George Rebane
[From time to time it’s good to recall that a prime purpose of RR is to leave a record that in this day and age not all Americans were informationally deprived sheeple who daily swallowed the lies and propaganda of its Constitution defying and corrupt government peopled by the abysmally ignorant and terminally hubristic. I have been expecting that this administration would finally level out in its rate of issuing idiotic and destructive mandates on the country’s shrinking share of workers and producers. But this was not to be, as each day the carnage from collectivist governance continues to grow.]
Gender equality in all aspects has been the socialist mantra. Politically propitious thought in academe has taught that it should be accepted axiomatically that men and women were equal in all dimensions save some plumbing discrepancies and perhaps a smattering of hormonal differences. Otherwise, men and women were deemed to be the same in thought and deed, and in their response to pharmaceuticals. Well, now it turns out that nothing could be further from the truth. Disquieting data denying equality along every gender specific attribute has been emerging for years, but due to the mindset of our recently educated scientists, they never considered expanding their developments, tests, and experiments to examine gender specific differences; as I said, the unquestioned and politically correct axiom was that men and women were equal.
Focusing on the differential reactions to drugs, these became so noticeable and persistent that finally even’60 Minutes’ (9feb14 edition), that icon of national information, had to take notice and presented a segment populated with scientists and researchers newly surprised that ‘yes Susie, men and women are profoundly different in both mind and body.’ Emerging records show that this truth has been administratively denied by the FDA for many years, and now it appears that almost all of pharmacology needs to be re-examined just to determine the proper gender-specific dosage levels since, at best, the dosages were initially generated for males only.
But what CBS (understandably?) failed to connect in its coverage of this latest massive bureaucratic bungle is that even science has been corrupted by the leftwing politics in our universities. And pharmacology is just the tip of the iceberg since much of the research in academe is sponsored by the federal government, a sponsorship the attached strings of which are quickly discerned by those researchers wishing to keep the federal fiscal faucet flowing.
Historically these science travesties have many poster children, perhaps the most prominent being the disastrous seed genetics foisted on USSR agriculture by Stalin’s promotion of Trofim Lysenko’s 'science'. In our own country we have even bigger debacles now baked into our scientific infrastructure in programs that promote science-free environmental and educational theories and stratagems. The AGW hysteria is a prime example whose tendrils reach into state-level programs like California’s AB32. And the list goes on.
Climatologists and fellows of the American Meteorological Society Richard McNider and John Christy give a detailed response (here) to the recent ignorance spouted by SecState Kerry about the “settled question” of global warming that is not embraced by skeptics likened to knuckle-dragging believers in a flat earth. Kerry, of course, knows nothing of any science, and is a bought and paid for political trumpet for the moneyed interests (e.g. Al Gore) that are reaping millions from the government’s environmental diktats and mangled green industries markets.
Today, the US is viewed by all – allies and enemies – as having abrogated its global role as the white hat hegemon since WW2. Our foreign policy is in shambles, and its effect on our QoL is felt daily as our economy tries to regain its footing against the strongest socialistic headwinds it has experienced since FDR’s alphabet soup days (back then NRA stood for the National Recovery Administration which did anything but help the country recover from its government induced Depression). The details of our foreign policy retreat and its effects are summarized by Niall Ferguson and Peggy Noonan among many others (here and here).
And what today demands the attention and energies of Team Obama and the divisions of double dummies in its train? - why it’s income inequality and global warming. Anything to take attention away from the cover-ups, scandals, lies, and massive failures of Obamacare, Benghazi, DOJ Fast & Furious, IRS targeting, NLRB, FCC ‘surveys’, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, the ‘Asia pivot’, TPP, DHS, Al Qaeda and Taliban ascendancy, EPA, ethanol fiasco, energy independence, green industries growth, national debt, uncounted and unknown trillions of unfunded liabilities, America’s student rankings, failures of private sector unionization, our shrinking workforce, NSA and privacy, and economic growth (no doubt I missed a few).
Journalism's New Lows or just SOP?
