09:27 – How can you tell when Brian Williams is lying? His lips are moving. It’s no wonder that sensible people ignore network and cable “news”. Even when the anchors aren’t flat-out lying, they’re pushing their progressive agenda. Other than the morning of 9/11, I haven’t watched a network or cable newscast or paid any attention to major newspapers in more than 30 years, and I haven’t missed anything. When politicians, bureaucrats, churches, corporations, or the MSM say anything, it’s a safe bet that they’re lying. So why waste time listening to anything they say?
More kit stuff today.
So how do you get your news?
Ours comes mostly from the net, the local rags, and shortwave, but I recently started getting the weekend editions of the WSJ and the Christian Science Monitor, the latter mainly because they minimize anything about their cult in it and they have a lot of what we would call good news, i.e., positive stories about folks getting stuff done, rather than the usual long list of horror stores found elsewhere, say, on Drudge or the MSM.
The WSJ is a pretty good indicator of what our dear leaders are thinking and the lies they wish to promulgate, i.e., things like a “jobless recovery,” and anything involving foreign “policy,” i.e., how it’s run pretty much by Israel’s Likud Party and “its amen corner in the U.S. Congress,” something Pat Buchanan said over twenty years ago, which caused him to be dumped from National Review and then castigated as an anti-Semite. What a laugh. Watch the reaction when Bibi shows up here again to get his b.j. from this dumbass Repub acolytes, who tend to believe in the Rapture and the coming Armageddon and how all the Jews will convert and be saved in the end.
These are people who make decisions based exclusively on the Book of Revelation and believe it refers to current events. God help us.
I don’t have any problem with Israel. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. I keep hoping that Israel will ground-burst nuke 21.4225°N 39.826181°E, which would pretty much destroy the basis for islam. The islamic nutters really believe that allah protects it and so it cannot be destroyed. If the Israelis vaporize it, that pretty much proves that allah is crap.
As if you can prove anything to people like that. That is the problem. ( I still like the idea.)
Home Schooling: More Pupils, Less Regulation
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/05/education/home-schooling-more-pupils-less-regulation.html
One problem with that scenario is that it leaves other islamic players holding nuclear cards, the most prominent example being Pakistan, whose leaders at any given point might choose to retaliate, and then we have a real mess on our hands. As it is, they’re at constant flash-point status with India over Kashmir. Or a gang of hadji bastards gets hold of a dirty nuke they can detonate in some Western city or cities. Once that genie is outta the bottle, we’re looking at true seriousness, worldwide. Apocalyptic-level, even.
That said, I don’t think Israel is our friend; they and their previous leaders have been spying on us since before WWII and we’re only as useful to them as the military protection we provide at whatever levels and the arms we ship them. Of course we’ve also been shipping arms to their enemies over the decades. Cui bono?
My inclination is to extricate ourselves totally from that area of the world and let them all slaughter each other like pigs, which seems to be their most favorite activity.
The not-so-secret secret is that every country spies on every other country, budget permitting. “Friendly” countries don’t go out of their way to publicize events of espionage by nominal allies, but don’t think it doesn’t go on.
(I doubt that Lichtenstein or Andorra participate much in spy operations, but that’s pretty much it.)
“Home Schooling: More Pupils, Less Regulation”
Cause for some hope.
I had the publik skool experience of the 1950s and 1960s in eastern Maffachufetts, but I independently supplemented it with a ton of broad and deep reading in the areas that interested me and I traveled to Boston a number of times to museums and various political events of the times. Not to mention other cultural stuff like rock concerts, while listening pretty much nonstop to classical music at home.
I favor the State keeping its mitts off home schooling entirely. Just about everything they touch turns to chit.
Today’s http://drudgereport.com/ headline is “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever”.
“New data shows that the “vanishing” of polar ice is not the result of runaway global warming”.
“When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified. ”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarming/11395516/The-fiddling-with-temperature-data-is-the-biggest-science-scandal-ever.html
Can we bring back public flogging now?
These are not scientists, they are snake oil salesmen. They are living from grants off the governments of the West. I doubt that China spends a penny on global warming studies whereas the USA spends about three billion dollars per year. Just on modeling! My industry is being maltreated by these people and their sympathizers. Everyone is having to take CO2 and CH4 minimization into account now for all projects.
It was a scam right from the start; as soon as we saw the usual suspects climbing on board and pushing it for all they were worth, and then picking up the alliances and enabling from government, media and academia. Cui bono???
