tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17116917112927897272024-03-04T21:15:26.207-08:00The "Real" Truth Project<b><i>
"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.</i></b>
<b>(Mark Twain)</b>.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger114125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-27877692299695324652016-12-01T08:45:00.002-08:002016-12-01T08:45:40.389-08:00"Fake News" peddlers have a huge asymmetrical advantageLet me suggest another sort of inquiry into the source of our fact-polarization. On the internet, promoters of obscure or semi-obscure misinformation have a huge asymmetrical advantage.<br /><br />Tom O'Bryan, a chiropractor and self-promoted as an "internationally recognized speaker specializing in Gluten Sensitivity & Celiac Disease" is quite likely <i>the main guy</i> responsible for the anti-gluten fad. People with celiac disease need to avoid gluten, but that disease affects about 1 in 100 people.<br /><br />Now, some experiments with Google. Thanks to the filter bubble different people will get different results from Google, unless you anonymize yourself, and "hit counts" are of very dubious value unless they are very small, so the following will give just a rough idea.<br /><br />If you Google{ "Tom O'Bryan" } Google claims 330,000 hits, and you will go through many pages without finding anything critical of the good doctor. I gave up trying. When I did Google{ "Tom O'Bryan" quack }, I got 222 nominal hits, including <a href="http://www.celiac.com/gluten-free/topic/90900-tom-obryan-cyrex-laboratories">http://www.celiac.com/gluten-free/topic/90900-tom-obryan-cyrex-laboratories</a>/ and <a href="http://glutendude.com/scams/i-hate-gluten-free-society/">http://glutendude.com/scams/i-hate-gluten-free-society/</a>. My conclusion: he is pretty much below the radar and nearly all that ends up on the web about him comes from him and his associates or believers. If Wikipedia had an article on O'Bryan, that would have come up on the 1st page but they don't.<br /><br />If you google "GMO", you will get a reasonable distribution of pro and con articles from the start. But when I google{ GML "pig intestines" } I get, among 22,800 nominal hits, about a 9:1 ratio of items tracing back to a probably very flawed study that <a href="http://www.naturalnews.com/">www.naturalnews.com</a> summarizes as "GMO feed turns pig stomachs to mush! Shocking photos ..."<br /><br />If you google{ <b>Obama wedding ring</b> } Google announces 3,600,000 hits and from the start it is about a 9:1 ratio of items claiming that something about Obama's wedding ring proves that he is a muslim. There is much variety, including "BARACK OBAMA'S GAY SHARIA WEDDING RING!!!". In the first few pages, about 1 in 10 items is a Snopes or factcheck or some such criticism of the theory.<br /><br />If you google{ <b>Obama muslim</b> } you get a non-overwhelming majority of items critical to the idea, at least for the first few pages.<br /><br />Finally, if you google{ <b>Obama religion</b> } you get mostly items asserting Obama is after all a Christian. In general, the closer you get to a representative or key phrase of a supporting argument for a theory with a big or moneyed set of promoters -- and moreover the theory is ignored by most people -- the more Google will seem to confirm that it is true.<br /><br />Searches that represent the headline claim will elicit more criticisms of fake facts, while searches that represent an obscure supporting claim will come up almost completely positive.<br /><br />People who get the anonymous right wing emails, or go to the 2nd or 3rd tier RW sites, which circulate the rumors of the day are treated to an endless parade of "last nails in the coffin of the AGW hoax", and when they look on the web they find almost nothing but support, heightened by the filter bubble effect since Google's interest is to show them things they like seeing.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-13800124987474154722015-09-04T21:36:00.000-07:002016-12-05T07:08:10.517-08:00What about me, Donald Trump?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMRjAkIn_AUW_v-cLWWTomSJo9xzdXJsA_SRbhXq9NM-YCmaPk2pFKgqGF5WdWFfZnZ1Y31UYchKYPPB4oqVkyDjazk9GwXztkBPt4qky244NciCw-XQSSVUGuMFGg2_SygptMROld7l7s/s1600/Cartoon3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMRjAkIn_AUW_v-cLWWTomSJo9xzdXJsA_SRbhXq9NM-YCmaPk2pFKgqGF5WdWFfZnZ1Y31UYchKYPPB4oqVkyDjazk9GwXztkBPt4qky244NciCw-XQSSVUGuMFGg2_SygptMROld7l7s/s400/Cartoon3.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
Long before he was a senator, Al Franken was a Saturday Night Live player whose special role was that of a cheerful clueless narcissist. His sketches were monologues; he would be posed behind a desk like a serious pundit, addressing the serious issue of the day. Then he would pause, and say<br />
<br />
<i>"Now I know you're wondering what does this mean for me, Al Franken?"</i><br />
<br />
That was the running joke, the monologue just kept coming back to "what does this mean for me, Al Franken?" - maybe you had to be there.<br />
<br />
He sort of kept drawing on that basic character throughout his career as a comic, including his first book <i>I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!: Daily Affirmations ....</i><br />
<br />
Then in 1999 he wrote <i>Why Not Me? The Inside Story of the Making and Unmaking of the Franken Presidency</i>. It seems he had a political passion, and a way to express it, and the rest, we might say, is history. He tried to influence opinion with the unsuccessful Air America radio network, then saw a chance to contest a GOP senate seat, and won it after a couple of months of vote recounts.<br />
<br />
<i><b>What About Me, Donald Trump?</b></i><br />
<br />
Donald Trump's efforts at making a difference in the political world have consisted most notably of several considerations of becoming president or governor of New York, and as for policy, his very vocal accusations that Barrack Obama was born outside the U.S., and that Obama's Columbia grades (which neither Trump nor the public had seen) weren't good enough to get him into Harvard Law School. He strongly backed Obama's 2009 rescue of the auto industry, and hinted that vaccines cause autism, and denigrated climate change concerns.<br />
<br />
That seems kind of all over the place. What about the key themes of his career thus far? Perhaps I'm missing something, but they seems to be<br />
<ol>
<li>making money</li>
<li>displaying his superiority to everyone else</li>
<li>and playing a major role in a media circus.</li>
</ol>
<br />
As a candidate, his positions seem opportunistic. Is he really stupid enough to be a birther, or was that just a way of getting attention (see item 3 above)? Now, as a presidential candidate, he gets plenty of attention by saying one inflammatory and extreme thing after another. Then for variety, he sometimes sits down with a journalist and sounds candid, as if he's thinking things out. This too is probably a pose.<br />
<br />
Why is he running? Maybe he woke up thinking "Why not me? I've done all these important powerful things, why not be president?"<br />
<br />
What does he think he would do with the presidency? Something audacious, no doubt, and most likely reckless, because that's the kind of guy he is.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-82321597469362667922015-02-13T19:28:00.001-08:002015-02-13T19:28:37.130-08:00Why are conservatives so enamored of Thomas Sowell?This is from what I wrote on Quora in response to the question.<br />
<br />
I have only read his later, awful, writing, but my impression is that his first 1 or 2 books were intelligent, and his 1980 Knowledge and Decisions very likely did a good job of popularizing Hayek's The Use of Information... or Von Mises Problem of Calculation in [socialist systems], and got him a lifetime position at the Hoover Institute. It must have been a relief. He got his Ph.D. in 1968 from U. Chicago under George Stiglitz, then (see wikipedia) he taught economics at Howard University, Rutgers, Cornell, Brandeis University, Amherst College. That's 12 years as a conservative black economist in the worst possible time in history to have done that.<br /><br />His book publishing history goes like 1968 - (year of Ph.d.) - 1971 no writing; probably having a terrible struggle.<br />1972 a technical economics book. 1975 Race and Economics, probably an intelligent moderately conservative analysis. 1980 Knowledge and Decisions, as I mentioned, which won him the extremely prestigious place at the Hoover Institute. From then to 2002 a book or two a year, including A Conflict of Visions -- very popular on the right today, which gives a totally out of date portrait of liberal (dreamers of human perfection) and conservative (pragmatists who understand human fallibility) philosophies because today the right is much more dominated by (their kind of) dogmatic utopians than the left (esp. look at Clinton and Obama - Clinton way too much blowing in the wind, and Obama pragmatic and intimidated by economists maybe up to now).<br />From 2002-present about 2 books a year and popular articles every week. I am sure Sowell was treated abominably by liberals esp. prior to his ascention to the Hoover Inst. But at some point I suspect somebody started throwing lots of money at him to write right-wing hack books. Read David Brock's Blinded by the Right: 1994 do hatchet job on Anita Hill; 1996 - offered nice advance to do hatchet job on Hillary Clinton, but halfway through becomes disillusioned with his current friends and writes a more nuanced book that fiinished him as a right wing hack writer.<br /><br />I have mostly sampled his post-2002 work except for the 1987 Conflict of Visions and the already fairly vile The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy. The late work as far as I can tell is pure pushing of right wing talking points from a bitter wounded liberal hater.<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-18756581972669652712015-01-21T19:17:00.001-08:002015-01-21T19:17:41.638-08:00What I get for being on National Review mailing listTitle=my guess as to why this came to my mailbox. I subscribe to keep up with their foolishness. Not only would Edmund Burke turn over in his grave, even Buckley would, I think.<br />
<br />
From: MikeWard@thebusinessemailer.com<br />To: hal@panix.com<br />Subject: Federal Reserve insider warns of 70% stock market crash (shocking footage)<br /><br />Dear Concerned American,<br /><br />I develop systems for the CIA that detect imminent threats to our national security from terrorists, rival nations, and internal weaknesses lurking inside<br />our economy.<br /><br />I'm stepping forward today because my team and I have uncovered a series of alarming signals that point to a fast-approaching, 70% stock market crash.<br /><br />And we have begun to prepare for an unstoppable $100 trillion American meltdown that will be unleashed in its aftermath.<br /><br />Unfortunately, our government has already enacted measures for this coming catastrophe as well. They call it "The Day After Plan."<br /><br />Because our leaders have kept you in the dark about this dangerous situation, I'm going to release all of the evidence my team has gathered.<br /><br />This way you can see it for yourself.<br /><br />(Warning: This footage is shocking) - http://tinyurl.com/financial-collapse-is-imminent<br /><br />I'm not asking you to believe me now. I realize what I'm talking about is very serious.<br /><br />Which is why I strongly suggest you take a few moments to view this evidence.<br /><br />And then ask yourself, "what if I'm right?"<br /><br />Click here to see everything...<br /><br />Stay Safe,<br /><br />Jim Rickards<br />Financial Threat and Asymmetric Warfare Advisor<br /><br />=====================================<br />Remove yourself from ProjectProphets - http://tinyurl.com/gobacktosleepameirca<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-2048965272002859462015-01-21T18:50:00.001-08:002015-09-04T22:03:17.818-07:00"The Paranoid Style in American Politics" never mentioned Lincoln, and Yet<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><b>A brief note:</b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><b>From the "House Divided" speech http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/house.htm</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span>
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><b>We can not absolutely <i>know</i> that all these exact adaptations are the
result of preconcert. But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different
portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places
and by different workmen -- Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance --
and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the
frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting,
and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted
to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few -- not omitting
even scaffolding -- or, if a single piece be lacking, we can see the place
in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in -- in <i>such</i>
a case, we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and
Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all
worked upon a common <i>plan</i> or <i>draft</i> drawn up before the first
lick was struck.</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><b> Stephen A. Douglas</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><b> Franklin Pierce</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><b> Roger Taine</b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><b> James Buchanan </b></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: arial; font-size: x-small;"><b>Oh, the anti-Lincoln Mises Institute Anarcho-Capitalists could have some fun with this </b></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-74943951544979330512015-01-09T08:09:00.002-08:002015-01-09T11:55:27.844-08:00Obama To Disband the Marine CorpsYou didn't know this, did you?<br />
<br />
On a flight home I sat in between two individuals, a Marine and
boxing promoter. The boxing guy was an older gentleman, and told
interesting stories, such as meeting Don King. Both men were very
pleasant and that helped make time pass on the flight. We were all
combat veterans and all Southerners, so we had a lot in common. Then
the discussion, inevitably, turned to politics.<br />
<br />
The older guy turned to the Marine and said "You know Obama is getting rid of the Marine Corps, right?"<br />
<br />
The Marine was puzzled. He hadn't heard this news. Neither had I.
"Yeah, Eric Holder just had a meeting with the Joint Chiefs. Obama is
going to disband them by Executive Order."<br />
<br />
Hooooo boy. We are going to do this now, are we? Putting aside for
the moment why the head of the DOJ would be involved with restructuring a
military department in the DoD, I said: "I don't think any president
can just disband a branch of service.<br />
<br />
quoting "SemDem" (Seminole Democrat) at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/01/1355083/-Obama-To-Disband-the-Marine-Corps<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>The article also questions statements about doughnuts being banned by the administration (based on a law passed over a year ago - so why are there still doughnuts?<br />
<br />
<hr />
Followed by the usual sort of "comments" debate:<br />
<br />
LIBERAL:<br />
...I don't even think it's brainwashing <br />
<br />
because first of all <b>they don't have much in the way of brains</b>, and second because I don't think washing would help much.<br />
...<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
ANTI-LIBERAL:<span class="cu"> </span><br />
<span class="cu"> Your condescension obscures your valid point</span><span class="crd ntb"></span>
<br />
<div class="ct">
</div>
<div class="ct">
<b>You need to let go of that</b>. Propoganda works because it works even if you're intelligent.</div>
</blockquote>
<div class="ct">
<blockquote>
In fact, it's quite likely that it's worked pretty well on you as
well - have you really considered all the advertising you're subjected
to - whether as billboards, paid placements, branded apparel, or "news"?<br />
<br />
It's truly staggering and pervasive. And it affects you whether you believe it or not.</blockquote>
</div>
Yeah, in this case, the anti-liberal came off more civil.<br />
<br />
<b>Yeah, I agree he needs to let go of that, the condescension, the calling people stupid.</b> (but if you tell me liberals are always like that anti-liberals, sometimes misnamed "conservatives", are unfailingly civil, I will give you a few counterexamples)<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-75458630946579368042015-01-08T20:13:00.004-08:002015-03-28T19:58:07.162-07:00Ways of Thinking About History, Take 2 (part 1?)<h3>
History and Systematization</h3>
I will always be enticed by the dream, of a grand system for discovering, from history, how to make a better world.<br />
<br />
At the same time, nearly all experience tells me this is a foolish, often dangerous, <b><i>chimera</i></b>.<br />
<br />
To
systematize, seems to be an irrepressible urge, evident in many people,
and a part of the design of human beings. This urge has given rise to
religions, cults, literary salons, 'think tanks', universities,
philosophical societies and their journals, those arrogant 'master
narratives', grand unified field theories, scientific and historical
conferences, and paranoid fantasies. <br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
This
drive to systematize resembles, in a way, the child-sized inflatable
"Bozo the Clown" punching bag, I had as a child. It had a round base
weighted with sand. If you tried to knock it over, it would always
spring right back with the same grin on its face, over and over again.<br />
<br />
The
drive to systematize will latch onto an object, like the goal of
understanding the human body and countering its diseases, and create one
foolish system after another, for hundreds, even thousands, of years,
until one day, maybe, it all starts coming together. That is the
upside - the payoff that has occasionally come from our system building
fixation.<br />
<br />
Thus, while it fails most of the time, it
occasionally produces stunning breakthroughs in our ability to
understand and control aspects of the world, for better or worse.
