Wall Street Journal

Kimberley Strassel Discusses Trump’s “Federalist Revival”

Published by Papa Giorgio

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL discusses the fight for Federalism and how Scott Pruitt will help in this endeavor:

Donald Trump had barely finished announcing his pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency before the left started listing its million reasons why Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt was the worst nomination in the history of the planet: He’s an untrained anti-environmentalist. He’s a polluter. He’s a fossil-fuel fanatic, a lobbyist-lover, a climate crazy.

Mr. Pruitt is not any of those things. Here’s what he in fact is, and the real reason the left is frustrated: He’s a constitutional scholar, a federalist (and a lawyer). And for those reasons he is a sublime choice to knock down the biggest conceit of the Obama era—arrogant, overweening (and illegal) Washington rule.

We’ve lived so many years under the Obama reign that many Americans forget we are a federal republic, composed of 50 states. There isn’t a major statute on the books that doesn’t recognize this reality and acknowledge that the states are partners with—and often superior to—the federal government. That is absolutely the case with major environmental statues, from the Clean Air Act to the Clean Water Act to the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Congress specifically understood in crafting each of these laws that one-size-fits all solutions were detrimental to the environment. Federal bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency traditionally and properly existed to set minimum standards, provide technical support, and engage in occasional enforcement. States, with their unique knowledge of local problems, economies and concerns, were free to innovate their own solutions.

But President Obama never held much with laws, because he failed at making them. After his first two years in office, he never could convince the Congress to pass another signature initiative. His response—and the enduring theme of his presidency—was therefore to ignore Congress and statutes, go around the partnership framework, and give his agencies authority to dictate policy from Washington. The states were demoted from partners to indentured servants. So too were any rival federal agencies that got in the EPA’s way. Example: The EPA’s pre-emptive veto of Alaska’s proposed Pebble Mine, in which it usurped Army Corps of Engineers authority.

One revealing illustration from EPA world. Under the Clean Air Act, states are allowed to craft their own implementation plans. If the EPA disapproves of a state plan, it is empowered to impose a federal one—one of the most aggressive actions the agency can take against a state, since it is the equivalent of a seizure of authority. In the entirety of the presidencies of George H.W. Bush,Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the EPA imposed five federal implementation plans on states. By last count, the Obama administration has imposed at least 56.

Much of Mr. Pruitt’s tenure as Oklahoma’s AG was about trying to stuff federal agencies back into their legal boxes. Most of the press either never understood this, or never wanted to. When the media wrote about state lawsuits against ObamaCare or the Clean Power Plan or the Water of the United States rule, the suggestion usually was that this litigation was ideologically motivated, and a naked attempt to do what a Republican Congress could not—tank the president’s agenda.

The basis of nearly every one of these lawsuits was in fact violations of states’ constitutional and statutory rights—and it is why so many of the cases were successful. It was all a valiant attempt to force the federal government to follow the law. And it has been a singular Pruitt pursuit.

[….]

It doesn’t need a climate warrior, as Congress has never passed a climate law, and so the EPA has no mandate to meddle there. What it needs is a lawyer, one with the knowledge of how to cut the agency back to its proper role—restoring not just an appropriate legal partnership with the states, but also with other federal bodies. One who reminds agency staff that the EPA was not created to oppose growth and development.

If Mr. Pruitt does this successfully, and on the way crushes the current president’s legacy, Mr. Obama will have only himself to blame. His abuse of federal power helped elect a new generation of state attorneys general and Washington Republicans passionately devoted to a states’ rights agenda. They’ll be advising Mr. Trump not just on environmental policy, but on health care, labor policy, entitlement reform. Say hello to the federalist revival.

 

 

 

 

Kimberley Strassell Interviewed by Dennis Prager

Published by Papa Giorgio

Info on the above audio:

In a wonderful interview with Kiberley Strassel, Dennis Prager asks away on some VERY important issues that we conservatives should be knowledgeable on. Namely how the Professional Left is using government to suppress political opposition to their view of life. The subject was so interesting I bought her book, “The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech“

There is a lot to listen to here, all of it is worthwhile… so settle in.

  • Her columns at The Wall Street Journal can be found here
  • You can also see her on Fox talking about her book, here
  • Follow her on Twitter.

The Left LOVES Radical Murderers | Angela Davis and Kathy Boudin

Published by Papa Giorgio

The Left LOVES Radical Murderers | Angela Davis and Kathy Boudin (Edition)

Dennis Prager goes through an excellent Wall Street Journal opinion piece (full article in the end “appendix”) detailing the people in attendance to honor Angela Davis at Brooklyn’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Museum. It sickens me that the left accepts radical murderers but at the slightest blip on a conservative “radar screen, fingers start pointing.

Dennis Prager is right, you can never be “too left.”

  • Also see The Daily Beast’s article, HERE.

I believe in rehabilitation, but Miss Davis is not rehabilitated. Instead, the Democrats and Leftists continually award such people with high paying jobs and and the like.

For example, the Democrat Party never rejected nor disciplined there members for racist activity, even up until current times. Trent Lott lost all positions or importance and was drummed out by fellow Republicans after praising Strom Thurmond, Chris Dodd in a similar situation was ignored. (Like Democrats getting committee leadership positions and three standing ovations in Congress after sleeping with an underage page… but Republicans drumming out any fellow persons who are similarly caught in these situations.)

BILL CLINTON: “A few years ago, this guy [Obama] would have been getting us coffee,”
JOSEPH BIDEN: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” continuing he said, “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
DAN RATHER: “but he couldn’t sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.”

The openly gay Democrat from Massachusetts was once embroiled in his own sex scandal, involving a young male prostitute who had launched an escort service out of the basement of Frank’s Washington, D.C., town house. When Frank, who had a sexual relationship with the hustler, discovered the enterprise in 1987…

These are the people who were outraged when a similarly gay “hustler” (Mark Foley) asked a sixteen-year old what he wanted for his birthday, and had PMs (private messages) with an eighteen-year old that were salacious.  No sex occurred between either the 16-year old nor the 18-year old.  Nancy Pelosi, who marched in lock step with a known pedophile and member of NAMBLA (who wants the age of consent to be 12-years-old) at a Gay Pride parade and then on television mentions how proud she is of this pedophile… she is now the champion of the Democratic movement?

I will choose having a party who trumpets out someone who is sending dirty e-mails to an 18-year-old intern (the age of consent in Washington is 16 by-the-by) rather than have Gerry Studds actually have sex with an intern and get three standing ovations by the democrats in Congress.  Wouldn’t you?  I guess if you’re gay and Republican, you are evil.  But if you are gay and a Democrat, you are a hero.

