Tag: BPA

MLLG

Letter to Liberals

George Noga

Defining Liberalism – Part 4

By George Noga – November 22, 2014

Dear Liberal Friends:

Although I find liberal ideas (to the extent such exist) jejune, vapid and repugnant, I always have accorded you personal respect and dignity, a courtesy few of you have reciprocated. This is akin to the Christian concept of condemning the sin while loving the sinner. Most of you have been quick to call me racist, evil and other vile epithets but I do not reciprocate, again defaulting to a Christian concept, turning the other cheek. Although I have many liberal readers, my blog is not aimed at those impervious to truth and logic. This post is an exception and is expressly for you, my liberal friends.

Our personal lives, dreams and hopes are not dissimilar; we all want a brighter future for our children and a healthier planet; we live within our means; we assist those in need; we consider ourselves moral and try to do the right thing. We live-and-let-live, which interestingly is a libertarian principle. We enjoy similar pursuits and generally get along very well together. When politics rears its head however, it seems we are from different planets – make that different galaxies.

“Your credo is sentio ergo sum – I feel therefore I am.”

I view your liberalism as an emotional state in which obvious contradictions, disdain for facts, utopian fantasies, obsessive desires to control and to take from others and antipathy for all who differ – in various degrees and patterns – come to dominate your thinking. It seems that you feel rather than think; hence your credo is Sentio ergo sum, i.e. I feel therefore I am. Notice I say liberalism is an emotional state; I do not, as do many others, term it a mental illness. Churchill described your liberalism poignantly as: “the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.”

Perhaps your liberalism was caused or exacerbated by fluoridation, EMT, the ozone hole, acid rain, GMOs, Thimerosal, dioxin, PCBs, acrylamide, BPA, pink slime or any combination of these and the 50 other instances of junk science in which you once believed – and perhaps continue to believe – and all of which have been proven false or grossly exaggerated. Did I mention anthropogenic global warming and organic foods? You embrace unreason because your progressive dogma is antithetical to objective reality and you prefer the ersatz comfort of mythology to the real world.

“Your liberalism is a lie.”

You believe the darndest things – many of which are contradictory. It is okay for a very young girl to have an abortion without parental knowledge or consent but not for her to sell lemonade in her front yard. Gender specific abortion is fine because we must kill females in order to protect their rights. Fifty million abortions are good but 1,300 executions are evil. Choice is your gold standard but you believe a woman cannot choose where to school her children, to own a gun and whether or not to buy medical insurance or to join a labor union. You believe more money improves schools, raising the minimum wage helps the poor, voter ID laws suppress minority voting, there is a war on women, government creates jobs,ad infinitum. Such modern day witchcraft inevitably leads to the syllogistic conclusion that your liberalism is a lie.

Most of you live inside a plastic bubble with other bien-pensant libs, in intellectually isolated and segregated enclaves; you live your lives without ever conversing with an evangelical Christian, conservative, libertarian or anyone from fly-over land. You attended government schools with a liberal curriculum using liberal textbooks written by leftist professors and taught by progressive unionist teachers in a milieu of political correctness.You are taught there are no values except that there are no values. There are no winners or losers because no one keeps score and everyone is above average. The media, pop culture and even religion reinforce your liberal mythology. If you ever venture outside your plastic bubble and perchance encounter truth, your first instinct is to deny it; your second is ad hominem attacks.

Your last liberal refuge is compassion and good intentions about which you never tire of regaling me. However, recent scholarship exposes your ersatz compassion as pathological altruism in which your attempts to promote the welfare of others, instead results in harm. The entire point of your falsetto compassion is for you to feel better when another’s suffering provokes unease; but this does not assure the sufferer of relief. Your interest is in accruing compassion points that you and others will admire. If you’re trying to prove your heart is in the right place, it isn’t. You regard your compassion as the central virtue that makes you good as distinguished from mean-spirited folks like me. But to bolster your rush of pious, pompous reaction, you need more victims in exactly the same way an addict needs more drugs.

“If you’re trying to prove your heart is in the right place, it isn’t.”