Medicine is a striking example. For thousands of years there has been
some sort of medical profession, and theories, books, and schools
devoted to the attempt to understand the human body and prevent and cure
disease. Yet only in the last century and a half have we come to
understand what was causing most disease (parasitic micro-organisms),
and how to counter them. With enormous energy, humankind kept
theorizing about, and treating, disease, and patients paid fortunes to
doctors, despite what today seems like their staggering inability to
actually do anything useful for disease sufferers, but now at last,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><i>... parents no longer see half their children die before adulthood.</i></b> <br />
<b><i>Going
beyond the example of medicine, the most recent breakthroughs in
knowledge, allow me to exchange notes with a researcher in England or
Australia.</i></b><br />
<b><i> Such breakthroughs have also lead to blitzkrieg, the twentieth century police state, and hydrogen bombs.</i></b></blockquote>
<b><i> </i></b> <br />
Then
there is the project of understanding human, particularly social,
behavior. Enlightenment philosophers and revolutionary era Americans
dreamed of a Christian or secular millennium of light. For some, the
key was a 'moral science', or calculus of human values. But we were not,
after all, on the brink of a golden age then. Rather, slavery was to
be an integral part of American life a long while yet, and the world at
large had the twentieth century ahead, of horrendous deeds, some of the
worst catastrophes brought about in the name of Marx's grand theory of
History.<br />
<br />
So I have something like a love-hate
relationship with this sort of intellectual ambition, or enthusiasm.
Sometimes I see people who appear totally in the grip of optimism about
the power of a certain system -- disciples of Marx, or Ayn Rand for
example, and they worry me deeply. Conversely, my extreme lack of any
clear belief about what is the best policy for U.S. government, or
system for the world to follow, leads some to believe that I'm
indifferent to political events.<br />
<br />
But I also love this
systematizing aspect of human nature as one might love a flawed family
member. Sometimes I turn it loose to soar and build castles in the air.
But I make a discipline of coming back, every time, to those things we
call 'facts', or what seems real and solid, or is connected to the real
and solid by small and careful steps of reason.<br />
<h2>
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="GetOverIt">Question</a>s to Be Gotten Over</h2>
<ul><i>The conviction persists, though history shows it to be a <b>hallucination</b>, that <b>all the questions that the human mind has asked</b> ... <b>can be answered</b> in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact, <b>intellectual progress usually occurs through shear abandonment of questions together with both alternatives they assume</b>, an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitalism and a change of urgent interest. <b>We do not solve them, we get over them</b></i>. <ul><ul>--John Dewey (quote lifted from Preface to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393317544/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0393317544&linkCode=as2&tag=talesoftheear-20&linkId=GL55HZL6YIQIJ46A">The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain</a><img alt="" border="0" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=talesoftheear-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0393317544" height="1" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" />
by Terrence Deacon, Some emphasis added).</ul>
</ul>
</ul>
In grade school we are taught (unless we refuse to be so taught)
to answer any question, however foolish, and never question the
question. It is one of the reasons I virtually stopped up my ears all
the time I was in secondary school. Questions like "What are the five
pillars of democracy?" got me incensed.<br />
<br />
Oh well, maybe
this is just an old obsession, but I am peculiarly apt (infuriatingly,
for the first years of our marriage, to my wife) to say <i><b>"I don't know"</b></i>, when my more precise thought is <i><b>"Sorry, that question doesn't seem to make sense to me (and I think the problem is fundamental, and rewording it won't help)."</b></i><br />
<br />
It <b><i>is</i></b>
true that I don't know, and I could be wrong about the nonsensicality
of the question, so there's something to be said for the more modest,
less confrontational version. To discern what is a valid question is
one of the most difficult tasks of all. But most people don't agree
with this, and/or would think that these statements I've been making are
some kind of double-talk or gibberish.<br />
<br />
Usually, if I
share with my conversation partner, the impression that a question seems
nonsensical (or contentless), I am unwillingly that much more embroiled
in the question that made no sense to me (unless I unilaterally break
off the conversation, which people are apt to resent). Most people,
unlike me, are sure they're making sense most of the time, and so would
be quite offended by such an assertion. But I am telling myself all the
time, in response to my <b><i>own</i></b> <i><b>thoughts</b></i>, "OK,
that's nonsense, just forget it." Now that my wife and I know each
other better, I more often express my true doubts about
taken-for-granted innocent sounding questions.<br />
<br />
The question, "What question <b><i>should</i></b>
I be asking?" is the one to go back to over and over - so I claim. Ah,
one might say, "But that is a normative question, and you have just
made a normative claim! A normative claim about a normative question --
in one sentence! What is your authority? What will be your standard
for that 'should'?"<br />
<br />
Why do I worry about getting such a
response? I think because people associate statements about the
difficulty of knowing anything with dogmatic cultural relativity, or an
obsession with debunking norms (the "village atheist" syndrome).<br />
<h3>
Some Questions to Question (and maybe get over):</h3>
<b>Q1) Who are the good guys (or who should we celebrate) in history?</b><br />
For
a while, founding fathers were treated as having had their due, while
"ordinary people" including slaves, Native Americans, women, artisans
and laborers were more and more "celebrated", along with that
abstraction, "diversity". Founding fathers and political history is
however making a comeback among academic historians.<br />
<br />
<b><u>Q2) Approaches to Causation:</u></b><br />
Suppose
we forget about history as a "celebration" of anything. Suppose the
historian comes, not to praise Caesar, nor to scold him, but to study
Caesar, his time, and the world he lived in, looking for chains of
causation -- inquiring why such a man came to exist, and how he effected
the world? Would that be a more useful pursuit?<br />
<br />
<b><u>Q3) Suppose we <span style="font-family: Arial Black;">did</span> understand causation in history/society. Where would it get us?</u></b><br />
<br />
In
the natural sciences, the discovery of consistent relations of
causation has greatly increased our control over nature. Now, in the
study of history, have we grasped any causal relations in such a way as
to increase our <b><i>control</i></b> over history? It seems doubtful. Are we likely <b><i>ever</i></b> to do so? <b><i>If we did, what would be the end result?</i></b> How about "control over our destinies". But if history would teach us how to <b><i>"cause"</i></b>
anything, it would teach us how to "cause" the sort of occurrences
history is made of -- events involving communities, societies,
institutions, and there's the rub.<br />
<br />
Here, the "control"
model, of a man at a "control panel", or in a "control center",
operating a big machine, breaks down or becomes problematic. Maybe
everyone can have his or her own computer or car to control, and some
few people can "control" a factory, or a whole "military establishment",
but we certainly can't <b>each</b> have our own world to "control". I
think this is the fallacy, as Habermas and others say (in effect, I
think), of trying to apply "instrumental reasoning" in a context in
which it doesn't work (or it is a nightmare if it does, to any large
extent, work). Some worry that western society is too stuck in a
worldview, paradigm, or "climate of opinion" (cf. Carl L. Becker) that
can see no other kind of rationality <b>but</b> instrumental reason.<br />
<br />
At
any rate, if we should ever "hit the jackpot" of historic and
sociological knowledge, and take huge steps in the direction of real
ability to "control", it should not feel like having a steering wheel in
ones hands, more likely like being on a steering <b><i>committee</i></b>.
More optimistically, our "use" of history to "control our destinies"
might feel more like a conversation (discourse?), a dance, or a jazz
improvisation; not that control that a technician exercises at a
"control panel".<br />
<br />
But history, as a study towards outfitting <i><b>individual</b></i>
wills to control, even if the desire is to mend the world -- such a
study is, I think, doomed to failure, nightmarish results, or at best,
limited usefulness.<br />
<br />
Outside of nightmare regimes, I
suspect the people who come closest to having an "applied social
science" -- being able to re-engineer the culture they run up against --
are military officers and sales motivators (for whatever that's
worth).<br />
<br />
Now if we could only have a universally agreed
upon goal, like "the greatest good for the greatest number", maybe we
could agree to seat that goal (in the incarnation of a leader,
answerable to all), at the great control panel of instrumental reason.
Maybe that would redeem instrumental reason, and allow us to view
history like "any other science". See any problem with that?<br />
<br />
Suppose, after all these caveats, we still try to understand something
about causation in history. Suppose we could apply such knowledge by, oh, say, a community decision about changing culture.<br />
<br />
<b> Q4) Who makes history? The great men or women? Or the masses?</b> Oh, <i><b>that</b></i> one.<br />
Once
all history was about how Great Men "made" history. Surely one
"leader" contributes more to the causation of historic events than one
"ordinary person". But just how overstated is this idea that leaders
"make" history? A study of Adolph Hitler surely fails to tell us "most"
of why the Holocaust occurred. Supposing we understood Hitler
"perfectly", that would still not explain how dozens, then hundreds,
then thousands, and ultimately millions of people boosted him to his
place of power, and then supported him in a career of unparalleled
destruction.<br />
<br />
<b>Q5) Can we predict the direction of history?</b> I think over the medium run, when things aren't terribly chaotic as they are something like half the time, <i><b>maybe</b></i>. <br />
Ultimately
though, I think, history is maddeningly contingent and infinitely
multicausal; that ridiculously small changes could have made things turn
out <b><i>very</i></b> differently; that, for example, if <i><b>Kaiser Wilhelm</b></i>'s
father had listened to the right doctors and lived long enough Wilhelm
off the throne for another decade or so, the 20th century could have
looked totally different.<br />
<br />
That is how it is with truly
complex and undesigned systems. It has been called the "butterfly
effect" -- that there could be an instance where a particular butterfly
flapping its wings in China effects whether or not a hurricane takes
place in Florida. If one accepts this, it may seem as if there can be
no coherence in history; that it is indeed "a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".<br />
<br />
<b>Q6)
Suppose our minds refuse to accept this extreme contingency. What sort
of theory of history might we construct, in which big turning points in
history always had suitably big causes?</b> <br />
<b><i> </i>One</b>
approach is to postulate God, or gods, that would govern the way things
turn out. People have favored this for most of history.<br />
<b>Another</b> is belief in some sort of <b>collective consciousness</b>, or "<b>spirit</b>"
or "destiny" of a given nation, or other sort of grouping, such as the
"proletarian class", or "believers in the true god", or those who "clear
their minds of superstitions and see things as they actually are", who
due to their sheer mass, their divine sanction, their "rightness", or
their unique understanding are <b><i>bound</i></b> to "overcome".Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-32451721933947107612015-01-07T17:09:00.000-08:002015-01-09T11:52:16.718-08:00What to Make of Judith Curry?Or Watt's Up With Judith Curry?<br />
<br />
This article is something of a "spin-off" of <a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2014/11/global-warming-and-controversy-what-is.html"><i>Global Warming and the Controversy: What is Scientific Consensus? Continental Drift as Example.</i></a><br />
<br />
A Common refrain of those who call global warming a hoax, is that mainstream climatologists are "<i><b>calling an opposing scientist a 'denier', ostracizing him/her and ridiculing them</b></i>".<br />
<br />
So what to make of Judith Curry, who while continuing to publish studies
supporting the general trend of global warming, has done more to impugn
the integrity of her colleagues, and encourage those who call them
liars than most actual climate change deniers <br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
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<tr><td><iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ss&ref=ss_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=talesoftheear-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=0980076374&asins=0980076374&linkId=OPQ32U7HIURKUR5W&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;">
</iframe>
</td>
<td><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">[Now regarding the word "denier", it has always seemed to mean someone who denies some position. It is used mostly by those who find the denial <i>wrong</i> in some serious way. "Deniers of God" has been used often, including by Gandhi, and Google books seems to turn up 116 books with the phrase. Holocaust denier has been the most common use for several decades; also HIV denier. You might consider that for those who sincerely believe global warming is apt to be catastrophic, causing millions of deaths, the consequences of denying it could be similar to those of denying HIV, only far worse.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;"> There is also a book, <i>The Deniers</i>, published in 2007 and revised in 2010 which embraces the word and gives it a positive valence, much as Quakers and Methodists decided at some point to stop resisting a label despite its derogatory origin.</span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;"> If the critics of "denier" really think the label is so awful, they could come up with something more accurate than "skeptic", except for those somewhere in the middle -- for those who call global warming a heinous hoax and those who support the idea liars]</span></b>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Curry is a professor and former department head at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Institute_of_Technology" title="Georgia Institute of Technology">Georgia Institute of Technology</a>., and is [co]author or [co]editor of 140 scientific papers. When "ClimateGate" was declared (and she continues to use that label), she became very critical of colleagues.<br />
<br />
Some notes from Wikipedia:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Curry also hosts a popular science blog in which she writes on topics
related to climate science and the science-policy interface.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-6"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry#cite_note-6"></a></sup></blockquote>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
While Judith Curry supports the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change" title="Scientific opinion on climate change">scientific opinion</a> on climate change,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Andrew_Revkin2_17-0"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry#cite_note-Andrew_Revkin2-17">[17]</a></sup> she has argued that <a class="mw-redirect" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatologists" title="Climatologists">climatologists</a> should be more accommodating of those skeptical of the scientific consensus on climate change.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Andrew_Revkin2_17-1"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry#cite_note-Andrew_Revkin2-17">[17]</a></sup>
Curry has stated she is troubled by what she calls the "tribal nature"
of parts of the climate-science community, and what she sees as
stonewalling over the release of data and its analysis for independent
review.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Andrew_Revkin2_17-2"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry#cite_note-Andrew_Revkin2-17">[17]</a></sup><br />
In February 2010 Curry published an essay called "On the Credibility of Climate Change, Towards Rebuilding Trust" on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Up_With_That%3F" title="Watts Up With That?">Watts Up With That?</a> and other blogs.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-18"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry#cite_note-18">[18]</a></sup> <sup> ...</sup></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Andrew_Revkin2_17-3"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry#cite_note-Andrew_Revkin2-17"></a></sup><br />
In September 2010, she created <i>Climate Etc.</i>, a blog related to
climate change and hosted by Curry. She wrote that "Climate Etc.