Oh, and Kennedy, ahhhh yes.  He wasn’t in the car that careened off the road killing a woman in Chappaquiddick.  What was he doing stumbling around, drunk, with his pants around his ankles where nearby a family member of his was attacking a woman?

I could go on, but you get the point.

APPENDIX

Angela Davis and Radical Chic 2016 (WSJ)

Acquitted of murder, tenured in academia, feted by the mayor’s wife in a ritzy setting made possible by the system she loathes.

By Roger Kimball

Saturday marked the 44th anniversary of Angela Davis’s acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. Remember Angela Davis? I asked several of my younger colleagues: No one under 35 had heard of her. But the former Black Panther, recipient of the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize, and two-time vice-presidential candidate on the Communist Party ticket with Gus Hall, was once a household name. That was enough for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, which last Thursday bestowed on Ms. Davis the 2016 Sackler Center First Award, “honoring women who are first in their fields.”

Previous honorees include the novelist Toni Morrison, Miss Piggy and Anita Hill—pioneers all, no question. Ms. Davis is surely the first person to have parlayed an appearance on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted list into a tenured professorship at the University of California.

The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium at the Brooklyn Museum was packed to overflowing for the ceremony. It began with a songfest. A couple dozen children from the Manhattan Country School, a boutique “progressive” institution, sang what seemed like 40 or 50 verses of “We Shall Overcome.” Elizabeth A. Sackler, chairwoman of the Brooklyn Museum and scion of Alfred M. Sackler, who made a large part of his considerable fortune marketing the painkiller OxyContin, introduced the evening. She noted proudly that she had grandchildren attending the school where singing “We Shall Overcome” is a daily ritual.

The evening also featured a welcome by Chirlane McCray, wife of Warren Wilhelm Jr., known to most New Yorkers as Mayor Bill de Blasio. The bulk of the evening was taken up with rituals of self-congratulation and a screening of a mercifully abridged “educational” version of “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners,” a 2012 documentary about the signal event in Ms. Davis’s career as a radical: her arrest, prosecution and exoneration. There followed a brief conversation between Ms. Davis and the prima donna Ms. of all Ms.’s, Gloria Steinem. Kathy Boudin, the former member of the Weather Underground who was convicted of murder in 1981, was also in attendance. It was old-home week for wizened radical chic.

In her introduction, Ms. Sackler said that the name Angela Davis, “the embodiment of all we hold dear,” is “synonymous with truth.” Really?

After a middle-class upbringing that included college at Brandeis (where she fell under the spell of the Frankfurt School Marxist guru Herbert Marcuse) and postgraduate work in Europe, Ms. Davis emerged as a doyenne of the violent, revolutionary fringe of 1960s radicalism. In 1970 she became romantically involved with George Jackson, a career criminal and Black Panther serving time in Soledad Prison for armed robbery.

In 1970 Jackson was one of several prisoners implicated in the murder of a prison guard. That August Jackson’s 17-year-old brother Jonathan burst into a Marin County courthouse during a trial. He distributed arms to the defendants, took the judge, the prosecutor and at least one juror hostage. Some of the weapons, as later testimony at her trial revealed, had been bought by Ms. Davis two days before. Jonathan intended to trade the hostages for the release of his brother and then flee to Cuba.

In what became a shootout, Jonathan and two of the defendants were killed. The judge’s head was blown off by a shotgun taped under his chin. Another hostage was paralyzed for life. In 1971, in a detail omitted by the “Free Angela” documentary, George Jackson and several other inmates murdered three prison guards and two white inmates, before being shot himself.

After the bloody courthouse melee, Ms. Davis fled and went underground. The FBI apprehended her in New York some months later. “Free Angela” argues that she was prosecuted because she was a Communist and black. In fact, she was prosecuted as a material accessory to murder.

How did she get off? In part, for the same reason that O.J. Simpson got off: celebrity, edged with racial grievance mongering. There was also the temper of the times. When she was apprehended, a hue and cry went around the world—especially in precincts hostile to American interests.

The spectacle of Angela Davis at the Brooklyn Museum was partly ironical, partly contemptible. The irony emerged from the discrepancy between the now-rancid radical rhetoric and comfy bourgeois reality, underwritten by capitalist enterprise. Things are “really, really rotten” in this country, Ms. Davis intoned at one point, eliciting knowing murmurs from the hip audience.

But not, of course, for her. When she was in prison awaiting trial, an unidentified farmer pledged his property to raise the $100,000 bail to secure Ms Davis’s release. “It seemed like a lot of money back then,” Ms. Davis assured the audience, unaware, perhaps, that to some it still is.

Perhaps the biggest laugh of the evening came when Ms. Davis noted that she had triumphed over California Gov. Ronald Reagan, President Richard Nixon and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, “three of the most powerful men in the world.” Gloria Steinem shot back: “And where are they now?” much to the hilarity of the assembled crowd.

Angela Davis travels the world these days collecting honors. She once supported the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan while refusing to speak up for political prisoners in socialist countries. Now she champions the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements and derides the police and capitalist West, mouthing radical slogans that, if acted upon, would destroy the civilization that coddles her.

“Broken Windows” Policy In Foreign Policy

Published by Papa Giorgio

Is there a middle ground between the aggressive foreign policy of the Bush Administration and the passive and hesitant foreign policy of the Obama Administration? Yes, and New York City is a model. How so? Bret Stephens, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Wall Street Journal, explains how the NYPD’s “broken windows” policy–swiftly and forcefully punishing even petty crimes–can be applied by the United States on a global scale.

White-House Spies on Republicans and Israel (via the NSA)

Published by Papa Giorgio

Here is a part of the Wall Street Journal article Dan Bongino was referencing:

President Barack Obama announced two years ago he would curtail eavesdropping on friendly heads of state after the world learned the reach of long-secret U.S. surveillance programs.

But behind the scenes, the White House decided to keep certain allies under close watch, current and former U.S. officials said. Topping the list was Israeli Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu.

The U.S., pursuing a nuclear arms agreement with Iran at the time, captured communications between Mr. Netanyahu and his aides that inflamed mistrust between the two countries and planted a political minefield at home when Mr. Netanyahu later took his campaign against the deal to Capitol Hill.