If you are so anguished about others’ suffering, why are you so disinterested in wasteful, misdirected and ineffective government programs? It is because you care much less about actually helping than you care about caring. Hence, it is more important for you to say or to do something rather than to accomplish something. Once you have written, spoken or even held forth at a social gathering about some government program, your work is done and you can bask in your own pious reaction. You always want a bigger welfare state for self validation rather than for helping others. That’s precisely why your mantra always is to spend more – it is really for your benefit for you to feel better about yourself.

To conclude dear liberal friends, you are all about feeling rather than thinking. You bought uncritically into every bit of junk science in your lifetime. You routinely accept grotesque contradictions as dogma. You believe so much that simply isn’t true, the only possible conclusion is that liberalism is a lie. You live in a plastic bubble where your myths are constantly reinforced. If you ever experience a conflict, you first deny the truth and then default to vicious and ugly ad hominem attacks. Unsurprisingly, studies show liberals hate more than any other group, a fact to which I can attest.

Even your compassion is phony; your tears are crocodile tears. If you really cared about the poor more than pumping up your self image, you would be more interested in the effectiveness (results) of programs intended to assist them rather than forever mindlessly spending more and more of other peoples’ money. By the way, study after study shows you talk a good game but don’t deliver; folks like me donate far more to charity than folks like you. You take great pride in your compassion and pristine intentions which you wear on your sleeve for all to see. Everything you do is to show your heart is in the right place; but if you’re trying to prove your heart is in the right place, ipso facto, it isn’t!  Have a nice day.

Acknowledgment and credit are due for the ideas presented herein dealing with the nature of liberal compassion. The books Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State and The Pity Party both by William Voegeli, as well as his summary in Imprimis, were sources for this posting.
MLLG

The New Age of Unreason

George Noga
By: George Noga – October 17, 2014
     Fluoridation, pesticide dangers, Laetrile, overpopulation, global cooling, organic food benefits, electromagnetic transmission lines and electromagnetic fields, acid rain, the ozone hole, Alar, silicon breast implants, falling sperm counts, killer bees, GMOs, vaccines and autism, global warming, swordfish overfishing, Mad Cow, SARS, landfill shortage, vaccines causing harm, Avian Flu, Thimerosal, Swine Flu, dioxin, PCBs, BPA, pink slime, manmade climate change, paper consumption harming the environment, cell phones and brain cancer, spousal abuse peaking during the Superbowl, anti-packaging paranoia, harm from saccharine and artificial sweeteners, fracking and the water supply, evils of plastic, acrylamide, ethanol and bioenergy, US infant mortality being worse than in Cuba and the Keystone Pipeline.
“The gestalt is that we are entering into a new age of unreason.”
      The preceding list has at least two things in common. Every item is junk science and has been shown to be either grossly exaggerated or, in nearly all cases, wrong and thoroughly debunked. Second, progressives bought hook, line and sinker into each and every one. What’s even worse is that liberals continue to cling to most of them despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Last year the citizens of Portland, Oregon, caught up in a time warp, voted 60% against adding fluoride to the drinking water. The uncritical acceptance of junk science on such a massive scale is due mainly to  liberal dogma and political correctness. The gestalt is that we are entering into a new age of unreason.
       Space limitations preclude addressing many of these exemplars of junk science; therefore, I will focus on only two of the most widespread, egregious and enduring myths, i.e. manmade global warming and organic foods. Alas, this is my parting shot at these topics – two of my favorite whipping boys over the many years of writing this blog.
Manmade Global Warming

       This remains a religion to its acolytes – all the mounting evidence and logic opposing it notwithstanding. To be clear, I always have acknowledged there has been a solar-caused secular warming trend for about 150 years. I also will aver there is a possibility that mankind, in some small and insignificant way, may be contributing as it is impossible to prove a negative. The evidence against a meaningful role for mankind can be summarized as follows:

