Posted on 05/18/2014 3:08:34 PM PDT by CutePuppy
What if everything you know is fake?
That is a premise that was repeatedly explored by author Philip K. Dick in his science fiction novels. Some of his stories have been made into popular films such as “Total Recall,” where a blue collar worker in the far future doesn’t know whether he is really a secret agent or just pretending to be one as part of an implanted memory.
In Dick’s novel “Time Out of Joint,” protagonist Ragle Gumm gets confirmation that something is terribly wrong with the world around him when he attempts to buy a beer at an outdoor food stand. Ragle drops a fifty-cent piece on the counter only to see first the coin and then the entire structure vanish, all to be replaced by a single slip of paper on which were printed the words “SOFT-DRINK STAND.”
Needless to say, such an experience is terrifying. It is no wonder, therefore, that lots of the characters in Phil Dick’s novels prefer to hang on to their illusions, their false realities, their provided worlds rather than confront the fact that they are being manipulated by outside forces.
By the same token, I suppose we should not be surprised that so many people prefer to hang on to their illusions about how America works than to admit that so much of what they know just isn’t so, as Ronald Reagan famously said about liberals. **
In almost every aspect of our lives — political, social and even scientific — we are being wrapped in a tapestry of lies with all the substance of Philip K. Dick’s soda stand. Here are some commonly asserted falsehoods that you are expected to believe just because they are repeated often enough.
Falsehood No. 1) Women are paid 77 percent of what men make for the same work, so therefore we need to pass new legislation to ensure women are paid fairly.
Actually, laws already exist to forbid gender-based pay discrimination, and occasions of true bias are rare. What the proponents of pay equity really want is equal pay for unequal work. They lump all jobs held by women together and all jobs held by men together and then create an artificial and meaningless average “male wage” and “female wage.”
There is not even the pretense that such numbers represent wages for “equal work.” It is a sham and a mockery intended only as one more means of redistribution of wealth.
Falsehood No. 2) The Obama administration is deporting illegal immigrants at a record pace.
Well, yeah, according to the Obama administration, but they just changed the way the numbers are added up in order to reach their record level. Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, told the House Appropriations Committee in March that 368,000 people were deported last year, but he admitted under questioning that more than half of those were simply people turned around at the border, not real deportations of people who had been living illegally within our borders. Those have never been counted as deportations in the past, but the administration decided to use them because it made them look tough. But fake numbers are just par for the course. Consider the following.
Falsehood Nos. 3 & 4) Inflation and unemployment are both going down under President Obama!
No wonder! Under the current administration the numbers have been monkey-wrenched for both of these key economic metrics. Unemployment statistics no longer count “discouraged workers,” those people who have been unemployed for more than 12 months but have given up looking for work. Say what? Is there some universe in which those discouraged workers are not unemployed?
And when you hear any glowing reports about inflation you should be equally skeptical since the administration years ago removed food and gas prices out of the inflation index even though they are a huge component of middle- and lower-class consumer spending.
Falsehood No. 5) Manmade climate change is proven, dangerous, and reversible.
This is the doozy. It is amazing how many people just repeat the mantra as if it were proven fact, no matter how glaring the contradictions are.
Last Tuesday, the Inter Lake had a front-page Associated Press story that said “Antarctic ice sheet melting expected to raise sea levels.” Curious, I googled Antarctic ice and came up with a story posted the night before at dailycaller.com headlined “Global Cooling: Antarctic Sea Ice Coverage Continues to Break Records.” Turns out that Antarctic sea ice coverage hit 3.5 million square miles in April — the largest on record. In addition, the story explained that sea ice levels were “significantly above” average for 16 consecutive months. That story got virtually no attention in the national media because it contradicted the “settled science.”
Speaking of settled science, it is easy to convince people it is settled when you control what gets published and what doesn’t. On Friday, it was revealed that an academic journal called Environmental Research Letters rejected a paper that questioned how sensitive the climate is to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The rejection said the report was “harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of ‘errors’ and worse from the climate skeptics media side.”
In other words, the report questioned climate change orthodoxy and therefore could not be published. This would worry people who had an open mind, but most people will never even hear about it just like they won’t hear about the record-setting Antarctic ice sheet.
And while on the topic of rising sea levels, I came across a fascinating scientific tidbit in an unrelated story about the discovery of a 12,000- to 13,000-year-old skeleton in Mexico. The remains were found under 120 feet of water, but the story noted that 13,000 years ago when the teen-age girl plunged to her death, sea level was 360 feet lower than it is now.
