Diversity in hiring is the top priority of most colleges and universities. However, the effort to hire more women, minorities, and LGBT individuals notably lacks one group: ideological diversity. It is well-known that most faculty are composed of an overwhelming majority of liberal and democratic members. However, this view, while generally accepted, is largely anecdotal. Now a new study by Heterodox Academy Director of Research Sean Stevens and Brooklyn College Professor Mitchell Langbert claims to have put hard numbers on that lack of diversity. In reviewing records with the Federal Election Commission, they say that they found that professors gave to Democrats over Republicans by a 95:1 ratio.
The researchers looked at 2,301 political donations and found that 2,081 went to Democrats while just 22 went to Republicans. Only nine professors gave to both parties.
An earlier study found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a 10:4 ratio. Business Management Associate Professor Mitchell Langbert reviewed the party affiliations of 8,688 professors at 51 of the top 60 liberal arts colleges listed in U.S. News and World Report’s 2017 rankings.
These studies magnify concerns for those of us who have objected to increasing speech regulation on campuses — restrictions that have seem to be more often applied to conservative students and speakers. Indeed, academics have at times been at the heart of such attacks on the free speech rights of conservatives on campus. In one incident at the California State University where assistant professor of public health professor Greg Thatcher is shown on a videotape wiping out the pro-life statements written in chalk by members of Fresno State Students for Life.
Perhaps the most unnerving controversy involved the confrontation of Feminist Studies Associate Professor Mireille Miller-Young with pro-life advocates on campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Miller-Young led her students in attacking the pro-life display, stealing their display, and then committing battery on one of the young women. She was convicted and sentenced for the crime. Despite the shocking conduct of Miller-Young and the clear violation of the most fundamental values for all academics in guaranteeing free speech and associational rights, the faculty overwhelmingly supported Miller-Young and the university decided not to impose any meaningful discipline. Faculty and student defenders attacked the pro-life advocates and one even referred to them as “terrorists” who did not deserve free speech. Miller-Young should have been fired but was instead lionized by faculty and students.
A recent study found at Harvard found that only 35 percent of conservative students felt free to share their views on campuses. That chilling effect is the result of not just open hostility to conservative voices on campus but a striking lack of diversity among academics in terms of ideology.
What scares me the most about the people pushing a climate change/ global warming agenda is they will have us living under rules and regulations that they will make themselves exempt from. Do you think the Hollywood elite or the politically connected will live under the rules and regulations as the rest of us.
Oh, you’re just saying that because elites flew 1500 private jets to a climate change summit featuring g Greta Thurnburg in order to bash fossil fuels.
When I was in Middle School I wrote a short story about a group of Victorian Era Noble English fuddyduds who besieged a small African village to offer them a very proper relief effort to save them from “starvation”. The short of the story was while the Africans were managing just fine, they were obviously starving because they had to hunt for food with spears and teamwork. The relief consisted of bringing all sorts of regalia and fine clothing, along with expensive silverware and china and serving them a rigid, exemplary food service under of course the obvious notion that showing them an upper class supper would transform them from their “savage” ways to an enlightened society by showing them which spoon to use with the caviar. Though they spent thousands of pounds in travel and setting up this canard, they left believing they changed Africa for the better and could rightfully claim in society they were magnanimous. The Africans however found the food didn’t agree with them and vowed never to welcome the white devils again.
In your example I see similarities with these modern fuddyduds and “sophistos” as Alex Delarge called them in the Milk Bar. They are just there to check off an item in a virtue checklist for which they subscribe. It’s about as fake as the boobs half of them bestow.
Melania and Ivanka went?
That is pretty good for middle school.
Yes. It takes a vivid propagandized imagination to think -hallucinate- that Hollywood is exempt from rules, regulations and laws. It could be confusing I guess because Trump certainly thinks he’s exempt from all and any restrictions on his behavior. Rule of Law does not apply to him.
Q.P.. Didn’t John Wayne say that?
“Vita est dura, sed durior si sis bardus.” – Life is tough, but it’s tougher if you’re stupi
To me this means that real men arent liberal arts professors.
“Truth has a liberal bias.”
… and then there are the actual Christian virtues…
Oh my god, this blog is going to have be put on suicide watch when Trumpy bear sucks swamp water in November and loses hard. It’ll be a shock for many of you no doubt (but not really). No need to worry though, your outrage will be sparked by the soon to follow indictments from SDNY. They’ll give you enough to rage on about for a good spell.
They’ll give you enough to rage on about for a good spell.
Wut?
You are the only one who is faux “outraged” on here. sadly if you were to be placed on suicide watch it would not be by any of us doing so. doubtful your mummy and dadda would care either
LOL
Bahahahahaha…you actually think I’m angry? Yay tone deafness!
Nice Peterson, what a guy. Remind me to ignore your cries when you are dying.
Says the bony process with a chip in his shoulder
Yeah, guess I should watch my purdy little mouth on here. Question: do you actually say mummy and dadda in real life?
Elvis, we lived through Obama for two terms without becoming deranged and trying to destroy the Constitution. You guys barely made it through Bush. It is the left that goes insane and threatens violence.
Yes indeed. The wailing of the ignorant will be deafening.
Can just hear it now. Ha.
We have been hearing it for 3 years
Get off of the pill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9pD_UK6vGU
Naw, Keith it’ still an “A.” Just a 7 letter word instead of Hawthorne’s 10 letter one.
Trumpers On Thread Deny..
Conservative War On Science
One of our Trumpers claims that Australia’s wildfires is merely an epidemic of arson. Like arsonists created record hot temperatures! The BBC link below explains how hot Australia has gotten.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-50837025
Regarding Above:
Here’s an official U.S. government report telling us 2019 was the second hottest year on record (behind 2016). The last 10 years have been one of the hottest decades ever recorded.
https://www.noaa.gov/news/2019-was-2nd-hottest-year-on-record-for-earth-say-noaa-nasa
did you explain what jevon’s paradox is or its relevance to carbon emissions reduction strategies yet?
oh no i see you didn’t because you can’t
did you explain what falsifiability and testability are in the context of scientfiic method yet, or explain how String Theory can be either verified or falsified?
oh no you cant
did you figure out what the scientific fad cosmology “simulation theory” is and how it’s precisely similar to the spurned religious “intelligent design”?
no because they are substantially similar., but elon musk believes simulation theory so its cool but Baptists believe Intelligent Design so it isnt.
That’s where you live Seth Peter. In the world of fads and fashions passing for thought!
Kurtz, show me a mainstream science journal that confirms what you’re trying to say. That’s all I need to see. And the same goes for your Intelligent Design defense: show me mainstream confirmation.
Conservative commenters try to pull this stunt all the time where they post pseudo science jargon and claim that it somehow verifies that Climate Change is false. But when asked for confirmation they can only cite obscure rightwing blogs.
Sorry Peter you don’t get it about Simulation hypothesis obviously. Go watch Neil De Grasse Tyson explain it. Get Nick Bostrom’s book. Read that. Then compare to Intelligent Design. It’s patently obvious the similarity.
I also gave you a link that explains precisely why String theory is not a verifiable and testable.
you want a better link on that one? Will you apologize? I doubt it. here’s a better link. read this. oh first maybe you better figure out what I’m talking about in the first place when i say string theory. then read it.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-string-theory-science/
as for your worshipful assertions about Climate Change you havent bothered to put 5 minutes into what I named, Jevon’s Paradox, and if you did, if you bothered, that would take you into reams of peer reviewed literature about climate change from the people you take as High Priests. Go study their catechisms and come back to me when you’re ready to admit that there’s a huge problem with mitigation being feasible!
I could care less what “conservatives” say about his or that. I am working from my own script here and trust me nobody on Fox news knows any more about Jevon’s paradox than you do! which is apparently zilch or you would cut bait and go figure it out.
ADAPTATION is the only sane policy response. go fetch up your own research since you’ve refused to work with what i’ve given you
benson did too a month ago, but he slithered away from the conversation more quietly than you have!
Thing is, Jevon’s Paradox is a short term theory taken from economic price spikes in markets and carried over into asserting that efficiency spurs never ending greater use (in the case of energy usage). Which is fine in accessing initial reactions. But things level out, they always do. Especially markets.
But in regard to climate change modeling and whether mitigation or adaption are answers, Jevon’s Paradox is speculative map, not territory. It also gets bound up in either/or ism.
In fact the scientific method and it’s ‘is it this or is it that’ limitations and abstractions is a necessary but insufficient approach to climate change because, obviously it (and basically every other scourge, epidemic or syndrome) functions on several levels at once.
Mitigation, yes. Adaption, yes. Remediation, yes.
