In the video below Mark Levin very gently takes apart Dr. Teresa Gilarducci. She works for George Soros now, but before that she was an econ professor at Notre Dame. She was also on President Clinton’s Social Security task force.
When she was at Notre Dame I debated her when I was an undergrad in front of an audience, as I was the only one between IU and Notre Dame who would take the partial privatization position point of view on Social Security. Her incredible hypocrisy, that Levin exposes so well in the video below, showed itself in true form in my debate with her as well. Her “logic” is entirely political, circular and based largely on denial and misdirection. She is sweet, attractive and charming, and well knows it as she uses that as a weapon in her arsenal.
Dr. Gilarducci thought she was going to be debating a “college republican” undergrad, what she got is a former radio talk show host who passed the state exams and used to sell retirement and insurance products.
I will not outline the entire debate, but in short I did two things.
First: I outlined the Galveston Plan which has worked wonders as a legal exception to Social Security. I also pointed out the government managed, but partially privatized retirement plan that Members of Congress have which has been a great success through thick and thin. Such a plan would serve as a good model to grow at least a small percentage of Social Security to at least attempt to have a growth to pre-fund our retirement benefits.
All she would say about these partially privatized plans is that the retirees wouldn’t get the money and even though retired Members of Congress and some in Galveston were already getting great benefits now she insisted that soon that money would vanish because only government transfer payments can be trusted. She kept saying again and again, “Until you go to get your money at retirement and it’s not there.”
Ironically in the video below, the type of plan she insisted could never work because the “greedsters” in the private sector would steal it all, is the exact same plan that she has for herself for her own retirement by her own admission.
Second: Dr. Gilarducci had written some good papers on 401K reform. She argued that too much of the 401K investment is in the employers own stock, so if the employer goes under said employee looses a lot of their retirement. As a fix she proposed that 401K laws be changed to require diversity of investment to more reliably pre-fund such retirement plans. Social Security has much the same problem as all of the eggs are in one basket, there is no diversity of investment and people’s retirement’s are not pre-funded.
So I used her own words and arguments on how to have a reliable and secure 401k, but replaced the term “401k” with “Social Security”. I used those near verbatim arguments to make most of my case.
All through the debate she insisted that (what she didn’t realize were her own arguments in her own published work) were just bad arguments from a young undergrad who just didn’t know better and that is how she treated me……until the end when I dropped the bomb that many of the arguments she so cutely poo-poohed were actually her own published work. She was floored.
During my last few shows, including as recently as yesterday, I have alerted you to Obama’s desire to nationalize your 401-k plan and eliminate your mortgage interest deduction.
Some background on the former. Back in October 2008, I got word that Professor Teresa Ghilarducci of the New School had testified before Rep. George Miller’s committee in support of a plan to nationalize private pension plans — in particular, 401-k plans. I not only spoke about it on my show back then, but we tracked down the professor and I conducted the first interview on talk radio. I will discuss this at more length on my program this evening, but I thought you might want to be among the first to listen to that interview again. Please pass it along to as many people as you can. See below.
It is interesting to see how those not influenced by our elite media and our union controlled public schools view American politics.
It reminds me of my Eastern European friends I went to college with who told me that American News Media read like Communist propaganda. Those who are from Europe and Russia know very well what how a Marxist and a Communist behave, but unlike too many Americans, they are not afraid to call it what it is [except several foreign professors I had who would say this privately, but were very clear that if they told the truth about this it would be the end of their teaching career as American universities are heavens for radicalized ideologues who cannot function in the private sector – Editor].
Russian columnist Xavier Lerma asks how can Americans be so foolish as to elect a communist like Obama again, how can they not see that he says one thing and does the opposite, don’t they read history in America?
Bye, bye Miss American Pie. The Communists have won in America with Obama but failed miserably in Russia with Zyuganov who only received 17% of the vote. Vladimir Putin was re-elected as President keeping the NWO order out of Russia while America continues to repeat the Soviet mistake.
After Obama was elected in his first term as president the then Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin gave a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in January of 2009. Ignored by the West as usual, Putin gave insightful and helpful advice to help the world economy and saying the world should avoid the Soviet mistake.
Recently, Obama has been re-elected for a 2nd term by an illiterate society and he is ready to continue his lies of less taxes while he raises them. He gives speeches of peace and love in the world while he promotes wars as he did in Egypt, Libya and Syria. He plans his next war is with Iran as he fires or demotes his generals who get in the way.
Putin said regarding the military [militarization is what the author meant as Russian is his first language],
Well, any normal individual understands that as true but [American style] liberalism is a psychosis . O’bomber even keeps the war going along the Mexican border with projects like “fast and furious” and there is still no sign of ending it. He is a Communist without question promoting the Communist Manifesto without calling it so. How shrewd he is in America. His cult of personality mesmerizes those who cannot go beyond their ignorance. They will continue to follow him like those fools who still praise Lenin and Stalin in Russia. Obama’s fools and Stalin’s fools share the same drink of illusion.
Xavier Lerma Continues to show that Obama is “repeating the Soviet mistake” by comparing what Obama is doing with what the Russian government now admits was their mistake:
“…we are reducing taxes on production, investing money in the economy. We are optimizing state expenses.The second possible mistake would be excessive interference into the economic life of the country and the absolute faith into the all-mightiness of the state.
There are no grounds to suggest that by putting the responsibility over to the state, one can achieve better results.
Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt – are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game.
During the time of the Soviet Union the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure no one would want history to repeat itself.”
President Vladimir Putin could never have imagined anyone so ignorant or so willing to destroy their people like Obama much less seeing millions vote for someone like Obama. They read history in America don’t they? Alas, the schools in the U.S. were conquered by the Communists long ago and history was revised thus paving the way for their Communist presidents. Obama has bailed out those businesses that voted for him and increased the debt to over 16 trillion with an ever increasing unemployment rate especially among blacks and other minorities. All the while promoting his agenda.
UPDATE: O’Reilly Factor goes to Fordham University – VIDEO
Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate:
Ann Coulter
Censorship is a huge problem in public schools and universities and most parents have no idea. If you doubt it simply go to thefire.org where you can see literally thousands of examples of illegal censorship and retaliation by academics and university administrators. The site is updated almost daily with new examples.
To see real life examples of incredible censorship and retaliation on video go HERE.
Fordham President Joseph McShane, S.J. expressed his “disgust” with College Republicans for inviting Ann Coulter to campus, and the invitation has now been withdrawn. He sent an e-mail to all students and parents accusing her of “hate speech.”
Fordham’s 2006 commencement speaker was MSNBC host Chris Matthews. The university did not even wait for Coulter to give her speech before condemning her.
Robert Shibley of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education said “Can Fordham’s adult students not be trusted to make up their own minds about the views expressed by a speaker? Does Father McShane believe Coulter is so diabolically clever that her use of ‘disgusting’ rhetoric will somehow fool Fordham students into believing what she wants them to believe? If so, he has a significantly lower opinion of the quality of American college students than I do.
“If Fordham students truly lack the ability to listen to an invited speaker, separate rhetoric from reality, and make up their own minds, then Fordham has much graver problems than Ann Coulter coming to campus.”
Coulter is shown answering questions at the Yale Political Union. The Yale Daily News said “Love her or hate her, it is impossible to ignore Ann Coulter. She’s made a career out of being a firebrand.” Below are a few of her more quotable moments at Yale:
“Liberals love mobs because they see them as their path to power.”
“I love the argument that illegal immigrants need a path to citizenship. We have a path to citizenship: it’s called legal immigration.”
“Every single thing President Obama has done is designed to wreck the economy and drive up the unemployment rate. It’s like he took everything Reagan did right and did exactly the opposite.”
“As long as Obama’s playing golf, he isn’t socializing anything else.”
UPDATE – Former KGB Agent Yuri Bezmonov on how the KGB targeted public education:
Most parents have no idea how well marxists, communists and similar far left radicals have infiltrated our public education system. We have been covering this story for a long time and we encourage readers to go through our coverage and see for yourself.
This is coverage that you will never see in the elite media, which is ironic because the marxism conference is held at NWU’s school of journalism.
This Saturday, the Midwest Marxist Conference was held at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. The event was teeming with teachers who spoke about the new found bond between the radical socialists and their Teachers Union. The all-day event, which collected money to support Chicago Socialists and featured a communist bookstore, provided students on-campus along with the radical left community to plan the next phase in their activism.
Becca Barnes, a Chicago Teachers Union teacher and organizer with Chicago Socialists, proclaimed at the beginning of the conference that “the struggle here in the United States has entered a new phase. Nowhere have we pointed the way forward more clearly than here in Chicago with the teachers union strike.”
After the opening plenary, breakout sessions addressed more specific topics like the history of the Democratic party, education, and case studies in Russia. In these sessions, speakers continued to celebrate the use of education as a mechanism to insert Marxism into public institutions. In one session, the idea of targeting their message to students, even over “the working class,” was debated.
