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.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
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!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)