George Rebane
The low cognitive reach of today’s journalists in intellect, knowledge base, and command of English is well recognized. But more and more of their deficits in reasoning and research are making themselves felt as they fall behind in their role as our society’s watchdogs. Three examples will illustrate.
Gov Christie’s ‘Bridgegate’ is not going away. In fact, it’s even hotter than ever now that a defense lawyer has claimed “evidence” which points to Christie knowing about the traffic jam while it was going on. Christie’s claim of ignorance on the matter clearly pointed to the notion that his office had nothing to do with causing the huge back-up. Everybody in NJ, most likely including the governor, knew about the jam because it was reported on every 6pm newscast, but that is not the issue. An attorney representing resigned Port Authority administrator David Wildstein was quoted, “Evidence exists tying Mr Christie to having knowledge of the lane closures during the period when the lanes were closed, contrary to what the governor stated publicly.” And that is the basis for the firestorm in the lamestream.
That quote is supposed to be the smoking gun that ties Christie to being complicit in ordering and/or condoning the lane closures while they were going on. But being complicit/condoning is the culpable, yet totally separate part from being aware, along with millions, that there was an ongoing traffic jam. Yet no sharp-witted journalist has been able to draw the distinction. The first hint of media recognition of these two orthogonal concepts finally came from Charles Krauthammer and an AP reporter on Fox News’ Special Report. And even then it did not solicit the obvious and required follow-on explanation and expansion from our Fourth Estate, even though Christie’s staff pointed out that the quote did NOTHING to connect a complicit Christie to the event. The loudly and oft broadcast faulty logic was supposed to carry the day against Christie’s 2016 candidacy, and so far it has. Even the hailed and usually meticulous WSJ has yet to pick up on the implied fallacy.
Let’s get back to income inequality (also here). The lamestream’s latest entry into our larder of common wisdom is that income inequality is caused by greedy capitalists taking away good paying jobs from the people and leaving behind scrabble for paychecks and growing unemployment, as they enrich their enterprises and themselves. No one in the reporter regiments has even thought to question the huge social changes that have taken place in the interval during which the cited inequalities came into being.
In a forthcoming and very technical report by Jeremy Greenwood et al the evidence is presented to buttress the plausible cause that income inequality arose because women got educated and entered the workforce to climb up corporate ladders and create households with two extremely high wage earners. While at the same time government came up with ever more regulations against job creation and rewards for not working, let alone being married to one who does work. Greenwood and co-authors show that removing the cause (many more smart women entering workforce) by eliminating these cultural changes would make the income inequality disappear.
If you think that the lamestream would send anyone except their crack corps of crickets to cover this little bombshell while Obama is playing the Elmer Gantry of Social Justice to national audiences, you’d be sadly mistaken, but hopefully not surprised. (more here)
Finally, we revisit that now notorious letter by KPCB co-founder Tom Perkins (reported here). In the interval, this letter has drawn the predictable outrage in the media from the usual crowd of light thinkers. The rage revolves around ‘How could Perkins compare today’s demonizing of the rich in America to Kristallnacht and the Holocaust?’
None of our contingent of progressive readers appear to have understood the difference between making a comparison between harbingers to potential atrocities, and equating a latter day harbinger to an historical atrocity. And the connection was made more egregious by using the Holocaust as the atrocity that has now been set aside only for Leftwing use in remembrances, admonitions, and accusations for currency in the formulation of public policies. All other uses would somehow “cheapen and coarsen by facile comparisons” the horrific and indelible dimension of those years in Nazi Germany. (I did agree that the real comparison should have been to Stalin’s genocide of the kulaks, or better, to Mao’s ultimate slaughter during the Cultural Revolution. Why go with second rate mass murders?) Again, no reporter has had the wits to point out the obvious chasm in the critics’ reasoning.
It sure looks like most journalists are standing right behind lawyers in their rush to join the world’s oldest profession.
Posted at 02:20 PM in Critical Thinking & Numeracy, Culture Comments, Current Affairs, We the iSheeple | Permalink | Comments (47)
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