One teacher, who spoke in an afternoon session, described his tactics to overcome the problem of teachers’ unwillingness to take part in the strike, while Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jesse Sharkey underscored Barnes’s earlier point when he spoke about the “struggle” of Chicago teachers and the need for additional support from other revolutionary movements. Through a renewed focus on the “strike weapon,” Socialist organizers remarked that they felt their movement had rediscovered its vigor—and the path forward ought to include “mass strikes,” they said.
Eric Ruder of the ISO spoke about the Socialists’ partnership with the Chicago Teachers Union during “The Meaning of Marxism” breakout session:
There are big moments in the sort of chain of historical development that we have to be able to intervene… And in order to that, you need an organization. That’s really the sort of thing you saw in the Chicago teachers strike. In a situation where there was a huge struggle, our organization threw itself in the middle of that and had a demonstrable impact on it.
Because we’ve been rooted, experienced activists who worked together in a collaborative way to try to build up that influence over the long haul… I think when you get in revolutionary moment where your ability to quickly assess what’s happening and make strategic and tactical shifts on the fly, that is essential.
Working class revolutions have never succeeded without the existence of a revolutionary party that’s capable of making those sorts of decisions and providing that kind of leadership. And that’s what we’re asking you, the members of this group, to join and help in that process. We need you to be able to have enough size and influence to matter, but you need us to be able to be part of a force that could intervene in that sort of chain in historical development.
The reporter who covered the event had this to say about the treatment he received while trying to cover the event:
After attending the all-day event, which began at 11 a.m., I was singled out as “not in solidarity” by International Socialist Organization (ISO) organizer Dennis Kosuth around 4 p.m, and removed from the premises for “not being a Communist.”
Despite registering for the event, the group of socialists that removed me, including pre-school teacher Kirstin Roberts, social worker Alison McKenna, printer Eric Kerl, Socialist organizer Shaun Harkin, and others. They surrounded me at the edge of a staircase, proceeded to push their way closer to me to force me down the stairs, and hurled insults at me as I attempted to find a way to leave safely. Even after leaving the conference, the group continued to bully me, with one larger man saying under his breath that “you know what would happen at Teamsters meeting” inferring a more violent solution to my presence:
The simple fact is that reporters do not seek out random “experts” to see what their opinion is; rather they pick pundits and know full well what their opinion is and it usually matches the editorial point of view.
At least a half-dozen professors who gave political donations to President Obama have been quoted in news articles opining about his administration and the 2012 race for the White House.
The findings of The Hill’s months-long investigation come as Republicans have been crying foul, alleging a media bias for Obama and against Mitt Romney.
The Hill cross-checked academics who have been quoted in news articles with Obama’s donor list and eliminated those who worked in prior Democratic administrations. The half-dozen professors detailed in this article do not mention their political affiliations in their bios online. A similar search for Romney donors did not yield any results.
New Oxford (Pennsylvania) High School Marching Band
We have said it hundreds of times and the evidence never stops piling up, leftist universities and union leaders are pushing this nonsense on our kids. I took an economic class in 2009 and I asked the students if they had ever heard anything good about capitalism in any class ever and the answer was no; and that is not unusual.
A Pennsylvania high school marching band is raising eyebrows with a halftime performance that commemorates the Russian revolution, complete with red flags, olive military-style uniforms, and giant hammers and sickles.
“St. Petersburg: 1917” is the theme for the New Oxford High School Marching Band. Ironically, the school’s athletic teams are called the Colonials and their colors are red, white and blue. The band’s website features a picture of the group with students holding a hammer and sickle. [Which they have no taken down and password protected their entire web site. I guess the publicity wasn’t so good. Anyone with a residue of common sense knows such publicity is what happens when you trick kids into celebrating the birth of a regime that killed over 100 million people – Political Arena Editor.]
“There is no reason for Americans to celebrate the Russian revolution,” said one irate parent who alerted Fox News. “I am sure the millions who died under Communism would not see the joy of celebrating the Russian revolution by a school 10 miles from Gettysburg.”
The parent, who asked not to be identified, attended a football last Friday night with his children. He said he was shocked by what he saw. “It was Glee meets the Russian Revolution,” he told Fox News. “I’m not kidding you. They had giant hammers and sickles and they were waving them around.” “Who thought this was a good idea?” [A radicalized academic maybe? – Political Arena Editor.]
Rebecca Harbaugh, the superintendent for the Conewago Valley School District, told Fox News that the band’s performance was “not an endorsement of communism at all.”
“It’s a representation of the time period in history called St. Petersburg 1917,” she said. “I am truly sorry that somebody took the performance in that manner. I am.”
“If anything is being celebrated it’s the music,” she said. “It is what it is. I understand people look at something and choose how to interpret that and I’m just very sorry that it wasn’t looked at as just a history lesson.”
Besides, she explained, “in 2008 we did an entire show on freedom.”
But some critics said it’s outrageous for any American school to be celebrating such a violent era.
“It would be tantamount to celebrating the music of 1935 Berlin,” the parent said. “If I was Lithuanian, Estonian, or Ukrainian, I’d be a little hot. I’d be really hot. It’s insulting to glorify something that doesn’t need to be glorified in America.”
Paul Kengor is the executive director for the Center for Vision & Values at Pennsylvania’s Grove City College.
He initially thought the halftime performance was a joke.
“This is surreal,” he told Fox News. “This is like something out of the Twilight Zone – but it’s even stranger than that.”
Kengor said even if the school was not celebrating the revolution “they seem to be commemorating this to some degree.”
“The Bolshevik Revolution launched a global Communist revolution that from 1917 through the 1990s was responsible for the deaths of over a hundred million people,” he said. “What the Russian revolution unleashed was a nightmare – a historical human catastrophe. This is something that should be condemned and not in any way commemorated or laughed at.”
Gerson Moreno-Riano, dean of Regent University’s College of Arts & Sciences, told Fox News the performance is shocking.
“The Russian revolution was one of the most violent episodes of the 20th Century,” he said. “Lenin put into place a doctrine of mass terror to crush the opposition and thousands and thousands of people were murdered.
The history professor said there’s very little to celebrate in that movement.
“It’s full of violence, terror, destruction and in some weeks thousands of people were executed – some thrown with rocks around their necks into the river to drown,” he said.
“It’s quite frankly horrific that a high school would be celebrating that at a football game,” he said.
He was even more disturbed by the group photograph of the band in front of the hammer and sickle.
“To raise the emblems of the hammer and sickle – the emblems of so much violence, destruction and terror – is a lack of knowledge of history,” he said.
In the best case scenario, he said the editors were simply ignorant of the era. [Teachers and school administrators ignorant of the evils of collectivism and communism? How could this be? – Political Arena Editor.]
Brigitte Gabriel, who watched Islamists take over Lebanon from within and slaughter the Christians there with the help of leftist Christians and secularists who did so in the name of “fairness and social justice”, founded ACT for America to warn people about radical Islamic influence in our government and universities.
People like to believe in the veracity of their own perceptions; literally they want to believe what they believe is in fact true. That has always been a fact of life, and this writer isn’t going to change it. However, what has changed is that our culture and society no longer reinforces practices, ideas and daily rituals that helped to keep that particular problem in check, making Americans better critical thinkers, and gave Americans a special collective wisdom.
Years ago Professor Christopher Lasch penned an article in Harpers titled “The Lost Art of Argument” where he lamented the so called “objective journalism” (which is anything but) model (from Walter Lippmann) as a tool for elites to set agendas and control the conversation on main street. The power of the elite media narrative is difficult to overstate, as it is much like group think. Everyone wants to be included and accepted, and if you stand out against such group narratives some will resent it. Most people do not realize just how easily they are persuaded by manufactured group narratives. Allow me to demonstrate with a few examples of popular group think narratives that many people still believe.
“Gravitas”. For those who are politically aware, and were so before the 2000 election, the word gravitas conjures up an image of former Vice-President Dick Cheney. Why? Dr. Thomas Sowell explained it well:
RUSH LIMBAUGH has been having some fun lately, playing back recordings of politicians and media people, who have been repeating the word “gravitas” like parrots, day after day. Before Dick Cheney was announced as Governor George W. Bush’s choice for vice presidential candidate, practically nobody used the word. Now everybody and his brother seems to be using it.
The political spin is that Governor Bush lacks “gravitas” — weight — and that Dick Cheney was picked in an effort to supply what the governor lacks.
In other words, the fact that Bush picked somebody solid for his running mate has been turned into something negative by the spinmeisters. The fact that media liberals echo the very same word, again and again, shows their partisan loyalties — and their lack of originality.
How many people believe that “former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is ignorant”?