Human reductionism created the problem, it’s not very good at solving it.
thanks to elvis for at least addressing the topic
this article explains the difficulties in detail. you can see if you buy it or not. I do.
https://economics21.org/inconvenient-realities-new-energy-economy
it seems to me that population at the current level means it’s basically impossible to reduce carbon emissions short of an immediate breakthough in fusion energy which can be scaled up quickly. that would be great but i wont hold my breath
Paul Erich said in 1994 that about a billion people was sustainable. I heard him say something similar a few months ago. Maybe people think he’s a fraud. I know conservatives do. I tend to give him more credit than the average conservative I think. Moreover I am aware of credible (to me) analysts who put the number below a billion. We are at what now, 7?
What I’m saying is, if climate change advocates really believe the carbon emissions are the culprit, then you necessarily should be just hoping for a global pandemic or something like that because short of that it will be impossible in the next decade to cut carbon emissions enough to arrest the cascading effects that may be triggered. So the only logical thing wouldbe to get busy on adaptation fast. But I can see that all the schemers like AOC just talk about a carbon tax and building new kinds of houses which is a pathetic joke of a solution. All that stuff is just mitigation and there is zero NOTHING coming from the usual Democrat leadership about adaptation which actually might be worth the effort.
So I don’t really think “climate change advocates” who comment in political circles really understand or believe fully in their own schtick. Either that or they just dont get get how and why energy is produced and stored and transported and consumed and must continue to be consumed at the current rates to support human civilization.
Well maybe the Corona virus is your long hoped for plague that will cut the world population to the bone. We’ll find out!
Let’s buckle up, shall we? Ha.
Some solid points in there, Kurtz. Some abstractions, too. Fascinating topic…., and one that has to step beyond the realm of philosophy if for no reason other than the alarm is going off. Full disclosure: my dad worked at NASA as a physicist and while he worked a good bit in the early days of satellite surveillance he also wrote a lot of their early stuff about how solar power was going to integrate into the economy. At least that’s how he could be identified in public, lol.
And oddly enough, I make my living now primarily by speculating on and identifying price spikes, so the topic flops my mop on any number of levels.
So in the interest of keeping things as focused as possible. As a species humans are going to have to change the way we generate energy. Good news is, while the vast majority of problems in shifting over detailed in the article are completely real and, indeed, huge stumbling blocks — the real benefit of shifting toward wind, solar, wave, etc. is this; as a rule whenever you don’t have to generate the power you collect and distribute you come out ahead, profiteering aside. So the real battle grounds aren’t so much at panel/windmill locations, it’s at the integration into the grid.
We’ll see how it all shakes out. Between that and the coronavirus, maybe there could be a much quicker shift than ever thought possible, hmmm? Lol.
Still, good to see you’re willing to venture into the back forty on the topic. Most never get past refusing to keep the temp less than 70 in their house…
And yeah…, I’m one of *those* guys…,spent a good while living entirely off the grid. So I guess that puts me in the confused category. Ha.
Welcome Elvis stick around we need more investors and independent thinkers here
say speaking of the grid here’s a guy who used to work at NASA and writes survivalist fiction now and sells EMP protection gear
just thought I’d plug his stuff for fun, had some interesting conversations with him in the past
https://disasterpreparer.com/product/solar-ferrite-bundle/
his name’s Arthur Bradley
Kurtz, my friend, do you have the money to cover our costs when it doesn’t work?
Do you realize that you are talking to one troll with multiple accounts?
Climate Change is false.
Climate change is False. Below is your citation from one of the most respected, academic science journals in the world: Nature Journal.
NB: the words are longer than 2 syllables and there are no emoticons. Just saying
Blackport, R., Screen, J.A., van der Wiel, K. et al. Minimal influence of reduced Arctic sea ice on coincident cold winters in mid-latitudes. Nat. Clim. Chang. 9, 697–704 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0551-4
Get back to us if you can get past the first paragraph. No I will not help you, and it is doubtful any of your multiple personalities are up for it
Estovir, I’m not seeing anything on your link. Is it a bad link or what?? Who publishes this magazine??
Show me the paragraph that denies Climate Change.
Estovir gave you far more credit than any of us on here would. He made it really clear, and you were too stupid to catch it,
Get back to us if you can get past the first paragraph. No I will not help you, and it is doubtful any of your multiple personalities are up for it
Peter, your handlers must beat you nightly . How else to explain your idiotic behaviors on here and you throwing excrement laced Left-wing bubble copy/paste crapola?
sheesh
Anonymous, why dont you copy & paste the key paragraph that rebuts theories of Climate Change. I’m not seeing it.
Peter, almost everyone believes in climate change. 50 million years ago Ellesmere Island in the Arctic was warm and wet. That is why people like you believe that 50 million years ago man gave up cars, coal and cantaloupe
Peter, you have a very simple mind and therefore think that climate science is an easy study where everyone is in agreement. They are not. Below are some comments from just one respected scientist who includes greenhouse gasses in his equations.The science is not settled and he didn’t even get to discuss that what the simpletons of the world want to do isn’t any type of solution. I am not trying to prove anything here. I am just trying to demonstrate that climate science is not an open and shut case and while there are agreements on somethings that you assume is a unified agreement you are simply wrong.
——
William van Wijngaarden is a professor of physics at York University in Canada. He’s an expert on all things to do with temperature. He’s made detailed studies of the physics of energy at the molecular level. He’s shown how to cool down atoms to near absolute zero using lasers. And he’s also an expert on the climate system at the macro level, having published many studies of temperature and precipitation changes around the world.
The Basic Mechanisms
So the first question we want to ask is suppose there was no CO2, no greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. What would happen?
Well, you would have the surface that would absorb sunlight and that would radiate heat to space. And the heat that is emitted from the surface would just go unimpeded to space, so basically there’s no blanket. So then it would be a lot colder than it is with greenhouse gases.
Now if you have an atmosphere with gases like CO2 and it isn’t just CO2 but water vapour, that’s the big greenhouse gas that people should talk about more, it’s water vapour, CO2, ozone, N2O and methane, those are the five big naturally occurring greenhouse gases.
If you have, say, a photon, or some heat, it goes up, it gets absorbed by one of those molecules. Well if that molecule has absorbed that heat, it will re-radiate it, but it will re-radiate in general in any direction. So some of the heat will come back down and some will come back up.
So it’s a bit difficult for that infrared radiation to just go out into space. Its trip to space is going to be slowed down and in being slowed down it turns out that results in the heating of the Earth’s surface.
Computing the Radiative Forcing of Greenhouse Gas Molecules
First consider: We have to ask ourselves what are the transitions where you can absorb this infrared light or heat. And by considering these five molecules, water vapour or H2O, CO2, ozone, N2O and methane, we’ve considered several hundred thousand different transitions.
So that’s one, just getting that data. Now there are libraries available where people have measured the frequencies and how strongly each of those frequencies is absorbed. So that’s Step 1.
Step 2 you have to know what’s the concentration of each of those molecules with altitude. So there you also rely on observations.
Step 3 is we need to know what’s the temperature versus altitude. So there are these standard temperature profiles that are also based on observation.
And then you have to calculate for each of those frequencies how each of those say 200,000 transitions absorb your different frequencies of light and you have to do that at every altitude. So that’s pretty involved.
The Logarithmic Relation Between CO2and Temperature
If you look at the greenhouse effect, the amount of warming, that depends logarithmically on CO2 concentration. So if I increase the CO2 concentration from 400 to 800 parts per million and get, say, a temperature increase of, say, 1 degree C, to get an additional 1 degree C of warming on top of that I can’t go from 800 to 1200, I have to go from 800 to 1600 parts per million. So it goes logarithmically. And that’s accepted by everyone.
Estimating the Temperature Effect of Doubling CO2 and Other GHGs
Well, what we’ve done in our work is we just consider those five gases. We see what happens if we double CO2, double methane, double N2O and have about a 6% increase in water vapour which corresponds to about a 1 degree C increase.
We find then that the temperature increase due to all those doublings is about 1 to 1.5 degrees C. That’s far below what many of those Armageddon folks like to talk about.
The big uncertainty is water vapour and especially clouds. And people don’t know what clouds do. If you have clouds during the day they block the sunlight and things cool down. If you have clouds at night they’re going to trap heat hence the temperatures stay warmer.
So are we going to have more clouds? Fewer clouds? We just don’t know.
Lots We Don’t Know
First of all, there are a lot of things we don’t know. We don’t know how to model ocean currents very well. Convection is extremely difficult to model, you’re dealing with a turbulent process, the equations are very complicated and no one can model that very well. So that’s why we have focused on radiation.