  • There has been observed warming by NASA on our moon, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Triton, Pluto, Titan, Dysnomia, Eris, Enceladus and elsewhere in our solar system. There is no instance of observed temperature decrease anywhere in our solar system. Moreover, the measured warming is in lockstep with that on Earth. Clearly, these measurements prove to anyone but a Luddite that warming is a solar phenomenon.
  • There has been no observed warming for at least 17 years and up to 25 years depending on which measure is used. This defies all computer models. Warmists can only dissemble; the best they can come up with is that the warming is hidden deep in the oceans – a proposition which, of course, can neither be proven nor disproven.
  • Virtually all other claims made by warmists have failed to materialize. The shrinking of the Arctic icecap (which they tout) has been far more than offset by the increase in the Antarctic icecap, which is 10 times larger than the Arctic icecap. Recently, the Arctic icecap has begun to increase. There have been no major hurricanes to hit the US since forever and there has been no more extreme weather than in the past.
       Even if, a arguendo, anthropogenic global warming existed, the warmists still are dead wrong about how to deal with it. Firstoff, moderate warming is a net benefit to mankind as has been acknowledged even by the UN-IPCC; if warming helps mankind, where’s the problem? Second, any actions taken by the USA and western world are meaningless without participation from China, India, Russia and Africa; how can you tell 25% of the population in India and China they can’t have electricity? Finally, the best way to deal with warming is to maximize economic growth so that we will have the ability in the future (should it be needed) to mitigate its effects. The warmists are wrong about every aspect of global warming; what they advocate will cause great harm to mankind.
Organic Foods

       Not only are proponents of organic food wrong at every level, their actions, if left unchecked, will wreak havoc on the planet and without any benefits whatsoever to consumers of organic foods; consider:

  • There is absolutely no difference in taste between organically grown food and conventionally grown food. Every independent, scientific taste test has shown people cannot tell the difference. I will put up $10,000 to back the claim that there is no statistically significant difference in a scientifically conducted taste test.
  • Organic foods have no added benefits for vitamins or minerals, i.e. they are not more healthful in any way.
  • Both organic and conventionally grown foods use pesticides; the difference is organic uses so-called natural pesticides in massive quantities and it leaches into the groundwater causing grave environmental harm.
  • Organic requires 40% more land, is more labor intensive, has 20% to 50% lower yields and costs up to 300% more. If adopted on a large scale, it would result is clearing millions of acres and destroying critical habitat.
       Organic is a lie; it is the holy eucharist in the church of progressivism! Organic food tastes the same, is not more healthful, uses pesticides and harms the environment; moreover, it is not sustainable if expanded to a larger scale and it is not local as 25% comes from China. Much organic food is fraudulent and has false organic certificates which are readily attainable. Organic even uses GMOs, the only difference being it won’t use GMOs resulting from gene splicing. Only liberals eat organic foods, a fact well understood by Whole Foods which locates its stores only in progressive enclaves that also have strong anti-vaccine movements and where Obama got 81% of the vote. How do you spell g-u-l-l-i-b-l-e?
The New Age of Unreason – Scientists versus Witch Doctors
       Scientists use logic, experiment, replication and the scientific method; true science is never settled. Scientists deduce conclusions from objective data; they have made breathtaking progress and have created a cornucopia of marvels. Space travel is commonplace; medicine routinely performs miracles; and personal electronics are mind boggling. Technology improves in quantum leaps and every measure of human and environmental well-being is the best it has been in 50-75 years and continues to get better all the time. Thanks to scientists, we inhabit a world of scientific and technical marvels.
“Unreason flourishes because progressive dogma is antithetical to objective reality.”
      Despite all the progress noted supra, we are now in a new age of unreason and it promises to get even darker. Unreason flourishes because modern progressive dogma doesn’t square with, and is antithetical to, objective reality. Liberals eschew science in favor of dogma, mythology and vapid political correctness. They are akin to modern day witch doctors; they screech in unison like imps and banshees believing that the more often and louder they repeat their pallid screeds and mantras and attack the real scientists somehow will make them right.
      Like witch doctors, they shriek incantations, bring out leeches, administer arsenic and bleed the patient. For maskirovkaand misdirection, they use euphonic names like class equity, moral equivalence, internationalism, fairness, environmentalism, and disparity of outcome. Many are former communists who have transmogrified into green commies and hijacked the environmental movement. Metastasizing liberalism has spawned and midwifed an endless sea of banalities and inanities interspersed with downright lies. It truly is nothing less than twenty-first century witchcraft!
       In the first paragraph I listed over 40 specific instances where progressives took the side of unreason. For about 25 of these issues (by my reckoning) they continue to believe in thoroughly discredited canards, continue to embrace feel-good fallacies and continue to sin against logic. Science has become politicized and spawned an epidemic of misinformation. It really all comes down to liberal politics trumping science and reason because liberalism is based on myths and lies that are antithetical to objective reality; given this choice, liberals would rather embrace witchcraft than the real world.