The National Security Agency’s targeting of Israeli leaders and officials also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups. That raised fears—an “Oh-s— moment,” one senior U.S. official said—that the executive branch would be accused of spying on Congress.

White House officials believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign. They also recognized that asking for it was politically risky. So, wary of a paper trail stemming from a request, the White House let the NSA decide what to share and what to withhold, officials said. “We didn’t say, ‘Do it,’ ” a senior U.S. official said. “We didn’t say, ‘Don’t do it.’”

…read more…

Some Recent Ben Carson “Media Attacks” Scrutinized (UPDATED)

Published by Papa Giorgio

(The Above Cartoonist’s FaceBook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/60781325403/)

A Tweet about the Wall Street Journal’s story targeting Ben Carson as a liar, via Twitchy:

Ben Carson’s FaceBook incluides the Yale paper’s incident from that time:

On Saturday a reporter with the Wall Street Journal published a story that my account of being the victim of a hoax at Yale where students were led to believe the exams they had just taken were destroyed and we needed to retake the exam was false. The reporter claimed that no evidence existed to back up my story. Even went so far as to say the class didn’t exist.

Well here is the student newspaper account of the incident that occurred on January 14, 1970.

Will an apology be coming. I doubt it.

Take note how Hugh Hewitt [via Breitbart] responds to Rachel Maddow’s contention of the ROTC offering/not-offering Carson a “Westpoint ‘Free-Ride'” (Fuller video here):

I am not a fan of Carson being in the top office in our country, but these recent attacks are weak!

…Hewitt said the conservative media should “not engage in knifing our candidates” and should instead call on the mainstream press to cover Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton more aggressively.

“You folks in the Manhattan, D.C. beltway media elite do not care to dive deep into the narratives of Democrats,” Hewitt said to Scarborough, who is a former Republican congressman.

[….]

Several parts of Carson’s autobiography, harrowing in detail, have recently fallen under scrutiny after news outlets have been unable to independently corroborate them with people from Carson’s past.

Last week, after Politico said Carson’s campaign admitted that something in his book wasn’t correct, Carson and his conservative allies fought back by saying the story was incorrect, prompting Politico to reshape the story.

(Washington Examiner)

Political Correctness Devastates UCLA ~ Who Killed the Liberal Arts?

Published by Papa Giorgio

What in the world happened to the liberal arts? A degree in the humanities used to transmit the knowledge and wisdom imbued in the works of great Western artists, writers, musicians and thinkers like Shakespeare and Mozart. But today, that same degree stresses Western racism, sexism, imperialism, and other ills and sins that reinforce a sense of victimhood and narcissism. So, what happened? Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute explains.

UCLA now is about as worthwhile as a local community college. You no longer go to these institutions to learn about great ideas, but now must listen to the static of EVERYTHING being made equally great by the magic wand of the left. Dennis Prager read from — and commented on — Heather Mac Donald’s Wall Street Journal article about UCLA nixing classical studies as mandatory for English lit majors. Here is some of that article as read above:

The Humanities Have Forgotten Their Humanity
When Shakespeare lost out to ‘rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class’ at UCLA, something vital was harmed.

Until 2011, students majoring in English at UCLA had to take one course in Chaucer, two in Shakespeare, and one in Milton—the cornerstones of English literature. Following a revolt of the junior faculty, however, during which it was announced that Shakespeare was part of the “Empire,” UCLA junked these individual author requirements. It replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.

In other words, the UCLA faculty was now officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Chaucer, Milton or Shakespeare, but the department was determined to expose students, according to the course catalog, to “alternative rubrics of gender, sexuality, race, and class.”

Such defenestrations have happened elsewhere, and long before 2011. But the UCLA coup was particularly significant because the school’s English department was one of the last champions of the historically informed study of great literature, uncorrupted by an ideological overlay. Precisely for that reason, it was the most popular English major in the country, enrolling a whopping 1,400 undergraduates.

The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his or her own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin.

Course catalogs today babble monotonously of group identity. UCLA’s undergraduates can take courses in Women of Color in the U.S.; Women and Gender in the Caribbean; Chicana Feminism; Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures; and Feminist and Queer Theory.

[….]

Compare the humanists’ hunger for learning with the resentment of a Columbia University undergraduate, who had been required by the school’s core curriculum to study Mozart. She happens to be black, but her views are widely shared, to borrow a phrase, “across gender, sexuality, race and class.”

“Why did I have to listen in music humanities to this Mozart?” she groused in a discussion of the curriculum reported by David Denby in “Great Books,” his 1997 account of re-enrolling in Columbia’s core curriculum. “My problem with the core is that it upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism. It’s a racist core. Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men? There are no women, no people of color.” These are not the idiosyncratic thoughts of one disgruntled student; they represent the dominant ideology in the humanities today.

W.E.B. Du Bois would have been stunned to learn how narrow is the contemporary multiculturalist’s self-definition and sphere of interest. Du Bois, living during America’s darkest period of hate, nevertheless heartbreakingly affirmed in 1903 his intellectual and spiritual affinity with all of Western civilization: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. . . . I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension.”

It is no wonder, then, that we have been hearing of late that the humanities are in crisis. A recent Harvard report from a committee co-chaired by the school’s premier postcolonial studies theorist, Homi Bhabha, lamented that 57% of incoming Harvard students who initially declare interest in a humanities major eventually change concentrations. Why may that be? Imagine an intending lit major who is assigned something by Professor Bhabha: “If the problematic ‘closure’ of textuality questions the totalization of national culture. . . .” How soon before that student concludes that a psychology major is more up his alley?

No, the only true justification for the humanities is that they provide the thing that Faust sold his soul for: knowledge. It is knowledge of a particular kind, concerning what men have done and created over the ages.

…read more…

Debating Gay Myths, Africa, and AIDS ~ Not God (Updated)

Published by Papa Giorgio

First Published November of 2011

Mike Slater went to the San Diego Pride Parade and played “Which Bigot Said It.”

Here’s the study from the Center for Disease Control: “…Results—Based on the 2013 NHIS data, 96.6% of adults identified as straight, 1.6% identified as gay or lesbian, and 0.7% identified as bisexual…”

As I am want to do at various times and seasons, is debate hot topic issues. I do not normally do this but rather those who wish dialogue find me out. Case in point, a post elsewhere on the Net about water bottles quickly led to talk about female hormones and HIV/AIDS. I know, its crazy right? Here is where the conversation gets good:

...RPT (Me)

AIDS is largely confined to the drug culture and the homosexual. Since this is the way it is most easily passed on to others. Most heterosexual cases can be tied back to some infection passed through this community.

