Somewhat political post, non baseball

[Edwards Kings]

Crackpots? Well, you can decide for yourself...

http://www.petitionproject.org/

That entire site is poorly written propaganda: https://www.skepticalscience.com/OISM-P ... ediate.htm

Funny...some of what I wrote was from the site you quote, which I find to be poorly written propagana in general. That blogger is one of the guys who manufactured the "97%" fallacy.

[KJ Duke]

"Milton Friedman, crackpot", cfolson, 2016.

Let's make this easy, what major problem hasn't the Federal gov't had a hand in F'ing up in the past 30 years?

Still looking for the part where I said that all authors are crackpots. Dang, can't find it.

http://www.governmentisgood.com/articles.php?aid=7

Lol, I see your depth level now. The real world is not a skimming overview list of history without any reference to costs, problems, failures, details, etc. Zero analysis, that is why liberal views like this even exist. And you still didn't answer my question.

[KJ Duke]

Still looking for the part where I said that all authors are crackpots. Dang, can't find it.

Here you go, your own words. Found it for you.

This is not supported by the majority of academics in any field (honestly, they are probably about as common as the scientists who don't agree with climate change). Sure you can find crackpot books that support it......

This statement directly implies the only books to be found supporting my statement are those written by crackpots. Therefore, you are suggesting that any book agreeing with my statement was authored by a crackpot. Therefore, you are suggesting Friedman is a crackpot. Logical deduction.


Next.

[KJ Duke]

Hillary Clinton solicited a $12 million donation from a government that her State Department considered corrupt, then realized the “mess” it would cause in her presidential run, a newly leaked ­email reveals.

King Mohammed VI of Morocco agreed to give the money to the Clinton Foundation, provided that it held a convention in his country in May 2015 with Clinton as the keynote speaker.

But Clinton realized that the conference, slated for a month after she announced her run for president, would hurt her candidacy.

“No matter what happens, she will be in Morocco hosting CGI [Clinton Global Initiative] on May 5-7, 2015. Her presence was a condition for the Moroccans to proceed so there is no going back on this,” top Clinton aide Huma Abedin wrote to campaign manager Robby Mook in a November 2014 email revealed by Wiki­Leaks.

In another email, Abedin warned that if Clinton didn’t attend, the $12 million would be off the table.

“Just to give you some context, the condition upon which the Moroccans agreed to host the meeting was her participation. If hrc was not part if it, meeting was a non-starter,” Abedin wrote in a January 2015 ­email to Mook and campaign manager John ­Podesta.

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Robby MookPhoto: Getty Images
“CGI also wasn’t pushing for a meeting in Morocco and it wasn’t their first choice. This was HRC’s idea, our office approached the Moroccans and they 100 percent believe they are doing this at her request. The King has personally committed approx $12 million both for the [foundation’s] endowment and to support the meeting,” Abedin continued.

“It will break a lot of china to back out now when we had so many opportunities to do it in the past few months. She created this mess and she knows it.”

The king gave the money to the Clinton Foundation and underwrote the CGI summit with the quid-pro-quo understanding that Hillary would attend, and other dignitaries attending were led to believe that she would be there.

But Hillary sent Bill and Chelsea Clinton while she campaigned in Nevada and California.

The deal with Morocco was struck even though the State Department — under Hillary Clinton — accused the country’s government of “arbitrary arrests and corruption,” according to Fox News.

It was unclear exactly how much went directly for the summit and how much went to the Clinton Foundation — but the total added up to $12 million, according to the emails.

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John PodestaPhoto: Getty Images
Guests at the May 2015 CGI summit — which was closed to the media — stayed at the five-star Selman-Marrakesh hotel, a posh lodging featuring a stable of Arabian horses and luxury amenities.

The meeting was officially paid for by OCP, a Moroccan government-owned mining company that has been accused of human rights violations.

Hillary Clinton supported the monarch when she was secretary of state, and the US-financed Export-Import Bank gave OCP a $92 million loan guarantee during her tenure, the Daily Caller reported.

Politico reported in 2015 that Clinton “was seen by [the Moroccan capital] Rabat as among its staunchest supporters in the Obama administration.”

The Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice charged OCP with “serious human-rights violations,” the Daily Caller said.

