[redrockcoulee]

Another example could be nuclear weapons. Canada has nuclear power but not weapons, the Untied States has both and Iceland I think has neither. it is due to different scientific theories or public policy?

Alberta had forced sterilization for decades under our Social Credit Party government, a right wing Christian led government from around the early 30s to 1971. I say Christian as their leaders were also ministers and ran Bible radio shows while in office. Jews were not sterilized under the Social Credit regime. I do not know if the BC Social Credit Party had the same policies.

Is not fields such as eugenics part of the social sciences anyways? If so they are not sciences but humanities and therefore not even good examples.

[GeneV]

It makes you wonder how much manipulation there is of ratings sites for commercial purposes.

[audiobomber]

He said that 80% of the books he's rated he hasn't read. If he's going online for 1/2 hour daily just to enter false ratings, then I doubt he's read even 1% of the books he's rated.

[GeneV]

I would think that most sites make you write a review. If your reviews all say "this is a bunch of socialist tripe" or the like, it would seem like someone would catch on.

[Ratmagiclady]

In a related note, NOM caught out faking photos. (Since their own rallies tend to attract like twelve people at most most of the time. )

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/26/national-organization-for-marriage-...n_1032624.html

Course, they're a well-funded bunch of dissemblers.

[Nesster]

LOL, RML, I caught that on Maddow last night.... and then she went on to expose the istockphoto sourced clip of a "pro Walker Wisconsin family" used in Wisconsin. Mike's probably not reading this thread, but here's good examples of where money in politics the Koch way is not a good thing. This is creating a fake view of reality, using hired stock photos and clips, in order to persuade people there are more of 'us' than there actually are. And that the politics are far more popular than they actually are. It's treating politics and politicians like laundry detergent, only without even the minimal truth-in-advertising standards a soap ad would need to meet.

[fisheye freak]

Politics in general is inhabited by sleazebags. All political organisations are full of back-stabbing low-lifes. The TEA party appears to be full of rednecks, the Republicans are bereft of talent(Palin as vice president?) and the Democrats are incompetent. It just seems that the bigger the group being governed, the harder it is to attract genuine talent. Humans are supposed to be in villages of 200 or so people. Everyone knows everyone so the best and brightest can be pushed to the fore. In the wider society, 200 people may know that a candidate is not the right person, but the rest of the society voting for them do not, so can be swayed by superficial things like looks, hollow promises, rhetoric etc. It may well be that a large group simply cannot elect the ideal leader. Well may some on this forum make comments about the "fisheye" , but I do like to look at the "big picture."

[causey]

Alexis de Tocqueville, Tocqueville: Democracy in America


“I do not know if the people of the United States would vote for superior men if they ran for office, but there can be no doubt that such men do not run.”

“There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.”

"In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own."

[causey]

look at the tactics used by other political groups-far more dubious activities occur there too. The classic is the global "warmists" ....This piece of mindless propaganda/ rhetoric was used to justify one of the most disgraceful crimes against humanity the human race has ever known. We are seeing before us this manipulation of "science' in the AGW arena to perperate the biggest scam in the history of humanity. The warmists wish to impose a tax on carbon dioxide emissions in a vain hope that it might make some difference to the climate. This scam from the TEA Party is a rather small storm in a "TEA"cup.

Skeptic finds he now agrees global warming is real - Yahoo! News

Skeptic finds he now agrees global warming is real

WASHINGTON (AP) — A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.
The study of the world's surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of "Climategate," a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists.
Yet he found that the land is 1.6 degrees warmer than in the 1950s. Those numbers from Muller, who works at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, match those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.
He said he went even further back, studying readings from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. His ultimate finding of a warming world, to be presented at a conference Monday, is no different from what mainstream climate scientists have been saying for decades.
What's different, and why everyone from opinion columnists to "The Daily Show" is paying attention is who is behind the study.
One-quarter of the $600,000 to do the research came from the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a major funder of skeptic groups and the tea party. The Koch brothers, Charles and David, run a large privately held company involved in oil and other industries, producing sizable greenhouse gas emissions.
Muller's research team carefully examined two chief criticisms by skeptics. One is that weather stations are unreliable; the other is that cities, which create heat islands, were skewing the temperature analysis.
"The skeptics raised valid points and everybody should have been a skeptic two years ago," Muller said in a telephone interview. "And now we have confidence that the temperature rise that had previously been reported had been done without bias."
Muller said that he came into the study "with a proper skepticism," something scientists "should always have. I was somewhat bothered by the fact that there was not enough skepticism" before.
There is no reason now to be a skeptic about steadily increasing temperatures, Muller wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages, a place friendly to skeptics. Muller did not address in his research the cause of global warming. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists say it's man-made from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Nor did his study look at ocean warming, future warming and how much of a threat to mankind climate change might be.
Still, Muller said it makes sense to reduce the carbon dioxide created by fossil fuels.
"Greenhouse gases could have a disastrous impact on the world," he said. Still, he contends that threat is not as proven as the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it is.
On Monday, Muller was taking his results — four separate papers that are not yet published or peer-reviewed, but will be, he says — to a conference in Santa Fe, N.M., expected to include many prominent skeptics as well as mainstream scientists.
"Of course he'll be welcome," said Petr Chylek of Los Alamos National Lab, a noted skeptic and the conference organizer. "The purpose of our conference is to bring people with different views on climate together, so they can talk and clarify things."
Shawn Lawrence Otto, author of the book "Fool Me Twice" that criticizes science skeptics, said Muller should expect to be harshly treated by global warming deniers. "Now he's considered a traitor. For the skeptic community, this isn't about data or fact. It's about team sports. He's been traded to the Indians. He's playing for the wrong team now."
Muller's study found that skeptics' concerns about poor weather station quality didn't skew the results of his analysis because temperature increases rose similarly in reliable and unreliable weather stations. He also found that while there is an urban heat island effect making cities warmer, rural areas, which are more abundant, are warming, too.
Among many climate scientists, the reaction was somewhat of a yawn.
"After lots of work he found exactly what was already known and accepted in the climate community," said Jerry North, a Texas A&M University atmospheric sciences professor who headed a National Academy of Sciences climate science review in 2006. "I am hoping their study will have a positive impact. But some folks will never change."
Chris Field, a Carnegie Institution scientist who is chief author of an upcoming intergovernmental climate change report, said Muller's study "may help the world's citizens focus less on whether climate change is real and more on smart options for addressing it."
Some of the most noted scientific skeptics are no longer saying the world isn't warming. Instead, they question how much of it is man-made, view it as less a threat and argue it's too expensive to do something about, Otto said.
Skeptical MIT scientist Richard Lindzen said it is a fact and nothing new that global average temperatures have been rising since 1950, as Muller shows. "It's hard to see how any serious scientist (skeptical, denier or believer — frequently depending on the exact question) will view it otherwise," he wrote in an email.
In a brief email statement, the Koch Foundation noted that Muller's team didn't examine ocean temperature or the cause of warming and said it will continue to fund such research. "The project is ongoing and entering peer review, and we're proud to support this strong, transparent research," said foundation spokeswoman Tonya Mullins.