Which is why I have to sit in amazing disgust about the “barebacking” and “bug chasers” are a sad phenomenon and puzzle to us — gay or straight — whom take a common sense approach to life.

That second article says: “The number of gay men looking to become positive seems to be growing. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control (The CDC) reports a new surge in the incidence of HIV among gay males, in part due to this unthinkable practice. But what can drive such a desire? Why would a life with HIV be desirable to some?”

Something I have pointed out Tammy Bruce says in her book The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values. A great read by the way. You get to see why a conservative gay person is so concerned about our culture and maybe how morally equating all choices and actions hurts it rather than helps it:

….What a difference treatment makes! As researchers succeeded in developing ever more effective drugs, AIDS became—like gonorrhea, syphilis, and hepatitis B before it—what many if consider to be a simple “chronic disease.” And many of the gay men who had heeded the initial warning went right back to having promiscuous unprotected sex here is now even a movement—the “bareback” movement—that encourages sex  without condoms. The infamous bathhouses are opening up again; drug use, sex parties, and hundreds of sex partners a year are all once again a feature of the “gay lifestyle.” In fact, “sexual liberation” has simply become a code phrase for the abandonment of personal responsibility, respect, and integrity.

In his column for Salon.com, David Horowitz discussed gay radicals like the writer Edmund White. During the 1960s and beyond, White addressed audiences in the New York gay community on the subject of sexual liberation. He told one such audience that “gay men should wear their sexually transmitted diseases like red badges of courage in a war against a  sex-negative society.” And did they ever. Then, getting gonorrhea was the so-called courageous act. Today, the stakes are much higher. That red badge is now one of AIDS suffering and death, and not just for gay men themselves. In their effort to transform society, the perpetrators are taking women and children and straight men with them.

Even Camille Paglia, a woman whom I do not often praise, astutely commented some years ago, “Everyone who preached  free love in the Sixties is responsible for AIDS. This idea that it was somehow an accident, a microbe that sort of fell from  heaven—absurd. We must face what we did.”

The moral vacuum did rear its ugly head during the 1960s with the blurring of the lines of right and wrong (remember “situational ethics”?),  the sexual revolution, and the consequent emergence of the feminist and gay civil-rights movements. It’s not the original ideas of these movements, mind you, that caused and have perpetuated the problems we’re discussing. It was and remains the few in power who project their destructive sense of themselves onto the innocent landscape, all  the while influencing and conditioning others. Today, not only is the blight not being faced, but in our Looking-Glass world, AIDS is romanticized and sought after…

Tammy Bruce, The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values (Roseville: Prima, 2003), 96-97.

Gay Patriot makes this “moral equivalence” claim as well:

[color-box]

The New York Times has noticed that bareback sex is a thing gay people are doing, which is breaking news from about the mid-1990′s when (according to Wikipedia) gay publications like The Advocate first took note of the phenomenon of gay men having unprotected sex and, in some cases, deliberately seeking HIV infection.

Anyway, the Times, perhaps after failing to find a celebrity to comment on the issue, goes to the next best source for information on epidemiology and behavioral psychology… an English professor from SUNY-Buffalo. Who provides this analysis:

What I learned in my research is that gay men are pursuing bareback sex not just for the thrill of it, but also as a way to experience intimacy, vulnerability and connection. Emotional connection may be symbolized in the idea that something tangible is being exchanged. A desire for connection outweighs adherence to the rules of disease prevention.

And some guys are apparently getting intimate, tangible, emotional connections 10-20 times a night in bathhouses.

It also seems that the readers of the NY Times, based on the comments, are in complete denial that this phenomenon exists, and think the author is just making it up to attack the gay community. Liberals choose to blame the recent dramatic increases in HIV infection rates on “the stigma attached to HIV.” Um, excuse me, but don’t stigmas usually make people avoid those things to which stigmas are attached?

In the real world, stigmatizing a behavior results in less of it: Which is why people don’t use the N-word in public any more and smoking has declined as a social activity. When the social stigma is removed … as with HIV infection and teenage pregnancy … you get more of those things.

[/color-box]

To which my young antagonist responded:

….But hold on a sec. You think gay people WANT AIDS? I hope you’re able to see that this really makes no sense at all. Sometimes it seems like you believe gay people are some subhuman race of self hating suicidal maniacs who are addicted to sinful pleasures just so that people like you can hate them for it. They are people. Just like us. They want AIDS just as much as you do.

And i don’t see you complaining to the porn industries every time some poor girl has to take one that way for a film shoot. I’m not sure if you want to believe that this is some kind of plague from god, but the truth is, homosexuals make up a small portion of people infected with AIDS. Most studies conducted found numbers as low as 3% of the total population. A New York times study in 1965 found a prevalence of 10%, which is the largest ever found.

Sorry dude. But AIDS is everyone’s problem.

As you can seer this convo is rolling along now. Not only do I have to deal with an engrained myth of 10% of the population is gay, I have to answer the topic of “the porn industry.” Fun time!

The 10% is a myth. There are entire books on Kinsey’s craziness, the least of which was his study accuracy. I have written and posted great audio about the transition of human sexuality, here is a great example of this idea from my post:

✦ …the new study finds only 1.4% of the population identifying with same-sex orientation…. Among women 18-44, for instance, 12.5% report some form of same sex contact at some point in their lives, but among the older segment of that group (35-44), only 0.7% identify as homosexual and 1.1% as bisexual. Read more: http://religiopoliticaltalk.com/2011/06/perceptions-of-the-general-public-vs-reality-in-regards-to-homosexuality-michael-medved/#ixzz1e42CTRQA

So with such a low number of gay men it is a tragedy that they make up for about 70% of AIDS cases. And as I have pointed out previously both from Tammy Bruce’s book and other studies… there is a growing segment within the gay community who practice unsafe sex and bug chasing as a badge of honor? That is a fact.