Perhaps some of you who are reading this very piece continue to buy into this false narrative. Just so you realize how much you have been effected I will pose the following: did you know that in her infamous interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson ABC had edited out portions of her substantive answers to make her look ignorant? Did you know that ABC did this again in her interview with Barbara Walters. Remember when Charlie Gibson asked her a question about the Bush Doctrine that “Palin got all wrong”? Well, depending on what political historian you talk to there are five or six Bush Doctrines of which Governor Palin and Charlie Gibson each described one accurately. Atlantic Monthly, a left-wing political magazine, went back and did an exhausting review of her time as governor and concluded that she did a great job and pointed out how she was an innovative and competent executive. Odds are that people who buy into the false narrative that Palin is ignorant don’t know any of this.
“Republicans want to gut Social Security.”
The truth is that Reagan (Republican) saved the program with key reforms without decreasing benefits. It was President Clinton (Democrat) who increased the tax on Social Security benefits on the middle class which amounted to a benefit cut. It was George W. Bush (Republican) who tried to get at least a part of Social Security put into individual growth accounts so that Congress couldn’t spend your money (Democrats in Congress stopped him), and it was President Obama (Democrat) who has kept up a Social Security payroll contribution cut that is blowing an even bigger whole in the program. Odds are that people who bought into this narrative didn’t know any of that.
“Republicans want to get rid of Medicare.”
I regularly encounter uninformed voters who buy into this particular false narrative. It was Democrats, with Obamacare, who gutted $716 billion (over 10 years) from an already in trouble Medicare program without a single Republican vote. It was Republicans who added the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit (Part-D) which is not only popular, but gives seniors a choice of plans. This was accomplished at 40% under budget because the program was designed so well. One current Republican idea is to redesign the other parts of Medicare to work in a way that is similar to Medicare Part-D, so that it too can be more efficient and save money to help rescue the program. Democrats say no. Odds are that people who bought into this narrative didn’t know any of that (gee I am getting repetitive).
“Democrats want to tax the rich.”
This is perhaps the biggest false narrative of all. The Democratic Party leadership has never been interested in taxing the very rich. They have been “taxing the rich” for 50 years. Is it just a coincidence that they just happened to keep missing the target? President Obama gave the speech at Google, which paid 2.4% federal tax on 3.1 billion in income. In that speech he trashed the Chamber of Commerce for fighting against raising the tax on most small businesses which actually employ people from 35.5% to 39.9% . In the 2008 elections President Obama railed against Wall Street, but not only did he take more money from Wall Street and “the big banks” and such, but as if to add insult, their executives became the who’s who of those running his administration (LINK – LINK). Keep in mind that CNN once said Obama attacks private equity at 6am and is fundraising with private equity at 6pm. Wall Street and the big banks made more under three years of Obama than they did under eight years of Bush. His Treasury Secretary says that taxes on small businesses must rise so that government doesn’t shrink, and Obama’s new health care taxes target you, not just the rich. All of the stimulus and spending and so forth all in the name of the poor sounded nice, but look who got rich. Odds are that people who buy into this narrative know none of this (really there is a point to this).
Such false narratives are not merely myths that people fall into, they become emotionally invested in them, to the point where some people will say anything to support them:
MORE – Watch people lie about the political debate they never saw – VIDEO
False narratives rely on three crutches:
1 – The first is the selective promotion of key facts, combined with the suppression and/or omission of key fundamental truths. The use of a key fact that is partially true, when inserted into the false narrative, creates clear disconnects from the fundamental truths of the situation or event.
Politicians are masters of this. The second Obama/Romney debate is a classic example. In the debate section on the brutal slaughter of Americans at our consulate in Libya, the administration knowingly put out a false narrative that our people were killed by a flash mob upset by a video on YouTube. The White House created this deception because it was caught in a “Mission Accomplished” moment from having created a false narrative which stated that because Usama bin Laden was out of the picture, Al-Qaeda was beaten (The truth is that Al-Qaeda’s umbrella organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been actively helped by this Administration) . When caught, the White House tried to rewrite history, and focused on a key assertion–that Obama used the word terror in one speech describing the attack, as if that somehow dismantles two weeks of willing deception.
2 – Delivery of the few selected facts delivered with an attitude (an emotional trigger) that creates the false narrative.
A good example of this comes from a piece I read in the Washington Post some years ago. The article stated there had been documented misuses of the Patriot Act in order to wrongly access the private information of innocent citizens, and the Attorney General refused to state whether he would press criminal charges. This sounds quite ominous doesn’t it? Thirteen paragraphs later we learn that the error rate had been about 1.5%, comprised of honest mistakes, and all were caught by the internal Justice Department Inspector General whose job it is to find and correct errors. Consider the entirety of the pertinent facts, remove the emotionally charged delivery, and the message is quite different from the headline, would you not agree? Most newspaper editors know that the majority of readers never get passed the fifth paragraph in a newspaper piece. This type of deception is known as attitude change propaganda. Attitude change propaganda is not produced by accident.[Note – today reported abuses of the Patriot Act are higher. We are aware of this, so please do not blow up our inbox – Editor]
3 – Repetition. Joseph Goebbels said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie”.
This is why truth itself can become an enemy to some, and why those telling the truth are often disregarded, maligned and ridiculed. Once again we can look to the Washington Post for an example. Remember the Valerie Plame story? Remember when the White House outed a CIA Agent because her husband, Joe Wilson, had written a letter saying that President Bush made false claims in a speech? Well there was one problem; this entire story was based on a small stack of lies, and virtually none of the narrative that was repeated over and over in the Washington Post and the elite media was true, and the Post well knew it. This very writer wrote a 40 page article on the Washington Posts’ coverage of this story. Day after day, on page one, the Post repeated Joe Wilson’s lies and perpetuated the false narrative, while at times even on the very same day on the editorial page or buried in the paper, they would tell the truth about what was going on and explain how the evidence clearly showed that Wilson lied about nearly every aspect of his story.
I have been pretty tough on the left in this article because deception and propaganda is fully endorsed by many leftist/progressive thinkers such as Mao, Walter Lippmann, Joseph Goebbels, nearly all writers from the Frankfurt School, and Saul Alinsky. The progressive leadership in this country uses lies as a tool for calculated aggression.
This is not to say that the American right is free of the problems of false narratives, group think, and ideological boxes either.
There are/were many in the State Department, elite media and some in the Republican Party who have totally bought into the propaganda from the Muslim Brotherhood–that they want peace, free elections, and so forth–when anyone who studies their history going back to WWII knows very well what their agenda is. Bill Kristol from the Weekly Standard, as well as some on the famed internet Republican Security Council, fell for the “Arab Spring” false narrative. How quickly we forget history. The Mullah’s in Iran spoke to the Carter Administration about freedom, democracy and social justice; look at what they did as soon as they got into power. The same goes for what happened in Lebanon, and then Gaza when they had elections. Now look at the disaster that is Egypt and Libya, and yet some Republicans continue to say we should help Syrian rebels with arms, which would essentially be handing Syria as well to the Muslim Brotherhood/Al-Qaeda.
Republicans would love to see a genuine democratic, pro-western revolution in the Muslim world as we had in Eastern Europe, but today many forget that it took years of cooperation between Reagan, Thatcher, and the Vatican to cultivate pro-western forces and influences in secret right under the communist’s nose. We were ready to come in with monetary, logistical and other support when those forces made a major push. We knew very well who it was we were supporting, and we had an overall strategic concept in mind. Many Republicans jumped on the Arab Spring bandwagon because they bought the pie in the sky narrative from the State Department and they really wanted to believe it. Why? Because the false narrative targeted the freedom loving sensitivities of most Republicans perfectly. In short, they selected tidbits of truth, omitted others, and made a false reality that fit ever so perfectly into an ideological box.
Some so called “neo-cons” (by their critics) of the GOP may like to shape reality into something neat and tidy, but they aren’t the only ones. Many Ron Paul supporters are just as guilty of this. They argue that the U.S. should adopt some form of neo-isolationism. While it is clear that for the sake of finances we need to have a foreign policy that is less flamboyant, trade still needs to be protected with a serious Navy; the diplomatic credibility of the United States must still be backed up with military capability. If you want to see an economic collapse like the world has never witnessed, park the US Navy at home and it won’t take long. Many Ron Paul supporters say that “neo-cons” are “chicken-hawks” who have never served in the armed forces, and who would never send their sons to die “in some Middle East hell hole” (their words not mine). While it is true that some who may be labled as neo-cons have never served, the truth is that many who agree with at least some of that policy have served and have family who are serving.
Another example of taking reality and manipulating it is the often heard claim from Ron Paul supporters that militant Islamists attack us because of our foreign policy, and the argument that if it wasn’t for “neo-cons” we would not get attacked. When I run into people who say this I ask them, “Militant Islamists attack and kill Hindus in India. What is it about Hindu foreign policy that makes Islamists do this? How about the Buddhists who lived in Afghanistan? In Afghanistan the Islamists ran the Buddhists out and blew up their monasteries and artifacts. What about the Islamists in Southern Thailand who like to kill school teachers who dare to educate little girls? When the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt with the aid of the Obama Administration, what is it that Coptic Christians did to cause the Muslim Brotherhood to attack them with armored vehicles? This is usually about that time where I start getting called all sorts of colorful names. The most experienced Middle-Eastern war correspondent says that those who believe the “its because of our policy” argument are fooling themselves.