And Mohamed Yeslem Beisat, the Washington envoy for the self-described “government in exile” Polisario Front, told Al-Monitor, a news site that focuses on the Middle East, in 2013 that “OCP is the first beneficiary of the war and the first beneficiary of the occupation — it is the one that is cashing in on the misery of thousands of refugees and hundreds of political detainees for the past 40 years.”

Beisat added, “They’re doing this because they know Hillary has some chances of being president of the United States. And they want her to support their brutal occupation of Western Sahara.”

#notcorrupt

[KJ Duke]

Another day, another Democrat finally owning up to the fact that ObamaCare is a disaster. And another state facing the implosion of its health insurance market.

Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton — once one of the Affordable Care Act’s most enthusiastic champions — is the latest Democrat to publicly eat crow for that support.

With good reason: Tens of thousands of Minnesotans are losing their coverage next year. And premiums on individual plans — which enroll 250,000 North Star State residents — will rise an average 50 percent to 67 percent.

“The reality is the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable for increasing numbers of people,” Dayton admitted last week, calling the situation in his state “an emergency.”

This just a week after former President Bill Clinton blasted ObamaCare as “the craziest thing in the world,” adding that “it doesn’t make sense.”

Which is a lesson that Dayton, other governors and, more significantly, millions of Americans are learning all too well.

A nationwide Bloomberg News survey found that at least 1.4 million people in 32 states will lose their health insurance next year, as private insurers — facing massive losses — flee the market.

And those unfortunates face fewer and fewer alternatives for their next policy: At least one in five Americans in the individual market next year will have only one insurer to choose from in their state.

An S&P Global Ratings forecast warns that, for the first time since ObamaCare got rolling, participation in the program will actually shrink by up to 8 percent.

The Obama administration insists this is all “part of the normal business cycle,” but that’s whistling past the graveyard.

Ever-higher premiums are keeping younger, healthier Americans — the ones whose premiums were supposed to subsidize insurance for everyone else — away in droves.

And what President Obama intended as his signature domestic achievement is well on the way to becoming his biggest failure.

#liberalideasarethebest

[cfolson]

Lol, I see your depth level now. The real world is not a skimming overview list of history without any reference to costs, problems, failures, details, etc. Zero analysis, that is why liberal views like this even exist. And you still didn't answer my question.

I apologize that I am not able live up to your depth.

This statement directly implies the only books to be found supporting my statement are those written by crackpots. Therefore, you are suggesting that any book agreeing with my statement was authored by a crackpot. Therefore, you are suggesting Friedman is a crackpot. Logical deduction.

This twists my words beyond belief. Your statement was "I could go industry by industry detailing one failure after another. Or you could just read about one of 300,000 books on the subject. No clue what you mean, but bad gov't can be traced to virtually every major economic and social problem." If Friedman said that, I will apologize again!

[cfolson]

Crackpots? Well, you can decide for yourself...

http://www.petitionproject.org/

That entire site is poorly written propaganda: https://www.skepticalscience.com/OISM-P ... ediate.htm

Funny...some of what I wrote was from the site you quote, which I find to be poorly written propagana in general. That blogger is one of the guys who manufactured the "97%" fallacy.

There is no 97% fallacy. Climate scientists agree in vast majority on this issue.

[KJ Duke]

... but bad gov't can be traced to virtually every major economic and social problem." If Friedman said that, I will apologize again!

Well that wasn't his quote it was mine, but you can judge for yourself if he would find that an outrageous statement. Just a few gems below.

“I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.”
― Milton Friedman

“Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”
― Milton Friedman

“None of this means that government does not have a very real function. Indeed, the tragedy is that because government is doing so many things it ought not to be doing, it performs the functions it ought to be performing badly. The basic functions of government are to defend the nation against foreign enemies, to prevent coercion of some individuals by others within the country, to provide a means of deciding on our rules, and to adjudicate disputes.”
― Milton Friedman, Why Government Is the Problem

“The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.”
― Milton Friedman

“Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.”
― Milton Friedman

A real or fancied evil leads to demands to do something about it. A political coalition forms consisting of sincere, high-minded reformers and equally sincere interested parties. The incompatible objectives of the members of the coalition (e.g., low prices to consumers and high prices to producers) are glossed over by fine rhetoric about “the public interest,” “fair competition,” and the like. The coalition succeeds in getting Congress (or a state legislature) to pass a law. The preamble to the law pays lip service to the rhetoric and the body of the law grants power to government officials to “do something.” The high-minded reformers experience a glow of triumph and turn their attention to new causes. The interested parties go to work to make sure that the power is used for their benefit. They generally succeed. Success breeds its problems, which are met by broadening the scope of intervention. Bureaucracy takes its toll so that even the initial special interests no longer benefit. In the end the effects are precisely the opposite of the objectives of the reformers and generally do not even achieve the objectives of the special interests. Yet the activity is so firmly established and so many vested interests are connected with it that repeal of the initial legislation is nearly inconceivable. Instead, new government legislation is called for to cope with the problems produced by the earlier legislation and a new cycle begins.”
― Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