Yes, AIDS is transmitted through sex the easiest, so the porn industry, as you rightly point out, is a vehicle for passing it I imagine. However, even this most recent AIDS scare in the porn industry had its genesis in Derrick Burts:

✦ But that didn’t put the matter to rest. The new question became: How did Derrick Burts, who says that outside of work his only sex partner was his girlfriend, get infected? The answer to that question may reveal some hard truths about the porn industry. Burts’ girlfriend tested negative. And no HIV-positive performer has stepped forward to admit to working with Burts. When it comes to working in a sex industry, however, “straight” is a flexible term. Like many male porn actors, Burts sometimes went “gay for pay,” performing in both straight porn with women under the name Cameron Reid, and gay porn with other men under the name Derek Chambers. The reason for two distinct names is that in the porn industry, doing both gay and straight porn—called “crossing over”—is both relatively common and also fairly taboo. Many female performers believe that the risk of contracting HIV during a scene is vastly increased if their male partner participates in gay porn. In October, when the alarm bells were first sounded about the still anonymous Patient Zeta, porn star Courtney Cummz told The Daily Beast she was “terrified” by stars who cross over, and thought the Occupational Safety and Health Administration should step in to prevent it…. For one thing, according to a recent study by the CDC, men who have sex with men are 44 times more likely to contract HIV than men who don’t. But perhaps the larger perceived problem is that HIV testing standards are completely different in gay porn than they are in straight porn. While most of the straight porn industry mandates a monthly HIV testing regimen, a significant portion of the gay porn world uses condoms—yet doesn’t require its performers to get tested. (Daily Beast)

So even in this industry, it seems that the homosexual side of it is masochistic.

Here is the response to my post:

The article i posted showing the results of numerous studies could be worth taking another look at. You say the 10% is a myth (even though most studies find somewhere between 3-6% prevalence) yet you offer me nothing substantial to back that claim up. I understand you get some info from books, but if the studies exist and have credibility, they should be as available as the studies I found. I question your understanding of the disease and its impact on the human race. You may have a bias to condemn people you see to be sinful, but if this were an act of god, then why is it striking Africa harder than any other country? why are 50% of all people with AIDS black. Did they somehow piss god off too?

Maybe if we look at HIV/AIDS for what it is, a non discriminatory disease, the big picture will make a little more sense.

Firstly, one should note God was never part of our discussion. This is telling. I used references to gay authors, court cases, articles, and the like. The fact still remains that in America the gay population is 1.7% but make up over 70% of the AIDS cases. Now the antagonist in the picture is bringing in worldwide statistics on AIDS, not only that, but also has imported God into the picture! I never used theology or my faith to make any of the points. In fact, I will post here the referenced blog I did on the stats aspect of this:

Michael Medved’s article on a recent poll that the above radio show is based on (with emphasis thanks to Kicking the Darkness): 

Key Concept

The nation’s increasingly visible and influential gay community embraces the notion of sexual orientation as an innate, immutable characteristic, like left-handedness or eye color. But a major federal sex survey suggests a far more fluid, varied life experience for those who acknowledge same-sex attraction. (from Medved article)

The results of this scientific research shouldn’t undermine the hard-won respect recently achieved by gay Americans, but they do suggest that choice and change play larger roles in sexual identity than commonly assumed. The prestigious study in question (released in March by the National Center for Health Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) discovered a much smaller number of “gays, lesbians and homosexuals” than generally reported by the news media. While pop-culture frequently cites the figure of one in 10 (based on 60-year-old, widely discredited conclusions from pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey) the new study finds only 1.4% of the population identifying with same-sex orientation.

Moreover, even among those who describe themselves as homosexual or bisexual (a grand total of 3.7% of the 18-44 age group), overwhelming majorities (81%) say they’ve experienced sex with partners of the opposite gender. Among those who call themselves heterosexual, on the other hand, only a tiny minority (6%) ever engaged in physical intimacy of any kind with a member of the same sex These figure indicate that 94% of those living heterosexual lives felt no physical attraction to members of the same sex, but the great bulk of self-identified homosexuals and bisexuals feel enough intimate interest in the opposite gender to engage in erotic contact at some stage in their development.

A one-way street

In other words, for the minority who may have experimented with gay relationships at some juncture in their lives, well over 80% explicitly renounced homosexual (or even bisexual) self-identification by age of 35. For the clear majority of males (as well as women) who report gay encounters, homosexual activity appears to represent a passing phase, or even a fleeting episode, rather than an unshakable, genetically pre-determined orientation.Gay pride advocates applaud the courage of those who “come out,” discovering their true nature as homosexual after many years of heterosexual experience. But enlightened opinion denies a similar possibility of change in the other direction, deriding anyone who claims straight orientation after even the briefest interlude of homosexual behavior and insisting they are phony and self-deluding. By this logic, heterosexual orientation among those with past gay relationships is always the product of repression and denial, but homosexual commitment after a straight background is invariably natural and healthy. In fact, numbers show huge majorities of those who “ever had same sex sexual contact” do not identify long-term as gay. Among women 18-44, for instance, 12.5% report some form of same sex contact at some point in their lives, but among the older segment of that group (35-44), only 0.7% identify as homosexual and 1.1% as bisexual.

The once popular phrase “sexual preference” has been indignantly replaced with the term “sexual orientation” because political correctness now insists there is no factor of willfulness or volition in the development of erotic identity. This may well be the case for the 94% of males and 87% of females (ages 18-44) who have never experienced same-sex contact of any kind and may never have questioned their unwavering straight outlook — an outlook deemed “normal” in an earlier age….

…(read more)…

(Nope… not God in that post.) It is obvious to anyone that when backed in a corner many liberals merely start to use ad hominem attacks, creating straw-man arguments, and the like. I will come back to the African connection, as it is very important for the reader to be able to respond to such positions/”facts”. However, let us return to the conversation as found on the Net. So picking back up, here is my first response:

If you do not know about Kinsey, I suggest – in the least – reading the second chapter of a book entitled “Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas.” The second chapter which deals with Kinsey is entitled “‘SCIENCE: How a Pervert Launched the Sexual Revolution.” This is where the 10% myth came from, Kinsey.

I have read the major biography of him (“Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life”) as well as two great books entitled:

1) Sexual Sabotage: How One Mad Scientist Unleashed a Plague of Corruption and Contagion on America (there is a generous preview of the book at Amazon)
2) Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences: The Red Queen and the Grand Scheme

All this is to say, I know where the 10% myth came from. And, I linked to one of my posts which not only had audio regarding the study PROVING my point, but also a link to the largest most in-depth study to date. I would listen to the audio portion as well, a gay man calls at the very end of the show making the point supported by the best evidence available yet.

[….]

Again, if you follow the links in my post you would have found this: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr036.pdf

I suggest you listen to the 16-minute audio also found in the post in regards to this study.