provides a forum for climate researchers, academics and technical
experts from other fields, citizen scientists, and the interested public
to engage in a discussion on topics related to climate science and the
science-policy interface."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Climate_Etc_8-4"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry#cite_note-Climate_Etc-8">[8]</a></sup>
She wrote: "I have a total of 12,000 citations of my publications
(since my first publication in 1983). Climate Etc. gets on average about
12,000 ‘hits’ per day, and 300-400 comments." She gets "zero academic
credit or incentives for my blogging and tweeting," but hopes that "
social media and the associated skill set [will become] better
recognized within the academic system."<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-19"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry#cite_note-19">[19]</a></sup></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Curry testified before the US House Subcommittee on Environment in 2013,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-20"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry#cite_note-20">[20]</a></sup> remarking on the many large uncertainties in forecasting future climate.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-21"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry#cite_note-21"></a></sup></blockquote>
I spent some time following the blog. Curry makes long posts about every other day, and it is typical for a post to get 500 comments. The quality of discussion is mostly very poor. Recently, a post commented on an Atlanta Journal-Constitution article "Ga. politicians cool to global warming" and this post got 758 comments. When I was watching it, the majority seemed like mutual admiration of most of the discussants and abuse slung at those who didn't agree with them. Part of a response to one of my comments was:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Whether Hitlery is shilling for the UN or the US does not make it right.
Without the gunboats nothing is going to happen until we do get rid of
the UN and put rational HONEST humans in their place. </blockquote>
<b>"Hitlery</b>", yeah, and I don't think that was so unique, although much of the rest was more turgid sarcasm than plain abuse, and it also seems to have been toned down lately by Curry excising some of the worst comments. There are also a dozen or so regulars espousing their own pseudo-scientific theories.<br />
<br />
Sometimes Curry's posts are reports on this or that meeting, convention or event; other times she expounds some possibly deep philosophy of science and/or sociology. The resulting discussions seemed like mediocre college bull sessions. I just have to wonder what a highly proficient scholar of climatology gets from writing so many long articles and attending to 500 or so often long comments. She definitely reads and gets involved in them. On the other hand, I can easily see the value to the "Global Warming is a Hoax" believers and those who leverage this apparent perfidy of a community of scientists and NGOs into proof that liberals and the MSM tell nothing but lies. To many readers it seems, like the reports from conservative think tanks that get briefly interpreted and spun on right wing blogs, like proof of their respectability, and again, of the perfidiousness of politicians, scientists, and international bodies that <i><b>claim</b></i> to have different opinions, though of course they're lying.<br />
<br />
While always among the "97%" who say AGW is real, Curry has been a very big thorn in the side of the AGW establishment, mostly by severely criticizing her colleagues as not doing things quite right, by saying "It's not as bad as all that" (followed by maybes and hedges), as in a recent WSJ opinion piece titled "The <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2014/10/09/my-op-ed-in-the-wall-street-journal-is-now-online/">Global Warming Statistical Meltdown</a>: (the WSJ version had this <i><b>long</b></i> subtitle:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/judith-curry-the-global-warming-statistical-meltdown-1412901060">Mounting evidence suggests that basic assumptions about climate change are mistaken: The numbers don't add up."</a>
</blockquote>
<br />
As with tabloid journalism, the screaming title is only moderately backed up by the article, but many more people will hear about the piece than will read it. It will appear prominently in every Liberal-hating blog in the land, and the take away will be "...Meltdown: Mounting evidence ... The numbers don't add up". <br />
<br />
Now one thing Curry illustrates is that while her colleagues are infuriated and call her terrible names like "denier" -- she remains a well placed professor, and keeps getting her papers published in major journals and makes presentations at conferences because these journals and conferences, believe it or not, evaluate papers based on their merit, not on whether the writer is a team player.<br />
<br />
She also heads a consulting company <a href="http://www.zoominfo.com/c/Climate-Forecast-Applications-Network-LLC/346602014">reported to make ($1-5 million yearly),</a> <a href="http://www.cfanclimate.com/omnicast.php">Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN)</a>
whose "innovative <a href="http://www.cfanclimate.com/CORP/DOWNLOADS/CFAN_OC.pdf">OmniCast</a>(TM) suite of weather and climate forecast
products for the energy sector incorporates the latest research in
weather and climate dynamics...". <a href="http://www.cfanclimate.com/CORP/DOWNLOADS/CFAN_OC.pdf">OmniCast(TM)</a> was<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"developed by CFAN in response
to the needs of a major client in the petroleum industry for extended
range, better-than-market weather forecasts to support energy trading,
sales and marketing."</i></blockquote>
Omnipage(TM) is accessible from the "Solutions" tab on all or nearly all pages of the web site; it is the only thing there for which there is a PDF brochure (very nicely designed), and the only CFAN trademark that I saw; it also appears to have been introduced about the same time the company was founded, all of which suggests it is not a small part of their business. The quote above seems designed to catch the eye of potential clients in the petroleum industry.<br />
<br />
Her ability to retain her academic position, publish papers and attend conferences just serves to illustrate why scientific institutions are needed if we want continued growth of knowledge, and if they have on occasion mistreated someone for their views, it is rare, in stark contrast to the situation on the anti-science side. I doubt that any FOX performer or Republican congress-person, or conservative/libertarian Think Tank employee would be cut a tenth as much slack as she has gotten. The FOX person would likely be fired as would the Think Tank employee, and the congress person would be "Primaried" out of existence. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-53989185590276841822014-12-08T21:11:00.000-08:002014-12-19T18:13:37.883-08:00When Someone says Islam *is* based on Tolerance, Charity, ... [the meaning of "is", part II]<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name">
</h3>
<div class="post-header">
</div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-7177700674853306063" itemprop="description articleBody">
If you haven't already, I recommend reading <a href="http://ontologicalcomedian.blogspot.com/2010/05/it-really-might-depend-on-what-meaning.html">Part 1</a>.<br />
<br />
OK, if someone says (as I'm sure some do) that "Islam <i><b>is</b></i>
based on Tolerance, Charity, ..." -- while on the other hand inciting
hatred and violence to Jews, or Americans, or Muslims of another
persuasion, then this is something we call <i><b>lying</b></i>, and that sort of thing happens a lot, as we all know.<br />
<br />
But there is plenty of evidence if you're willing to look, of ordinary
Muslims, in America, Britain, Pakistan, or Africa, whose lives are about
going to work and raising children who say and sincerely believe such a
statement.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
As I see it, they are to a great extent using the word <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">is</span></span> to make a declaration; they are not merely <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">describing</span></span> some objectively observable entity called Islam. Now as I said in <a href="http://ontologicalcomedian.blogspot.com/2010/05/it-really-might-depend-on-what-meaning.html">Part 1</a>, we human beings are habitually often muddled about whether something that comes out of our mouths is a <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">declaration</span> or a <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">claim of fact</span>. This "muddle" has been called by one ontological comedian "<i>not knowing your ass from a hole in the ground</i>",
because he claims nothing is more like the essence of who you are than
your ability to make a declaration, and know that you have made a
declaration, and <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">follow through as if what you just spoke was a declaration</span>.
In fact when most mortals say something say something like "I'm going
to lose 10 pounds in the next month", our mental attitude is somewhere
on the boundary between promise and mere prediction.<br />
<br />
So, even if the declarer says "No, this isn't me, this is just what Islam <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">is</span></span>",
I say they are almost surely in part holding it as a declaration. And,
unless they are among the liars and propagandists, they truly believe,
and may actively <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">support</span></span> the belief that the haters, the terrorists, and the Imams who act like a law unto themselves are <i><b>not</b></i> practitioners of <i><b>their</b></i> Islam.<br />
<br />
And we ought to be very glad they are out there talking and <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">living</span> that way.<br />
<br />
P.S., the Koran and other Islamic writings, like the Bible, contains
contradictions, and people resolve those contradictions in their own
creative ways, or the ways of their communities. I'm not familiar with
the most disturbing passages of the Koran, which I assume exist, but in
the Christian and Jewish Bible, Isaiah 13, we see God's declaration
that:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
3: I have commanded my holy ones; I have summoned my warriors to carry out my wrath...<br />
<br />
15: Whoever is captured will be thrust through; all who are caught will fall by the sword.<br />
<br />
16: Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives ravished.</blockquote>
Infants dashed to pieces before their eyes? wives ravished? Strong words.<br />
<br />
There is a whole lot of exhortation to slaughter wicked infidels in the
"Old Testament" as Christians call it, yet I don't personally know any
Christians or Jews who live by that sort of code <i><b>today</b></i>, though I'm sure they exist somewhere. Maybe <i><b>you</b></i> would say they are not <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">real</span></span> Christians or Jews. And if that's what you say, holding it partially, at least, as a promise, then I say "<i><b>more power to you</b></i>".<br />
<br />
If we blind ourselves to the existence of sincere Muslims who are decent
human beings, we are left with what? Wage war on the whole Muslim
world? Nothing could do more to bring on a uniting caliphate in that
very divided world.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-60367982422906280622014-12-08T18:14:00.000-08:002014-12-19T18:30:45.800-08:00 It really MIGHT depend on what the meaning of the word "is" is. (Reposted)<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name">
Reposted from the <a href="http://ontologicalcomedian.blogspot.com/">Ontological Comedian</a></h3>
<div class="post-header">
</div>
<div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-8265966443234296560" itemprop="description articleBody">
If you think every word has a definition, and definitions are how we know what words mean, consider the word "is" -- <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">which is a pivotal part of every definition</span> -- indeed of the very idea of definition. A bear <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">is</span></span> a large furry mammal that sometimes walks on it hind legs, etc., etc.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
When Bill Clinton said:<br />
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if he--if
'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one thing. If it
means there is none, that was a completely true statement....Now, if
someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual
relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present
tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true."</blockquote>
<br />
it was just an example of a legalistic way of dealing with a question --
i.e. it's fine to ignore the intention of a question, even when it is
perfectly obvious that you are doing so -- you can split hairs and
answer the literal meaning of a poorly or not too carefully worded
question, and not say "Oh, but I suppose you meant ...". That's the
rule of the game on the witness stand.<br />
<br />
But there is one huge and important variation in the way the word "is"
is used. If someone says, "I am your friend", or "I am a Christian", or
"I am a Muslim", the statement is or should be a promise. Actually it
is almost certain to be a mixture of promise and assertion. By the
"assertion", I mean you might run through some checklist like "I go to
church", "I pray", etc., or "We get together socially every week or so",
"I came to help you when you moved". <i><b>But</b></i> the statement {I am your friend/a Christian/a Muslim} would be heard by <i><b>almost anyone</b></i>* as having an element of <i><b>promise</b></i>, promising for one thing that you<i><b> will still be</b></i> ____ ten minutes from now, tomorrow, maybe forever [<b><span style="font-size: xx-small;">your friend/a Christian...</span></b>]; you are not just making an <i><b>observation about this moment</b></i> -- indeed you are not <i>"just making an observation"</i> at all. Unless that element of <i><b>promise</b></i> or <i><b>intentionality</b></i> was part of your being as you made the statement [<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><b>I am your friend...</b></span>] -- i.e. <i><b>if</b></i>
you had a mental reservation like "but I won't be your friend
tomorrow", most people with normal brains would consider that
untruthful.<br />
<br />
The same sort of distinction applies, even more sharply, to any sentence <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">purely</span> about the future (so we're likely to pass from "<i><b>am/is</b></i>" to "<i><b>will</b></i>" or "<i><b>shall</b></i>"). A sentence about the future is <i><b>either a promise or a prediction</b></i>, and people are apt to interpret a sentence about <i><b>oneself in the future</b></i> as a promise.<br />
<br />
Well, maybe, because what you would wish to be a promise is more
typically an unholy mixture. A real promise is like when Scarlett
O'Hara says "Never Again", and is never quite the same again. A <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">real</span></span> promise changes the person who makes it. The truth is, nearly everyone is a bit confused about whether they're <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">really</span></span>
making a promise or not. E.g., when you said "I'm going to lose 10
pounds in the next month", it was part promise and part prediction, and
as soon as you saw, with a sinking feeling, that the prediction was
proving false, whatever promise aspect was in it when you said "I'm
going to lose 10 pounds in the next month", that <span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">promise</span> aspect probably started to evaporate.<br />
<br />
I could cite John Searle (a philosopher) or others, but these words either get you or they don't.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
* Now how the hell do I know this, you might ask, but at least consider whether the statement "rings true" for you or not.</blockquote>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-83014186268687032752014-12-04T14:16:00.000-08:002014-12-19T18:42:25.237-08:00The Big Lie again: "Holiday Trees" and Steven Levy "commentary" The following is going viral again as it apparently has around every Christmas of the past few years<br />
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/l/Steven-Levy.htm#.VIDWCUrUhLU<br />
<br />
The above sources says it is based partly on a screed by Ben Stein, which is easy to believe considering other things he's written.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Apparently the White House referred to Christmas Trees as Holiday Trees for the first time this year which prompted CBS presenter, Steven Levy, to present this piece which I would like to share with you. I think it applies just as much to many countries as it does to America.<br />
<br />
I have no idea where the concept came from, that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can't find it in the Constitution and I don't like it being shoved down my throat...</blockquote>
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
A full copy of the email is at<br />