Right now we are unable to make a prediction of how turbulence, those fluid equations, how that behaves. That’s just too hard for us to model. And even if we get much, much faster computers that’s going to remain a very, very tough problem.
The H2O Continuum
Some basic physics that even isn’t very well understood: For example, people like to talk about when you calculate the absorption of these different wavelengths, they say OK you have all these different lines for CO2, H2O etc. So then they make some predictions based on those lines of absorption and then they look at observations and then they look for the difference and they find that there’s a big difference and that they say is due to something called the H2O continuum. Well you ask “What is the H2O continuum due to?” and no one seems to know.
So when you ask, is this well understood, no it’s not. I think the problem in this field is people have not said, make some predictions, what are the observations, is there agreement between the model and the observations? And sometimes these models just have failed abysmally.
That doesn’t mean the modelers are dumb folks. But it’s just a very difficult thing sometimes to model. Climate is not simple to model.
there’s a warming trend and it’s not clear why but dullards like me will tend to attribute it to the biggest source of heat anyhow which is the sun which goes through activity cycles
were are in a warming trend and it’s pretty well measured by now
but about “mitigation:” this is the idea you can reduce carbon emissions because they are the bogyeman that the paris accords and AOC say are at cause regardless of all the complexities of climate causation which they just dismiss.
reducing carbon emissions is basically impossible. this is reality and all the “climate” propaganda operates under the lie that it is possible.
why? first off you cant shut out the lights all of a sudden because people will die offf. not ok!
secondly. what’s the plan, solar and wind? ok, again not really possible at scale, but let’s say there’s unexpected progress. problem: you make more efficient energy the cost of it goes down and then people use more…. total energy consumption goes up and adding renewables often does nothing to alter the net carbon emissions. may make them worse! that’s jevon’s paradox in a nutshell. and there is no replacing hydrocarbons with batteries and stuff. that’s physically impossible with a world population which depends on food and other basics of civilization manufactured and transported with energy that comes 81% from fossil fuels.
making batteries consumes a lot of energy; the more you make the more mining and hydrocarbons are necessary to be used to make them.
then there’s updating the grid. a lot more mining and hydrocarbon consumption to do that too!
of course if you starved off 4/5 of the world’s population then you might be able to run what’s left over on non-hydrocarbons assuming the grid would survive whatever conflagration would be necessary to eliminate that many people. which is an untenable assumption.
so if carbon emission are the culprit well guess what they aint goin away.
and if they’re not, like, if this is just due to increased solar activity, well, we can’t change that can we.
hence if there is a warming trend as they say, seems to me we are going to be stuck with it.
and the only sane thing is “adaptation” … get used to it, build out more resilient infrastructure, and prepare for massive migration from coastal and equatorial regions.
let’s just say the climate cools instead, which it might do, because our science and predictive models are imperfect. and the “consensus predictions of the scientists” could turn out wrong.
well if we build out better infrastructure then the money’s not wasted anyhow. see how easy that was?
FEDERAL COURT RULES..
INTELLIGENT IS NOT SCIENCE
https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/21/education/judge-rejects-teaching-intelligent-design.html
this is in the context of evolution. my point was not about evolution it was about cosmology speculations. simulation hypothesis is fundamentally similar to ID just applied to cosmology. your link about the case adds nothing
of course evolution has some very perplexing anomalies and statistical improbabilities to it, but i wont get into that. oh well maybe just a liittle. is it possible that all the amazing genetic diversity of all living things just came about by random mutuations in the short time life’s been on Earth? Evolutionists say yes, but some mathematicians say, no. .I’ll just link to the evolutionist treatment of this, which I can actually accept, and I’m not personally an advocate of ID in the same sense Baptists are.
http://ramanujan.math.trinity.edu/polofsson/research/Chance.pdf
Ok fine. but if you turn back to Simulation hypothesis, what does it depend upon?
A probablistic argument that we just MUST be living in an alien simulation. Elon Musk even stated a “one in a billion” or whatever. How he comes to such a number, I don’t know. As speculative as the stock price of Tesla I guess!
See for debunking ID, they say the probabilistic critique is just wrong.
But probabilistic speculation about this and that, is the essential element of Simulation hypothesis! The notion is we just MUST be living in an alien sim because, well, it’s all possible and if it’s possible then it must be! Er wel something like that. I’ll let Tyson explain it better than me.
Is this not inconsistent. Maybe Seth Peter can explain?
Dear Seth:
The wood in my woodshed is dry. Very dry. My remarking that it takes a human act to light it, or dry lightening, makes no claim whatsoever on the state of dryness of the wood, the conditions that made the wood dry, or how it got into my woodshed.
My matches also will not light of their own accord.
you need to learn something about the difference between mitigation and adaptation.
https://climate.nasa.gov/solutions/adaptation-mitigation/
now I’m going to tell you what engineers will tell you if they are honest.
global carbon emission growth will be impossible to significantly reduce so long as there is even a small rate of population growth. and nobody is in the position to suddenly curtail population growth either short of global war.
moreover, we can not stop warming due to solar activity anyhow. and solar warming will be increasing over the solar cycle to come, regardless of the albedo effects of changing cloud cover, which haven’t been precisely understood to the level where they can be accurately predicted in climate modeling.
simple logic dictates that resources should be put massively more towards adaptation and fast.
but you fools are parading around a high school girl at Davos and have an idiotic green new deal farce up your sleeve that would just be an excuse to tax your adversaries into submission and actually do nothing to stop climate warming trend.
that’s reality whether you acknowledge it here or not
the crazy thing is that you’ve made me for a climate denier. oh, i’m not. the globe is getting hotter alright. the ice is melting. from whatever combination of causes. No, i tell you what they call me. a climate doomer that’s what.
but you don’t know what that is either. you’re in a bubble created by the WAPO and legacy media just as surely as the “fox news” people you mock. sad!
Well they only hire/accept their own, so..
I might add that there is also to some degree influence from weak-minded or opportunistic individuals who see the dominant paradigm of these institutions as being liberal and for the sole purpose of self-preservation or an attempt to further themselves, or broadcast their egos they become champions of a cause purely for show.
One method of determining if sincerity exists in people who put on lapel pins, waive banners (either in actuality or virtually), and soap box ideas is if one could discover with true accuracy what the actual purpose for them doing this is.
Asking these people is most likely to elicit a lie from them as to why they do this. But if you can find the real reason they engage in this behavior it is telling.
Let’s take an example of a minister wearing a rainbow colored stole to promote gay rights. When a truthful mind is engaged as to why they adorned this, there are two general reasons.
1) They truly desire for the gay community to receive a fair deal in society and want others to think about treating them well.
2) They want others to know they themselves promote this cause.
The basis for this lies in whether the truly elusive notion of altruism is at hand, and thus the sincerity of the wearer.
In answer 1) is where the altruism lies, the selfless advocacy of the gay cause. In answer 2) is mostly vanity, self-righteousness, opportunism, or self-preservation that motivates the wearing of the stole.
I believe that much, but surely not all, of what motivates those in this article to give money as they do follows answer 2). It is not as important that democrat politicians get money, it is that they the individual professor shows everyone that they give money that counts to them.
One has to also wonder how skewed the result of this survey is. How honest are those who answered the question, believing some form of badness would befall them if they said they did not donate to democrats or worse if they did so for republicans. Well the system has certainly shown that punishment is to be prosecuted for wrong-think in many universities and colleges.
In some businesses even among the most educated there are those that have a lot of control over salaries and want people to donate to the 501C3 of their choice not the choice of the ones donating the money.
That is true.
Anecdotally, a relative of mine worked at the corporate headquarters of a large corporation. United Way wormed its way into the company and intertwined itself with management, becoming the 800 pound gorilla of obligatory contribution. The company tied to the employee review process an element of whether or not the employee contributed to the cause. It was reportedly not based on amount of contribution, but whether or not a payroll deduction of once or regular contribution was made or not. An employee could minimize the coercion by only making a token one-dollar contribution to obtain the brownie point. Yet there was pressure exerted to contribute.
My relative objected to this practice and later had a friend of theirs actually suffer a sudden hardship in their life and United Way refused to help them in any manner. On top of that there was some embarrassing news about the United Way’s local chapter’s leadership becoming involved in some form of malfeasance. Thereafter we made it a point at that time to refuse United Way’s corporate blackmail at all costs. That was twenty years ago and to this day I will never give anything to that self-serving bureaucracy.
oh United Way. There was the time I had to evict a local United Way poohbah from a house where he’d failed to pay the rent for many months and was letting a lady turn tricks out of it.
By Golly, the landlord had never given permission for a ‘Home based business!”