More modern survey data has modified even that claim. In fact, an overwhelming majority of the population are exclusively heterosexual. However, of the small number of people who have ever experienced homosexuality on any of the three measures of sexual orientation (attractions, behavior, and self-identification), the number who have been exclusively homosexual on all three measures throughout their lives is vanishingly small—only 0.6% of men and 0.2% of women. Even if we go by the measure of self-identification alone, the percentage of the population who identify as homosexual or bisexual is quite small. Convincing evidence of these has come from an unlikely source—a consortium of 31 of the leading homosexual rights groups in America. In a friend-of-the-court brief they filed in the Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas sodomy case in 2003, they admitted the following:

✦ The most widely accepted study of sexual practices in the United States is the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS). The NHSLS found that 2.8% of the male, and 1.4% of the female, population identify themselves as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. See Laumann et al., The Social Organization of Sex: Sexual Practices in the United States (1994). So it’s fair to say that the “ten percent” myth has been discredited even by pro-homosexual groups themselves.

…More:

  •  The CDC reported that a 2002 National Survey of Family Growth set the number closer to 2.8% of adults claiming homosexuality.
  •  In 1993, USA Today reported that only 2.3% of males ages 20 to 30 said they had a same-sex experience in the last decade.
  •  In 1991, the National Opinion Research Center found that respondents who claimed they were active homosexuals only numbered .7%.
  •  As far back as 1988 a Canadian survey found that 98% of first-year college students under 25 indicated they were heterosexual.
  •  And the 2000 Census found that only .42% of American households consisted of same sex, unmarried couples as heads of households. This is less than 1%.

Still, the largest and most thorough study done yet puts the number of firmly gay people at 1.7%. Some studies put it at slightly more, some less.

So what about Africa? One of my favorite columnists/authors is Michael Fumento. He has some great insights into the problem of Africa. I will post his article on the issue, as, i think it is an important topic… I will highlight portions I think are fitting for this discussion. you will see Michael’s true care and concern near the end:

Why is HIV So Prevalent in Africa?

Ninety-nine percent of AIDS and HIV cases in Africa come from sexual transmission, and virtually all is heterosexual. So says the World Health Organization, with other agenciestoeing the line. Some massive condom airdrops accompanied by a persuasive propaganda campaign would practically make the epidemic vanish overnight. Or would it?

A determined renegade group of three scientists has fought for years – with little success – to get out the message that no more than a third of HIV transmission in Africa is from sexual intercourse and most of that is anal. By ignoring the real vectors, they say, we’re sacrificing literally millions of people.

These men are no crackpots. John Potterat is author of 140 scholarly publications. He began working for the El Paso County, Colorado health department in 1972 and initiated the first U.S. partner-tracing program for AIDS/HIV.

Stuart Brody, who has just accepted a full professorship in Psychology at University of Paisley in Scotland, has published over 100 scholarly publications, including a book called “Sex at Risk.” Economist and anthropologist David Gisselquist has almost 60 scholarly publications to his name and is currently advising the government of India on staunching its potentially explosive epidemic.

These renegades point out that a reason we know vaginal sex can’t be the risk in Africa it’s portrayed to be is that it hasn’t been much of one risk in the U.S. Here 12 percent of AIDS cases are “attributed to” heterosexual transmission, meaning they claimed to have gotten it that way. Of these, over a third are males.

Yet San Francisco epidemiologist Nancy Padian evaluated 72 male partners of HIV-infected women over several years, during which time only one man was infected. Even in that case, there were “several instances of vaginal and penile bleeding during intercourse.” So even the small U.S. heterosexual figure appears grossly exaggerated.

The chief reason it’s so hard to spread HIV vaginally is that, as biopsies of vaginal and cervical tissue show, the virus is unable to penetrate or infect healthy vaginal or cervical tissue. Various sexually transmitted diseases allow vaginal HIV infection, but even those appear to increase the risk only by about 2-4 times.

So if vaginal intercourse can’t explain the awful African epidemic, what can? Surely it’s not homosexuality, since we’ve been told there is none in Africa. In fact, the practice has long been widespread.

For example, German anthropologist Kurt Falk reported in the 1920s that bisexuality was almost universal among the male populations of African tribes he studied. Medical records also show that African men who insist they’re straighter than the proverbial arrow often suffer transmissible anorectal diseases.

Yet almost certainly greater – and more controllable – contributors to the African epidemic are “contaminated punctures from such sources as medical injections, dental injections, surgical procedures, drawing as well as injecting blood, and rehydration through IV tubes,” says Brody.

You don’t even need to go to a clinic to be injected with HIV: Almost two-thirds of 360 homes visited in sub-Saharan Africa had medical injection equipment that was apparently shared by family members. This, says Brody, can explain why both a husband and wife will be infected.

For those who care to look, there are many indicators that punctures play a huge role in the spread of disease. For example, during the 1990s HIV increased in Zimbabwe at approximately 12 percent annually, even as condom use increased and sexually transmitted infections rapidly fell.

Or consider that in a review of nine African studies, HIV prevalence in inpatient children ranged from 8.2% to 63% – as many as three times the prevalence in women who’d given birth. If the kids didn’t get the virus from their mothers or from sex, whence its origin? Investigations of large clinical outbreaks in Russia, Romania, and Libya demonstrate HIV can be readily transmitted through pediatric health care.

Good people can differ on exactly how much of the HIV in Africa is spread vaginally – including our three renegades themselves. Nevertheless, their findings readily belie the official figures. AIDS studies in Africa, Potterat says, are “First World researchers doing second rate science in Third World countries.”

There’s no one reason for the mass deception. In part, once people have established any paradigm it becomes much easier to justify than challenge.

“These guys are wearing intellectual blinders,” says Potterat. “Only a handful are even looking at routes other than sex. They have sex on the brain.” Other reasons:

● Grant money goes to those who follow the dictates of the paradigm, not to those challenging it. “Sex is sexy,” notes Potterat.
● There’s fear that blame for the epidemic will fall on the medical profession.
● To the extent vaginal sex does play a role in spreading the disease, there’s fear people will stop worrying about it.

Finally, says Brody, for researchers to concede they were wrong would be “to admit they’re complicit in mass death. That’s hard to admit that to yourself, much less to other people.” Hard, yes. And too late for many. But not too late for millions more in Africa and other underdeveloped nations – if we act now.

So what has been done in the above. The porn industry example was annihilated, the Africa example decimated, and the 10% myth blown apart, and the best available evidence puts AIDS as an epidemic in the bi-sexual, gay, and drug culture, except in Africa, where it is partly the medical fields issue as well. Why is this a problem with anal intercourse?

