makes me angry. When you say "faith" in America, most people think of "blind faith", where you don't know much, you don't have any facts, and you just take a leap into the void and hope that crystal bridge materializes sooner or later beneath your feet. That is NOT faith.
Faith, like "love", is a verb. It's what you do. Greg Koukl defines it as "putting to work your confidence that what you know to be true, works." Thus, when you sit down on a stool, you're exercising your faith that the stool has been properly glued at one time in its life and continues to hold together well enough to support your weight. But it goes deeper even than that. When you marry your sweetie, you're demonstrating your faith in the institution of marriage. When you don't force her to wear a chastity belt, you're exercising your faith in her quality and character. If you've never talked to your wife and have never learnt anything about her character, this could be blind faith, but I hope you've gotten to learn something about who and what quality she is, and your failure to purchase that chastity belt really is an expression of your well-founded (NOT blind) faith in that character.
You know, I'm constantly in the presence of such people. Their favorite sneer line is, "I don't believe in anything I can't see."
I immediately come back with, "Of course you do. You believe in your great-grandmother, you believe in your husband when he goes around the corner, you believe in polar bears and penguins, you believe in Cleopatra and Abraham Lincoln. You believe in DNA and x-rays. You believe in anger, love, kindness, and charity. You believe in pain and you believe in loneliness. Tell me, how much does a mile of justice weigh?"
Any one of these statements disproves their silly assertion that they don't believe in anything they can't see. You'd think that in the interest of intellectual honesty they would feel obliged to alter their tag line to fit the truth, but what usually happens is they deny that I've disproved their assertion and start calling me names or try to attack me from some other direction. Being a liberal means never having to say you're sorry. Yes, I know there are conservative atheists, but you know this is largely a liberal/conservative issue; that's why you believe all conservatives are Bible-thumping jingoists who cling to their Bibles and their guns, and that to be liberal is to be intelligent, logical, and atheistic.
Prager gave four reasons why he thinks God is faring so poorly. I missed them. I will conclude by saying only that I think it all boils down to that one answer: "I'm an atheist because I'm so smart." Every time I have had a debate or even an argument on this issue, my wonderful reasoning has flummoxed the opposition and they always, ALWAYS fall back on that answer. "I'm too smart to believe in sky fairies," or "You worship some Flying Spaghetti Monster" or some variation thereupon.
Prager once again offered a statement that "sure, of course it's all based on faith" which just makes me angry. When you say "faith" in America, most people think of "blind faith", where you don't know much, you don't have any facts, and you just take a leap into the void and hope that crystal bridge materializes sooner or later beneath your feet. That is NOT faith.
Faith, like "love", is a verb. It's what you do. Greg Koukl defines it as "putting to work your confidence that what you know to be true, works." Thus, when you sit down on a stool, you're exercising your faith that the stool has been properly glued at one time in its life and continues to hold together well enough to support your weight. But it goes deeper even than that. When you marry your sweetie, you're demonstrating your faith in the institution of marriage. When you don't force her to wear a chastity belt, you're exercising your faith in her quality and character. If you've never talked to your wife and have never learnt anything about her character, this could be blind faith, but I hope you've gotten to learn something about who and what quality she is, and your failure to purchase that chastity belt really is an expression of your well-founded (NOT blind) faith in that character.
The conservative question is, "Does it work?"
And the liberal questions are, "Does it look good?"
That's why they don't ask, "And did it work?"
Eighteen thousand a year spent on students. That's in NYC and Washington, D.C. and other high-paying states. It hasn't helped. Even the smaller classroom expenditures in California caused zero improvement in student achievement.
Prager asks, "Why do we need the Department of Education?"
We don't. It hasn't done a damned thing for education. As a matter of fact, because the bureaucrats entrenched there have NO CLUE what a good education looks like. However, they do know how to take authority away from the people who are actually looking the children in the face. They do know how to think up stupid, silly, nonsensical "theories", impose them on the children, turn glassy-eyed when they don't work, and pronounce that what we need is more of this stuff.
We need to get rid of this horrible, expensive bureaucracy which has presided over a horrible, horrible decline in the quality of education in this country.
That's why they don't ask, "And did it work?"
Eighteen thousand a year spent on students. That's in NYC and Washington, D.C. and other high-paying states. It hasn't helped. Even the smaller classroom expenditures in California caused zero improvement in student achievement.
Prager asks, "Why do we need the Department of Education?"
We don't. It hasn't done a damned thing for education. As a matter of fact, because the bureaucrats entrenched there have NO CLUE what a good education looks like. However, they do know how to take authority away from the people who are actually looking the children in the face. They do know how to think up stupid, silly, nonsensical "theories", impose them on the children, turn glassy-eyed when they don't work, and pronounce that what we need is more of this stuff.
We need to get rid of this horrible, expensive bureaucracy which has presided over a horrible, horrible decline in the quality of education in this country.
As a result of Obamacare
As a result of Obamacare--not the cutbacks, but the flailing struggle to make Obamacare look as if it will save costs over the old health care "system"--AARP could likely receive about a billion dollars' handout from the US Government. This is because of their medigap insurance, whereby AARP covers what is not covered by Medicare, but since it is directly reimbursed to them because of the cutback, only probably out of another account and not out of Obamacare,
AARP loves nationalized health care. They lobby for it. Democrats, heavily funded by AARP, pass the bill with the accounting trick, the gap that will make it look as if the American taxpayer is saving money.
Millions of older Americans who have not bought plans to cover this gap have to buy insurance to cover the gap from AARP. AARP receives a huge amount of money paid directly to it by the people they advocate for.
AARP's Medigap insurance covers the old folk as they go to their doctors. Younger taxpayers reimburse the doctors. AARP rakes in huge amounts of taxpayer dollars.
Get it?
Start subscribing to AMAC.
AARP loves nationalized health care. They lobby for it. Democrats, heavily funded by AARP, pass the bill with the accounting trick, the gap that will make it look as if the American taxpayer is saving money.
Millions of older Americans who have not bought plans to cover this gap have to buy insurance to cover the gap from AARP. AARP receives a huge amount of money paid directly to it by the people they advocate for.
AARP's Medigap insurance covers the old folk as they go to their doctors. Younger taxpayers reimburse the doctors. AARP rakes in huge amounts of taxpayer dollars.
Get it?
Start subscribing to AMAC.
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