Why Everyone Was Wrong About Man-made Global Warming

George Noga

Why So Many Were So Wrong For So Long

 By: George Noga – November 23, 2013
      Buried deep in the bowels of the new UN-IPCC report is a scientific consensus that  global warming has been, is now and will continue to be a net benefit to humanity and to our planet into the 22nd century. This post dissects how liberals, as well as many people of good will, could be so wrong for so long and why many cling to the man-made warming myths and won’t abnegate despite a preponderance of evidence they are wrong.

  1. They wanted to believe. Liberals  were eager to believe because warming is a key tenet of their religion; they blindly and uncritically accepted man-made warming. They swallowed all the warming myths just as they gullibly bought into earlier panics about  fluoridation, pesticides, vaccines, overpopulation, swordfish overfishing, Mad Cow, SARS, landfill shortage, Avian Flu, Thimerosal, Swine Flu, global cooling, electromagnetic transmission, Laetrile, Alar, silicon implants, GMOs, dioxin, PCBs, BPA, pink slime and ad infinitum. Non liberals believed because they trusted government and the statist media. They couldn’t conceive so many people, so powerful would lie for so long.

  2. They confused politics and science – either intentionally or with reckless disregard. The UN-IPCC always was more about politics than science. The summary reports were the only ones the media read; these were prepared by appointed political bureaucrats pushing a big government agenda. The summaries often contradicted the main body of the report. Al Gore and the now infamous “Earth in the Balance” and “An Inconvenient Truth”  never were anything but advocacy pieces and  affronts to truth, science and logic.

  3. They vastly overestimated the number of scientists believing in man-made warming. There probably never was a majority who bought into the IPCC party line; many opponents were too afraid to speak up. Most scientists supporting anthropogenic warming were corrupted, or at least tainted, by past, present and hoped-for-future government grants; hence, they were not independent. Liberals chose to ignore the large number of  independent, non-tainted scientists who were critical. There always was a large cohort, now a large and increasing majority, who did not accept the warmist mythology.

  4. They failed to understand and to respect the nature of science. With reference to number 3 supra, the number of scientists who believed or disbelieved was meaningless and is antithetical to science. Science is about the scientific method – objective proof and replication and decidedly is not about opinion polls of scientists. Far too much faith was placed in computer models – now disgraced and discredited – which also is not science.

  5. They ignored powerful and abundant warning signs they were wrong: (1) No scientists or warming advocates (Al Gore) would debate. If the science truly were settled, the pro warming advocates should have been eager for a debate as they could have crushed their opponents. (2) Temperature readings elsewhere in the solar system moved in lockstep with Earth’s providing powerful evidence warming was solar and not man-made. (3) The Antarctic icecap (10 times the size of the Arctic icecap) has been increasing. (4)  There has been no observed warming for the past 17 years. (5) Vast unexplained discrepancies arose between real world events and climate computer models. (6) There was mounting evidence that warming, far from being a grave peril, was a boon to both man and planet.
      Even if the warmists had been right, their proposed cures were disastrous. Their cure was to bankrupt the entire planet to bring about tiny marginal gains over a great period of time. They would have wrought untold misery for everyone. If we instead followed policies promoting economic growth, the increased wealth generated over time would have permitted even Bangladesh to build a world class (think Holland) flood control system long before it was needed. Moreover, the Bangladeshis would all have been rich rather than impoverished by liberal dogma. The liberal solution was to destroy Bangladesh in order to save it.
“From fluoridation to pink slime and everything in between, liberalism is a lie.” 
     Liberal religion always trumps truth, science and logic. Liberals have been wrong since at least the 1950s – from fluoridation to pink slime and everything in between. Even rats eventually learn to avoid electrical shocks – but then again it is not about religion to them.
     There is no significant anthropogenic warming and natural solar warming is a benefit to our planet and to all its denizens – perhaps until the 22nd century. Get used to it and learn to like it!