He showed up to the hearing with cash in hand. Funny how the world works!
Maybe Trump came by?
“Anecdotally, a relative of mine worked at the corporate headquarters of a large corporation. United Way wormed its way into the company and intertwined itself with management, becoming the 800 pound gorilla of obligatory contribution.”
Amazing (or not so amazing), my specific examples all had to do with United Way.
Conservatives tend to disparage doubt and inquiry and promote authority and obedience. That pretty much explains why they aren’t teaching in venues of higher education — they don’t believe in teaching or education.
TC tends to write his own facts. Those aren’t venues of higher education, they are absurdly expensive re-education camps established for the purposes of propaganda and indoctrination. If those venues educated, America wouldn’t have legions of graduates roaming the countryside caterwauling about the logic of the simple concept of taking out a loan and paying back a loan. If those venues educated, America would not be flooded with Chicken Little Enviro-Wackos who see the sky falling. If those venues educated, there would be no need for affirmative action grade inflation.
I would go on but, not being a teachers union thug or a parasitic, haughty professor, I have to get to work creating wealth.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
“Sittin’ on the beach everyday in my seeeerrrrrsucker suit!”
“The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man”
Yeah, I’m sharp
I’m really, really sharp
I sure do earn my pay
Sitting on the beach every day, yeah
I’m real real sharp, yes I am
I got a Corvette and a seersucker suit
Yes I have
– Mick Jagger
That is why conservatives do not have free speech on campus but any fascist nut dictator can speak at will.
The left does not believe in freedom of speech or diversity.
Conservative students can find or fight for a place on campus. The Dean of my college suggested I be “deaggressed” because I was too hard on my professors. I just expected them to read the entire book they assigned and be able to discuss it. And, I expected them to back up their opinions with facts, not feelings.
Paul, I never had those types of problems. I was lucky. In general everyone that taught me liked me and knew I could prove virtually everything I said. Fortunately almost everything was in the harder sciences so there wasn’t any dispute over my grades. You did a lot in the arts so much of the grade could be fudged one way or the other, You were at much greater risk.
I was in law school decades ago when liberals actually had some integrity. my constitutional law prof was a state leader for ACLU and she was the closest thing i had to a mentor there.
back then the black kids said I was racist too except they liked me anyhow. things were a lot more fun in those days when it came to talking politics. people were not crazy like now. it’s descending into CW2 i tell you
Kurtz, on this blog you are dealing with some of the cream of the crap.
Paul:
You may like this story about my kid who apparently is a chip off the old block. As a college senior, he was asked to participate in a group project to define the obvious benefits of campus diversity in honor of an incoming new college prez whose claim to fame was some diversity case. Unbeknownst to me, he took the position that artificially manufactured and enforced diversity was of no benefit and would ultimately lead to conflict based on Robert D. Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone. The prof, an Ivy-league sort, was at first aghast saying “look, just assume it is.” His group of three brave sould didn’t and presented the paper as originally conceived. They received the highest grade by the intellectually honest prof.
Diversity is dictatorship in its raw form. In America, diversity is compulsory free assembly. Wait! That dudn’t make any sense. What, compulsory free assembly? No, compulsory diversity in a free America. Americans enjoy freedom of assembly. Let’s leave it at that, Comrades.
People must adapt to the outcomes of freedom.
Freedom does not adapt to people…dictatorship does.
“Diversity is dictatorship in its raw form.”
George are you planning to run yourself through a copy machine and then start your own country?
No. I’m planning to reimplement the “original intent” and fundamental law of the American Founders who were unrivaled geniuses in the province of self-governance. Contemporary “diversity” is an unconstitutional ideology of forced national and racial integration or dictatorship which denies rights and freedoms to Americans. The Constitution provides Congress no power to deny the rights and freedoms of any individuals in order to favor other individuals, either publicly or privately. The American Founders provided maximal freedom to individuals and severely limited and restricted government. Americans enjoy every conceivable, natural and God-given right and freedom per the 9th Amendment. If Americans cannot discriminate, Americans cannot be free. People must adapt to the outcome of freedom. The outcome of freedom does not adapt to people…dictatorship does.
George, I think I know what you are talking about but I think you have to define what you mean by Contemporary “diversity” and “If Americans cannot discriminate,”. Without very careful and detailed explanation of your meanings I think, if I understand what you wish to say, you could be badly understood.
Conservatives tend to disparage doubt and inquiry and promote authority and obedience.
Nope
the greatest educators of all time were and still are the Jesuits. Universities were started by Catholic monks beginning with St Benedict of Nursia, 5th Cent AD
Fun fact: the prevalence of suicide is higher in those who lack faith and rebel against authority, but lower in those who embrace a monotheistic religion and believe in authority
Since you are a person affiliated with a university, you can access the following medical journal to verify my assertion. it’s in there.
Can’t access it? Then you will just have to believe
🙂
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1902944
NB: if you believe the kids at my university are receiving a higher education, let me tell you about the bridge in the Everglades that I have for you. It has your name all over it
“the greatest educators of all time were and still are the Jesuits. ”
Why don’t you pound your chest a little harder? I like a bit of braggadocio.
I’d be happy to spot you in the gym tomorrow morning at oh-dark hundred, when the doors open at 5:45 AM….tomorrow is chest/triceps, followed by 30 minutes cardio exercise. Word has it Mespo is joining as well. Tell him not to wear Spandex.
Ad Madjorem Dei Gloria
“I’d be happy to spot you in the gym tomorrow morning at oh-dark hundred, when the doors open at 5:45 AM”
What are you going to prove? Your brawn is bigger than your brain or your brain is bigger than you brawn? 🙂 Let’s go for a dip in ice water.
You mentioned pounding chest. You said nothing about swimming in ice water . I’m Cuban. I don’t do well in iced water. Unless if you add a splash of Bacardi Rum…and a cute little umbrella to match Mespo’s Spandex
time for bed. I’m getting the evil eye from my better half
‘nite Johnboy
“I don’t do well in iced water.”
Afraid of shrinkage? 🙂
Bacardi Rum is fine, but I am fond of high grade Scotch and Irish whiskey along with Tequilla and Gin. Maybe I need to take a look at my liver 🙂
It’s what I always wear!
i think they’ve lost their touch. i went to a jesuit university and never saw one until baccalaureate. there were scant Catholics to be found in the faculty, not sure how that fit into their model, but I’m simple that way. They’re known for being clever. Maybe that’s why I don’t get it. Not Jesuitical enough!
I think the Jesuits are mostly out for their own glory. I can understand why a lot of Catholic kings throughout history wanted them suppressed.
Now there’s a Jesuit Bishop of Rome and we can see how well that’s going. Not.
“i think they’ve lost their touch. “
Kurtz I would be careful saying things like that. Their touch caused the Church to be in a lot of hot water.
it is not conservatives who promote authority but populists. they can be found in both parties, though Trump is the archetype.
populists like authority because they like social order. liberals like social disorder because in fomenting it they serve the interests of those they have always served, the richest among us. i mean not the 1% but the billionaire stratum.
marxists got one thing about history: liberalism is the handmaid of capitalism.
the left right paradigm is and oversimplifcation and worse than useless, it is deliberately misleading
what they hate about trump is not that he is left or right. he is arguably quite moderate. many conservatives whined and complained about him incessantly until it was clear he could not be stopped in the last Republican primary.
what they hate is that he is a populist. their word for this is “demagogue”
but yes he listens to the demos– the people. he serves our interests! he is a welcome authority indeed
I think their primary objection is that Trump is an outsider. Their secondary objection is that a Republican won and we have seen their ignorant behavior over the last 50 years everytime a Republican was in office. Their third objection which is most prevalant right now is that Trump is succeeding.
“Parasites And Dependents Must Not Be Allowed To Vote”
The Greeks created and the Romans perpetuated restricted-vote, republican democracy. The American Founders generally implemented vote restrictions as: Male, European, 21, 50 lbs. Sterling/50 acres. The Founders understood the maximal freedom provided to individuals and the severe constitutional restrictions and limitations on government such as Article 1, Section 8 which precludes redistribution of wealth and regulation and the Right to Private Property which precludes social engineering such as affirmative action and rent control, etc. The American Founders did not suffer, fund or otherwise establish or intend, a massive, unconstitutional socially engineered, redistributionist government which perpetually voted itself back into office.