We are experiencing a wholesale breakdown of critical thinking in this country and most of the learned academics I know have confided this to me directly. I have noticed this myself in my studies. How did this happen? Professor Lasch was rather fond of the old fashioned “partisan press” that we used to have before the “Lippmann Objective Model”. In those days each town had two or more newspapers, each with its own partisan or philosophical viewpoint. Each day citizens would read them all and discuss the arguments of the day at the local barber shop, soda shop, or even at work. There is no better exercise for creating an informed, thinking electorate. Today we live in an electronic society where people can just push a button and anything that puts them out of their comfort zone vanishes instantly.
American society has become a place where people get beyond offended when told that they are wrong. We have teachers who too often cannot understand the difference between being presented an inconvenient truth that scuttles their narrative and a personal attack. We have people who refuse to take the argument of another seriously, so any truths another may have will not be accepted or even considered. Truth has become the new hate speech.
This must stop.
The sting in any rebuke is the truth – Ben Franklin.
[Editor’s Note – For a short video followup on this story click HERE – you won’t regret it.]
Are they paid to be there or just victims of DC public schools? Your guess is as good as mine. This is from our pal Michelle Fields at The Daily Caller:
This is as comon as an example of “liberal media corruption” as any. This is not how I was taught to behave in a hard news interview when I went to J-School. Some might ask, are too many journalists just this stupid?
Obama 2002 speech: “Rich people are all for non-violence”, unless they are perpetrating it.
We often talk about how President Obama has the mindset of a radicalized leftist university academic’ this video is one more example of many. Where was the media to vet him in 2008?
Unfortunately this is not an unusual happenstance at our universities today. The progressive secular left is very well entrenched in public education and antisemitism is very fashionable on campus and as actively promoted by many faculty and university administrators. Unless one is active on following campus issues, one would have no idea how extreme and prevalent antisemitism on campus has become. Colleges across the country even sponsor “Israeli Apartheid Week” on campus with student funds. At these events they call for the genocide and elimination of Israel.
To combat this, famed actor Robert Davi has narrated and helped create the following video to combat the lies used to indoctrinate students with at these events and to show what happens at events at colleges across the country. This is a must see video.
You had no idea such nonsense is being preached to your kids on campus did you? Most parent’s don’t.
At universities that are not quite so entrenched by progressive secular antisemitism the hated and discrimination is not so bold, but rather is demonstrated in other ways such as the denial of Jewish and Christian student groups for recognition, which is illegal, and groups such as FIRE and the Alliance Defense Fund have been somewhat successful and overcoming such tactics by campus administrators. As a former Chief Justice of Student Government at my alma mater I was made aware of several cases if professors and administrators discrimination against such students (fortunately a warning from me was enough to help make the offender back off in most cases). It amazed me the leaps of “logic” that academics and radicalized administrators would take to justify their illegal actions and it amazed me how they could make the most unreasonable positions sound reasonable in order to justify their outrageous actions.
I contacted R. Tamara de Silva of the Thomas Jefferson Legal Institute, the attorney involved in the case, to comment but she informed me that the judge in the case has asked both sides to not speak to the press. The institute has said that “religious freedom goes to the heart of the First Amendment. The desire of people to freely exercise their religion has been and is, one of the most powerful political forces in the world”.
CHICAGO (CN) – Northwestern University is discriminating against the Jewish faith by dissociating with a Chabad organization that has been on its campus for 27 years, the group claims in federal court.
Chabad-Lubavitch is a hasidic movement and major form of Orthodox Judaism with more than 3,300 institutions, or Chabad houses, worldwide.
“At the very inception of the Tannenbaum House, in the early 1980s, Chabad had to litigate its right practice religion freely in the city of Evanston,” according to the complaint. “The court, in hearing the matter, determined that ‘the real fear of the defendant city and intervenors is that [Chabad] will use its property to permit the plaintiffs to practice their ancient religion in the way they have conducted it for the past centuries.’ Today, Chabad once again has to fight for that right.”
As a university chaplain, Rabbi Dov Hillel Kelin uses a stipend to obtain kosher food from a third-party vendor, Sodexo.
But on Sept. 11, 2012, the university allegedly sent Klein a letter that it was disassociating from Tannenbaum House.
Though the complaint does not quote from the letter, it says hints that allegations of misconduct against Klein are at the root.
“Northwestern had no legal reason to disassociate from the Tannenbaum House,” the complaint states. “The university knew that its proffered reasons were specious and based upon innuendo and falsehood. The reasons offered for that disassociation were wholly pretextual and meant to single out Chabad against all other faiths for removal from Northwestern University.
“Even if the reasons offered for that disassociation were not false, many other campus organizations including religious organizations, had committed the same acts for which Rabbi Klein stood falsely accused,” it continues. “The university was aware of this, and chose only to disassociate with Chabad.”
The Chabad House says Northwestern disassociated “solely on the basis of Rabbi Klein’s, LCI’s and the Tannenbaum Chabad House’s affiliation with Chabad Chassidism.”
“Northwestern University would not have taken this action if plaintiffs were not adherents of Chabad Chassidism,” it adds.
Northwestern has allegedly barred Klein from renewing his contract with Sodexo or “sponsoring a Birthright Israel trip.
“If Rabbi Klein is enjoined from participating in the above referenced activities, and contracts, and if Rabbi Klein is cut off from providing authentic Jewish and Chassidic experiences to Northwestern University students, it would case irreparable harm to Rabbi Klein, to the charter and purposes of the Tannenbaum Chabad House, and to Lubavitch-Chabad of Illinois,” the complaint states. “It would also cause irreparable harm to Jewish students of Northwestern University.”
Klein, Lubavitch-Chabad of Illinois and Lubavitch-Chabad of Illinois dba The Tannenbaum Chabad House sued Northwestern University, University Chaplain Timothy Stevens and Vice President for Student Affairs Patricia Telles-Irvin.
They seek punitive damages for violations of the Civil Rights Act, and an injunction for Klein.
Tamara de Silva represents the Chabad House and Klein.
Northwestern spokesman Al Cubbage told Courthouse News that he was not aware of the lawsuit and declined to comment on Northwestern’s motivation for dissociating from Chabad House.
Of course it is illegal for the Army to participate in law enforcement, but since when do laws like the Posse Comitatus Act matter to far left oligarchs bent on a radicalized agenda?
In this scenario the TEA Party comes into a town, occupies it without paying for permits, etc, and takes over parts of the town illegally, while ignoring the requests from law enforcement. Now wait a minute, who behaves this way? Oh that’s right, the Obama endorsed Occupy Wall Street movement that has resulted in dozens of rapes, several deaths, arrests measured in the thousands, organized efforts to resist, even with violence – law enforcement, mass vandalism, threats etc. But it is the TEA Party folks who show up with cute signs and flags, and always clean up after themselves that are the problem.
PJTV’s Trifecta and reporter Anthony Martin respond:
A retired U.S. Army colonel who now teaches modern warfare to soldiers at the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. has co-written an article with a Civil War expert that has ignited a firestorm today among those increasingly concerned about what some say is a distinct anti-civilian tone that has infected much of the military and Homeland Security since 2009.
Retired Col. Kevin Benson and Jennifer Weber, Associate Professor of History at the University of Kansas, co-wrote an article for Small Wars Journal on a 2010 Army report titled, “U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, The Army Operating Concept 2016 – 2028.”
The report describes how the Army will respond to threats “at home and abroad” in the coming two decades and in doing so has made clear that a monumental cultural shift has occurred in the thinking of those at the top levels of military command. This shift has some government watchdogs worried, particularly given that Benson is using the platform provided at Fort Leavenworth to educate military personnel in his vision of the nature of modern warfare in America. According to the vision articulated by Benson, future warfare will be conducted on our own soil. The military will use its full force against our own citizens. The enemy will be average citizens whose values resonate with those articulated by the tea party.
The fictitious scenario used in the Army report as a teaching tool is a future insurrection of “tea party activists” in South Carolina. As the scenario goes, the tea party group stages a takeover of the town of Darlington, S.C. The mayor is placed under house arrest and prevented from exercising his duties. The police chief, the county sheriff, and other law enforcement officials are removed from office and told not to interfere. The city council is dissolved. The governor of the state, who had previously expressed solidarity with tea party goals, does little to address the situation.
A news conference is called by the new town leaders, all tea party activists, who tell the media that due to the failure of central government to address the concerns of the citizens, the Declaration of Independence has been re-imposed and the local government has been declared null and void.
Several items of interest are to be noted in the scenario the Army uses to describe the tea party activists — “right wing,” “extremists,” “insurrectionists,” all of whom are lumped together with militias and organizations that are considered “racist” and “anti-immigration.”
By contrast, those who oppose the tea party are referred to as “mainstream.”