[jeffkrol]

Funny.............

This was apparently too much for O’Reilly, who asked Marshall to “prove” that the Koch brothers were “tied into the Tea Party financially” (a claim that Marshall didn’t seem to be making, but she didn’t deny making, either). There have been several reports, the most exhaustive from The New Yorker, that make the financial link from the Koch brothers to the Tea Party, but Marshall instead noted that they had contributed money to politicians favorable to the movement, and not to the grassroots itself. Or at least she tried to, before O’Reilly interrupted her half a sentence in.

“You’re a Fox News contributor, you have a responsibility,” he replied, and got her to admit that “with a check in hand” she could not prove a direct donation to a Tea Party organization, but that the ties to politicians favorable to the group were there. This was not enough. “I want to remind you not to make statements you can’t back up on this network,” O’Reilly instructed. “We don’t do that on this network. Other networks do. We don’t.”

Bill O'Reilly Occupy Wall Street | Leslie Marshall | Koch Brothers | Mediaite

[Chwisch87]

The message I got from that video is a buncha of people who want to be told what to think within a certain idea of their world view.

[stevewig]

Politics in general is inhabited by sleazebags. All political organisations are full of back-stabbing low-lifes. The TEA party appears to be full of rednecks, the Republicans are bereft of talent(Palin as vice president?) and the Democrats are incompetent. It just seems that the bigger the group being governed, the harder it is to attract genuine talent. Humans are supposed to be in villages of 200 or so people. Everyone knows everyone so the best and brightest can be pushed to the fore. In the wider society, 200 people may know that a candidate is not the right person, but the rest of the society voting for them do not, so can be swayed by superficial things like looks, hollow promises, rhetoric etc. It may well be that a large group simply cannot elect the ideal leader. Well may some on this forum make comments about the "fisheye" , but I do like to look at the "big picture."

Fisheye, although the points that you make may well be true, they still end up being pointless and effectively you ended up saying nothing – and in fact just adding to existing problems.

Due to the inevitable and evil nature of human nature en-mass and unfortunately proven true historically up to the present day, our so called "Democratic" forms of government have proven to be bad, ineffective, riddled with many of the faults that you detail and yet better than any other form of governance yet tried or devised.

Until you have come up with a better way of governing human society I suggest you direct your efforts to improving the quality of candidates elected and the policies instituted. These depths of despair and negativity annunciated by you only make matters worse and definitely tend only towards increased deterioration of society rather than any improvement.

Try running as a candidate yourself, for example!

[Nesster]

The idea that politicians are good for nothing, back stabbing, sleazy scumbags, and the parties are worse, is problematic: on the one hand it breeds learned helplessness and suppresses voting - which are your usual right wing strategies for winning elections. On the other, it breeds radicalism which can be demagogued and/or turn violent.

The view that despite some good for nothing, back stabbing sleazy scumbags etc, there are plenty of people with good motives plying the 'art of the possible', and that even choosing between two sleazebags, one will do society more good than the other, or the other may do more harm than the first.

[audiobomber]

The idea that politicians are good for nothing, back stabbing, sleazy scumbags, and the parties are worse

I certainly don't feel that way about Canadian politicians or parties. I don't think it's fair to say about most American politicians either. There are certainly some who deserve the label.

[stevewig]

I certainly don't feel that way about Canadian politicians or parties. I don't think it's fair to say about most American politicians either. There are certainly some who deserve the label.

Yes, I have much more agreement (or sympathy) with this viewpoint!

I often wonder to myself how many good people are deflected from involving themselves in the political world because of the culture of immediately pinning a big target to themselves for the media to take aim at. Almost everybody has something in their past that they do not want to see in the headlines.

Particularly true in the US - look at what is happening to CAIN right now. Is he going to be dumped for all the wrong reasons or not?

I wonder how much talent, available for the betterment of society, is lost for this type of reason and I have no answer as to how you control the media or even if you should do!

However, I must repeat that everyone of us has something in their history that they do not want the media to jump on!