“There is still a tendency to regard any existing government intervention as desirable, to attribute all evils to the market, and to evaluate new proposals for government control in their ideal form, as they might work if run by able, disinterested men free from the pressure of special interest groups.”
― Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom

“The smaller the unit of government and the more restricted the functions assigned government, the less likely it is that its actions will reflect special interests rather than the general interest.”
― Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

“Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.”
― Milton Friedman

“Every special group around the country tries to get its hands on whatever bits and pieces it can. The result is that there is hardly an issue on which government is not on both sides. For example, in one massive building in Washington some government employees are working full-time trying to devise and implement plans to spend our money to discourage us from smoking cigarettes. In another massive building, perhaps miles away from the first, other employees, equally dedicated, equally hard-working, are working full-time spending our money to subsidize farmers to grow tobacco.”
― Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers claim that vouchers would destroy the public school system, which, according to them, has been the foundation and cornerstone of our democracy. Their claims are never accompanied by any evidence that the public school system today achieves the results claimed for it—whatever may have been true in earlier times. Nor do the spokesmen for these organizations ever explain why, if the public school system is doing such a splendid job, it needs to fear competition from nongovernmental, competitive schools or, if it isn't, why anyone should object to its "destruction." The threat to public schools arises from their defects, not their accomplishments. In small, closely knit communities where public schools, particularly elementary schools, are now reasonably satisfactory, not even the most comprehensive voucher plan would have much effect. The public schools would remain dominant, perhaps somewhat improved by the threat of potential competition. But elsewhere, and particularly in the urban slums where the public schools are doing such a poor job, most parents would undoubtedly try to send their children to nonpublic schools.”
― Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” —Justice Louis Brandeis,”
― Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

[KJ Duke]

And one very timely video on govt in healthcare:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPADFNK ... D8&index=4

And another on govt "raising revenue":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2Kg2Sv ... 660848E2D8

[Outlaw]

75 million votes for one and 65 Million votes for the other. No MSM here.

[Edwards Kings]

There is no 97% fallacy. Climate scientists agree in vast majority on this issue.

I have heard that number tossed out by President Obama ("97 percent of climate scientists agree: Climate change is real and man-made."), Secretary Kerry ("When 97 percent of scientists agree on anything, we need to listen, and we need to respond. Well, 97 percent of climate scientists have confirmed that climate change is happening and that human activity is responsible."), in Congressional hearings, NASA, the media, tweets, blogs, the kid selling donuts...

Wow. 97%. I agree with Secretary Kerry. IF 97% of scientists agree on anything, we SHOULD listen. But do they? Can you cite references (the number is often quoted but rarely cited)? What scientists? What disciplines? I am not really trying to burst bubbles, but sacred cows make the best hamburgers.

Let's look at the number it self. 97%? 97% agreement on ANYTHING is amazing, much less something as complex and variable as the global climate is amazing. I find it hard to believe that there is such a consensus out there. Hell, if I got 100 fat people in a room and asked them if a chocolate covered donut tastes good, I seriously doubt I would get 97% consensus. It is that number that actually got me looking because I do not believe 97% of scientists would agree that hot is hot and cold is cold.

I went to the website you mentioned, as well as Forbes, WSJ, Washington Post, and others. I found several separate references to the 97% related to different "studies". Guess what? All the different studies seem to hit the 97%? Amazing, right? Different approaches, different people, different types, and all hit 97%. Quite the coincidence.

But lets start with the site you mentioned. In 2013, John Cook, an Australia-based blogger and part of the site, and some of his friends reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011. John Cook is the Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland. Cook reported that 97% of those who stated a position explicitly or implicitly suggest that human activity is responsible for some warming. His findings were published in Environmental Research Letters.