Now our kids accept it unquestioningly as Holy Writ. Just like affirmative action, diversity, abortion as a divine right, etc., etc. These are now sacraments.
A fine job, successful by all measures, conducted by the Left in its Long March through all our institutions since before the Good War.
It was obvious it was a scam when the solution to putative global warming was the same as the solution for putative global cooling: The West must stop growing, the West must send money to corruptocracies, and everyone in the world must give up their freedoms and turn power over to a world government.
Not my kids. I deliberately raised my boys to be cynical and skeptical. (And sarcastic little bastards, while I was at it.) Son#1 was pretty sure it was BS from the start, from the way the public school teachers were trying to ram it down the kids’ throats with no dissent allowed. Son#2 was less sure, but he’s dealt with a compulsive liar (his mother) his entire life, and he wasn’t accepting “proof by repeated and increasingly heated assertion” either.
Even my daughter, age 7, is already developing a skeptical mindset, and she’s very interested in everything science-related. I’m able to counter some of the arrant nonsense she’s exposed to in school or wherever, simply by discussing whatever topic comes to hand and by being prepared to admit to ignorance or error when appropriate — that last bit by itself gets me a lot of points with her and the other 7-y-o I’m taking care of, compared to most adults who charge forward even when a 7-y-o can spot their mistakes.
My elementary school teachers frequently complained to my mother that I was testing them throughout the year, as well as challenging them if their statements didn’t pass the smell test, or refusing to accept their unsupportable assertions. Little support though I got as a child, I do have to give my mom credit for suggesting that if a first grader was able to pick holes in what the teacher said, maybe the problem wasn’t with the first grader.
Good on ya, mate, as our friends down in Oz would say.
Our kids here think I’m a fascist wack job, basically, but that’s what I thought about my old man, too, back in the day, and now I find not only was he right after all, but the bugger didn’t go fah enough.
I was also lucky enough to have three or four really good teachers in high skool and then a couple more in grad skool, amazingly enough. But I have relied mainly on my autodidact tendencies for over half a century.
Speaking of our friends here, we haven’t heard much lately from several; Mr. Chuck among them. I hope the Tiny Town PD hasn’t locked him up for being an obstreperous bugger or sumthin.
Ditto on Mr. Chuck. Hopefully he is out videoing his ass off recording statements.
If you do check in Mr. Chuck, any update on the ripping tome?
[snip] they’re pushing their progressive agenda [snip]
I have to disagree with your terminology. Williams et al. push an agenda in which the people are made dependent upon their government; I call that regressive.
Technically it should be “regressive” but they like to think of themselves as “progressive,” and thus better than everyone else and helping to move the Human Race FORWARD. Upward and onward, as history to them is a linear progression, with things always supposed to get better. The words “liberal” and “conservative” don’t mean anything like their original definitions, either, not anymore.
Heat wave here now at 12 degrees; snow continuing another 36 hours, supposedly, six to eight inches or more, an inch per hour tonight, with crappy visibility and hazardous road conditions. I ain’t driving anywhere but Mrs. OFD told me a while back her flight is still scheduled to take off right about…now. Heading to Minnesota for ETA around 11 tonight.
I won’t be driving Princess back to Montreal tonight and tomorrow is looking pretty iffy, too. These trips are at least usually good for recon of the border region, checking for security, natural and man-made obstacles, road conditions, etc. I still say a mass exodus of panicked zombies from Montreal to here is unlikely to be very successful, even in summer.
We were at 75 F this afternoon and 72 F right now here in the Land of Sugar where we just walked two miles in the brilliant sunshine and nice breeze. Bouncing down to 58 F tonight and a very pleasant week in the 60s and 40s once that very cold front comes through. Makes one want to jump on the motorcycle and ride a few hundred through beautiful south Texas.
I still say that public flogging is too good for these global warming people. Of course, I fully expect them to park on APC on my street someday and take me away for re-education. We have it so good in the USA that they want to destroy it and take us down to the rest of the world’s level of subsistence.
” We have it so good in the USA that they want to destroy it and take us down to the rest of the world’s level of subsistence.”
I’m not sure that’s the reason, but it sure does look like the plan.
We’re also just small-fry, you and me, Mr. Lynn; they may come for us eventually but in the main I think they’ll have their hands full dealing with mass civil unrest and possible future civil war. I’ll be too old to bother about soon enough, anyway; they can just write me off as some old ex-drunk, ex-junkie war vet with a fried brain, of no threat to anyone.
The warmists are just the latest in a long line of useful idiots for the Left in what remains of the West.