Since the advent of the progressive evolution to Marxist communism, unconstitutional government has grown exponentially to its current gargantuan magnitude. The weight of the burden of benefit programs, entitlements and public workers is crushing and the beneficiaries vote as a block for more and evermore redistributed wealth, programs and benefits. That onerous cargo must be offloaded. The reason for restrictions on the vote is to keep governance coherent, rational and objective. It is impossible for beneficiaries of programs, benefits and entitlements and public workers and contractors paid by the government to vote coherently, rationally or objectively. They vote, understandably, for their government provided prosperity. It is the charge of government to address the anomaly, the aberration of self-serving voting and the only and effective way to do that is to restrict from voting any and all persons who receive sustenance and funding from the government whether it be direct public assistance, food stamps or governmental contracts. People who benefit financially from government funding cannot be allowed to vote. Their vote is a given and knowable; they vote for their own affluence and abundance. The vote must be restricted and limited to the taxpayers who pay for the government.
Americans have been fooled by communists who have conducted this voting charade for more than a century. As the Greeks, Romans and American Founders of 1789 did, America must impose severe voting restrictions beginning with any and all individuals who receive payment through the government from taxpayers. It is long past time to severely restrict the vote to citizens who create wealth not citizens who consume wealth. Government in America will not be rational until most governmental programs and operations are privatized and severe voting restrictions are implemented.
__________________________________
Merriam Webster
“…citizens entitled to vote…”
republic noun
re·pub·lic | \ ri-ˈpə-blik
\
Definition of republic
b(1) : a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law
______________________________________________________
11% of the population voted in 1789.
How many people voted in 1789?
1788–89 United States presidential election
December 15, 1788 – January 10, 1789
69 electoral votes of the Electoral College 37 electoral votes needed to win
Turnout 11.6%
Nominee George Washington Party Independent Home state Virginia Electoral vote 69 States carried 10 Popular vote 43,782 Percentage 100.0%
– Wiki
Good thing America is a representative republic, rather than a democracy. A pure democracy is like two wolves and a sheep deciding “what’s for dinner?”
Anon, in fact, America is a communist “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The entire American welfare state is unconstitutional including, but not limited to, affirmative action, quotas, welfare, food stamps, rent control, social services, forced busing, minimum wage, utility subsidies, WIC, TANF, HAMP, HARP, Student Lonas, Agriculture, Commerce, Education, Labor, Energy, Obamacare, Social Security, Social Security Disability, Social Security Supplemental Income, Medicare, Medicaid, “Fair Housing” laws, “Non-Discrimination” laws, etc. The Constitution does not allow taxation for individual or specific welfare, regulation or compulsory disposition of private property. Read it sometime.
i agree with George in restricting the franchise but its another one of these good ideas that’ won’t fly under current circumstances
for a renewal of our constitutional republic, the tree of liberty would need a lot of water first.
most people aren’t anywhere near prepared for that mentally or socially, let alone materially
si vis pacem…..
“…it’s another one of these good ideas that won’t fly under current circumstances.”
– George Washington or King George III ??? (facetious)
____________________________________________
“Desperate times call for desperate measures.”
“For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable.”
– Hippocrates
___________
America is in a condition of hysteria, incoherence, chaos, anarchy and rebellion.
President Abraham Lincoln seized power, neutralized the legislative and judicial branches and ruled by executive order and proclamation to “Save the Union.”
President Donald Trump must now seize power, neutralize the legislative and judicial branches and rule by executive order and proclamation to “Save the Republic.”
As Eisenhower would warn us today, “Beware the government/media, academic/entertaintment industrial complex.”, but, some ideas are so stupid only an “intellectual” could believe them.
The once hallowed halls of academia have been turned into a warm comfortable nest for indoctrination, propagating the pusillanimous pap and proggy propaganda of the hive-minded Godless communists, socialists, secular-progressive totalitarians and infested with low-flow lockstep liberal lemmings, pro-abort feminasties, gender-bending cis-normative LBGTQIA-EIEIO barnyard menagerie of sex confused, man-bunned, Peter Pan Pajama Boy Proglobots, radical environmentalists, Angry Blue Fisters, Hate America Firsters and end-stage TDSers.
A college student today can be exposed to every form of hateful Leftist collective orthodoxy without ever having heard a single solitary Conservative POV. They can graduate owning a worthless degree in Grievance Studies, in massive student debt, and hating all our traditional shared American values, their parents and their God and Country.
Since there’s such precious little real intellectual diversity amongst the hive-minded multi-cultist diversity-mongers, perhaps it’s time to take a page from Lefty’s playbook and demand some Title IX set asides for Conservative thought.
Thank you, Jonathan Turley. You rock! You haven’t crossed the Rubicon of Reality like so many Lefties.
Seems to me as if the distinguished Prof Turley is talking himself around from his admitted Liberal position. Probably due to having to listen to the Schiff’s and Nadlers of this world.
The ratio cited in the article is a 98.5:1 ratio. Even worse!
There is nothing scientific or noble about bigots in academia and their group-think voting record. If tenured profs/hate agents are so smart, why are they rushing to enable a socialist/communist regime? How tolerant was Mao? Stalin? Mussolini? Hitler? Castro? etc… Do you idiots really believe Warren or Bernie or the AOC mob won’t go gulag on academia?
Mussolini would be a breath of fresh air.
If they keep on physically attacking lawful Trump demonstrators and the incompetent cops watch on and do nothing, then it’s necessary to organize and SELF HELP
This is something I look forward to being addressed after Trump is re-elected. As a retired teacher I’ve maintained for years that tenure needs to be removed from academia in order to regain some control over the class of instruction our children are receiving today. Before removal of tenure our legislators could get the federal government out of the student loan business!
If I recall correctly most of academia depends a large part on government largesse. this being the case and whereby communism doctrine is illegal to teach in the USA, why are we as taxpayers subsidizing anti-American propaganda?
Well, it could also be in part hat those pursuing useless degrees in subjects such as women’s studies or Tibetan poetry discovered that they could not find employment in the real world so what happened? They went into academia which created a job for them. They must subscribe either through necessity or due to their own self-entitled attitude to a liberal mantra because that is the type of groupthink that is needed to allow their position to exist. They need liberal politicians to keep the gravy train going since a purely republican approach to academics would see the waste of time and money they are and would ax the program. If they were more self-sufficient they would never have pursued such fields to begin with.
My take on all of this is that academics generally don’t donate to Republican politicians because:
1) Republicans have a long history of overt hostility to public education — its axioms, its methodology, its conclusions, its funding, even it availability and accessibility. And this Republican hostility has been expressed across the full range of intellectual inquiry, not just somewhat-subjective areas such as literature or history but also well-established scientifically-based ones such as biological evolution, species diversity, climate change, and public health.
And 2), because contemporary Republicans have a much stronger tendency than Democrats to be irrational, arrogant, domineering, selfish, and to oppose any economic restraints; effectively, they are the proverbial “bulls in a china shop”. Few contemporary Republican politicians seem to believe in any adherence to the precautionary principle, or even basic respect for the natural world, let alone to act as stewards towards it — though with their claimed religious piety, one would think that they would embrace the idea of stewardship.
Biologist, one needn’t look any further than Trump’s War On Science to know why conservatives are unwelcome in academia. Or perhaps the drive to have ‘Intelligent Design’ recognized as science. A Federal Court finally ruled that ‘Intelligent Design’ was creationism masquerading as science.
It would seem that your indoctrination is now complete. Congratulations. Now go out into the world and shout yous socialistice views to those willing to listen. I am not one of them.
Biologist, one needn’t look any further than Trump’s War On Science to know why conservatives are unwelcome in academia.
There is no ‘war on science’, Peter. You’re both invoking your fantasies as a reason for institutional misbehavior. Even if there were, it would hardly explain abiding corruption in academic life. Do you think the faculty were all hired in the last four years? Try to make an effort to sound like something other than a knucklehead.
Absurd (and all Trumpers) would have us believe that Australia isnt burning and Greenland isnt melting. So if one believes that, then there is no War On Science.
Absurd (and all Trumpers) would have us believe that Australia isnt burning and Greenland isnt melting. So if one believes that, then there is no War On Science.
I’m sure this seemed a coherent thought to you while you were typing it out.
Peter tell us how your Green New Deal pals plan on working out Jevon’s paradox problems?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/the-efficiency-dilemma
of course they have no answer and neither do you
here let me tune you into reality
https://economics21.org/inconvenient-realities-new-energy-economy
bottom line: whether it’s from carbon emissions or solar activity, there is a warming trend and it is irreversible. get used to the idea of adaptation and quite worry about mitigation if you actually care
we know you guys dont. you actually don’t believe your own schtick!