Pretty compelling but not so fast. In Science and Education in August 2013, David R. Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Center for Climatic Research) and three coauthors reviewed the same papers as did Mr. Cook and found "only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse" the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming. Elsewhere, climate scientists including Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir J. Shaviv and Nils- Axel Morner, whose research questions the alleged consensus, protested that Mr. Cook ignored or misrepresented their work.

Another cited source is William R. Love Anderegg, then a student at Stanford University, who in 2010 used Google Scholar to identify the views of the most prolific writers on climate change. His findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. Mr. Love Anderegg found that 97% to 98% of the 200 most prolific writers on climate change believe "anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for 'most' of the 'unequivocal' warming." There was no mention of how dangerous this climate change might be; and, of course, 200 researchers out of the thousands who have contributed to the climate science debate is not evidence of consensus. And to use "most prolific" as the basis for his study? I am one of the most prolific writers on this board discussing fantasy baseball and based on past performance, I do not know beans. So "prolific" is not a great standard.

Perhaps the most quoted (from what I was able to find, so you may consider that statement a belief) is a 2009 article in "Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union" by Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, a student at the University of Illinois, and her master's thesis adviser Peter Doran. Now, they selected something like 10,000 scientists they thought should know the most and sent them a survey. Complex issue right? Team of students reaching out personally to scientist to ask a long series of detailed questions, right?

It was a two-question online survey of selected scientists. Mr. Doran and Ms. Zimmerman claimed "97 percent of climate scientists agree" that global temperatures have risen and that humans are a significant contributing factor. The two questions were:

(1) Have mean global temperatures risen compared to pre-1800s levels? Well, yes. The "pre-1800's" was the end of a 400 year mini-ice age, so ok.

(2) Has human activity been a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures? This is I believe a point of contention but still a very broad based question. Too broad for such a complex issue. But how did folks respond?

The survey's questions don't reveal much of interest. Most scientists who are skeptical of catastrophic global warming nevertheless would answer "yes" to both questions. The survey was silent on whether the human impact is large enough to constitute a problem. Nor did it include solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists or astronomers, who are the scientists most likely to be aware of natural causes of climate change.

Wait...wait...wait...let that last point sink in. They really excluded all those disciplines from their "consensus".

But ok. They got 97% from their online respondant's right? Actually, no. They chose the target audience and got 3,146 respondents. Of the 3,146, they select 79 respondents who listed climate science as an area of expertise and said they published more than half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change. 77 of 79 is 97%. 79 is the consensus of all climate scientists? Really? About 90 percent of the scientists agreed with the first question and 82 percent with the second. So even on the 1st most obvious question, they could not reach 97%.

OK. What if it isn't 97%, but really high. Another cited source for the consensus I was able to locate was a 2004 opinion essay published in Science magazine by Naomi Oreskes, a science historian (science historian, not a scientist) now at Harvard. She claimed to have examined abstracts of 928 articles published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and found that 75% supported the view that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming over the previous 50 years while none directly dissented.

Ms. Oreskes's definition of consensus covered "man-made" but left out "dangerous"—and scores of articles by prominent scientists such as Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels, who question the consensus, were excluded. The methodology is also flawed. A study published earlier this year in Nature noted that abstracts of academic papers often contain claims that aren't substantiated in the papers.

So believe what you want, my friend, but I think the 97% is wholly contrived, inaccurate and purposefully misleading. A fallacy.

[headhunters]

wow about 5 pages behind. a few things: 1000 years ago 99% of "scientists" thought the world was flat and the sun revolved around the earth. the more important thing for the dems and repubs on the board is- anothony hopkins had a nice little speech in silence of the lambs on a persons "essence". politicians- they have ONE job. to get elected. that is their essence. the better they are at that the longer they last. giving us scum buckets like nancy pelosi and john mccain. to say 97% of scientists believe something over and over again; not 95% or 98%, is so contrived it is unbelievable. it is basic branding. keep it short, keep it simple, and repeat it.but it is why the dems are so much better at it than the republicans. they are the party paying off most of their constituents to vote for them- $ to have babies $ to stay unemployed 35-40 year pensions that are bankrupting one state after another and on and on. but that is not enough. they still need about 15% of the voting public to just bury their heads in the sand and believe the propaganda the dems throw out.

[DOUGHBOYS]

Three of the most entertaining and free places to go for people watching is WalMart, Sam's Club, and Costco.
It is unbelievable, the amount of unemployed people who come in to cash their Govt. checks on the first or second of every month. Most are able bodied. Most, loving that they don't 'have' to work for a paycheck.
The running joke being that they are Obama employees.
A 97 percent chance that this also wins their votes.