I see the USA eventually like the “Red Dawn” movie except the commissars will come from DC. All of the influential town people will be taken to the local drive-in or Walmart parking lot to show us indoctrination films. When we do not kowtow to their party line after a period of time, then they will take us out in the country side, have us dig a mass grave site, and then use the APC gun on us.
We must stop this nonsense now in DC but I have no idea other than the ballet box. And most of the Republicrats running in 2016 follow this line except Perry and Scott. Even SCOTUS is in on the action which really worries me. We may be headed for civil war if this does not stop, right now.
How convenient for them up here, then; we have a large drive-in movie lot that is now defunct because the last owner died a year or so ago and it’s just been dormant since; directly across the street is the Super Wall-mutt store complex with a vast parking lot, and both sites are right off an interstate exit, convenient for the APC’s, too. Or used as an airstrip as was its original intent during the “Cold War.”
Maybe the PA system and screen still work OK for the indoctrination films, and rather than move us out the countryside, they can bulldoze a mass grave right there, as the Wall-Mutt parking lots are paved and the drive-in lot is bare earth covered by snow and ice right now.
The ballot box is also defunct in this country. Your boy Perry is about to waffle big-time on gun rights issues and Walker’s just another hack. We have no one. Mordor inhabitants of the political stripe are as divorced from the Murkan public and ordinary Murkans as any hereditary nobility has ever been from its feudal subjects.
I agree we’re likely headed for eventual civil war but have no idea of the time frame involved; we may pass through a period first of increasing State repression in the regime’s desperate attempt to maintain “order” and “national security.” This will fail, in the end, and then we may find ourselves in what the very late English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called a ‘state of nature,’ where the hand of every man is raised against every other man’ and life itself is poor, nasty, brutish and short.
By that time I figure most of us on this board will be long gone, from natural causes, more or less, so we’re only gonna be seeing the beginnings of all this.
A couple of years ago I had a PhD graduate student riding with me to work and did for about 3 years. She did not drive and paid me to take her to the university where I was working. She of course knew every thing, especially regarding any topic I would bring up because I was a mere mortal in her eyes.
Many a time I would bring up an article about the global, whatever, and she would quickly discredit everything I brought up. She had bought into the kool aid and was convinced that we were all going to fry in the upcoming heat wave. I said, I doubt it. Food grows better in warmth and higher carbon dioxide and that is better for everyone. She never agreed and just believed we were going to die.
I would always point out that anyone that wanted to study global warming had an easy time getting funding. Anyone that wanted to study against was basically on their own. It seemed to me that scientist were following the money rather than science and told her that. She just said that there was no use studying something that did not exist and we should be concentrating our efforts on what we knew existed. I then asked how do we know it exists if were are only studying for the conclusion we wanted to reach. Should not someone be looking in the other direction? She would get quiet and go back to working Mathlab on her laptop.
It scared me that people like this were in academics and may be the future of the country. Never questioning, just following.
“She would get quiet and go back to working Mathlab on her laptop.”
Of course.
Which shows that she knows you were right and that she was gonna just go with the Zardoz figure out front and not the little old man behind the curtain.
“Never questioning, just following.”
No kidding. And that’s just the dopes in academia. How about all the cretins in government, the minions of the State? How are they different from minions and bureaucrats in the old Soviet Union or Nazi Germany? One only need refer back to the history books, and the psychology experiments of Dr. Philip Zimbardo.
“She never agreed and just believed we were going to die.”
Did you ask her for a few hours of quality time alone with her before she and you die?
OFD, what do you think of the guy from Wisconsin?
What guy from Wisconsin? Walker? Just another piker, bullshit artist, carny barker and snake-oil salesman, like all our hack politicians. The only use I have for any of them is as fertilizer or shark chum.
As Dr. Bob said earlier about the nooz hawkers, you know they’re lying when you see their lips moving.
In my lifetime, and that’s over sixty years now, we’ve had two reasonably decent politicians, Ron Paul and the late Sam Ervin. The rest have been criminal scumbags, looters, and by association with the regimes since I was born, war criminals.
How’s the weather down there in Oz? Ours is subzero with blowing snow for 48 hours straight and the ice fishermen are out on the bay in force with their vehicles; it’s a solid block of ice out there close to shore. Yo, this our version of globalchangewarmingclimate, Pat. Pending.
We’re also just small-fry, you and me, Mr. Lynn; they may come for us eventually but in the main I think they’ll have their hands full dealing with mass civil unrest and possible future civil war.