Gee, now that sounds like cataclysmic climate change — and it had nothing to do with mankind, except we had to adapt and change in order to survive in the newly warming world. You see, about 13,000 years ago we were in the last years of a lengthy ice age. As the ice melted, the sea level started rising. It rose most of those 360 feet in the years between about 12,000 B.C. and 4,000 B.C. But in the past 6,000 years, there has still been a very gradual increase in sea level that certainly predates the Industrial Age and greenhouse gases by many thousands of years. Between 1870 and 2004, the sea level supposedly rose about 8 inches. Since then, it may have risen another half inch or so, but according to one study, the rate of increase has slowed dramatically in the past 10 years during a period of dramatic increase in industrialization worldwide.
Global warming advocates are gung-ho to change all human activity in an effort to stop that half-inch rise in sea levels, but ask yourself this: How do they know that the current minimal rise in sea level is not just the vestigial effect of the warming trend that ended the ice age rather than the result of our puny human endeavors? And how do the rest of us know that the entire “real climate” — the one that can’t be manipulated by computer models and politicians — hasn’t disappeared, leaving nothing behind but a slip of paper that says global warming?
Too scary? Don’t blame me if the truth hurts; just close your eyes and it will go away. ***
** "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble; it's what you know that just ain't so" - Mark Twain
*** "Reality is that which, when you stop believing it, doesn't go away" - Philip K. Dick
People are much more comfortable in their lies and misconceptions, than they ever could be with the real world, seen for what it is.
The Universe is a large and frightening place, and is totally unconcerned with your dreams, hopes and aspirations. The only crime for which there is no escaping the consequences is stupidity. The sentencing may not be swift, but it is sure and merciless, neither cruel not just.
Re: the “discouraged worker” and “food/energy inflation” issues.
My understanding is that these measurements were being used long before Obama took office.
I may be wrong, but if this is right it is dishonest to blame it on Obama.
We are born, and are lied to until the day we die. Lied to about politics, religion, life, expectations and science. Our hopeless task is to sort it out.
Too hard for clever folks to understand
They're more used to words like: Ideology . . .
They're not talkin' 'bout right and left
They're talkin' 'bout
Right and wrong - do you know the difference
Right and wrong - do you know the difference
“if this is right it is dishonest to blame it on Obama.”
True.
It’s like that story about Hanoi Jane and the POWs. I haven’t heard it repeated since it was shown to be false. That’s because conservatives do not knowingly repeat such falsehoods.
Which position is anti capitalist, collectivist and authoritarian? Science has precious little to do with global warming hysteria. Our cultural revolution has a green guard and a gay guard in addition to the red guard of Maoist fame.
You are correct, to a large extent, which is why I didn't emphasize that part.
What I think author is reflecting, however, is the Obama administration and the media's efforts in emphasizing the "headline" overall core inflation and U3 unemployment numbers while de-emphasizing and/or ignoring certain other indicators such as "consumer inflation" numbers and the tremendous drop in labor participation rates which make "headline" numbers look better than they otherwise would look.
CPI-U was introduced in 1978, but BLS is publishing CPI-W and number of other indexes.
Consumer Price Index Summary - CPI from BLS
FWIW, the MIT's independently calculated Billion Prices Project follows US CPI reasonably closely and it has food and gas components.
Beautifully stated!
Re the Universe, stupidity and consequences:
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former" - Albert Einstein
"You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality" - Ayn Rand
The best way to set up a person for cognitive dissonance is to have him DO something - big or small, doesn’t matter - in the name of his new belief. Compared with merely holding the belief (often loosely-held), such an action both reinforces the belief and magnifies the potential cognitive dissonance exponentially.
The purveyors of the global warming scam understood this. They seized upon recycling (which many people were already doing) and energy efficiency (everybody wants to cut their utility bills), and told us we were saving the planet. They told us if we merely replaced our light bulbs (who doesn’t have to do that from time to time anyway?) we could join the “Saviors of the World” club. And every time we did some little thing like that, and told ourselves it was a good thing to do, we invested ourselves more deeply in the belief.
(Think of as religious syncretism with a twist. :-)
Correct. I know that early in GWB’s first term, we here at FR were vigorously debating the difference (i.e. fraud) between the “headline” unemployment number (U-3) and the more accurate and always higher U-6.