Homosexuals also continue to contract and spread other diseases at rates significantly higher that the community at large. These include syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, hepatitis A and B, a variety of intestinal parasites including amebiases and giardiasis, and even typhoid fever (David G. Ostrow, Terry Alan Sandholzer, and Yehudi M. Felman, eds., Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Homosexual Men; see also, Sevgi O. Aral and King K. Holmes, “Sexually Transmitted Diseases in the AIDS Era,” Scientific American). This is because rectal intercourse or sodomy, typically practiced by homosexuals, is one of the most efficient methods of transmitting disease. Why? Because nature designed the human rectum for a single purpose: expelling waste from the body. It is built of a thin layer of columnar cells, different in structure than the plate cells that line the female reproductive tract. Because the wall of the rectum is so thin, it is easily ruptured during intercourse, allowing semen, blood, feces, and saliva to directly enter the bloodstream.

This is why any anal sex should be rejected even in hetero relationships/marriage.

Ahhh, just another day in the trenches… this one just a bit deeper than others.

To Live Like a King ~ Fidel Castro’s Extravagant [Capitalist] Lifestyle

Published by Papa Giorgio

See as well my previous post,

Here is part of the Wall Street Journal article Dennis is reading from:

…The legend of Castro as a great revolutionary who sacrifices for his people is preserved by keeping the details about his life a state secret. Sánchez’s account shows the real Castro: vengeful, self-absorbed and given to childish temper tantrums—aka “tropical storms.” “The best way of living with him,” Sánchez wrote, “was to accept all he said and did.”

The book is timely. The Obama administration has just removed Cuba from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism amid sharp criticism from exiles. Their concerns are sensible: Though Castro is now rumored to be feebleminded, the intelligence apparatus he built—which specializes in violence to destabilize democracy and trafficks in drugs and weapons—remains as it has been for a half century.

Sánchez witnessed firsthand Castro’s indifference to Cuban poverty. The comandante gave interminable speeches calling for revolutionary sacrifice. But he lived large, with a private island, a yacht, some 20 homes across the island, a personal chef, a full-time doctor, and a carefully selected and prepared diet.

When a Canadian company offered to build a modern sports-facility for the nation, Castro used the donation for a private basketball court. Wherever he traveled in the world, his bed was dismantled and shipped ahead to ensure the comfort he demanded.

Castro was obsessed with spreading his revolution. Outside of Havana was a secret camp called Punto Cero de Guanabo where, Sánchez wrote, Cuba “trained, shaped and advised guerrilla movements [and organizations] from all over the world.” Recruits from places like Venezuela, Colombia, Chile and Nicaragua practiced hijacking airplanes and learned to use explosives.

“The Chile of Salvador Allende at the start of the 1970s,” Sánchez wrote, “was without doubt the country in which Cuban influence had penetrated most deeply. Fidel devoted enormous energies and resources to it” and he infiltrated it heavily with Cuban intelligence operatives.

Sánchez learned about what had happened in Chile from Castro’s notorious revolutionary spymaster Manuel Piñeiro, who “was always hanging around the presidential palace” talking about it.

The Cuban regime “penetrated and infiltrated [Allende’s] entourage” with the objective of creating “an unconditional ally in Santiago de Chile.” Marxists “ Miguel Enríquez, the leader of [Chile’s] Movement of the Revolutionary Left, and Andrés Pascal Allende, co-founder of that radical movement and also nephew of President Allende” were Castro protégés who trained in Cuba…

(WSJ)

(Click to Enlarge)

...BBC Interviews Sánchez

The public image of Cuba’s former leader Fidel Castro is that of the exemplary and frugal leader, but his bodyguard of 17 years claims it was a sham….

John Simpson interviewed Mr Sanchez for BBC’s Newsnight programme.

In May the New York Post did a larger article on this topic. In it we find more details bout this extravagant lifestyle and the “equality” Castro achieved was built on the murders of engineers, journalists, priests, gays, and other free-market believers that threatened Castro in dumbing down his population for the express purpose of easily controlling:

…Few, meanwhile, know that Fidel has had at least three children out of wedlock, including one with his personal interpreter and longtime mistress, Juanita.

Castro may not be as ostentatious as Khadafy or Saddam Hussein, but he’s rich beyond most people’s dreams. His simple appearance is due more to laziness than austerity. Castro, who rarely wakes before 10 a.m. or 11 a.m., is happy not to wear a suit and confessed that the main reason he has a beard is so he did not have to shave every day.

But there were plenty of perks to being the depository of Cuba’s wealth. He has his own private basketball court where he never lost a game. And his own private hospital housing two people full-time simply because they shared his blood type.

At Punto Cero, each member of his family possessed his or her own cow, so as to satisfy each one’s individual tastes, since the acidity and creaminess of fresh milk varies from one cow to another. And so the milk would arrive on the table, each bottle bearing a number, a little piece of paper scotch-taped onto the bottle, corresponding to each person’s cow.

Antonio’s was No. 8, Angelito’s No. 3, and Fidel’s No. 5, which was also the number he wore on his basketball shirt.

There was no question of deceiving him: Fidel possessed an excellent palate that could immediately detect if the taste of milk did not correspond to that of the previous bottle.

Perhaps most extravagantly, Fidel Castro has his own secret island.

Ironically, he has John F. Kennedy to thank for it. In April 1961, a group of CIA-trained exiles landed at the Bay of Pigs and tried to overthrow the Cuban government. It was a complete fiasco.

In the days following the failed attack, Fidel came to explore the region when he encountered a local fisherman with a wrinkled face whom everyone called El Viejo Finalé. He asked Old Finalé to give him a tour of the area, and the fisherman immediately took him on board his fishing boat to Cayo Piedra, a little “jewel” situated 10 miles from the coast and known only to the local inhabitants.

Fidel instantly fell in love with this place of wild beauty worthy of Robinson Crusoe and decided to have it for his own. The lighthouse keeper was asked to leave the premises and the lighthouse was put out of action and later taken down.

To be precise, Cayo Piedra consists of not one island but two, a passing cyclone having split it in half. Fidel had, however, rectified this by building a 700-foot-long bridge between the two parts.

The southern island was slightly larger than its northern counterpart, and it was here, on the site of the former lighthouse, that Castro and his wife, Dalia, had built their house: a cement-built, L-shaped bungalow arranged around a terrace that looked out to the east, onto the open sea.

While ordinary Cubans suffered, this is where Castro would relax.