The obvious question that arises is why would this sort of scenario, with its obviously biased and skewed portrayals, be presented as a teaching tool to military personnel? Why would the U.S. military consider the tea party to be “extremist” or “insurrectionist?” And why would the tea party be classified together with groups that are “racist, “anti-immigration,” and “extremist right wing?”
In the numerous tea party rallies that have occurred across the nation no racism was noted by any observer. Speakers included persons of all races and ethnic backgrounds. No sentiment was expressed against legal immigration but outrage was directed toward those break the law and enter the country by illegal means. And the charge that the tea party is extremist right wing is difficult to justify given that the main thrust of the movement is the protest against runaway government spending that has placed the nation on the brink of economic ruin due to its enormous and unsustainable debt.
Yet repeatedly since the election of Barack Obama in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has referred to the tea party as “potential homegrown terrorists.“
…the military under the Obama administration has made sure that the words “Jihad” and “Islamic” are deleted from all official documents concerning very real threats to the safety and security of citizens. The administration went out of its way, for example, to avoid referring to the Fort Hood terrorist as an “Islamic extremist.”
Yet when describing the frightening possibility that a U.S. city could be seized by an insurgency group, its mayor, police chief, and city council removed from office and placed under house arrest, the Army chooses to use the tea party, not an Occupy Wall Street nor a radical Islamist entity, as the insurgency group in the teaching tool.
When former U.S. Rep. Gabriella Giffords, D-Ariz., was shot along with others in the infamous Tucson massacre of 2011, the Obama administration, the mainstream media, and liberal activists were quick to blame the tea party, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Mark Levin for using “hateful rhetoric” that leads unstable persons such as the Tucson shooter to undertake such violent measures.
Yet none of the those mentioned as the sources for the hateful rhetoric have ever called for violence against anyone.
Several who posted comments on the PJTV video stated that they had attended Benson’s workshop and that each time someone would point out the threat posed by groups such as Islamic extremists, or the Occupy movement, workshop leaders would turn their comments around to continue the established scenario that ordinary citizens are the ones who pose the threat due to their hysteria over Islam and liberal insurrectionist groups.
Yet the ones who routinely call for violence against those who steadfastly resist their collectivist plans are the liberals in academia, government, the media, and left wing activist groups.
Time Magazine’s Joe Klein once accused conservatives shortly after the 2008 election that they were guilty of “sedition” and implied that sedition laws should be resurrected so that conservatives who resist the program being implemented by Barack Obama could be rounded up and jailed. Pamela Geller of the blog Atlas Shrugs has received countless death threats for merely reporting the facts on the activities of extremist Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood stated recently that America will be “brought to its knees.” Liberal commentators on various web sites have routinely called for the deaths of conservatives such as Dick Cheney and Michelle Malkin, and when former Fox News commentator Tony Snow was diagnosed with cancer, left wing hysterics stated that they hoped he would die a slow, painful death.
But these examples are only the tip of the iceberg. President Barack Obama stated in 2008 during the presidential campaign, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Obama’s friend and political ally Bill Ayers called for young people to kill their parents when he launched the very first “occupy” movement in Chicago in 1969. Ayers is also on record as stating that he supports the killing of tens of millions of conservatives unless they agree to be reeducated in his extremist liberal agenda.
Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, have often stated that they have not changed their views at all since the 1960s and wish they had done much more to advance their agenda.
In addition, the Communist-Socialist-Marxist ideology is singularly responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people during the 20th century alone. Stalin murdered at least 20 million Russians. Chairman Mao murdered at least 65 million Chinese. Fidel Castro along with his henchman Che Guevara murdered hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans, a figure that many say is much too low. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge murdered at least 5 million Cambodians and Southeast Asians after the Viet Nam War.
An in-depth study conducted by a University of Texas professor in 1997 for the National Center for Policy Analysis places the figures cited above much higher.
The “statistically impossible lack of diversity” on campus demonstrates ideological discrimination.
It is not surprising how willing leftist academics were willing to admit that they engage in such persecution and discrimination. This is how entrenched the far left is on campus. This problem is so bad that groups such as FIRE, the ACLJ and the Alliance Defense Fund routinely take action against universities whose faculty and administrators actively conspire to engage in such persecution.
If you doubt it I will just provide a few of the thousands of examples we could list here LINK – LINK :
Missouri State University orders Christian student to engage in homosexual sex act, abandon Christian beliefs, engage in far left political advocacy…or else:
In 2007, the University of Delaware’s Office of Residence Life used mandatory activities to coerce students to change their thoughts, values, attitudes, beliefs, and habits to conform to a highly specified social, environmental, and political agenda:
Teacher Michele Kerr describes how Stanford University’s Teacher Education Program (STEP) tried to oust her for her for not being a leftist:
It’s not every day that left-leaning academics admit that they would discriminate against a minority.
But that was what they did in a peer-reviewed study of political diversity in the field of social psychology, which will be published in the September edition of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Psychologists Yoel Inbar and Joris Lammers, based at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, surveyed a roughly representative sample of academics and scholars in social psychology and found that “In decisions ranging from paper reviews to hiring, many social and personality psychologists admit that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues.”
This finding surprised the researchers. The survey questions “were so blatant that I thought we’d get a much lower rate of agreement,” Mr. Inbar said. “Usually you have to be pretty tricky to get people to say they’d discriminate against minorities.”
One question, according to the researchers, “asked whether, in choosing between two equally qualified job candidates for one job opening, they would be inclined to vote for the more liberal candidate (i.e., over the conservative).”
More than a third of the respondents said they would discriminate against the conservative candidate. One respondent wrote in that if department members “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.”
More:
But Harvey Mansfield, a conservative professor of government at Harvard University, argues that the anti-conservative bias is real and pronounced. He says conservatism is “just not a respectable position to hold” in the academy, where Republicans are caricatured as Fox News enthusiasts who listen to Rush Limbaugh.
Beyond that, conservatives represent a distinct minority on college and university campuses. A 2007 report by sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons found that 80 percent of psychology professors at elite and non-elite universities are Democrats. Other studies reveal that 5 percent to 7 percent of faculty openly identify as Republicans. By contrast, about 20 percent of the general population are liberal and 40 percent are conservative.
Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammers found that conservatives fear that revealing their political identity will have negative consequences. This is why New York University-based psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a self-described centrist, has compared the experience of being a conservative graduate student to being a closeted gay student in the 1980s.
In 2011, Mr. Haidt addressed this very issue at a meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology — the same group that Mr. Inbar and Mr. Lammer surveyed. Mr. Haidt’s talk, “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” caused a stir. The professor, whose new book “The Righteous Mind” examines the moral roots of our political positions, asked the nearly 1,000 academics and students in the room to raise their hands if they were liberals. Nearly 80 percent of the hands went up. When he asked whether there were any conservatives in the house, just three hands — 0.3 percent — went up.
This is “a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Mr. Haidt said.
This will make you ill. This is exactly the kind of anti-Christian bigotry that is preached by the left by radicalized university academics. I have seen this ignorant attitude all too many times coming from them.
You just cant make this stuff up folks. Of course Spanier has been shilling and covering for the progressive secular left for years – LINK and was invested in the child sex abuse cover-up according the the investigation of Penn State by former FBI Director Louis Freeh.
Political commentator Marie Garr said it best, “Guess they figure he can keep a secret……….GEEZ!”
Graham Spanier might have been ousted from his post at the helm of Penn State over the sex-abuse scandal that engulfed the university, but it seems he’s found a backup employer: the American taxpayer.
Only a disgraced public figure would consider joining the much-maligned ranks of the federal workforce as a step up, reputation-wise. We can assume there were no openings for a used-car salesman.
Spanier was faulted in an internal Penn State report after the conviction on child-molestation charges of former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. The report said he, head coach Joe Paterno and others helped cover up Sandusky’s abuse.
His lawyer confirms to the Loop that Spanier is working on a part-time consulting basis for a “top-secret” agency on national security issues. But the gig is so hush-hush, he couldn’t even tell his attorneys the name of the agency. In April — months after his ouster as president but before the release of the internal report — he told the Patriot-News of central Pennsylvania that he was working on a “special project for the U.S. government relating [to] national security.”
But who’s he working for? The CIA? Homeland Security? Or maybe just a dull consulting firm with a government contract?
“I have no idea,”says his lawyer, Peter Vaira. “We know the work is in security and he’s prohibited from disclosing which agency or agencies he’s working for.”
Here is the rub. Even if he is not working for a government agency directly and he is a contractor for an intelligence agency he would still have to submit an SF86 and still pass the most rigorous national security scrutiny – unless of course that process was greased for him just like it has been for others in the Obama White House who couldn’t pass such scrutiny normally on their best day. One thing is almost a certainty; someone tipped off the Washington Post to this and they almost certainly know more than what they are reporting here.