Seth Peter explain to us what a testable hypothesis is
now explain to me how “String Theory” in physics is actually a testable hypothesis
pro tip: it isn’t. It’s informed speculation and however much math spookery they fold into it, it’s not testable ergo it’s ……
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2015/12/23/why-string-theory-is-not-science/#59058cb96524
it’s also not falsifiable.
so it’s about the same sort of thing as intelligent design if we’re talking pure science here
Kurtz, get lost with that B.S. Nothing’s more obnoxious than the Climate Change Denier pretending to spout Pseudo-Science in effort to support denial.
Oh Seth Peter, so dismissive to someone who actually wants to chat! I feel sad, boo hoo. But let’s unpack your curt dismissal!
So you’re saying what? You deny the Jevon paradox? ok, you don’t bother to look it up. shows you actually haven’t read much about the math which goes into alternative energy development in the context of climate mitigation difficulties. i guess that explains why you seem so fake.
So you’re saying what? Simulation hypothesis is above your head, or it doesn’t sound like intelligent design to you, why? Because secular science guys think it’s ok to posit aliens designed our “simulated reality” and that’s different from saying God designed our reality? I guess the point sailed over your head Peter
So you’re saying what? String theory is a testable hypothesis? Falsifiable? Can you explain how? Oh wait let me rephrase that question. Do you know the relevance of the terms “falsifiable” and “testable” hypotheses to the “Scientific method” at all or do you just accept what “the scientific community says” as patently true like a bunch of priests uttering dogma?
Peter, those that believe in real science always question everything they know. The left draws conclusions and then prevents any questions from being asked or discussed. The left isn’t all that disimilar to the Church when it locked up Galileo for his scientific thoughts.
Thinking like a dinosaur there, Allan. Ship’s sailed long ago on climate science. You may not like its conclusions, but that’s another matter.
Elvis, that type of thinking that you bring to the blog is the same type of thinking that people had when they thought the sun revolved around the earth. No, the science is not settled and what you believe will save the earth is near meaningless.
I suggest you speak Greta. Apparently her knowledge of physics is much greater than yours so you might be able to learn f few basics. Unfortuantely, that will not help you much when it comes to understanding climate change.
“Absurd (and all Trumpers) would have us believe that Australia isnt burning”. Give us an example of where TIA claimed that there were no wildfires in Australia.
Over a hundred people were arrested for arson in the beleaguered country.
“State authorities have arrested a total of 183 people in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania since November 2019, in relation to 205 bushfire-related offences, according to Australian media.
Police concluded 103 fires in Queensland had been started deliberately, with 98 people – 67 of them juveniles – identified as the culprits.
In New South Wales, 24 people have been charged with deliberately lighting bushfires, with a further 53 people currently facing legal action for allegedly failing to comply with a total fire ban.”
https://www.unilad.co.uk/news/nearly-200-people-arrested-in-australia-for-deliberately-lighting-bushfires/
Unless there’s dry lightening, fires are human caused, either on accident or on purpose. It can range from arson, to car accident, a lit cigarette, drug pipe, homeless encampment warming fire, leaving a candle on, downed power line, reflective glass or metal, sparks from a fire pit, or any number of other causes.
Karen, why dont you explain why the most powerful manager of Hedge Funds is now taking Climate Change into consideration regarding investments. In fact, Insurance Underwriters have been taking Climate Change into consideration for several years st this point. It effects their bottom line.
Seth Peter, explain in your own words how “testability” and “falsifiability” are relevant to the scientific method.
You can use the internet. Ok. i know you’re here, let’s see what you can come up with in a half hour to convince us that you didn’t flunk high school chemistry! Or you even took it in the first place! I tell you what Peter i was in the honors section and I got an A!
Before you presume to lecture others aboutr rejecting science too much, establish some credibility perhaps?
Then we can move on to some engineering. a) explain Jevon’s paradox. b) discuss how it impacts the feasibility of carbon emission mitigation strategy planning.
I’ll check back later, eh?
anyways it’s obvious her point was that the cause or one of the causes of fires you referenced apparently was arson not “carbon emissions”
You seem to think “climate change” and addressing it is a simple equation. Vote yes for Democrats is the solution, right?
Goes to show how shallow and fake your grasp on the subject really is. Educate yourself, I”ve given you some grist for the mill, if you dare. Start with Jevon’s paradox! Put it in your browser and it will take you straight into the “climate change” literature you supposedly espouse! See, it’s not so simple, even though you pretend that it is. As you arrogantly claim “Trump supporters say xyz”
what a pious fraud you sound today, how appropriate you’re spewing forth on this thread about those other pious frauds, biased professors from the ivory tower
Peter, of course climate change effects the bottom line but climate change has been with the earth thoroughout its entire existence. The question you are discussing is what causes climate change. That doesn’t effect the bottom line. Whether or not an area is going under water because of humans or because of changes in weather patterns doesn’t matter. The insurance costs will be the same.
Hi Seth:
Let’s discuss how most climate policy does zero to improve either the climate or air quality, and instead enriches coffers?
Let’s also talk about the chances of the human race artificially forcing an entire planet’s climate to freeze, pardon the pun, at today’s values. It is absolutely true that humans affect the planet. Heck, even wolves deeply affected the micro climate and environment of Yosemite with their removal. Humans caused the decertification of Lebanon when they removed the trees to make ship masts and burn for fuel, and then their goats over grazed. Humans grade the land, drying it out, removing the causes of underwater reservoirs, while draining them dry. This dries the land. Removing trees dries the land and causes soils to destabilize. We pump out tonnes of pollution into the atmosphere, with Asia the worst offenders. We pollute waterways. All of those gases we produce affect our atmosphere.
Yes, humans do affect the climate. Of course they do. The disagreement among scientists is how much, and most unfortunately, there has been a terrible conflict of interest. The climate models have always been wrong. There has been data fabrication, and temperature testing stations have been moved, removed, and the data lost. There have been myriad scandals inside the scientific community in regards to anthropogenic climate change that you may not be aware of.
I am also realistic. Before fossil fuels, we burned trees, dung, and peat for fuel, belching out enormous quantities of smoke while also destroying the oxygen factories of our planet, the forests. People used to freeze to death in winter. Fossil fuels expanded our life expectancy by leaps and bounds. Fossil fuels brought us asphalt roads, plastic tubing for IV lines, medicines, the keyboard upon which I’m typing, my computer, my iPhone, tennis rackets, polyester clothing (ugh, OK, that’s maybe not a benefit), plastics..the list just goes on and on. Fossil fuels are used to produce solar panels, wind turbines, and nuclear energy plants. Fossil fuels ship virtually every good on the planet. The last I checked, there simply is no technology capable of replacing the diesel truck and trailer…yet.
Activists keep howling that they want fossil fuels gone today! They are morally superior if they claim that the world would be better off if we stopped fossil fuels immediately. OK. Since solar and wind power is extremely expensive and unreliable, people would go back to burning trees, dung, and peat, and the atmosphere would be worse off.
CA has experienced rolling blackouts. Even before the fires, when demand outstripped supply, there were blackouts. After the fires, we have had many blackouts on high fire danger days. Apparently, one of the most highly regulated and controlled industries in our country, the electricity utility, under the state of CA’s control did not upkeep a safe power grid. Apparently, it’s so unsafe that we kept having our power shut off to prevent fires. That’s because the power company doesn’t want to be sued like PG&E. By constantly shutting off power, they motivate voters to put pressure on politicians to fix it, and politicians “fix” things by throwing money at them. The utilities want to be absolved of responsibility in the event their power lines cause a fire, and they want more money.
With this unreliable power grid having its meltdown in the background, Democrats keep proclaiming we should get rid of fossil fuels. Our energy companies can’t keep the lights on. How in the world would it keep hundreds of millions of vehicles on the road, all across the country? And much of our energy portfolio is in fossil fuels, so if everyone went to electric vehicles, not only would we be stranded if we ran out of juice without a charging station, but many of those cars would in essence be coal powered.
So, do you want a cookie or a trophy for proclaiming your love of the environment? Because I’ll mail you one if it makes you happy. Meanwhile, I live in reality. I’m grateful we all get to live longer because of fossil fuels. I realize that there are myriad products we must find economic, viable replacements for before we can think about abolishing fossil fuels. Electricity must be economical, or else people will not be able to afford to heat their homes and buy food, or they will burn wood. I’ve mentioned before that there have been more ads for wood burning and pellet stoves, in order to combat the rising costs of alternative energy.
When CA enrolled us in the clean power alliance, my energy bill doubled.
And yet, if you point out the malfeasance in various studies, the self dealing, the loss of original data, or that you believe fossil fuels are necessary until we come up with a viable replacement, then you’re some sort of Nazi.