<br />
http://myrightwingdad.blogspot.com/2014/11/fw-fwd-america-strong.html<br />
<br />
Did this originate with a sincere "Tea Partier"? I doubt it. Such people think they understand the world although they understand it wrongly, and are eager to explain how they think it works, but they don't manufacture such lies. Here is an example of what I'd easily believe came from a sincere but anger-choked Tea Party member:<br />
<br />
http://myrightwingdad.blogspot.com/2014/11/fw-obama-is-finally-on-roll.html<br />
<br />
But somebody somewhere is turning out these "big lie" emails. Somebody gets them from a friend or relative which helps to get them past the natural skepticism filter. How far back does one have to go to find the big liar? It is very hard to say.<br />
<br />
I've tried to give a picture of this whole phenomenon in <a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2011/08/my-not-really-right-wing-mom-and-her.html">"My Not-really-right-wing Mom and her adventures in Email-Land (revision)"</a><br />
<br />
False attribution is a very common methodology in "email-land". <a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2010/06/to-my-not-really-right-wing-mom-in.html">Wall Street Journal Articles</a>, a piece by Lee Iacocca, and even a <a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2010/09/why-would-right-wing-source-make-up.html">piece by Charles Krauthammer</a> (who apparently isn't right wing enough for the email writer) have been manufactured to lend somebody's good name to complete lies.<br />
<br />
Does it matter? I think it does, and has largely been behind substantial minorities of Americans believing such things as that Obama is a Muslim, or was not born in the U.S. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-19513384575853719752014-12-04T12:47:00.000-08:002015-04-27T16:45:37.491-07:00What is Science and What Can We Learn From it About Keeping Our Heads on Straight Generally.<br />
<br />
Here are three posts trying to make some contribution to philosophy of science and to the public's understanding of it.<br />
<br />
The first, <a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2014/11/what-is-machine-natural-machines-and.html">What is A Machine? Natural Machines and Origins of Science</a> tries to express something possibly original about the occasions when people have gotten a foothold on the path to a major branch of science. Before the scientific revolution there were, hidden amidst the blooming buzzing confusion of nature, a few "natural machines". Unlike the typical object in nature, they behave with predictable simplicity, although this may not be obvious for a long time -- until certain concepts and technologies aid in their analysis. These include a heavy dense projectile in (parabolic, as it turns out) flight, and the system of the Earth, Sun, moon, and planets (and their moons). Probably, I should say machines and mechanical processes, but I like the idea of a flying rock or cannonball as an ultra-simple machine.<br />
<br />
The next essay, <a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2014/11/finding-your-invisible-elephant-science.html">Finding Your Invisible Elephant. A Science Requires, and is Shaped by, a Tractable Subject Matter</a> suggests that "scientific method", or other good epistemic processes such as peer review journals and conventions are not enough. Once a discipline, through a fruitful set of techniques, is able to repeatedly find its way to make contact with a coherent set of fundamental facts of nature, only then do the practices of academia give rise to a ratcheting mechanism that can make the diverse efforts of many autonomous individuals and groups converge on better and better understanding of some set of phenomena. This does not work for literary criticism, and its working in many fields of social science, such as sociology of scientific knowledge, is highly dubious. <br />
<br />
The third essay, <a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2014/11/global-warming-and-controversy-what-is.html">Global Warming and the Controversy: What is Scientific Consensus? Continental Drift as Example</a> focuses on a case study of scientific consensus by a practitioner of the fairly new field of social epistemology, Miriam Solomon in her book <i>Social Empiricism</i>. It concerns the gelling, over several decades, of recognition of the phenomenon of continental drift, or plate tectonics. Many very diverse disciplines had to finally agree that they all had data pointing to the same surprising phenomena before it could legitimately be said that there was a <i><b>scientific consensus.</b></i><br />
<br />
Now, this falls short of what the title seems to promise, but is part of a project of trying to take small, sometimes painful steps in that direction.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-7880457655204271982014-11-15T18:44:00.003-08:002015-01-07T17:11:37.549-08:00Global Warming and the Controversy: What is Scientific Consensus? Continental Drift as Example. One common way of attacking the mainstream of climatology for its "global warming consensus" is to claim that consensus is just that sort of authoritarian "group think" that Galileo confronted in the Inquisition. A companion claim is that mainstream climatologists have abandoned "the scientific method". Some of those who say they have a case against AGW are likely to say that <i><b>they</b></i> are practicing the true "scientific method" and anyone who doesn't accept their experiment(s) or studies as decisive must be rejecting the scientific method. They may also delve into the mainstream studies. Global warming dissidents (who rarely sound to me like true skeptical thinkers) often cite studies by scientists who would be surprised to learn that anyone is saying their study disproved AGW, so it is often not scientists, but "science critics" claiming the scientific method has been abandoned by mainstream climatologists. One person with whom I recently argued (on Facebook) said "<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10153271035858265_10153272684873265:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10153271035858265_10153272684873265:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10153271035858265_10153272684873265:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10153271035858265_10153272684873265:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0.$end:0:$0:0">When I went to college and took experimental psychology, the premise of experimentation was to challenge existing theory" and later "</span></span></span></span><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10153271035858265_10153274233813265:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10153271035858265_10153274233813265:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10153271035858265_10153274233813265:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10153271035858265_10153274233813265:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10153271035858265_10153274233813265:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">There
is a scientific experimental process<i><b> ... propose a postulate, select your population or test material,
identify and isolate variables, run your test, draw conclusions, repeat,
publish, then stand up to challenge</b></i>."</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10153271035858265_10153274233813265:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10153271035858265_10153274233813265:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10153271035858265_10153274233813265:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10153271035858265_10153274233813265:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10153271035858265_10153274233813265:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0"> In my previous article, "<a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2014/11/finding-your-invisible-elephant-science.html"><i>Finding Your Invisible Elephant. A Science Requires, and is Shaped by, a Tractable Subject Matter</i></a>" I argued that a hallmark of a mature science is that its methodology can be led in unexpected directions by the set of phenomena it studies, and much of the methodology does not fit that simple description. Different sciences lead to different methods, although I believe all sciences use the classical scientific, or experimental methods on occasion, just not exclusively.</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
Astronomers, who try to tell us what the universe consists of, turn their very high tech telescopes to the skies, and go bit by bit over the database of images. They say "this looks like one of those", and if on closer and closer observation, it looks more and more like one of those, they are kind of relieved, and kind of disapointed, because this isn't the day they see something that nobody else knows about. If they can't identify a thing, they will try to do "whatever it takes" to arrive at some understanding. Some facets of "whatever it takes" will consist of <i><b>choosing populations ... isolating variables</b></i>, etc. but consider how we got here. Does poring over vast amounts of data looking for something interesting fit that paradigm? To me, no, I don't see how it does. And then when they have something mysterious, the next step may be to get someone with a very different sort of telescope to take a picture of that spot in space, and pore over it and see if it in any way makes sense.<br />
<br />
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, biologists were almost exclusively devoted to collecting and examining specimens trying to fit them into a sort of "family tree" of life, even though they didn't have the evolutionary theory that said it was kind of a literal family tree, but on closer examination of how all the specimens fit together it seemed more and more natural to think of it as a kind of tree. Somehow they got an insight that some variations were more essential than others, so that species that varied in those ways were not just different species (two leaves possibly on the same twig), but different genuses or families ... I.e. on different branches.<br />
<br />
There is a wonderful case study in Miriam Solomon's book Social Empiricism, of how over several decades, a consensus was reached on continental drift i.e. plate tectonics. Specialists in far-flung fields had a stake in the theory, first put forth by a German geologist and meteorologist in 1915, but not taken very seriously for a couple of decades. There were geologists studying the formation of mountain ranges, paleomagentologists who studied variations in the world's magnetic fields over millions of years (there are some very specific local patterns, especially as it turns out, around the deep trenches of the oceans). There were paleologists with data to consider about the movements and evolution of species across different continents -- how did they get from one continent to another (the idea that continents far apart were once in close contact helps explain many of these patterns). And there were geophysicists, who would have to explain in terms of physics, just how it could happen. Those in some specialties soon found facts to support the idea, while others for a long time found very little supporting evidence in their fields. As a result, the different fields came to accept the theory one by one, some lagging by a decade or more, even in some fields writing satirical poems about the believers in continental drift. Oceanographers were among the last converted, but then became major contributers to the theory as they made discoveries about the ocean bottom that helped explain it or were explained by it.<br />
<br />
This kind of process is really what is meant by scientific consensus. It is not groupthink, but different specialists deciding whether their field supports a theory or not, and as long as one specialty holds out, those who feel convinced of the theory remain uncomfortable, wondering if those other specialists, whose work they don't understand so well, know something that we don't. When scientists in all these diverse began to regularly produce discoveries that helped explain or were explained by continental drift, there was a consensus. Note that even the Nobel prize winner in one field may have to rely on abstracts of papers in another field, and believes in the general competency of the other field, even when they are in disagreement -- not that some people don't violate that atmosphere of civilized respect occasionally, but it is the general rule.<br />
<br />
As long as a proposed theory leaves one or more major disciplines skeptical, general science publications will tend to say the matter is controversial. It is generally only when the last discipline(s) are convinced that their field can confirm the theory that these publications say there is a scientific consensus.<br />
<br />
I began to read science seriously around the time when continental drift became a settled question in science, when plenty of older books and articles still referred to it as controversial. I've watched the growth of consensus about global warming not terribly closely, but the process looked very similar (to me) to that of continental drift, moving from "this is a theory that some scientists have" to "still controversial" to "scientific consensus".<br />
<br />
Any single paper or piece of evidence for global warming should not convince one, and some wouldn't provide any argument at all without combined with other bits of evidence. Scientists look for many demonstrations from many different angles, and keep looking even after they are convinced. Likewise, any single anti-AGW argument/demonstration is not going to turn the world around.<br />
<br />
The papers I've received from non-believers in global warming have generally looked flawed to me. The author, certain that he has made a great demonstration of something may claim his work singlehandedly disproved AGW, and might -- I think only if out of touch with the real science community, be convinced that scientists have become corrupt, and are no longer working according to "real" scientific principals, but I see no sign of that.<br />
<br />
It has never been the case that the most recent paper determines what is believed in a field. If there is a contradiction than at least one piece of the puzzle must be flawed, but it could as easily be the latest one as some older one (or maybe to accept the latest demonstration, one must reject vast numbers of older ones).<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Claims of Ideologically Driven Global Warming Agenda Seem at Best Greatly Exagerated. <a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2015/01/what-to-make-of-judith-curry.html">One Example to Consider: Judith Curry</a></span></h3>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-62389008188014033052014-11-08T17:56:00.003-08:002014-12-19T18:50:16.310-08:00Gerrymandering Viewed as a Nonpartisan (or rather pro-electorate vs the system) Issue<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="uiGrid _51mz _5f0n"><tbody>
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<div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_545ec7688244b1894819352">
The difficulty we have with gerrymandering is that it will always seem attractive to the party in power. </div>
<div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_545ec7688244b1894819352">
</div>
<div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_545ec7688244b1894819352">
Common sense reforms should make us all feel we have more of a chance
of being represented. Redrawing the map by both sides has one big
nonpartisan effect; it is overall very good for incumbents. It tends to
make every district a "safe" district for one party or the other.
Another effect, sometimes in competition with the first is, due to
"safe" districts, primary elections become ver<span class="text_exposed_show">y
important; general elections much less so. During the primaries,
candidates must try to "click" with one group riled up enough to turn
out for primary elections. So you are far less likely to get people
with balanced perspectives.<br /> In this age, balance or moderation
tends to be ridiculed by both (or all) sides. But it is the way of
getting the best from multiple perspectives. It gives you people able
to argue fruitfully, not just posture for the "base". In reality,
sometimes the more conservative idea fits the situation best, and
sometimes the more visionary idea does. If people can fruitfully argue,
we are more likely to get the benefit of that. I believe you are also
more likely to see flaws (to missing the mark or just excess complexity) <i><b>corrected</b></i> in some legislation with more moderates rather than the
attitude extremists often have "We won't cooperate to improve it because we like it being as
bad as possible because we want it to fail" (see <a href="http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Ftinyurl.com%2Fpf2z4qx&h=LAQFQqyU9&s=1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/pf2z4qx</a>).</span></div>
<div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_545ec7688244b1894819352">
<span class="text_exposed_show"><br />
What would an alternative to eternal gerrymandering look like?
Maybe laws that say a district should have a certain geometric
compactness. That is something where an intuitive concept could be
represented by a mathematical formula. We might not understand the
formula, but by looking at examples of what conforms to it and what
violates it, we could see whether results look intuitively right.