One would think that a university that has a law school could grasp something a simple as the First Amendment, but you would be wrong if you thought that. Censorship and discrimination against conservatives, Jews, Christians and other groups not in favor with the radical left are under some form of attack at our public universities. This problem is so huge that there are at least half a dozen civil rights organizations that use most ore all of their resources fighting just this type of illegal discrimination; and they are so overwhelmed with cases that they have to be selective on what cases to draw attention to.
If you thought college was a place for young people to speak out, challenges one another’s deeply-held beliefs and grow intellectually, chances are you’ve never been to Indiana University Southeast.
The school, located just 10 miles north of Louisville, Ky., is the latest college to see its speech code come under fire from a group that advocates freedom of speech on campuses. One stipulation in the code requires that students may only “express opinions” within a free speech zone, which is antithetical to what a college should stand for, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an advocacy organization which defends the free speech and due process rights of college students.
“It’s the price you pay for living in a free society,” Robert Shibley, Senior Vice President of FIRE, told FoxNews.com.”The entire enterprise of a university is to express scholarly thoughts and opinions…restraints on that are impossible.”
The broad regulation probably doesn’t even state what its clumsy crafters meant it to say, said Samantha Harris, FIRE director of speech code research.
“IUS almost certainly doesn’t mean this–if you want to tell your friend that you think it’s hot outside, you have to go to the zone to do it…it’s an indicator of just how poorly written and unconstitutional this policy is,” she said.
IUS’s code also requires university approval for acts of ‘expressed opinions’ by submitting an application at least five days in advance.
But the school defended the speech code, expressing concern the exercise of First Amendment rights outside designated zones could disrupt others’ pursuit of an education.
“[The guidelines] were intended to provide some guidance on the issue so that those wishing to gather and express an opinion could do so without endangering people or property,” the school told FoxNews.com in a statement. “The guidelines also were intended to protect the rights of all students to have unfettered access to educational activities on campus (in other words, the exercise of free speech rights should not result in blocking access to buildings or disrupting classes or campus events).”
The university also said that it has never had any complaints about the policy since its implementation in 2004, and it welcomes the FIRE’s feedback.
“We have to regulate other groups who come from off campus. Some come and preach a lot of hate. We just can’t have them wandering around campus with bullhorns over here,” Joseph Wert, associate professor of Political Science and Dean of the School of Social Sciences at Indiana University Southwest, told FoxNews.com.
Oh that sounds so reasonable doesn’t it? Yes you see, IUS had this problem with people roaming about aimlessly with BULL HORNS shouting so no one could study…….yup that must be it.
Yup, and Joseph Wert had to get a PhD. to come up with that one. Professor Wert you are an idiot, and you are even more of an idiot if you think that anyone is going to fall for such an excuse. First of all, the First Amendment has never been construed by the courts to allow what is known as a “heckler’s veto” meaning that the speech in question is not so much about content as it is about disrupting the lawful activities of others. Your university speech code is written in such a way to adjust the universities illegal reaction depending on the content of the speech; meaning that “Students for Pushing Israel Into the Sea” get a prominent place to hold their speech event, but “Students Against Abortion” get to have their event in a tiny room no one can find. College administrators and professors like Joeseph Wert gets lots of practice making the totally unreasonable sound reasonable.
That is why the policy is written so broadly and poorly, so that it can be used for selective enforcement. There are countless cases of FIRE and other groups helping students who have had such speech codes used against them illegally. This is why FIRE in league with other groups have been suing universities to have such speech codes thrown out by the courts. Universities know about these lawsuits, but too often they go to court anyways knowning full well they are going to lose only for the purpose of forcing civil rights groups to expend more resources. After all it’s only your tax dollars funding your local university.
I have been waiting for this for a long time. When I was in college finishing my latest degree I was making many of these very same claims about global warming alarmist nonsense as the IAC report below. Leftist students and faculty pretty much told me that I was nuts, and I wasn’t a climate scientist so how would I know? Well it looks like I knew. It was easy. First of all it doesn’t take a genius to see when the scientific method is being ignored and second of all, what I am an expert on is politics and I know a political movement when I see one.
At the bottom of the article I posted a list of links that I wrote starting in 2007 saying many of the same things the IAC has pointed out below. Why am I so often using the word “I” when that is not an attitude that as editor I often take here at Political Arena? To be honest, I am going to take the low road and revel in rubbing it in my critic’s noses. I reactivated my old college blog just for the purpose of posting this story. We should ask ourselves what has happened to our education system when the doctoral academics who doubted me and called me names behind my back were all wrong, while the mere undergrad like me was spot on? – Chuck Norton
On June 27, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a statement saying it had “complete[d] the process of implementation of a set of recommendations issued in August 2010 by the Inter Academy Council (IAC), the group created by the world’s science academies to provide advice to international bodies.”
Hidden behind this seemingly routine update on bureaucratic processes is an astonishing and entirely unreported story. The IPCC is the world’s most prominent source of alarmist predictions and claims about man-made global warming. Its four reports (a fifth report is scheduled for release in various parts in 2013 and 2014) are cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. and by national academies of science around the world as “proof” that the global warming of the past five or so decades was both man-made and evidence of a mounting crisis.
If the IPCC’s reports were flawed, as a many global warming “skeptics” have long claimed, then the scientific footing of the man-made global warming movement — the environmental movement’s “mother of all environmental scares” — is undermined. The Obama administration’s war on coal may be unnecessary. Billions of dollars in subsidies to solar and wind may have been wasted. Trillions of dollars of personal income may have been squandered worldwide in campaigns to “fix” a problem that didn’t really exist.
The “recommendations” issued by the IAC were not minor adjustments to a fundamentally sound scientific procedure. Here are some of the findings of the IAC’s 2010 report.
Alternative views not considered, claims not properly peer reviewed
The IAC reported that IPCC lead authors fail to give “due consideration … to properly documented alternative views” (p. 20), fail to “provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors” (p. 21), and are not “consider[ing] review comments carefully and document[ing] their responses” (p. 22). In plain English: the IPCC reports are not peer-reviewed.
No formal criteria for selecting IPCC authors
The IAC found that “the IPCC has no formal process or criteria for selecting authors” and “the selection criteria seemed arbitrary to many respondents” (p. 18). Government officials appoint scientists from their countries and “do not always nominate the best scientists from among those who volunteer, either because they do not know who these scientists are or because political considerations are given more weight than scientific qualifications” (p. 18). In other words: authors are selected from a “club” of scientists and nonscientists who agree with the alarmist perspective favored by politicians.
Too political…
The rewriting of the Summary for Policy Makers by politicians and environmental activists — a problem called out by global warming realists for many years, but with little apparent notice by the media or policymakers — was plainly admitted, perhaps for the first time by an organization in the “mainstream” of alarmist climate change thinking. “[M]any were concerned that reinterpretations of the assessment’s findings, suggested in the final Plenary, might be politically motivated,” the IAC auditors wrote. The scientists they interviewed commonly found the Synthesis Report “too political” (p. 25).
Really? Too political? We were told by everyone — environmentalists, reporters, politicians, even celebrities — that the IPCC reports were science, not politics. Now we are told that even the scientists involved in writing the reports — remember, they are all true believers in man-made global warming themselves — felt the summaries were “too political.”
Here is how the IAC described how the IPCC arrives at the “consensus of scientists”:
Plenary sessions to approve a Summary for Policy Makers last for several days and commonly end with an all-night meeting. Thus, the individuals with the most endurance or the countries that have large delegations can end up having the most influence on the report (p. 25).
How can such a process possibly be said to capture or represent the “true consensus of scientists”?
Phony estimates of certainty
Another problem documented by the IAC is the use of phony “confidence intervals” and estimates of “certainty” in the Summary for Policy Makers (pp. 27-34). Those of us who study the IPCC reports knew this was make-believe when we first saw it in 2007. Work by J. Scott Armstrong on the science of forecasting makes it clear that scientists cannot simply gather around a table and vote on how confident they are about some prediction, and then affix a number to it such as “80% confident.” Yet that is how the IPCC proceeds.
The IAC authors say it is “not an appropriate way to characterize uncertainty” (p. 34), a huge understatement. Unfortunately, the IAC authors recommend an equally fraudulent substitute, called “level of understanding scale,” which is more mush-mouth for “consensus.”
The IAC authors warn, also on page 34, that “conclusions will likely be stated so vaguely as to make them impossible to refute, and therefore statements of ‘very high confidence’ will have little substantive value.” Yes, but that doesn’t keep the media and environmental activists from citing them over and over again as “proof” that global warming is man-made and a crisis…even if that’s not really what the reports’ authors are saying.
IPCC participants had conflicts of interest
Finally, the IAC noted, “the lack of a conflict of interest and disclosure policy for IPCC leaders and Lead Authors was a concern raised by a number of individuals who were interviewed by the Committee or provided written input” as well as “the practice of scientists responsible for writing IPCC assessments reviewing their own work. The Committee did not investigate the basis of these claims, which is beyond the mandate of this review” (p. 46).