On the west side of the island, facing the setting sun, the Castros had built a 200-foot-long landing stage for his personal yacht. The Aquarama II, decorated entirely in exotic wood imported from Angola, had four engines from Soviet navy patrollers, a gift from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. At full throttle, they propelled Aquarama II at the phenomenal, unbeatable speed of 42 knots, or about 48 miles an hour.

To allow Aquarama II to dock, Fidel and Dalia had also had a half-mile-long channel dug; without this, their flotilla would not have been able to reach the island, surrounded by sand shoals.

The jetty formed the epicenter of social life on Cayo Piedra.

A floating pontoon, 23 feet long, had been annexed to it, and on the pontoon stood a straw hut with a bar and barbecue grill.

From this floating bar and restaurant, everyone could admire the sea enclosure in which, to the delight of adults and children alike, turtles (some 3 feet long) were kept. On the other side of the landing stage was a dolphinarium containing two tame dolphins that livened up our daily routines with their pranks and jumps.

Fidel Castro also let it be understood, and sometimes directly stated, that the revolution left him no possibility for respite or leisure and that he knew nothing about, and even despised, the bourgeois concept of vacation. Nothing could have been further from the truth…

[….]

The Cuban economy, which derived almost 80% of its external trade from the eastern bloc, was collapsing like a house of cards and households were surviving on the breadline while the GNP had decreased by 35% and electricity supplies were seriously inadequate.

Meanwhile, Fidel Castro sipped his whiskey on the rocks and ate fresh fish in the shade of his secret island.

(NYPost)

Climate Change Indoctrination Part of Common Core “Scientism”

Published by Papa Giorgio

Dennis Prager reads from the Wall Street Journals article entitled, “Schoolroom Climate Change Indoctrination“. In the article we see Federal authorities blatant power grab at indoctrinating our children.

More-and-more parents will opt to home school… or offer classroom style “counter-courses” to teach a better path at critical thinking. In The Animal Farm, Napoleon takes the puppies away from Jessie and Bluebell as soon as they are weaned to “educate” them. While this is a picture of the KGB specifically, broadly speaking it is a picture of a state large enough to indoctrinate children by choosing how to teach children versus the parents choosing at a local level.

For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to visit:

http://www.dennisprager.com/ ~ see also: http://www.prageruniversity.com/

Here is part of the Wall Street Journal article:

While many American parents are angry about the Common Core educational standards and related student assessments in math and English, less attention is being paid to the federally driven green Common Core that is now being rolled out across the country. Under the guise of the first new K-12 science curriculum to be introduced in 15 years, the real goal seems to be to expose students to politically correct climate-change orthodoxy during their formative learning years.

The Next Generation of Science Standards were released in April 2013. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia have adopted them, including my state of New Jersey, which signed on in July 2014 and plans to phase in the new curriculum beginning with the 2016-2017 school year. The standards were designed to provide students with an internationally benchmarked science education.

While publicly billed as the result of a state-led process, the new science standards rely on a framework developed by the Washington, D.C.-based National Research Council. That is the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences that works closely with the federal government on most scientific matters.

All of the National Research Council’s work around global warming proceeds from the initial premise of its 2011 report, “America’s Climate Choices” which states that “climate change is already occurring, is based largely on human activities, and is supported by multiple lines of scientific evidence.” From the council’s perspective, the science of climate change has already been settled. Not surprisingly, global climate change is one of the disciplinary core ideas embedded in the Next Generation of Science Standards, making it required learning for students in grade, middle and high school.

The National Research Council framework for K-12 science education recommends that by the end of Grade 5, students should appreciate that rising average global temperatures will affect the lives of all humans and other organisms on the planet. By Grade 8, students should understand that the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is a major factor in global warming. And by Grade 12, students should know that global climate models are very effective in modeling, predicting and managing the current and future impact of climate change. To give one example of the council’s reach, these climate-change learning concepts have been incorporated almost verbatim into the New Jersey Department of Education model science curriculum.

Many of the background materials and classroom resources used by instructors in teaching the new curriculum are sourced from government agencies. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency has an array of ready-to-download climate-change primers for classroom use by teachers, including handouts on the link between carbon dioxide and average global temperatures and tear sheets on the causal relationship between greenhouse-gas emissions and rising sea levels.

Similarly, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Energy Department have their own Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network, or Clean, which serves as an online portal for the distribution of digital resources to help educators teach about climate change. One such learning module requires students to measure the size of their family’s carbon footprint and come up with ways to shrink it.

Relying on a climate-change curriculum and teaching materials largely sourced from federal agencies—particularly those of the current ideologically driven administration—raises a number of issues. Along with the undue authoritative weight that such government-produced documents carry in the classroom, most of the work is one-sided and presented in categorical terms, leaving no room for a balanced discussion. Moreover, too much blind trust is placed in the predictive power of long-range computer simulations, despite the weak forecasting track record of most climate models to date.

This is unfortunate because the topic of man-made global warming, properly taught, would present many teachable moments and provide an example of the scientific method in action. Precisely because the science of climate change is still just a theory, discussion would help to build student skills in critical thinking, argumentation and reasoning, which is the stated objective of the new K-12 science standards…..

…read it all…

S.E.T.I. ~ Shutting Down The Search for Life After Decades of Failure

Published by Papa Giorgio


Via The Wall Street Journal

In 1966 Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead? Many have accepted the cultural narrative that he’s obsolete—that as science progresses, there is less need for a “God” to explain the universe. Yet it turns out that the rumors of God’s death were premature. More amazing is that the relatively recent case for his existence comes from a surprising place—science itself.

Here’s the story: The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion—1 followed by 24 zeros—planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion—1 followed by 21 zeros—planets capable of supporting life.

With such spectacular odds, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a large, expensive collection of private and publicly funded projects launched in the 1960s, was sure to turn up something soon. Scientists listened with a vast radio telescopic network for signals that resembled coded intelligence and were not merely random. But as years passed, the silence from the rest of the universe was deafening. Congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search continues with private funds. As of 2014, researches have discovered precisely bubkis—0 followed by nothing.

What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.

Even SETI proponents acknowledged the problem. Peter Schenkel wrote in a 2006 piece for Skeptical Inquirer magazine: “In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest . . . . We should quietly admit that the early estimates . . . may no longer be tenable.”

As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. Probability said that even we shouldn’t be here.

Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.

Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can account for it? Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?

There’s more. The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces—gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces—were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction—by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000—then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp.

Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology . . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”…

…read it all!…