I have no idea where I am on their lists. I had a rather unpleasant visit with the FBI and then the CIA around 14 or 15 years ago. In my freaking office, unannounced and uninvited. The FBI guy told me that the CIA guy would show up the next day and how I could validate him. They totally wasted my time, the CIA guy accused me of spreading nuclear technology outside the USA, and then asked me to violate my ethics and perform an possibly illegal act. I am a patriot! The CIA guy was scum and I suspect that the FBI guy was also.
Your boy Perry is about to waffle big-time on gun rights issues
Huh? I don’t believe it. Rick knows which side of the gun that his votes are on. Plus Repubs always go to the right to get the nomination.
Would a Perry and Walker slate in 2016 (in either order) make you happy at all?
Are you thinking about Abbot? Yes, we are arguing here in The Great State of Texas whether open carry requires a license or not. Open Carry is a done deal, you will probably need a CHL though. I’m looking for a nice sam browne and holster for my S&W 629.
Ok, this is distasteful and offensive but funny (full frontal nerdity):
http://ffn.nodwick.com/?p=1349
It’s warm down here but, apart from a hot spell a month ago, not too bad. I just turned off the a/c – I was freezing my butt off. I don’t need the thing, but it is nice on rare occasions. Having a ceiling I *can’t* touch helps too.
The scumbags here want to raise the price of peak electricity so high that I couldn’t afford to use it. They want to install smart meters that determine when and what you are using electricity for and charge you accordingly. Want to turn on the a/c at 5 PM? No problem sir, here’s our bill for $20 per KWh.
If they try this me I’ll tell ’em I know some mean hombres with an arsenal of guns (before they lost them in various rivers) who they’ll be meeting. The solution is more generating capacity. 50 years ago under Sir Thomas Playford SA had the cheapest electricity in the nation with good old brown coal and gas generators. Now the current SA state Labor government is investigating nuclear. Good on ’em I say.
nuclear. Good on ‘em I say.
Indeed! We’ve got several of the world’s largest reserves of uranium ore, we’ve got a scientific community that’s done the research, and knows how to use it. We could certainly make use of huge supplies of low-cost electricity, to refine all our other ores if for nothing else, and to conserve our reserves of fossil fuel – or perform brute-force transformation of natural gas and propane into heavier petroleum fractions. Iron and zinc, nickel and chrome. Lead, copper and tin. Sulphur. Titanium. Aluminium. Silver and gold. Low cost, high value. Desalinated water. Salt, sodium, chlorine. Nitrogenous fertiliser, explosives. Maybe we could use all that cheap nuclear energy to turn our sand into silicon, then make photovoltaic cells out of it. Lock our nuclear waste up in Synrock® and cache it out in the “Dead Centre” until we could get around to reprocessing it. Squander our reserves of nuclear ores, just to create short-term wealth for the next couple of millenia, until we got around to mining the asteroids. Heck, it would all be worth it if we could just make the Greens go critical – we could fuel the reactors with them – surely they must be good for something.
Heck, we’ve got the world’s most populous Muslim nation just a sea-slug’s fart and the wiggle of a shark’s fin to our North, and they regularly prove themselves eager to kill Australians. It would do us no harm to be publicly known as a nuclear nation, even if we swore on a stack of Bibles and a heap of composted Korans that we really didn’t have nuclear weapons. I mean, I’m convinced we don’t have them now, but I doubt it would take as long as a year to change that starting tomorrow. Granted the political pull, even I could do that much; and there’s a lot of people who could do better.
Did you ask her for a few hours of quality time alone with her before she and you die?
Uh, no. I have standards. They may be low but I have standards.
The scumbags here want to raise the price of peak electricity so high that I couldn’t afford to use it. They want to install smart meters that determine when and what you are using electricity for and charge you accordingly. Want to turn on the a/c at 5 PM? No problem sir, here’s our bill for $20 per KWh.
Follow our hosts advice and install some solar panels?
BTW, we have the smart meters here in the Land of Sugar. Most residences and businesses here are buying power on a 12 month rate. The electricity companies are buying and selling power on a 15 minute rate. The system is working well as I pay 9 cents/kwh at home and 11 cents/kwh at the office.
“Would a Perry and Walker slate in 2016 (in either order) make you happy at all?”
No.
“…and they regularly prove themselves eager to kill Australians. It would do us no harm to be publicly known as a nuclear nation…”
And the Red Chinese and Norks a bit further to the north. Damn. Ramp up that nuke program again.