Too bad, because these are both big issues in light of recent revelations that a majority of the authors and contributors to some chapters of the IPCC reports are environmental activists, not scientists at all. That’s a structural problem with the IPCC that could dwarf the big problems already reported.
IPCC critics vindicated
So on June 27, nearly two years after these bombshells fell (without so much as a raised eyebrow by the mainstream media in the U.S. — go ahead and try Googling it), the IPCC admits that it was all true and promises to do better for its next report. Nothing to see here…keep on moving.
Well I say, hold on, there! The news release means that the IAC report was right. That, in turn, means that the first four IPCC reports were, in fact, unreliable. Not just “possibly flawed” or “could have been improved,” but likely to be wrong and even fraudulent.
It means that all of the “endorsements” of the climate consensus made by the world’s national academies of science — which invariably refer to the reports of the IPCC as their scientific basis — were based on false or unreliable data and therefore should be disregarded or revised. It means that the EPA’s “endangerment finding” — its claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and threat to human health — was wrong and should be overturned.
And what of the next IPCC report, due out in 2013 and 2014? The near-final drafts of that report have been circulating for months already. They were written by scientists chosen by politicians rather than on the basis of merit; many of them were reviewing their own work and were free to ignore the questions and comments of people with whom they disagree. Instead of “confidence,” we will get “level of understanding scales” that are just as meaningless.
And on this basis we should transform the world’s economy to run on breezes and sunbeams?
In 2010, we learned that much of what we thought we knew about global warming was compromised and probably false. On June 27, the culprits confessed and promised to do better. But where do we go to get our money back?
Related from my old college blog:
Inconvenient Questions Global Warming Alarmists Don’t Want You to Ask – February 18, 2007 – LINK
Top Scientists Say: You Are Not the Cause of Global Warming – October 22, 2007 – LINK
Global Cooling Continues; Global Warming Alarmists Still Issuing Death Threats – December 28, 2008 – LINK
UK Telegraph: 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved – December 28, 2008 – LINK
National Climatic Data Center: Cooling in Last 10 Years – January 10, 2009 – LINK
The Debate is Over. Global Warming Alarmism is About Achieving Central Control of the Economy and Now They Admit It Openly – March 27, 2009 – LINK
Al Gore: Climate change issue can lead to world government – July 11, 2009 – LINK
EPA Tried to Suppress Global Warming Report Admitting Skeptics Correct – October 23, 2009 – LINK
New AP Article on “Global Cooling Myth” Spins a Bad Study – UPDATED: Look where they put THIS ground station… – October 27, 2009 – LINK
Professors Paid to Plagiarize – UPDATE: Global warming scientists hacked emails show manipulation of data, hiding of other data and conspiring to attack/smear global warming skeptics! – November 19, 2009 – LINK
National Association of Scholars on the “ClimateGate” Scandal – November 28, 2009 – LINK
Examples of the “Climategate” Documents – UPDATE: BBC Had the emails and files for 6 weeks, sat on story. UPDATE II – They carried out their conspiracy threat; much of the raw data from CRU destroyed! – November 28, 2009 – LINK
Scientific American thinks you are stupid: The dissection of a blatant propaganda piece for global warming alarmism. – December 6, 2009 – LINK
The Roundup: IPCC Authors Now Admitting Fault – No Warming Since 1995 – Sea Levels Not Rising. Senator Inhofe: Possible criminal misuse of taxpayer research funds. – February 23, 2010 – LINK
OOPS AGAIN: IPCC scientists screeching about the cataclysmic effects of sea-level rises forgot to consider sedimentary deposits… – April 23, 2010 – LINK
UN IPCC Co-chair: climate policy is redistributing the world’s wealth – November 18, 2010 – LINK
More Hadley Center Global Warming Horror Claims Debunked by Real Science – December 6, 2010 – LINK
ClimateGate One Year Later. Elite Media Still Lying – December 6, 2010 – LINK
More ClimateGate One Year Later – December 7, 2010 – LINK
IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT: Most global warming models are exaggerated, many scientists in it for the grant money or treat it like a religion – December 7, 2010 – LINK
How Global Warming Propaganda Works – December 8, 2010 – LINK
NASA’s global warming evidence page filled with lies, half truths and suspect data – December 10, 2010 – LINK
Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research: Halt economic growth, start government rationing. Global Warming Alarmists Party Fat in Cancun – December 21, 2010 – LINK
Global Warming Conference Delegates Sign Petitions to Ban Water and “Destabilize U.S. Economy” – February 15, 2011 – LINK
Global Warming Alarmist Quote of the Day – Former Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart: No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits…climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.
AAUP Seeks to Limit Transparency Over Climate Science – September 19, 2011 – LINK
Gelernter opposes Barack Obama primarily because Obama is one of the “Airheads” produced by the U.S. educational system.
“Obama is an Airhead and no ordinary ideologue,” writes Gelernter in America-Lite, “but he is certainly a left-liberal; he repeats the doctrine he learned from left-liberal intellectuals.”
Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, said his teaching experience has contributed enormously to his pessimistic assessment of American culture. “Every year I see a new class of smart kids, motivated kids, who are just ignorant,” said Gelernter.
“We educators have a responsibility,” said Gelernter, “and we’re failing.”
America-Lite shows “how we lost control of our own culture,” and how the “sullen, seething contempt for Western culture” that characterizes many educators is producing generations of ignorant citizens (dubbed “Airheads” by Gelernter) who accept liberal ideology because it is all they’ve ever known.
Gelernter called out conservatives, saying Republicans are focusing on secondary issues and avoiding the “deeper problems” in American culture.
“Conservatives are letting the country down,” said Gelernter.
From the book description:
America-Lite (where we all live) is just like America, only turned into an amusement park or a video game or a supersized Pinkberry, where the past and future are blank and there is only a big NOW. How did we come to expect no virtue and so much cynicism from our culture, our leaders—and each other?
In this refreshingly judgmental book, David Gelernter connects the historical dots to reveal a stealth revolution carried out by post-religious globalist intellectuals who, by and large, “can’t run their own universities or scholarly fields, but are very sure they can run you.” These imperial academics have deployed their students into the top echelon of professions once monopolized by staid and steady WASPs. In this simple way, they have installed themselves as the new designated drivers of American culture.
Imperial academics live in a world of theory; they preach disdain for mere facts and for old-fashioned fact-based judgments like true or false. Schoolchildren are routinely taught theories about history instead of actual history—they learn, for example, that all nations are equally nice except for America, which is nearly always nasty.
With academic experts to do our thinking for us, we’ve politely shut up and let second-raters take the wheel. In fact, we have handed the keys to the star pupil and teacher’s pet of the post-religious globalist intellectuals, whose election to the presidency of the United States constituted the ultimate global group hug.
How do we finally face the truth and get back into the driver’s seat? America-Lite ends with a one-point plan.
Before we get on to the child abuse scandal, this writer has been paying attention to what has been going on at Penn State for some time. The administration at Penn State has a long history of unethical, radical, and other bad behavior including coverups of other scandals. Here are some examples:
Penn State makes a video painting returning veterans as dumb, mentally unstable, and violent – LINK
Professor at Penn State explains how to teach anti-Israel propaganda to students (video) – LINK
Until the Sandusky Scandal, the most recent internationally covered scandal at Penn State was with their premier climate Scientist Michael Mann. Prof. Mann is one of the infamous “ClimateGate” scientists, who’s own emails revealed that Mann, along with other leftist climate scientists, manipulated data, destroyed data that concerned them, used ridicule and pressure tactics to manipulate the peer review process, etc all in an effort to push global warming alarmism. According to their own emails they had agreed that if ever caught they would destroy much of their raw data, which they did.
Understand that billions of dollars (including billions of your tax dollars) has been spent on the global warming question and as a result Prof. Mann brought in millions for himself and Penn State University. So when the emails were leaked and they were as caught as caught could be, and when other climate scientists started to back away from the claims of Dr. Mann and others at the IPCC, Penn State was pressured to have an investigation of Prof. Mann and their investigation said that Prof. Mann did nothing wrong and totally cleared him, even though the evidence was plain as could be and in the public domain – LINK – LINK – LINK.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has cataloged a list of cases of illegal censorship, retaliation, and discrimination at Penn State as long as your desk – LINK.
While such a child abuse scandal may be unusual on our college campuses, the pattern of abuse of power, illegal actions and the effort to cover them up is typical of university administrations and is a huge problem.
State College, Pennsylvania (CNN) — The most powerful leaders at Penn State University showed “total and consistent disregard” for child sex abuse victims while covering up the attacks of a longtime sexual predator, according to an internal review into how the school handled a scandal involving its former assistant football coach.
Investigators conducted more than 400 interviews and found that several officials had “empowered” Jerry Sandusky to continue his abuse, while Joe Paterno, the school’s legendary head football coach, could have stopped the attacks had he done more, investigators said Thursday.