Better yet, in my opinion, we might introduce an arbitrariness,
according to a mathematical formula. If you had a square state (which
we don't of course) it could look like a checker board. Actually this
doesn't quite work because it won't give you districts of approx equal
population within a state, city, or county to be "districted" More
sophisticated mathematics could generalize that formula. Another reason
for putting it all in the hands of a mathematical/computer best
line-drawing system that we can judge intuitive by the intuitive
pleasingness of the results: it eliminates the considerable amount
that can be done to create solid incumbancy districts (Dem districts or
Repub. districts, or white, black or Latino districts) while the
districts still look nice and geometrically compact.</span></div>
<div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_545ec7688244b1894819352">
<span class="text_exposed_show"><br /> I believe
some decades ago, gerrymandering, or rather drawing maps heavily relying
on human judgement to attain some electoral tendency, regained some
respectability when they were used to increase the chances of certain
minorities getting a representative who looked like them. Lani Guinier,
a legal scholar nominated by Clinton for Attorney General had some
ideas for allowing such possibilities without distorting the electoral
map in any way. They involved a sort of one man, N-vote sort of system,
which was quickly vilified (as was Guinier) as a violation of the
sacred 1-man 1-vote principle; but it did not violate it at all in
spirit.</span></div>
<div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_545ec7688244b1894819352">
<span class="text_exposed_show"><br /> Besides anti-gerrymandering, another common sense reform
principle driven by the goal of real representativeness (not favorong
one ideology or the other) is to reduce the role money plays. In <a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2014/08/might-it-be-possible-to-tune-out-or.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/<wbr></wbr><span class="word_break"></span>2014/08/<wbr></wbr><span class="word_break"></span>might-it-be-possible-to-tune-out-or.html</a>
I proposed a model for this, suitable for growing up from the "grass
roots" *if* the idea and trial results can over time persuade enough
people.</span></div>
<div class="text_exposed_root text_exposed" id="id_545ec7688244b1894819352">
<span class="text_exposed_show"><br /> One example of money in politics that a conservative
might be able to relate to is how much of a farce the 2012 Republican
presidential primaries were. There were several instances of one
candidate being up in one state and another in the next that looked less
like the states having different ideological tendencies, and instead
seemed explanable by someone having just bought a few million dollars
worth of ads through one PAC or another. E.g. Sheldon Adelson bringing
Newt Gingrich up from out of nowhere to near the top for a couple of
days. Adelson is a casino magnate whose main issue these days is to
suppress online gambling.</span></div>
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</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-32559576180817072262014-11-05T19:35:00.000-08:002015-04-09T18:13:08.554-07:00Finding Your Invisible Elephant. A Science Requires, and is Shaped by, a Tractable Subject MatterThe story of the blind men and the elephant comes from India. One version, in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant">Wikipedia</a> follows: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Six blind men were asked to determine what an elephant
looked like by feeling different parts of the elephant's body. The blind
man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who
feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the
trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear
says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says
the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the
elephant is like a solid pipe.</blockquote>
<br />
Some may see it as a parable about the impossibility of knowledge, but the way I look at it, with enough blind men operating under the incentive structure of science, comparing notes, arguing this interpretation and that, they would eventually "get it" perhaps making a clay model of an elephant that one person could get their hands around. Of course if they are no good a listening to each other, or lack persistence and/or the right sort of discipline this won't happen.<br />
<br />
Previously, I wrote about how the few rare "natural machines" like the solar system have been a major factor in bringing sciences into being. Now I'd like to suggest a different metaphor and try out the notion that the keystone of a science is finding its invisible elephant. Rather than make all scientists blind, I'd rather make elephants invisible.<br />
<br />
What does it look like when we are failing to find our elephant? Maybe one man really is grasping a pillar, another a tree trunk, or hand fan, and another pushing on a wall. No wonder their observations don't add up. Suppose they <i><b>insist</b></i> on their observations adding up to something - then they may produce a forced "body of knowledge", something like astrology.<br />
<br />
So what does a science finding its elephant look like? There should be some convergence of observations when the blind men work together effectively, like more than once a man grasps something like a pillar. Attempts to find relationships between observations. Maybe 4 men are saying "this is like a pillar", and they can tell by listening they are close to each other, and they reach out until they grasp each others' hands, and get a sense of where each man is, and maybe all link hands to discover that the pillars are in a rough square. Someone again says it's like a rope, and they wave their hands around until the one with the "rope" finds he's roughly equidistant from two of the "pillar" men. And on and on. Someone says "this is like a creek", but his voice is too far away, so the others say "That's something else, come back to where we are." And as long as they stay close together, maybe holding hands, circling the object together, certain observations occur repetitively, and all the relations between the observations begin to add up to something. Maybe someone bounces a basketball their way, one grasps it and says "something new!" but they soon realize it isn't part of the thing they're trying to understand. It is "irrelevant data", or "noise" as in Nate Silver's
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159420411X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=159420411X&linkCode=as2&tag=talesoftheear-20&linkId=3V6D2CPDJLJW5HYV">The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't</a><img alt="" border="0" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=talesoftheear-20&l=as2&o=1&a=159420411X" height="1" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" />.<br />
<br />
When observations add up and complement each other, and it becomes more and more clear which observations belong to the newly emerging object of study, and which do not, we can say there is a tractable domain. Tractability is not absolute. Until the 20th century, medicine was largely intractable. We had only glimmerings of understanding here and there that could not be worked into any sort of whole. Failure to admit this -- wishful thinking -- led to systems like that based on the "humours" (or 5 basic fluids supposed to account for the body's workings) which lead to inappropriate bleeding and purging, and sometimes even preventing elimination, all on the theory that too much or too little of some "humour" caused a given syndrome.<br />
<br />
A tractable domain means one has a good sense of the thing that is under study - and this leads to techniques of study specific to the domain or object of study, unlikely to make sense in any other domain. It might be invisible elephants, or equally invisible atoms, whose properties can only be known via more complex and roundabout ways than merely looking. The idea that all scientific methodology can be summarized by one "method" is more often heard in disciplines that are trying hard to be scientific than in those which have gotten very clear about, and been shaped by, their subject matter.<br />
<br />
Consensus that we are talking about the same thing (from different angles) is the sign that you may have found your elephant. In 17th century physics it was the large objects of the universe going around and around in patterns that Galileo, Kepler, and Newton finally made sense of and it lead to powerful general principals. In the 18th century, various manifestations of electricity presented a mystery to be solved, once some of the phenomena proved to relate to others in certain patterns. Lightning in the sky may somewhat resemble the sparks that jump from the glass globe that has been rubbed in a certain way, but are they really alike? Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have answered this. In late 19th/early 20th century physics it was the structure of the atom (you can tell by now that a field might have more than one elephant, but it needs at least one).<br />
<br />
Maybe it's just because of an argument I had a while back over global warming with a guy claiming methods cited to support it were not "the scientific method", and he described "the scientific method" as he learned it from his psychology professor some decades back ... but I really suspect it is a sign that a science has not yet gotten much traction when you hear so much about a (one size fits all) "scientific method".<br />
<br />
Sometimes mistaken "knowledge" plagues humanity, and a radical new vision is required to prove tradition must be broken, and that a better understanding can be gained. But the image of Galileo or Columbus or Pasteur standing alone is a kind of story that has itself become too much of a tradition - a story that our minds love to hear -- we are fooled into thinking that practically everything good had to come from such a stand. We have an addiction to the idea of the individual rebel that is so prevalent that groups with quite opposite tendencies, such as Hollywood liberals and those who loathe such liberal politics are alike sunk in it up to their eyeballs. We celebrate Steve Jobs and forget about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_%28company%29">Xerox PARC</a>, a collaboration which generated the fundamental concepts behind the Apple computing model. "Liberal" Hollywood gives us Dirty Harry, Jack Bauer, and dozens of other action heroes who act on their own, as well as heroic victims and lone whistle blowers by themselves against shadowy forces, and artists despised in their own lifetimes.<br />
<br />
There really are many occasions for honoring such individuals, but our popular art and literature hardly recognizes anything else, and we tend to exaggerate their aloneness. Like Newton, had to stand on the shoulders of many others (not all giants). <br />
<br />
Superheroes. which have gone from comic books for nerds to a main staple of Hollywood, seem to be the purest embodiment of our fascination with one great soul having to save the world with no help from anyone, and, of course they are the least realistic embodiment. The right leaning press gives us the lone gunslinger (in the supermarket yet) and heroic billionaires at risk of being tied up and paralyzed by the system.<br />
<br />
Science still on occasion needs the unique visionary who find a new elephant, or find out that everybody else had the elephant upside down. Sometimes they can't make themselves understood, and suffer frustration, but, at least in the hard sciences, it still takes a unique vision to win the greatest rewards, such as the the Nobel Prizes. Scientific culture is such that if nearly everyone is mistaken, and one person can demonstrate this, they may be controversial for a while, but the best proof or demonstration tends to win in time -- due to a culture founded on the idea that the truth is the most important thing<br />
<br />
But the majority of scientists are trying to get more and more detail on the same elephant, like the astronomers who spent their lives even before telescopes plotting where the star or planet is in the sky at such and such a longitude and latitude at a certain moment, who gave Kepler and Newton the masses of data they required. Without them, most great leaps could not have happened.<br />
<br />
Scientific consensus has been confused with group-think, which is far more likely to come from think tanks set up to serve a particular political agenda, or scientists who cater to tobacco or oil companies. True scientific consensus comes from many scientists putting maps, table, graphs, observations and experiments together and after much wrangling coming to approximate agreement about what they add up to. It is often something that just one of the scientists cannot confidently pronounce without the others, all looking at the problem from different angles.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-61033864577037202602014-11-01T21:31:00.000-07:002014-12-19T18:52:51.685-08:00What is A Machine? Natural Machines and Origins of Science<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Note: This essay is likely to evolve, but started as "<a href="http://ontologicalcomedian.blogspot.com/2010/07/what-is-machine.html">What is a Machine?</a>" on the "<a href="http://ontologicalcomedian.blogspot.com/">Ontological Comedian</a>" blog)</span></b><br />
<br />
<br />
The concept of <b><i>machine</i></b> pervades our culture, and has
occupied an important place in philosophical debates for at least the
last two or three centuries.<br />
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<br />
For example, it is often argued that living organisms, or the human mind, are "ultimately just machines". I.e. underlying all the organic, often amorphous complexity
of the world we perceive, is a level at which ultra-miniscule machines
function predictably. Electrons spinning around nuclei at an exact,
measurable speed; light photons traveling always at a particular speed.
At the heart of biological processes are DNA molecules whose properties
can in theory be exactly deduced from the sequence of molecules of which
they consist.
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
But if "everything is a machine", we could stop using the word because it doesn't distinguish anything from anything else.<br />
<br />
For many words, like "fish", "atom", "electron", "planet", "star", one can readily settle on a <i><b>canonical technical or scientific definition</b></i>, but for "machine" this does not seem to be true, so it seems like a word that is best understood by its <i><b>common usage</b></i>.<br />
<br />
<br />
In common usage, "machine" refers to a man-made object the exact size, shape, and other properties of whose parts are precisely determined (often, it is said they are constructed by "precise machining") which will behave, or respond to manipulation, in precise ways (unless something breaks).<br />
<br />
<br />
In nature, it is hard to find anything that quite looks like this. To find
mechanical behavior ready-to-hand in nature (before books, economic
systems, large-scale governments, and factories came into being), we
have to start with systems<b><i> simpler</i></b> than what we normally think of as a machine. A good example is a rock that is thrown. Once set
in motion, there is such predictability about the trajectory of the rock
that a skilled person can make it strike in a certain place from 100
feet away. <br />
<br />
In prehistoric times, when hand-throwing of projectiles (e.g. rocks, spears) was an essential skill, it was a great
mystery what went on between<br />
(1) the moment when I think of hitting "that animal with this rock" and<br />
(2) the moment when the rock leaves my hand in flight towards the animal.<br />
How
does the thought lead to the perfect motion of the hand? Even today, we only have sketchy explanations. <br />
<br />
But with the rock (or cannon ball) in motion itself, the mysteries have long since solved by the study of <i><b>
trajectories</b></i>. In the renaissance, men like da Vinci and Galileo
developed mathematical theories for modeling these trajectories, and successfully used these theories to calculate the elevation of a cannon's muzzle that
will make the ball land on the target. <br />
<br />
The path of the cannonball, as science tells us today, is so simple and
predictable because forces have been isolated. We can almost say that
the rock's path is determined by (1) its initial velocity and (2) the
earth's gravity, and the interplay between these two "inputs" is indeed
simple, and reducible to a formula, as Newton showed. <br />
<br />
Now the caveman could not work out this theory; nevertheless the
mathematically predictable behavior of a compact heavy object in flight
(given its velocity and direction at the moment it goes into free
flight) made it possible for the right-brain, which deals with spatial
relations in a nonverbal way, to determine how to throw a rock in order
to hit a target. We know there is another complicating force, wind resistence, but it is strongest with light objects like feathers, and negligible, to a useful approximation for compact heavy bodies.<br />
<br />
When we build a machine, we build something such that the dominant forces affecting any part are extremely simple, and ones we can control. Forces like friction, usually in conflict with our design goals, are minimized partly through using
polished, precisely straight or precisely round, or otherwise
precisely, regularly, fashioned surfaces, and arrangements. Once set in motion, we know which way our mechanical contraption
will go; or if we want it to go a certain way, we know how to make this
happen. Where do we find anything of such regularity in nature? <br />
<br />
The rock or cannonball <b><i>in flight</i></b> is one such. Being a
system that only exists for a second, it may not seem very satisfactory. Yet much of what Galileo learned about nature came from studying such trivial mechanical systems as a compact body in passive free flight.<br />
<br />
For millennia, we have had the stars and planets to look at. Their combination of mostly ultra-simple regularity, with the exception of a handful of objects called planets (Latin for "wanderers") tantalized humans, who correctly guessed that to understand them might solve a great and important mystery. Hoping to solve a mystery with a strong direct bearing on our lives, they produced various forms of astrology, and believed that comets, among the rarest and least regular phenomena foretold disasters. Over several millennia, some people have intuited that the night sky, with its thousands of visible points always fixed in the same relative position, and the moon and 5 planets which followed their own more mysterious rules, and the sun which rendered most of the rest invisible, gestured towards some important solvable mystery, and this was one of the earliest examples of good scientific thinking.<br />
<br />
In the 17th century, it was finally persuasively shown that this night sky disclosed one of the first great natural machines ever comprehended by mankind. A set of
bodies in motion, so arranged that all the possible forces that could
come into play have been put into a balance, such that only some few
properties determine the visible parts of the system's functioning <br />
<br />
Perhaps we should really study the idea of <b><i>mechanical regularity</i></b>, how humankind ever discovered such a thing (which may help us understand something about how the idea is <b><i>construed</i></b> by people). What sorts of things we can accomplish with this phenomenon called <b><i>mechanical regularity</i></b>, and to what extent does it really pervade nature. <br />
<br />
Before the solar system could be seen in its true shape, time had to become more real and measurable. The idea of a second, and that each day consisted of 86,400 of them, would have been incoherent until a few centuries ago. For millennia the measurement of physical length or distance played an indispensable role in technology, facilitating the building of large structures such as bridges, castles, and cathedrals. True measurability of time, however, was hardly dreamt of. Ultimately the key to the measurability of time was to map time onto distance.<br />
<br />
The necessary thing was a machine that always moved at the same speed. This had to be difficult. Without seconds and minutes, how do you even define speed? The significance of the pendulum was, like so many other things, first described by Galileo. Its significance was that a well designed pendulum could go on swinging back and forth for days, and even though the distance of the swing decreased over time, the length of <i><b>time</b></i> for each swing remains almost exactly the same. To explain this in terms of physics is quite complex. The formula given by Wikipedia is:<br />
<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-13"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendulum#cite_note-13"></a></sup><br />
<dl><dd><img alt="
T = 2\pi \sqrt{L\over g} \left( 1+ \frac{1}{16}\theta_0^2 + \frac{11}{3072}\theta_0^4 + \cdots \right)
" class="mwe-math-fallback-image-inline tex" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/6/2/f/62f55d40065dea4bdcaccc5d3bff03d7.png" /></dd></dl>
This varies with the arc of the swing of the pendulum, <i>θ<sub>0, </sub></i>but for small arc, i.e. the swing is small relative to the length of the rod or string, the figure in parentheses can, to a close approximation, be treated as simply <b>1</b>.<br />
<br />
The usefulness of a well constructed pendulum was discovered long before this complex formula could be guessed at or justified by physics, but it produced a very simple regularity -- with a pendulum of the right length, <i><b>one swing = one second</b></i> (or <i><b>some</b></i> precise number of seconds, even as the swing of the pendulum gets shorter throughout the day. And the use of gears can make a clock's second hand and other hands travel at a very nearly constant speed, mapping time onto the distance traveled by the hands.<br />
<br />
Mechanical regularity is a rare phenomenon in nature, or in anything we can easily construct from nature.