Try to restrain yourself from the emotional hysteria that accompanies every discussion about climate. Yes the climate is changing. Of course it is. It always has. There is a valid argument that humans affect the environment, as well as the climate. We will adapt if we want to survive.
The biggest drivers for evolution, since life began, are two things – the climate, and food availability. Those are the intense pressures that have driven evolution all this time.
Do you really think our species can remove one of those drivers, forever?
All we can do is keep moving forwards towards cleaner air and water, and reliable, clean, affordable energy. Weaponizing climate science is a mistake. All it accomplishes is divisiveness, and what gets done by a divided people?
well said Karen those are all valid insights
all life requires energy consumption
This guy Peter is a know nothing.
seth you haven’t met the secular cousin of intelligent design
SIMULATION THEORY
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/are-we-living-simulated-universe-here-s-what-scientists-say-ncna1026916
let me know if you want about 20 citations more it’s quite interesting
basically the notion is aliens created a big computer matrix and that’s what we live in
sound silly? Let Professor Tyson explain some. then tell me intelligent design is any sillier?
LOL!
Who the heck is Seth?
Do you mean Mr. Shill?
Seth.
That’s hilarious!
Republicans are at war with science? Why is it then that so many Republicans use the scientific definition of sex rather while so many Democrats think your sex can be anything you want it to be at any time of day? That’s how a male boxer beat up a bunch of female boxes and took the title. He said he was female, and that was good enough to get him in a ring where he could punch women.
I posted a clip of a reknowned physicist explaining how the “simulation hypothesis” posits that, possibly, we are all just living in a big alien computer simulation and challenged him to explain how that’s any less silly than “intelligent design’ which says, possibly, God designed the universe
he refused the challenge. he can’t address jevon’s paradox in the context of climate change mitigation strategies even though he says we must believe in climate change whatever that means. he ignores a simple challenge to define how string theory in physics is testable and falsifiable or not (ie, scientific or not)
he declines and just sputters out that i am spoutintg psuedo science. Well Seth Peter sir, if you think my three points are psuedoscience, then it’s you who evidently doesn’t grasp the essence of the scientific method itself.
or if I’m wrong tell me how we can verify the supposed “quantum foam” from which the High Priests of Physics are saying an “infinite amount of universes are bubbling in and out of existence”
Tell me that’s not speculation! How do the presume to verify what’s outside the entire universe, for starters? I hear this stuff often since I am a lifelong student of astronomy and it never fails to amuse me how people oooh and ahhhh at physicists and kiss their rings like they’re so many bishops in the high cathedral!
“Biologist, one needn’t look any further than Trump’s War On Science”
Peter, that Trump has policies you disagree with but help Americans to survive doesn’t mean that he is against science. He created Space Force which indicates science is very on his mind. You think people get to vote on science. They don’t scientists have to prove themselves something progressives know little about.
to supplement my remarks below, i just plucked off the internet some musings from a fellow who had the same thought i did about “intelligent design” this is from quora, reply to question as to the difference between intelligent design and simulation hypothesis:
—————————-
“Tim Farage:
Answered Jun 23, 2017 · Author has 3.9k answers and 6.8m answer views
Nothing. If our universe is a computer simulation created by an alien intelligence, then our universe was intelligently designed.
Intelligent design does not allow one to determine the identity of the designer.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson speculated about this a month or two ago. Then Elon Musk said that there’s only a 1 in a billion chance that our universe is NOT a simulation.
No one seems to laugh at them for believing that our universe as well as humans were intelligently designed.
I wonder why?”
_________________
guys like Tim Farage get ignored, as the fools mock intelligent design on the one hand and cant see the obvious parallel in simulation hypothesis
now for the record, I think simulation hypothesis is possible, but, if it is, then intelligent design is basically a variation on it which simply adds God in the place of space aliens ie “a sufficiently advanced civilization”
hey, Seth Peter thinks that’s bunk, but, apparently Elon Musk thinks we’re in a simulation. check out the joe rogan interview. he just doesn’t call the designers God. because why? because he doesn’t worship them that’s all. but that Tim Farage gets it: what would be the difference?
you could render this in precise symbolic logic to explain but i wont bother. you either get it or you dont
You’re telling us a great deal about your social and political fantasies. You’re telling us very little about working Republican politicians. If they actually were hostile to ‘public education’, you’d have been hurt real bad by now.
@This is absurd x XV:
No “social and political fantasies” in my head. My statements are based on well-established facts, such as:
1) the decline over many years of the proportion of financial support for public higher education provided by state governments either dominated by Republicans or hampered by the long-term effects of Republican policies and ideologies,
2) the denunciations of both public education as a whole and well-established scientific conclusions in particular that are repeatedly spouted by Republican politicians,
3) other overt hostile actions by Republicans in government, such as their subpoenaing of the emails of a climate scientist I know. (The subpoena was without any proper cause or merit. It was undoubtedly designed to intimidate, and waste his time).
I myself haven’t “been hurt real bad” by Republican policies. But I’m retired. However, every student who graduates with a load of academic debt and every teacher who can only get hired as an overworked, poorly-paid adjunct rather than tenure-track (in both cases, in large part because of reduced state support for public higher-education) HAS been hurt, and that is real.
1) the decline over many years of the proportion of financial support for public higher education provided by state governments either dominated by Republicans or hampered by the long-term effects of Republican policies and ideologies,
IOW, you fancy you’re entitled to the public treasury.
2) the denunciations of both public education as a whole a
IOW, you fancy it’s intolerable for people to call attention to institutional failures or to advocate alternative modes of service delivery or financing. Who in your family’s on the payroll.
nd well-established scientific conclusions
Courtesy the University of East Anglia, home of ‘hide the decline’.
3) other overt hostile actions by Republicans in government, such as their subpoenaing of the emails of a climate scientist I know.
(The subpoena was without any proper cause or merit. It was undoubtedly designed to intimidate, and waste his time).
You might ponder why someone might not take your word for it.
I myself haven’t “been hurt real bad” by Republican policies. But I’m retired. However, every student who graduates with a load of academic debt and every teacher who can only get hired as an overworked, poorly-paid adjunct rather than tenure-track (in both cases, in large part because of reduced state support for public higher-education) HAS been hurt, and that is real.
The share of each age cohort passing through baccalaureate granting institutions went from about 25% in 1958 to about 45% today. Someone was financing the ever escalating quanta of physical plant, faculty, administration, and staff. It’s your objection that your kind weren’t subsidized by the larger society even more extensively than you have been.
Courtesy, the Digest of Education Statistics, we see that in 2015-16, tuition and fees accounted for 22% of the revenue of public-sector 4 year institutions. Grants and contracts from public agencies account for 37%. Hospital revenue accounts for another 16% (n.b. north of 40% of that is financed through Medicaid and Medicare). Sales from auxilliary enterprises are another 9%. If you weren’t an obnoxious pecksniff, you might ask why the trajectory of escalating expenditure might be restrained to provide for less reliance on the assumption of debt by students. You don’t, of course, you just demand more from the rest of society.
And more job opportunities for people like you. The already existing nexus of subsidies and your own personal interests and vanity have generated gluts of people with academic research degrees and now you’re denouncing others for not providing more largesse to correct a problem you’re deeply implicated in generating. And you’ve demanded lifetime job security for yourselves without giving any thought to the possibility that a prudent institutional administrator might be loath to add ever more to his fixed costs.
It’s regrettable the young were subjected to you for so long.
oh these universities love to build the new buildings. they could care less about teaching or student debt. they just want to externalize that problem on the taxpayers like they externalize a lot of their local costs on the nearby towns to which they fail to contribute a sufficient amount of property taxes.,
oh they usually pay something, but see if you can figure out HOW those numbers are determined. very tightly held secrets! because that system is wholly corrupt
see it’s quite easy if you understand the system, to know who you need to “massage” for favors and approvals
find the general counsel’s office. sitting in there are people who make it one of their top priorities to seduce and control local officials. just the right ones. i could give you a list of free stuff the property tax authorities can expect to receive under the table here but I don’t want to embarrass any of my friends!
Biologist,
Who told you we don’t spend enough on public education? Do you think that if we keep shoveling even more money into a flawed system, that we’ll get a better result?
We are actually at a record high in spending. The unions wrested pension deals the taxpayers can’t afford. Entire cities fell to bankruptcy when those bills couldn’t be paid. But if you object, the teachers strike and refuse to teach kids. Unions are like organized crime, in the manner in which they attack, and sometimes even assault, “scabs”, the terrible name they call those non union people who work.
Prior to Prop 13, everyone’s property taxes were annually reevaluated at market value. Therefore, as the cost of land went up, so did your taxes. You paid more and more and more as if that property was producing revenue for you. And then, when you sold it, you got taxed again on capital gains.