In a scandal that has shaken Pennsylvania residents and gripped the nation, leading to Paterno’s dismissal and the ouster of longtime president Graham Spanier, Louis Freeh, the former FBI director who led the review, said top university officials forged an agreement to conceal Sandusky’s sexual attacks more than a decade ago.
“There are more red flags here than you can count,” said Freeh, emphasizing the abuse occurred just “steps away” from where Paterno worked in the university’s Lasch Building.
Freeh’s 267-page report is the product of a Penn State-funded investigation, which is separate from a government investigation into charges of perjury and failure to report abuse pinned against the school’s former Athletic Director Tim Curley and ex-Vice President Gary Schultz.
The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office is investigating what Penn State knew about a 2001 incident of child sex abuse by Sandusky, reported by then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary, and how it was handled.
Neither McQueary, Sandusky nor Paterno — who died in January — were interviewed by Freeh’s team and no trial date has been set for Curley and Schultz, though proceedings are expected to begin later in July.
The prosecution of Curley and Schultz comes on the heels of the widely watched Sandusky trial, in which the former defensive coordinator was convicted of sexually abusing young boys over 15 years.
“Our most saddening and sobering finding is the total disregard for the safety and welfare of Sandusky’s child victims by the most senior leaders at Penn State,” Freeh wrote. “The most powerful men at Penn State failed to take any steps for 14 years to protect the children who Sandusky victimized.”
The Wall Street Journal also covered the Freeh Report on Penn State HERE.
…and Al Gore is Guilty of exaggerating his arguments..
Environmental scientist James Lovelock, renowned for his terrifying predictions of climate change’s deadly impact on the planet, has gone back on his previous claims, admitting they were ‘alarmist’.
The 92-year-old Briton, who also developed the Gaia theory of the Earth as a single organism, has said climate change is still happening – just not as quickly as he once warned.
He added that other environmental commentators, such as former vice president Al Gore, are also guilty of exaggerating their arguments.
The admission comes as a devastating blow to proponents of climate change who regard Lovelock as a powerful figurehead.
Five years ago, he had claimed: ‘Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.’
But in an interview with msnbc.com, he admitted: ‘I made a mistake.’
He said: ‘The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing,’ he told ‘We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear cut, but it hasn’t happened.
We have said it time and time again and even though there are mountains of evidence most parents still do not understand; public education has been so radicalized that it has become subversive. Textbooks, many classes and teachers actively push a radical far left indoctrination on the kids and this teacher from Portland is no different. Would anyone like to bet that is is not an Obama voter?
According to Portland area teacher Bill Bigelow, July 4th fireworks shows need to be reconsidered, the Education Action Group reported Tuesday.
According to Bigelow, Independence Day “…provides cover for people to blow off fireworks that terrify young children and animals, and that turn the air thick with smoke and errant projectiles. Last year, the fire department here [Portland, OR] reported 172 fires sparked by toy missiles, defective firecrackers, and other items of explosive revelry.”
Bigelow was just getting warmed up.
“Apart from the noise pollution, air pollution, and flying debris pollution, there is something profoundly inappropriate about blowing off fireworks at a time when the United States is waging war with real fireworks around the world. To cite just one example, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London found recently that U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan alone have killed more than 200 people, including at least 60 children. And, of course, the U.S. war in Afghanistan drags on and on. The pretend war of celebratory fireworks thus becomes part of a propaganda campaign that inures us—especially the children among us—to the real wars half a world away,” he added.
“Yes, to this ingenious teacher, fireworks promote war. In fact, he says fireworks are ‘pretend war,'” Kyle Olsen wrote.
Olsen reminded readers that the tradition of celebratory fireworks dates back to July 3, 1776, when John Adams suggested in a letter to his wife that the day “ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”
“Is there any vestige of original Americana that Marxist educators won’t seek to erase from our culture?” Olsen asked.
Bigelow, for example, cites a July 1852 speech by Frederick Douglass that decried Independence Day celebrations in a country that had the institution of slavery.
The Oregon teacher said Douglass gave his speech “four years after the United States finished its war against Mexico to steal land and spread slavery, five years before the vicious Supreme Court Dred Scott decision, and nine years before the country would explode into civil war.”
“His words call out through the generations to abandon the empty ‘shout of liberty and equality’ on July 4, and to put away the fireworks and flags,” Bigelow added.
Unfortunately, Bigelow failed to mention that slavery ended in the United States as a result of the conflict.
Olsen says that teachers like Bigelow “would rather make students feel guilty about being Americans than encourage them to appreciate the great things about their nation.”
“If they manage to win their internal war on America by brainwashing too many young minds, we will all be sorry in the very near future,” he concluded.
A Marist poll conducted last year showed that over a quarter of Americans do not know that the original colonies separated from Great Britain. According to the poll, some of the countries mentioned were China, France, Japan, Mexico and Spain.
Minorities, this is what the “enlightened academic left” thinks of you. And this is not just a few radicalized pinheads in Minnesota, this type of senseless race bating, victimology, and stereotyping is typical of “black studies” and other neo-Marxist grievance studies programs in public school and universities in almost every state.
The left needs racial division and must pit one group against another for people to buy their ideology. This goes double for leftist academics who get millions of dollars spent of grievance studies programs, various grievance studies centers, publications etc.
Remember the Un-Fair Campaign, that august collection of enlightened and thoroughly non-racist individuals who believe that whites have an irrevocable privilege that gives them an advantage in society (and that, by extensions minorities will always need special favors to get a leg up)? Well, if you don’t, for the purposes of this story, it may be advisable to rewatch this ad of theirs:
As you can see, the Un-Fair Campaign is aptly named. Their perspective on race is deeply unfair. Fortunately, at least one group has set out to make a video that rebuts the above, and shows how the perspective involved is unfair not just to whites, but to minorities as well. The resulting effort may cause you to spontaneously break out into applause:
What with the refusal of the University of Minnesota-Duluth, one of the Un-Fair Campaign’s biggest institutional sponsors, to defund the organization, this variety of outraged mockery is perhaps the best response.
My friend Scott Ott and his friends at Trifecta had the most thoughtful response to this issue we have yet seen:
In this video, Touré, the one-named host of MSNBC’s The Cycle, attempts to humiliate Alex Schriver for being Republican. He suggests that something happened to him that has forced him into being Republican before Schriver confidently fires back against the MSNBC host for his ignorant and degrading comments.
The 23-year-old Schriver not only speaks intelligently beyond his years, but politely makes MadonnaSealPrince Touré look silly and unknowledgeable about the state of politics.
Schriver, a native of Tennessee and a graduate of Auburn University, is the National Chairman for the College Republican National Committee. Click on the link to check out their great organization that works to promote conservative ideals to college age Americans.
The law and the case law on this issue is as clear as clear can be. Student groups at public universities may not be discriminated against on the basis of viewpoint.
There are no exceptions to this rule within the law, yet over and over censor happy leftists at public universities break the law and do just that. They discriminate against Christian clubs, Jewish clubs, conservative and libertarian clubs. They often get away with it because either the students involved do not know their rights, or they are unwilling to take the fight to the courts.
But make no mistake, plenty of these cases go to the courts even when the university knows it has no chance of victory. The administrators are spending taxpayer dollars and will spend taxpayer dollars when they lose. It is no skin off their shoes. YOU pay.
Such is the case at Texas A&M University. Universities and clubs on campus bring in leftist speakers to talk to the students every year, and when a club attempts to bring in a conservative speaker the university administrators dig in their heals to try and stop or censor the event.
The Texas Aggie Conservatives needed $6,800 to host a February speaking engagement featuring black social conservative Star Parker. The group’s leaders requested $2,500 from Student Organization Funding to offset the cost. Officially recognized student organizations have access to the account for special events and general budget funding.
But according to Texas Aggie Conservatives and their attorneys, the school limits access to the money based on indefensible restrictions. All recognized organizations are eligible for the funds as long as they’re not formed for religious, social or political purposes. Sports clubs and groups tied to the student center and health science center also are barred from requesting funds.
David Hacker, an attorney with the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), which represents the Texas Aggie Conservatives, questioned the limitations of the funding, saying the school “has to provide those funds on a viewpoint-natural basis.”
The ADF filed a lawsuit June 19 against Texas A & M University (TAMU), challenging the funding restrictions as a violation of the students’ First Amendment rights.
TAMU spokesman Lane Stevenson could not discuss the issue, saying only that the university refrains from commenting on pending legal matters. Texas Aggie Conservative leaders referred all questions to their attorney.
Hacker said the university’s policy was not only unconstitutional but inconsistently applied. Other student organizations, including the NAACP, the Muslim Student Association, the Black Student Alliance, and TAMU V-Day, which hosts “The Vagina Monologues,” a racy stage play, all received money from the fund.
Hacker said the students with Texas Aggie Conservatives discovered the discrepancies. They also discovered the school had denied funding to Christian fraternity Beta Upsilon Chi.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Political Arena 