We have to look very hard to find it, and in doing so, we develop a
habit of <b><i>not</i></b> focusing on the contingent. <br />
<br />
If our surroundings seem very regular and controllable, as they do in our
very technological world, it is not just because humankind
"discovered" the regularities of nature. It is largely because we <b><i>rearranged</i></b> the substances of our world into regular, governable, objects.<br />
<br />
<i>[Note: The next and final couple of paragraphs are ruminations
that haven't gotten very far, and may appear to point in directions that
I would disavow after spending more time with them:]</i><br />
<br />
During the Enlightenment, there was a great fascination with the idea of <i>social engineering</i>.
But what do we have to do to make people and societies controllable?
We make objects controllable by isolating and simplifying the relevant forces, eliminating those that are irregular or that we don't understand by purifying the materials;
making things exactly round or exactly straight or exactly flat (as
nearly as possible).<br />
<br />
One an analogous process with human beings is to
reduce motivations to one simple one, which, for someone in the right
position, can be easy to manipulate; i.e. <b><i>fear</i></b>. Or it could be money.<br />
<br />
At any rate, that is largely the rule that slave owners followed, and
the rule used by the largest-scale social engineers of the last two
centuries: Napoleon, Hitler, and the leaders of the large Communist
nations. <br />
<br />
The liberal economists had a different approach. They had no desire for, and abhorred a <i><b>totalizing</b></i> (for a nation or world) social machine that would perform
acrobatics and turn on a dime. But they helped provide a lens for looking at humankind strictly through its relationship with money -- very attractive as it is all reducible to numbers, raising the hope of powerful physics-like formulas. There is indeed the enticement that all our efforts might be reduced to an optimization problem to be solved by a computer.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-90727725698027932602014-10-01T18:53:00.002-07:002014-12-19T18:53:37.760-08:00If there are men in this country big enough to own the government they are going to own it.Woodrow Wilson had some very big flaws, but kudos for:<br />
<br />
“<a class="qlink" href="http://izquotes.com/quote/278653">If there are
men in this country big enough to own the government of the United
States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is
whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are
free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our
own.</a>”<br />
―<a href="http://izquotes.com/author/woodrow-wilson">Woodrow Wilson</a><br />
<br />
http://izquotes.com/quote/278653Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-21728036824270040012014-08-26T19:56:00.002-07:002014-12-19T18:57:20.299-08:00Possible Approach to "Tune Out" or Neutralize Money in Politics? A Small Experiment.<br />
<span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}">I'd
like to throw this out as a test project, in case there are any takers,
or rather for now, mostly throw it out for comment and criticism to see
if it can be taken any further. The general idea is that voters really assume the attitude that we are the hirers of our public servants, and taking the stand that, yes, they are our public servants.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span class="userContent" data-ft="{"tn":"K"}"><br /> <br /> Take a small town, say about
4000 pop., where people generally know each other, and can nearly all
agree that the way we run elections is very dysfunctional compared to a
normal hir<span class="text_exposed_show">ing process. This would have
to be a very unusual town for such a conversation to take place; maybe
it would be a very small suburb of Redmond Washington. Liberals,
libertarians, and conservatives would hold a town hall type conversation
and almost all agree that the current prototype of an election is
dysfunctional. They might then agree to tell the candidates "Save your
money, no ads, signs, etc. We're providing a different forum for you to
represent yourselves, and whoever ignores this will forfeit our respect
for sabotaging the experiment we want to carry out." <br /> <br />
Townspeople would spend a period of time, with face to face meetings and
online debating forums figuring out what questions they'd want
answered. Maybe a few of the sort of people who would normally become
activists for one or the other party would supply the drive, looking
into what was done by the town under the last mayor. Discoveries would
be made like "Oh, here's one thing the mayor does that I never thought
of, hiring concrete contractors; I wonder how he/she would decide which
one to use."<br /> <br /> Then candidates are interviewed one at a time in a
town hall type setting with web and/or local cable broadcast. Each
candidate will be called individually on one or more evenings partly to
avoid time-wasting put-downs of the other candidates.<br /> <br /> I think
this would get national news attention and provoke discussion. There
are plenty of stories of unusual situations in small town elections just
because a man and his ex-wife are running against each other, or the
(male) mayor goes trans-gender and has large breast implants (and to
warm our hearts, the town chases off out of town demonstrators against
such an "abomination" -- this one I actually heard about recently).<br /> <br />
I realize the "normal hiring process" analogy has to be stretched and
squeezed to fit the very different situation, but I think it's worth an
experiment, at least, to see if we could capture some of the virtues of a
process that has worked (and been thought out and rethought, and books
written on it) that has worked well enough for private business.<br /> <br />
What we currently do is as much like a normal hiring process as if the
hirer couldn't even get the candidates into their office, but must watch
them out the window performing circus-like theatrics; they don't get to
ask questions, but the candidates shout out whatever they think is
relevant over a bullhorn.</span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-27026272404913034212014-08-18T18:03:00.001-07:002014-12-19T18:59:15.801-08:00What did Saul Alinsky Really Say?<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"I’ve never joined any organization — not even the ones I’ve organized
myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I
could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it’s
Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand
described as 'that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right.'
If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to
absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually
constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by
such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions
of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide."</i></blockquote>
<br />
This is one little quote from the guy who, according to the mythical<br />
"<a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2014/07/myths-about-saul-alinsky-and-obama.html">8 Principles of Control</a>" or <span style="font-size: small;"><time datetime="2014-02-22T18:21:29" itemprop="dateCreated"> </time><a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2014/07/myths-about-saul-alinsky-and-obama.html"><span style="color: #1f497d;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">How to create a social state</span></span></a><span style="color: #1f497d;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica;"> wanted to make the world a totalitarian zombie factory.</span></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-23725498196817624482014-08-07T16:05:00.001-07:002017-12-27T18:53:11.251-08:00From Natural (or Naturalized) to Social EpistemologyI've been reading an anthology called <i>Naturalizing Epistemology</i> (1986) edited by Hilary Kornblith.<br />
<br />
"Naturalizing" epistemology has been heavily identified with W.V.O.
Quine (author of the 2 first articles in <i>Naturalizing Epistemology</i>).<br />
<br />
Others draw parallels between naturalized epistemology and the much
earlier philosophy of pragmatism, or John Dewey in particular, as in
Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Vol. 32, No. 4, Fall,
1996, "Dewey, Quine, and Pragmatic Naturalized Epistemology". Or see
Stich 1993 "Naturalizing Epistemology: Quine, Simon and the Prospects
for Pragmatism". The title alludes to Herb Simon, the Nobel Laureate (Economics), Turing Prize winner, cognitive psychologist, AI pioneer, etc.<br />
<br />
Naturalized epistemology, like many other intellectual approaches has a strong and a weak program, or position. The strong
might be represented by Quine's "Why not settle for psychology".<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
Basically, I think general naturalized epistemology aims to ground epistemology in something solid and material like <b>people</b>,
and their scientific study -- as opposed to reasoning with purely
mental constructs. Another tendency that claims to be "naturalizing"
epistemology is to study how "good reasoners" arrive at what they think
is the truth, and this may mean trying to rigorously define how
scientists think.<br />
<br />
"Why not settle for psychology" is to pass
the buck or forward all questions to another department (e.g.
psychology, sociology, history of science), as if the disciplinary
traditions of philosophy have nothing to offer. Do they really have
nothing to offer?<br />
<br />
I think one way to not pass the buck is to
focus on certain habits that seem to affect, or afflict, virtually all
of philosophy when it deals with thoughts, truth, etc. Namely to talk
as if our subject is some "canonical knower", talking of what "is known"
without reference to any particular knower, seeming to forget about the
fact that I am in my mind and you are in yours. Descartes' "<i>Cogito
ergo sum</i>" might be more naturalistic in this sense if he had written "<i>So you think
maybe you don't exist? But then aren't you experiencing something, an
awareness of words and/or pictures that seem to be inside your body.
