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Posted on 03/31/2007 8:28:21 PM PDT by ventanax5
There is so much talk by people calling themselves the elite that I am not surprised that they are trying to hold onto that. Almost all of the academics I knew came from modest origins. Often successful people feel a little unsure and guilty about their success and so jealously protect themselves against all comers.
Excellent article! Wow - stringing together all of those consensus arguments from the past and mocking them.
As an aerospace engineer, I often argued with my colleagues and management that just because everyone in the room (except for a few skeptics) agreed on something, that it was the right decision to make.
Often, the consensus of a "team" was the "lowest common denominator" opinion, and resulted in a wrong decision, a weak decision or a delayed decision. Of course, the skeptics in the group insisted on using the scientific mewthod and past experience rather than the consensus approach.
In these "consensual" decisions, it was often the loudest voice or the most aggressive personality in the "team" that drove the group to the "consensus." And they were usually proven wrong by future events and occasional catastrophic failures.
You can always tell when the skeptics are right - all of the "know-it-alls" disagree with them, try to coerce them to agree with the consensus opinion, call them names, and threaten their livelihood.
We need a million Michael Crichton's.
Brilliant. Bookmarked.
possibly something for your ping list. At any rate, a bump for later reading.
darn, I meant to add you as well for your ping list, if you're interested.
"But Sagan and his co-workers were prepared, for nuclear winter was from the outset the subject of a well-orchestrated media campaign. The first announcement of nuclear winter appeared in an article by Sagan in the Sunday supplement, Parade. The very next day, a highly-publicized, high-profile conference on the long-term consequences of nuclear war was held in Washington, chaired by Carl Sagan and Paul Ehrlich, the most famous and media-savvy scientists of their generation. Sagan appeared on the Johnny Carson show 40 times. Ehrlich was on 25 times. Following the conference, there were press conferences, meetings with congressmen, and so on. The formal papers in Science came months later.This is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold."
I used Sagan's nuclear winter article in the October 1983 Parade to destroy his scientific career. There was a whopping big lie in it which was career suicide. I spotted it immediately, investigated, and handed the results to America's foremost atmospheric scientist, who passed the word around in an effective fashion.
Sagan had intentionally misrepresented the opinions of his nuclear winter co-authors on a key point in his Parade article. They called him on it in a footnote in the December 1983 nuclear winter article in Science. I was alert to the issue, grasped the significance of the footnote, and found the source in a Livermore Lab study.
Then I bundled everything off to the atmospheric scientist and he used it to good effect. No one would work with Sagan, his grant applications were denied, etc., and he had to leave the science profession to take up a second career as a science-fiction writer.
More importantly, the scandal about Sagan mis-representing the views of his nuclear winter colleagues was so messy that the lefties gave up promoting the nuclear winter concept lest what Sagan did become a matter of public notice. This is why the apparently "hot" nuclear winter topic up and died in just a few months, and most especially its use as doomie propaganda died. Which was what I wanted.
And the scientist I worked with has continued bashing junk science in general, and now global warming in particular.
Take a look at my No. 26 for an example of Piltdown Man scale scientific fraud meeting a just, albeit secret, result.
So...does this mean it isn't Bush's fault?
No, it means that Bush is an extra-terrestrial.
Post of the day!!!!!
Excellent piece.
Bump!
LBT
......
ping for later
Bump to read later.
"Bump" for later reading.
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Ping me if you find one I've missed.
UFO PING LIST: LOOKS LIKE THIS IS WORTH READING AFTER ALL.
Please let me know if you want on or off the list.
Thanks.
I always felt Sagan was a government stooge, shill, dupe, idiot.
I think it's still a hoot that after all his years as a government debunker, hostile to ET's, he writes a novel about ET's. Duplicitous to the max to the end, evidently.
Guess he knows now.
The universe is a whisp of a priority.
God always has been; is and always will be. And where there's God, "all there is" is subject to change by the unchanging God.
I like Chriton but I think his worship at the altar of the religion of science needs more balance and realistic perspective vis a vis the horrors and emptiness of science as a redeeming social value.
Handing REACTIVE ATTACHMENT DISORDERED mean bully children atomic weapons to fling about with nihlism as a foundational value is not a very redemptive habit of science or of politics.
For example, if I were literally the only person in the world who accepted the theory of plate tectonics, Wegener's continental drift, the continents would still move. All the media-savvy from PT Barnum to Rosie O'Donnell would not stop them.
INDEED, INDEED, INDEED.
NOR are carefully calculated globalist manipulations cloaked in the pontifical religious robes of SCIENTISM going to alter truth a micro-gram's worth regardless of how fast they help rush us into the global government.
The power mongers from Shrillery up and down imagine that they can play with masses of people; masses of money and masses of propaganda as children play with marbles. They will eventually fall in the pit they have dug. Along the way 1/3 to 2/3 of the globe's population will have been destroyed. Aren't their plans sweet? All for the children, of course.
ping
Thanks.
But, Nuclear Winter, Second Hand Smoke, and Global Warming are all leftist strategies for getting policy decisions and power that they could not otherwise get.
One that he did not mention, but which could fit is: "Gun Control".
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