People were literally getting taxed right out of their homes and businesses. The elderly were especially hard hit. If this was a landlord, it would be like he doubled your rent every year. Do you think, if these were rents, people would have something to object to?
I know this is extremely difficult for Democrats to understand, but property owners, just like renters, cannot afford to have their costs to live there doubled annually.
That’s how Prop 13 came into being.
The Teachers Union pensions are underfunded. They went on strike, and got an agreement to put Prop 13 on the ballot. They are threatening to remove the protection from business properties, and they’ve got it worded so that the property tax effect is hidden. Nowhere do they mention that if you go back to astronomical increases in business property taxes, that it will increase the cost of every good and service in the state, which will hit the poor the hardest.
Democrats were so enraged at Prop 13. They thought it was their money. They thought they could squeeze and squeeze and squeeze, and people would keep working and keep paying. Already there is an exodus of taxpayers and contributors out of CA. Every week, someone tells me they’re leaving. And they do. It’s not an empty promise. They can’t stand the taxes and the homelessness and the politics that portray the successful as the enemy.
If Prop 13 falls, so many jobs will leave. It will blight entire areas.
But the teachers unions say that’s their money. They don’t tell you that we keep voting for more and more and more money for them, but it goes to pensions and admin. Nope. Unless we go back to taxing people out of their homes and businesses, they will claim we don’t pay enough.
Meanwhile, we’re at record highs for how much we spend. And for what? Common Core math that makes kids take 20 minutes to do a simple multiplication problem.
Biologist, why do you feel entitled for blue collar workers who did not go to college to pay for the college degree of others, bankers, lawyers, doctors, research scientists, economists? Why should someone else invest in your education if you don’t want to?
It would be especially egregious to expect bricklayers and mechanics to foot the bill for fluff degrees like gender studies and patriarchal suppression.
Perhaps if student loans were not so readily available, people wouldn’t graduate $100,000 in debt with a degree in transgenderism or political activism.
People on the left who frequently are well off have this awful tendency to want more from others. They are hoping to get poorer folk to subsidize their pleasures and their ability to have a higher future income. That is a transfer from those with less to those with more.
@Biologist – You haven’t looked in the mirror lately nor read much or you would not espouse those opinions.
My take is that academics are selfish, atheistic, perverts who generally think that the world revolves around them and actually nobody really gives a rats about them, and therefore it hurts their arrogant feelings that they nurture together in their group thinks. Academics find solace in hiding from the world and snarking at it from ignorance and childishness. They hide behind their books and think that makes them wise when in fact since they lack even the intellectual capacity for wisdom, they end up falling for any stupid con that their fellow academics can come up with.
America’s wealth was created in the private sector. Elon Musk et al. are advancing America while succeeding in the private sector. Electricity is generated and distributed by companies in the private sector as state-regulated-monopolies – even the monopolies are in the private sector. Maximal efficiency exists in the private sector, even for state-regulated-monopolies. Education for all citizens was promoted by the American Founders. Education was/is not mandated by the Constitution. Education should be commensurate, apropos, local, competitive and private. Any portion of the education industry that must be public or governmental, must retain employees who cannot strike and cannot vote.
Biologist – have you ever taken 5 minutes to discover what Republicans’ complaints about the public education system are about? Obviously not, so let me enlighten you.
1. Our public education system is doing a miserable job educating our youth. It is impervious to improvement. Studies have shown that whole language doesn’t work, yet schools insist on using whole language or blended learning, rather than a phonetics heavy curriculum. (https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read)
2. Many of us oppose tenure in K-12. Tenure was supposed to be a protection for university professors, and even then I’m not sold on it. Tenuring a kindergarten teacher is absurd. We end up with bad teachers, no more useful than a hockey puck sitting on a desk, but it takes years in court and hundreds of thousands of dollars to fire them. We don’t have a meritocracy. Good teachers are not rewarded based on merit, and bad teachers get rewarded for time served. As a union boss once said, he’d start representing the interests of children when they started paying union dues.
3. We support school choice, but Democrats don’t. A couple of towns over, there is a school that is overrun with violence. One mother told me her special needs child was attacked 8 times, and the last time they broke his bones. It’s an infamous school. You need permission from the district to move to another school, or out of district. Democrats are extremely biased against charter schools. Democrats have pushed policies that will prevent any new charter schools from opening, and Bernie would see them abolished entirely. If you live in a district with a terrible or dangerous school, you can feel trapped. I never met so many homeschool families as I did when I moved here. The public schools do not have a good academic reputation out here. Parents should have options so that they can vote with their feet. I believe we should follow what they do in Breda, where education funds are tied to each individual child, who can go wherever their parents choose to send them.
4. Democrats gave us Common Core, which makes children hate math. It makes simple math problems unbelievably complicated. I did not want to homeschool my kid, because he’d miss out on the school experience and friendships. However, I basically partially homeschool him, teaching him cursive, grammar, math, and I also taught him how to read, all outside of school. He has to put in extra time after school just to get a good education.
5. Public schools have become infested with Democrat politics. The curriculum is blatantly pro-Democratic and anti-Republican and anti-American. Kids are taught to be ashamed of their country. I volunteered in my son’s class recently, and the social studies reading on CA history was decidedly anti-American. It did not teach the context of antiquity, how land was quarreled over globally, and it definitely didn’t mention how tribes fought each other, either. In the story I read, it made Mexico out to be magnanimous and victimized, while the US was a robber baron. The history that is taught on Republican presidents is biased.
6. Sex education was politicized, and is no longer a biology class. Now it’s a how to class, taught by Planned Parenthood, with no opt out allowed (link to follow as I’m at my max.)
So, basically, the quality of the public school education is quite poor, Common Core made our children less prepared for college, and it’s politicized.
If you support that, then why?
No Opt Out Allowed, how Democrats brought Planned Parenthood into the classroom, exposing even young children to inappropriate content. In addition, they have incorporated ideas like the Genderbread Man to very young children, giving them the idea that they can decide to be a different gender any day of the week. Since gender dysphoria is associated with a very high rate of suicide, post surgical “reassignment”, this is reprehensible. It will increase the incidence of this mental disorder, and by result, increase suicides.
Too many Democrats also support the castration of boys suffering from gender dysphoria, even though the overwhelming majority of these cases resolve on their own by adulthood.
But it’s a big mystery to Biologist why Republicans take issue with the state of our public education. History will look back at this time and view the transgender craze with similar horror as the castrati movement of old, in which boys were castrated to turn them into opera singers.
2), “because contemporary Republicans have a much stronger tendency than Democrats to be irrational, arrogant, domineering, selfish, and to oppose any economic restraints;”
Interesting, as studies have proven that Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to unfriend or disown someone over politics.
Leftism is a hateful movement. Unfortunately, the Democrat Party is moving farther Left. That’s how we’ve arrived at a day when a little old baker can be tormented, harassed, and sued in an effort to destroy his livelihood and impoverish him, because he did not want to bake a blue cake that was pink on the inside to celebrate mental illness, for religious reasons. He also refused to bake a satanic cake for the same guy.
That’s how we got Antifa, who ran down an elderly man and dragged him from his car because he had Southern license plates.
Thats how we got to a point where conservative invited speakers are threatened with violence if they come to college campuses across America. If they do get inside, with a police presence, then Leftists yell and blow whistles, trying desperately to keep the audience from hearing anything and making up their own minds. That’s how we got to the anti-semitic BDS movement on the Left. The antisemitism in the women’s march, which, as has been pointed out by others, was merely a Democratic rally marketed to women. Conservative women were not welcome. Trump supporting women were for darn sure not welcome. This made it not a woman’s march at all, rather a Democratic Women’s convention.
If you want all immigration to go through legal channels, and point out any problems with illegal immigration, the Left calls you a Xenophobe.
If you use a scientific definition of the sexes, and believe that gender dysphoria should be treated with kindness, but that male patients cannot be given access to women’s and girls’ showers, changing rooms, battered women’s shelters, or sports, then the Leftists call you a transphobe.
If you want trade deals to be negotiated that benefit America, and American workers, the Left calls you Xenophobic.
If you are a Republican, the Left calls you a fascist, or, as Biologist pointed out, “irrational, arrogant, domineering, selfish” and opposed to any economic restraints. And no respect for the natural world? Ridiculous and wrong.
If you point out the facts that Obamacare is too expensive and most good doctors and cancer treatment centers don’t accept it, the Left will claim you don’t care about the poor.
Do you see the trend? Do you see how Biologist illustrated the substitution of ad hominem for debate, or understanding? It’s all about calling us names so you won’t have to discuss the facts.