[Edwards Kings]

it is basic branding. keep it short, keep it simple, and repeat it.

Agreed. It is the "big lie". Große Lüg. A propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

Both parties use it. Global warming. Welfare mothers. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." "Read my lips: no new taxes". "After all, what difference does it make?" "I will make America great again!"

[KJ Duke]

Agreed. It is the "big lie". Große Lüg. A propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

I have read research on both sides, objectively both sides sound plausible to my non-scientific mind. I have nothing to offer on which is right or wrong. I do believe that, in general, finding ways to conserve natural resources is a good idea, for obvious reasons, whether global warming concerns are a reality or not.

Even though I fully support conservation generally, it is very difficult to listen to the many global warmers speak with absolute certainty when they really have no frame of reference, or adequate education, to judge. They are simply parroting what they've heard over and over, and the 97% phrase is a great example. Propaganda is powerful, and its use as a marketing tool is at an all-time high in politics because media consumption is at an all-time high.

When I hear these same global warmers telling me with certainty how I am wrong about subjects for which I know I have a far greater understanding (and objectivity), like economics, than they do, I am then suspicious of their beliefs on all other subjects because they've exposed themselves as personalities that can fervently believe in things they're in no position to judge.

[jvetter]

wow about 5 pages behind. a few things: 1000 years ago 99% of "scientists" thought the world was flat

There is actually some reasonable evidence that this is false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

[headhunters]

you didn't just use wikapedia to try to dispute that did you? actually- I had no idea anyway. how about blood letting?

[KJ Duke]

The political organization of Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, an influential Democrat with longstanding ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton, gave nearly $500,000 to the election campaign of the wife of an official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who later helped oversee the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s email use.

Campaign finance records show Mr. McAuliffe’s political-action committee donated $467,500 to the 2015 state Senate campaign of Dr. Jill McCabe, who is married to Andrew McCabe, now the deputy director of the FBI.

The Virginia Democratic Party, over which Mr. McAuliffe exerts considerable control, donated an additional $207,788 worth of support to Dr. McCabe’s campaign in the form of mailers, according to the records. That adds up to slightly more than $675,000 to her candidacy from entities either directly under Mr. McAuliffe’s control or strongly influenced by him. The figure represents more than a third of all the campaign funds Dr. McCabe raised in the effort.

▬ WSJ

Media/public outrage barely a blip. Society is OK with conflict of interest and corruption so long as they're not spoken in the form of an insult.

[DOUGHBOYS]

There is almost an expectation of politicians being corrupt.
Catching them may be the easy part now.
With those expectations, getting people to care is another matter.

[TOXIC ASSETS]

And that's the problem Dan.
Hillary Clinton has a list of corruption a mile long. By any measurement she should either be in jail or on trial.
Not running for president, and apparently winning the polls.

You just can't get people to do the analysis needed to make a good decision. It's all about, Trump's an A-Hole. Trump is mean. Trump is anti women.

Meanwhile the entire system is rotten to the core, and people (or at least a majority of them) don't care.

[headhunters]

actually I think most VOTERS are in a sort of comfort zone in life. I am this religion, I am this political party, I root for these teams, I am a liberal, I am a conservative. once making those choices- they defend them. in law- "never ask a question you don't know the answer to" in sales I learned- and taught- never ask a candidate if they were going to accept a position unless you knew the answer would be yes. people make decisions and then immediately defend them. in the beginning they may have buyers remorse- but unless they change quickly they need to rationalize their decision was "correct". people can't live in "dissonance"

[DOUGHBOYS]

And that's the problem Dan.
Hillary Clinton has a list of corruption a mile long. By any measurement she should either be in jail or on trial.
Not running for president, and apparently winning the polls.

You just can't get people to do the analysis needed to make a good decision. It's all about, Trump's an A-Hole. Trump is mean. Trump is anti women.

Meanwhile the entire system is rotten to the core, and people (or at least a majority of them) don't care.

So, Hillary can still be President.
But if there were a President's Hall of Fame, she would not be allowed in.

[Edwards Kings]

[Edwards Kings]

[DOUGHBOYS]

It's not Jeckyl and Hyde.
It's Hyde and Hyde,,,and HIDE!