Not too long ago I fell for a Civil War hoax and posted it. An “Enslavement Proclamation” issued by Jeff Davis in reply to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
In my partial defense, it was a contemporary hoax, printed by the 1863 equivalent of The Onion, so the language used was pretty close.
But I posted a retraction as soon as I found out the truth, and I certainly wouldn’t repeat it.
(Think of as religious syncretism with a twist. :-)
That is a very good analogy. It IS the method various shades of The Left (pink, red, green etc.) inculcate their faithful, particularly young and those with unformed / uninformed opinions.
It's exactly why I often explain how we have to use similar tactic to [begin to] introduce the right information to these unfortunate souls to revert them from brainwashed state:
From Gingrich: The challenge confronting Republicans - FR, post #26, 2012 December 24
You will not even get to the first base with them, if you are considered a "climate change denier" - they simply will not listen to you or your arguments - you will be challenging their faith. If you don't challenge their faith, it's very easy to provide the argument that the right "green solutions" (like "clean, cheap, green" nuclear energy, natural gas, filtrated oil and anthracite, and even localized - not expensive farm-based - solar energy) will make their energy more plentiful, cheaper and will not require taxes, fees, more regulation and (most importantly for them) "sacrifices" that Democratic doomsday versions of "global warming"/"climate change" are requiring them to accept. You don't need to change their faith in "climate change" to convert them from liberal drones demanding drastic actions (meaning more taxes, fees, subsidies for "green" technologies like expensive and inefficient wind turbines and solar farms, which are nothing more than crony socialism) into allies who will be on your side of the "green revolution" and leave Democrats in the dust on the issue, because their only interest in the hoax is government-doled money. ..... < snip > < snip > ..... To many young people (and many not so young), the "man-made global warming / climate change" is by now a matter of faith, even, as they might believe, scientifically-based "faith" - you will not get through to them about science or fraud or possible positive aspects of AGW (read recent article WSJ: Matt Ridley: Cooling Down the Fears of Climate Change, 2012 December 18).
We need to learn how to fight fire by fire, but to it successfully and intelligently, we first need to understand which "fire" or particular "fusion of beliefs" drives them.
That’s certainly a shrewd tactic. I can’t justify it though.
Catholicism might be okay with it: “Sure, bring your fertility symbols and your winter solstice trees. We’ll incorporate them as Easter bunnies and eggs, and Christmas trees. Anything to get you to join our religion.”
Diluting a lie doesn’t make it any less a lie. (”Muslims and Christians both worship the same god.” - G. W. Bush) And I’m not convinced that any (or the most) good can come from pretending a lie isn’t a lie - even in the area of politics/AGW. Maybe I’m wrong?
“But I posted a retraction as soon as I found out the truth, and I certainly wouldn’t repeat it.”
That’s all you can do. Everybody gets taken in from time to time.
2. I wouldn't lie about having the differences - just not argue them, in order to show that together we can accomplish the "common good" - solving the problem their "religion" supposedly tries to solve with the practical methods and tools that are far superior for both people and the environment than the "solutions" their "teachers" told them to be necessary as the only ones capable of doing the job / "saving" the planet.
Eventually, the hope would be that they would wise up as a result (they don't even have to give up their love for the environment, if that is what it really was in the first place, rather than fear of "environmental disaster") but, if not — fine, the rest of us (and they, too) would not have to bear the burdens and the expense of the progressive "environmental solutions" (i.e., transfer of capital from productive sources to their own pockets) which is the only reason the progressives are in this game, for as long as they can take it.
Deny the progressive "thought leaders" the means to financially benefit from the "AGW / man-made climate change" hoax and you'll see how fast it will disappear from the news in favour of some other necessity or disaster du jour - investing in "infrastructure" (like light rail) is usually convincing enough for enough people to vote for it.
Okay, I understand now. And it sounds both reasonable and honest.
Perhaps I need to modify my approach to AGW proselytes...maybe try a flanking maneuver instead of the usual frontal assault. :-)
The crucified 21st century Messiah will rise from the dead
Attempting to win them over with the "frontal assault / brute force" of explaining the facts is not going to work (at least in the beginning) if they think you are an enemy / unbeliever / not down for the cause and because they already "know" ("what ain't so") so it's no wonder that it has not gotten us anywhere all this time.
Perhaps I need to modify my approach to AGW proselytes...
:~) Welcome to the club!
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