Call that your 'self' and you can't avoid thinking it exists in some
form, whether as a disembodied spirit cohabiting with a body, or a
biological process, or a computer simulation. This only works for <b>your</b> existence. It won't convince you that <b>I</b> (Descartes) exist -- in fact I might be long dead as you read this.</i>"<br />
<br />
The main move in "naturalizing" epistemology <b>without passing the buck</b> is, in my opinion to keep grounded in the realization that there is only <b>me</b> knowing, or <b>you</b> knowing, or either of us believing mistakenly, and there are the processes by which we came to know or believe. And the <b>canonical knower</b>
is a fiction, and declarations like "it is known" or "it is knowable"
are just too vague. This grounds me in the realization that the vast
bulk of what I think I know is due to having gotten it from some trusted
source. It used to be trendy to say that would make me an
"authoritarianism", but if "authoritarianism" is a real thing to be
avoided, it can't just be something we <b>all</b> do because there is no alternative.<br />
<br />
There may be a "right" way to establish a scientific fact, but in
almost all cases, hardly one person in a million has actually <i><b>witnessed</b></i> it being established. The vast majority "know" it because they read it in a book.<br />
<br />
So we are left mostly with the sources we have chosen to trust, and the question of <b>what can justify that trust</b>. Perhaps you believe you do a good job of determining who to trust, and we all know people who we think <b>don't</b> do such a good job. Alvin Goldman, the only other author besides Quine allotted 2 articles in <i>Naturalizing Epistemology</i> is now (some years after the book was published) the best known proponent of one of two conflicting schools of <b><i>Social Epistemology</i></b>.<br />
<br />
I want to suggest if you approach naturalized epistemology right, then
social epistemology is a natural outcome. Goldman treats the question of
"Who to Trust" seriously in "Experts: Which Ones should you Trust?" in
the journal <i>Philosophy and Phenomenological Research</i>, Vol 63, No. 2 (7/2001)<br />
<br />
[NOTE: many online papers by Goldman are generously provided at<br />
<a href="http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/goldman/Papers.htm" title="http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/goldman/Papers.htm">http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/goldman/Papers.htm</a>]<br />
<br />
Suppose we wanted to make "general principals of knowing who to trust" a part of the elementary school curriculum. What would these principles look like? The following examples
involve social reasoning as well as the <b>intentional stance</b> beloved of evolutionists like Daniel Dennett.<br />
<br />
For deciding on the trustworthiness of a magazine, we might suggest "look in the back to see if its
ads are directed to really gullible people -- if so, suspect the rest of
the magazine is directed to really gullible people. I suspect a great
deal of our ability to discriminate trustworthy sources is based on
somewhat similar rules of thumb. So if the magazine that advertises the
"X-ray glasses" says we will all be flying around with jet packs in a
couple of decades (a typical example from the 1960s), then deploy bullshit
detector.<br />
<br />
You might move to a new location, and at a block
party, ask around about who is a good plumber or mechanic (on in some
areas, where is it safe/unsafe to walk at night). Somehow, I think most
of us can do a reasonable job of deciding who to take most seriously
and who is perhaps a blowhard. Could that be taught in school? There
are few more important life skills.<br />
<br />
I often get the impression that the best argument against a proposition is the quality of the arguments put forth in its favor. If on some momentous controversial issue, an advocate of some position sends me article after article that makes me ask <i>"Is
that the best they can do? Is an 85 year old retired atomic scientist
the best they can do to impress me with the case against Global
Warming?"</i> and similar questions depending on the article, this
leads me to conclude that the supposed case they have against Global
Warming is ginned up, and until I start hearing more impressive
arguments, I will continue to think so <b>based on analysis of what <span style="text-decoration: underline;">they</span> have to say for themselves</b> -- <b>not</b> because somebody else tells me they're full of shit. Unfortunately, others read the same writers and see nothing wrong.<br />
<br />
My knowledge of epistemology is uneven, and acquired all on my
own motivated by a sense that <i>something is breaking down in terms of
people's common sense about what venues to trust, and wondering what has
brought this about and what to do about it</i>. I'm not sure how much help can be gotten from philosophical tradition (that is, its actual instantiation, as opposed to whatever philosophy in theory <b>might</b> be), but I have found some encouragement there as well as in several other places, and am trying to stitch the pieces together.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-77658786148394109492014-07-31T09:25:00.000-07:002014-12-19T19:04:37.813-08:00A modest search engine proposal How much AI technique could it possibly take for google (or something better) to do a decent job with<br />
<blockquote>
<b>speechby:obama attitude:positive "Saul Alinsky".</b></blockquote>
I.e. "<b>speechby:</b>" and "<b>attitude:</b>"
don't exist, but could, I believe be implemented pretty accurately, to
see in this case if we can find any instances of Obama praising Saul
Alinsky.<br />
<a class="twitter-timeline-link" dir="ltr" href="http://t.co/am5e0RBws6" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title="http://tinyurl.com/k8ztbmx"><span class="js-display-url">An article: "Bill Ayers and Obama Both Quote Alinsky"</span></a><span class="js-display-url">
claims such quotes exist, but their one attempt to demonstrate it is
laughable -- something vaguely like a paraphrase of an Alinsky
statement, but which has, in fact the reverse sense of what the supposed
"original" meant</span><span class="js-display-url">.</span><br />
<a name='more'></a> Yet I think most
of the world, and not just conservatives, if they have any idea who
Alinsky is, will tend not to question Obama's "debt" to Alinsky -- just
for the sheer number of times it's been said or implied. For the other
shoe dropping, false quotes that help demonize Alinsky, see <span class="js-display-url"><a class="twitter-timeline-link" dir="ltr" href="http://t.co/Nwzwxj5vTM" rel="nofollow" target="_blank" title="http://tinyurl.com/qa6fglk"><span class="js-display-url">tinyurl.com/qa6fglk</span></a></span>.<br />
<span class="js-display-url">The point isn't to defend Obama. It is that I think the world would work better if the ratio of:</span><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="js-display-url"><b>ability to find verifiable facts pertinent to political discussion</b> </span><br />
<hr style="padding-left: 30px;" />
<b>supply of highly opinionated and slanted "news". </b></blockquote>
<br />
could be raised by, say, an order of magnitude.<br />
<span class="js-display-url">So many assertions are made that are
likely not true, but are incredibly difficult for the average person to
disprove. In this Internet era, the personal cost to write some almost
free associative screed about a political point is very low, while the
personal cost of finding quite a lot of pertinent facts is awfully high.</span><br />
<span class="js-display-url">This is not to say the "average person"
will look for facts to confirm or contradict what they read, but much of
what they read is written by bloggers some of whom are sincere and
would become users of such resources, and I do believe the emotional
rewards of finding a nugget of truth versus the current pain of often
fruitless search would have an effect on people's thinking habits --
maybe small at first but growing over time.</span><br />
<span class="js-display-url">The particular proposal merely
illustrates one of many sorts of resource that are missing or hard to
find. Ideas for other such resources would be welcome.</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-51017271774995208342014-07-15T18:14:00.001-07:002014-12-19T19:08:57.664-08:00"Obama Confession" by Andrew Hodges<table><tbody>
<tr><td>I just have to give an example of the strange places some Americans have gone fishing for the truth. Psycho-history once had its day, but that day is long past, except in right wing daemonizations of Obama which are big sellers.<br />
<br />
If you're tempted to buy this, let me suggest looking at <span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R30GGFXYF54UBO/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0961725516">this review of another book by the author</a></span> called <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0961725516/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0961725516&linkCode=as2&tag=talesoftheear-20&linkId=SV7W4VCB7DMEHMD3">A Mother Gone Bad: The Hidden Confession of JonBenet's Killer</a></i><br />
<i></i><br />
<i><img alt="" border="0" src="http://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=talesoftheear-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0961725516" height="1" style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" width="1" /></i><br />
Here is one excerpt from the review <i><b>"he concludes that the misspelled word "bussiness" all by
itself indicates that a woman did it because of several random words
that he himself, out of the blue, associates with that word. Yes, it
really is that bad!"</b></i>
</td><td><iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ss&ref=ss_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=talesoftheear-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=0961725540&asins=0961725540&linkId=BDHJGZ54JITWF5QL&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;">
</iframe>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
Much is said about the author's prowess as a criminal profiler but where are his solved cases? We have only his claims about who the (unconvicted) perpetrators are in his two books on Jon Benet and one on the disappeared Natalee Holloway (whether she was murdered at all has not been determined, except by Dr. Hodges).<br />
<br />
Using his "science of the super mind" has also enabled him to write an "interview" of Jesus Christ, the author picks quotes from various Obama speeches, and gives them outrageous "meanings". These words from the 2008 inaugural address:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><b>In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small
band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy
river. The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow
was stained with blood. At the moment when the outcome of our
revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these
words to be read to the people:</b></i> </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><b> “Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter,
when nothing but hope and virtue could survive… that the city and the
country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”</b></i></blockquote>
The book then asks<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"Was the 'common...danger' Obama saw in America in reality himself? That is, was his super-intel confessing specifically to his secret sabotage of the nation? Did he tell us that story to bypass his denial and deliver to America a solemn warning of his ominous presidency, about to unfold?[p41]</i></blockquote>
This book presently has an Amazon rating of 13,000 which is pretty damn good, though not "best-seller"<br />
<br />
<b>The Latest:</b> If you hear more than the usual number of "warnings" about Obama declaring martial law or wanting "total gun control", especially saying it came from Obama's mouth, it's likely to trace back to Hodges, and the article featuring him in <a href="http://www.wnd.com/2014/07/forensic-profiler-obama-slipping-mentally/">WND.com (WorldNetDaily)</a>, where he pulls these phrases out of his magician's hat based on "analysis" of Obama's speeches.<br />
<br />
<b>Tip:</b> If you wonder whether a periodical is counting on its audience being gullible, just look at the ads. Here's the very first one I notice in that issue of WND: <br />
<table><tbody>
<tr><td class="rh10c"><div class="rh10 rh-box-title rh-title collapsed-box">
<a class="rhtitle" data-original-href="http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=CBTGdBbLGU__yBdSgpgPd7YKgDraZr4oHjuvbmIQBwI23ARABIO3SmyFQ7I3Wz_3_____AWDJ1uqKtKTYD6ABks7p3QPIAQGoAwHIA8MEqgSgAU_Q-drXErPKIdWhsDs4WYxvNdg-pf2ERMS5K-RB6VMDnEkdKUIsvD77b0MuXp0D2XvG4VPmOxLylOOB_FmE1ZbapHatrTr9VxHzazW-WgX2urbENXvRolpvO6MSHbH0stDZ-CY10IobKwQytDNPCXcko5clE2ISNSsUKVorMACaRBU_yuCluB6jrYj_7CeWmLlBNO0R5j2EZHQ7j5eCUWKIBgGAB9axliI&num=1&cid=5GgtlphPhXpIOr90Rj2KidJZ&sig=AOD64_31k-kGaOJz3cTs20Y29RIzehMoqg&client=ca-pub-8415620659137418&adurl=http://www.gfchips.com/ford.aspx" href="http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=CBTGdBbLGU__yBdSgpgPd7YKgDraZr4oHjuvbmIQBwI23ARABIO3SmyFQ7I3Wz_3_____AWDJ1uqKtKTYD6ABks7p3QPIAQGoAwHIA8MEqgSgAU_Q-drXErPKIdWhsDs4WYxvNdg-pf2ERMS5K-RB6VMDnEkdKUIsvD77b0MuXp0D2XvG4VPmOxLylOOB_FmE1ZbapHatrTr9VxHzazW-WgX2urbENXvRolpvO6MSHbH0stDZ-CY10IobKwQytDNPCXcko5clE2ISNSsUKVorMACaRBU_yuCluB6jrYj_7CeWmLlBNO0R5j2EZHQ7j5eCUWKIBgGAB9axliI&num=1&cid=5GgtlphPhXpIOr90Rj2KidJZ&sig=AOD64_31k-kGaOJz3cTs20Y29RIzehMoqg&client=ca-pub-8415620659137418&adurl=http://www.gfchips.com/ford.aspx" target="_blank" title="www.gfchips.com"> $69 Ford Power Chip</a></div>
</td></tr>
<tr><td class="rh11c"><div class="rh11 rh-box-url rh-url">
<div class="rhurlctr" dir="ltr">
<a class="rhurl" data-original-href="http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=CBTGdBbLGU__yBdSgpgPd7YKgDraZr4oHjuvbmIQBwI23ARABIO3SmyFQ7I3Wz_3_____AWDJ1uqKtKTYD6ABks7p3QPIAQGoAwHIA8MEqgSgAU_Q-drXErPKIdWhsDs4WYxvNdg-pf2ERMS5K-RB6VMDnEkdKUIsvD77b0MuXp0D2XvG4VPmOxLylOOB_FmE1ZbapHatrTr9VxHzazW-WgX2urbENXvRolpvO6MSHbH0stDZ-CY10IobKwQytDNPCXcko5clE2ISNSsUKVorMACaRBU_yuCluB6jrYj_7CeWmLlBNO0R5j2EZHQ7j5eCUWKIBgGAB9axliI&num=1&cid=5GgtlphPhXpIOr90Rj2KidJZ&sig=AOD64_31k-kGaOJz3cTs20Y29RIzehMoqg&client=ca-pub-8415620659137418&adurl=http://www.gfchips.com/ford.aspx" href="http://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=CBTGdBbLGU__yBdSgpgPd7YKgDraZr4oHjuvbmIQBwI23ARABIO3SmyFQ7I3Wz_3_____AWDJ1uqKtKTYD6ABks7p3QPIAQGoAwHIA8MEqgSgAU_Q-drXErPKIdWhsDs4WYxvNdg-pf2ERMS5K-RB6VMDnEkdKUIsvD77b0MuXp0D2XvG4VPmOxLylOOB_FmE1ZbapHatrTr9VxHzazW-WgX2urbENXvRolpvO6MSHbH0stDZ-CY10IobKwQytDNPCXcko5clE2ISNSsUKVorMACaRBU_yuCluB6jrYj_7CeWmLlBNO0R5j2EZHQ7j5eCUWKIBgGAB9axliI&num=1&cid=5GgtlphPhXpIOr90Rj2KidJZ&sig=AOD64_31k-kGaOJz3cTs20Y29RIzehMoqg&client=ca-pub-8415620659137418&adurl=http://www.gfchips.com/ford.aspx" target="_blank" title="gfchips.com"> gfchips.com</a></div>
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<tr><td class="rh13c"><div class="rh13 rh-box-body rh-body">
<span class="rhbody"> 60 Horsepower 4-7 MPG Fuel Savings Easy Install</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-60955936403467903242014-07-14T18:42:00.000-07:002014-12-20T06:58:47.360-08:00Applied Memetics, Godwin's Law, Leo Strauss and Reduction ad HitlerumAccording to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law">Wikipedia</a>,<b> Godwin's law</b> (or <b>Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies</b>)<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-GL_FAQ_1-0"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law#cite_note-GL_FAQ-1"></a></sup><sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Godwin94_2-0"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law#cite_note-Godwin94-2"></a></sup> is an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_humor" title="Internet humor">Internet adage</a> asserting that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler <span class="nowrap"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely" title="Almost surely">approaches 1</a>".</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Godwin">[Mike] Godwin</a> has stated that he introduced the law in 1990 as an experiment in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics" title="Memetics">memetics</a>.<br />
<br />
<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-Godwin94_2-3"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law#cite_note-Godwin94-2"></a></sup><br />
... it is
framed as a memetic tool to reduce the incidence of inappropriate
hyperbolic comparisons. "Although deliberately framed as if it were a
law of nature or of mathematics, its purpose has always been rhetorical
and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to
Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust" title="The Holocaust">the Holocaust</a>", Godwin has written.<br />
<br />
Godwin's law is familiar enough to the general public to have gotten into the Oxford English Dictionary.<br />
<br />
<table><tbody>
<tr><td><iframe frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&OneJS=1&Operation=GetAdHtml&MarketPlace=US&source=ss&ref=ss_til&ad_type=product_link&tracking_id=talesoftheear-20&marketplace=amazon&region=US&placement=0385511841&asins=0385511841&linkId=242KAWOMELS3YBQH&show_border=true&link_opens_in_new_window=true" style="height: 240px; width: 120px;">
</iframe></td><td>Has the "experiment in memetics" worked? Maybe among the participants of email listserve debates from circa 1990. The Wikipedia article says<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion
forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and
whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate" title="Debate">debate</a> was in progress"</blockquote>
Unfortunately, that sounds, today like a quaint and innocent time. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
E.g., in Bing.com, I get 71,800 matches for "Hitlery", a nickname often used by right wing bloggers for Hillary Clinton. Then <a href="http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=hitlery&FORM=HDRSC2">click on the "Images" tab and see what you get</a>.<br />
<br />
Then there is the book you see above, a blurb for which read<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the
insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents.
Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining
their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists
in our midst?</blockquote>
Mostly, when I see someone called "fascist" in any article comment section, it is <i><b>directed</b></i> at liberals, not coming from them. As a baby boomer, I remember when college students talked that way about conservatives, but it looks like, in many ways, movement conservatives are the ones who want to relive those times.<br />
<br />
Some of them, like David Horowitz, may have been themselves part of the "New Left" back them, and just continue to use the same hyperbolic insulting tactics they did back then.<br />
<br />
In some places you may seen Godwin's Law "otherwise known as <i><b>Reduction ad Hitlerum</b></i>", but that phrase was invented by Leo Strauss around 1960, long predating Godwin. Strauss was a mentor to conservatives such as Allan Bloom (academic) Paul Wolfowitz, a leading neoconservative and proponent of the Iraq War inside the Bush Administration.<br />
<br />
See also <a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2011/02/integration-of-theory-and-practice.html">The Integration of Theory and Practice</a>.<br />
<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-12"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law#cite_note-12"></a></sup><br />
<span class="nowrap"></span><br />
<span class="nowrap"></span><br />
<span class="nowrap"><span class="Unicode"></span></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-41811836787952409302014-07-03T18:23:00.001-07:002016-06-28T08:44:36.386-07:00Myths About Saul Alinsky (and Obama)<div class="b-media h-hide--on-preview">
<div class="b-media__body">
[<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">NOTE: Current latest tRTP posting: <a href="http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2016/06/clinton-and-bengazi-vs-reagan-and.html">http://therealtruthproject.blogspot.com/2016/06/clinton-and-bengazi-vs-reagan-and.html</a></span></b>]<br />
Lately, right wing sources have been circulating a fictitious set of 8 "levels of control" or "How to create a social state" that Saul Alinsky was supposed to have written, which led off with<br />
<i>1) Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people</i> <br />
<br />
This myth is so thoroughly digested and accepted that <i><b>answers.yahoo.com</b></i> will spit it out as the answer to "What are the 8 levels of control as outlined by Saul Alinsky?" (last time checked: 2014-08-18).<br />
Yet is very easily shown to be a total fiction.<br />
<br />
Alinsky has been dead for over 40 years, yet the phoney connection between Alinsky and his supposed "How to create a social state" only appears on web pages from 2013 on, which probably means it is scuttlebutt generated for the post-election renewal of the war on Obama.<br />
<br />
If you <b>Google { alinsky "Control healthcare and you control the people" }</b><br />
with a custom date range 1/1/2000-1/1/2013 you get 9 hits which all seem to <i>not really be that old</i>; but an unrestricted search gives 85,600 results (<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>note that Google gives different results for different people based on their records of what you've shown interest in -- so your mileage may vary</b></span>)<br />
<br />
So, apparently nobody ever heard of Alinsky saying "Control healthcare and you control the people" before 2013, though he's been dead since 1972.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
If you truly put yourself into a pre-1972 mindframe, "<b><i>Control healthcare and you control the people</i></b>" would seem to have come out of left field (or right field). But the natural explanation is it's tailored to support the myth that Alinsky was Obama's "mentor", which has been building steam since 2007 or 2008. The origin of this myth in 2013 suggests "Obamacare" helped motivate the rewriting of the long dead Alinsky's life story.<br />
<br />
Apparently, somebody around the start of 2013 decided the ploy was underperforming because Alinsky had not been adequately demonized. <br />
<br />
I don't think there is anything in <i>Dreams from My Father</i>, to suggest that Obama ever thought about Alinsky, which I don't think can be ascribed to "caginess" as it was written long before Obama sought any public office, and does mention such political no-nos as the use of marijuana and cocaine before he "got serious" in college. In fact I think the book is written as if he doesn't care too much whether the reader admires him or not, though he did want you to admire his grandmother. It's just <i><b>"Here I am, a sort of poor black kid raised mostly by my white grandparents who did right by me, who's graduated Harvard Law school and been the first black president of the Harvard Law Review" </b></i>- the exact narrative that lead acquaintances to urge him to write his story.<br />
<br />
Obama and Alinsky were both community organizers but the similarity seems to end there. Alinsky sounds like a fairly serious rabble-rouser (in good causes I think), while Obama seemed calm and fairly modest in his aims. He only did it for a couple of years and according to the book, it seems <i><b>struggle to get the city to get asbestos removed from some public housing</b></i> was the highlight of his Community Organizer years. I'm not sure he did anything much more dramatic than that. <br />
<br />
Since Hillary Clinton did in fact write a senior thesis on Alinsky, I think it very possible that the whole strategy of demonizing Alinsky was developed with her in mind, but once Obama took the lead it was too good not to use just because Obama was a Community Organizer.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.wearesc.com/forums/forum/main-category/off-topic/89018-who-was-sol-alinsky-here-is-short-summary">Here</a>
is an item posted since February 2014, around the time <i><b>Snopes.com</b></i> says
such lists began to show up. This is probably just one of many. I am
posting it with some comments to give some idea how accurate it is. As some rough gauge of its prevalence, as I noted earlier,<br />
<b>Google { alinsky "Control healthcare and you control the people" }</b><br />
produces 85,600 results.<nobr></nobr><br />
<h2 class="b-post__title OLD__post-title">
Who was Sol(sic) Alinsky? Here is short summary
</h2>
<div class="b-post__timestamp OLD__post-date">
<time datetime="2014-02-22T18:21:29" itemprop="dateCreated">02-22-2014, 03:21 PM <span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>The "summary" begins with a good paragraph of verifiable info on Alinsky including that his major books were <i>Rules for Radicals</i> and <i>Reveille for Radicals</i>. In the following, I have used online text versions of those 2 books to search for anything even vaguely related to these claims</b></span></time><br />
<time datetime="2014-02-22T18:21:29" itemprop="dateCreated"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b><br /></b></span></time>
<time datetime="2014-02-22T18:21:29" itemprop="dateCreated"> </time><span style="font-size: large;"><i><b><span style="color: #1f497d;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica";"><u>How to create a social state by Saul Alinsky:</u></span></span></b></i></span></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="OLD__post-content h-padding-vert-xl">
<div class="axd axd_first-post">
<br />
The phrase "social state" does not appear in either of Alinsky's major books. </div>
<div class="js-post__content-text OLD__post-content-text restore" itemprop="text">
<blockquote>
<blockquote>
<i>There are eight <u><b>levels of control</b></u> that must be obtained before you are able to create a social state. The first is the most important.</i></blockquote>
The phrase "levels of control" do not appear in any of Alinsky's books. When "control" is mentioned in these books it seems to generally be something to be avoided.
<br />
<blockquote>
<br />
<i>1) Healthcare – Control healthcare and you control the people</i></blockquote>
Neither the word "healthcare" nor the phrase "health care" appear in either of Alinsky's major books. He apparently had little or no interest in health care.<br />
<blockquote>
<br />
<i>2) Poverty – Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.</i></blockquote>
The word "poverty" occurs 3 times in <i>Rules</i> (for Radicals) and 4 times in <i>Reveille</i> (for Radicals). There is no hint that to "Increase the Poverty level" would be a good idea.
<br />
<blockquote>
<br />
<i>3) Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.</i></blockquote>
The word "debt" once in Reveille (a mention that someone was in debt) and never appears in Rules.
<br />
<blockquote>
<br />
<i>4) Gun Control – Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.</i></blockquote>
The phrase "gun control" does not occur in either book. Nor is there any reference to the 2nd Amendment.<br />
<blockquote>
<br />
<i>5) Welfare – Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income)</i><br />
<br /></blockquote>
The phrase "take control" does not occur in either book.<br />
<blockquote>
<i>6) Education – Take control of what people read and listen to – take control of what children learn in school.</i></blockquote>
The phrase "take control" does not occur in either book.<br />
<blockquote>
<br />
<i>7) Religion – Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools</i><br />
<br /></blockquote>
Neither "belief in God" nor "belief in <i><b>the</b></i> God" occur in either book.<br />
<blockquote>
<i>8) Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.</i></blockquote>
Neither "class warfare" nor "divide the people" occur in either book. Discontent is barely mentioned.
</blockquote>
<br />
<h2 class="b-post__title OLD__post-title">
<a href="http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/alinsky.asp"> <span style="font-size: small;">http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/alinsky.asp</span></a></h2>
<br />
From http://billmoyers.com/content/who-is-saul-alinsky/<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The way Newt Gingrich refers to the
connection between Barack Obama and Saul Alinsky, one might think the
president and the community organizer were golf buddies… except for the
stubborn fact Alinsky died in 1972 when Obama was 10. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Among Gingrich’s quotes: <i>“Obama believes in Saul Alinsky and secular European socialist bureaucracy.”</i> And <i>“Saul Alinsky radicalism is at the heart of Obama.”</i></blockquote>
<br />
<a href="http://www.linksrank.com/" title="Click here to see who's linking to my site.">Who links to my website?</a>
</div>
</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1711691711292789727.post-18501641349448414382014-07-03T13:01:00.002-07:002014-12-19T19:14:36.826-08:002014 "Planning" for 65,000 unaccompanied minor aliens - though it would be the first year more than 5,000 appeared<span style="font-size: large;">How to create an <i><b>illusion</b></i> of proper sourcing:</span><br />
A widespread story has appeared that the U.S. was looking for one or more contractors to help deal with an estimated 65,000 unaccompanied minor illegal immigrants for 2014 when <i><b>up to now, no more than 5,000 unaccompanied minor illegal immigrants a year have been seen</b></i>.<br />
<br />
It looks like the story originated with "<a href="http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2014/06/20/question-if-dhs-is-surprised-at-the-number-of-unaccompanied-minors-crossing-the-border-then-why-where-they-looking-for-a-vendor-to-support-65000-unaccompanied-minors-in-january/">Conservative Treehouse</a>". They provided a link to the <a href="https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=c6d7c0050b912fbc917a46d6709d38bd&tab=core&tabmode=list&=s=opportunity&mode=form&id=c6d7c0050b912fbc917a46d6709d38bd&tab=core&tabmode=list&amp">original solicitation for services on a legitimate government site</a>. Yes, it sure enough says "There will be approximately 65,000 UAC (Unaccompanied Alien Children) in total". So, impressive sourcing, straight to the government document.
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<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
What are people making of this? You might be amazed. The government was, back in January 2014 "seeking vendors to handle transportation logistics". Limbaugh says</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>you tell me this is not purposeful. Listen. "Six months ago, the Regime
began planning how to transport tens of thousands of undocumented
children from the border.</i></div>
</blockquote>
Others will say more clearly what he is implying. Limbaugh is very good at avoiding the sort of clear cut falsehood that would get him in real trouble. But he gets people thinking about things, and they go looking for answers that are only a "google" away.<br />
<br />
The Treehouse sort of says it, in a deniable way:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i> It’s enough to make you think we might have (State Dept.) NGO’s in Panama, Honduras, Guatemala etc. directing this entire “surprise influx”…. <br /> …Nah, this administration would never intentionally orchestrate something so nefarious or troublesome, right? Right?</i></blockquote>
And Representative Steve King, R-Iowa goes way out on a limb, referring to it as a "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloward-Piven_strategy">Cloward-Piven strategy</a>" -- which apparently means the point is to cause general chaos so the "Regime" can declare a state of emergency and take over.<br />
<br />
So, forgetting about the "Cloward-Piven strategy" in case that doesn't stick to the wall, we can at least say the "Regime" somehow knew there was going to be something like 65,000 "UAC"s this year when there were never more than 5,000 in a year. Oops. There is no sourcing for this 5,000 a year, not a hint of where that number came from.<br />
<br />
So Suppose we Google{ "unaccompanied alien children" statistics }<br />
We find another government page "<a href="http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/orr/programs/ucs/about"><span class="separator"></span></a><a href="http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/orr/programs/ucs/about">About Unaccompanied Children's Services</a>" giving these statistics and projection for 2014:<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisce36KIUqaRqQ4hniAkmS7xBxOgV0iBYE8B3zZ79AFnDqnmIsd0yAGlGwdNTlg-ApolL4qwWD35E2t8_9i98aS6ozFLZbpl6MdvU-Z71yIN-YVrlwzZLfJul49FkwU49ET-Mqdj1QRNRd/s1600/Screenshot+from+2014-07-03+15:43:11.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisce36KIUqaRqQ4hniAkmS7xBxOgV0iBYE8B3zZ79AFnDqnmIsd0yAGlGwdNTlg-ApolL4qwWD35E2t8_9i98aS6ozFLZbpl6MdvU-Z71yIN-YVrlwzZLfJul49FkwU49ET-Mqdj1QRNRd/s1600/Screenshot+from+2014-07-03+15:43:11.png" height="199" width="320" /></a></div>
So the numbers have been roughly doubling every year, making an estimate of 60,000 very plausible.<br />
<br />
This sort of child immigration is not new. 4 years ago (2010) there was a documentary on it called "<a href="http://www.whichwayhome.net/">Which Way Home</a>". The synopsis for the <u><i><b>2010</b></i></u> documentary says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>The film follows several unaccompanied child migrants as they journey
through Mexico en route to the U.S. on a freight train they call "The
Beast." Director Rebecca Cammisa (Sister Helen) tracks the
stories of children like Olga and Freddy, nine-year-old Hondurans who
are desperately trying to reach their families in Minnesota, and Jose, a
ten-year-old El Salvadoran who has been abandoned by smugglers and ends
up alone in a Mexican detention center, and focuses on Kevin, a canny,
streetwise 14-year-old Honduran, whose mother hopes that he will reach
New York City and send money back to his family.</i></blockquote>
Going back to the government web site, they have a "fact sheet" at <a href="http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/orr/unaccompanied_childrens_services_fact_sheet.pdf">www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/orr/unaccompanied_childrens_services_fact_sheet.pdf</a><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>The average length of stay in the program is currently near 35 days. Of the children served, some 85% are reunified with their families.</i></blockquote>
This, as far as I can tell, is the "Regime"s nefarious plan. To deal as well as we can with children who misguidedly or out of true desperation rode across Mexico on the tops of freight trains and/or with the help of "coyotes" to get here. The Request for Information (on potential contractors) says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;">ICE is seeking the
services of a responsible vendor that shares the philosophy of
treating all UAC with dignity and respect, while adhering to standard
operating procedures and policies that allow for an effective,
efficient, and incident free transport. </span><span style="font-size: small;">The
Contractor shall provide </span><span style="font-size: small;">unarmed escort staff,
including management, supervision, manpower, training,
certifications, licenses, drug testing, equipment, and supplies
necessary to provide on-demand escort services for
non-criminal/non-delinquent unaccompanied alien children ages infant
to 17 years of age, seven (7) days a week, 365 days a year. T</span><span style="font-size: small;">ransport
will be required for either category of UAC or individual juveniles,
to include both male and female juveniles. There will be
approximately 65,000 UAC in total</span></div>
</blockquote>
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