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education and schooling folly international affairs

Doctor-​to-​Be of Theology

“The year 2023 is the centenary of the passing of the Freedom of Religion Act in Finland,” writes “conferer” Martti Nissinen, promoting a future ceremony of the University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Theology — in which one degree will go to … Greta Thunberg.

Much has been made, online, of theologians, of all people, awarding an honorary degree to a young environmental activist demonstrating no academic much less godly accomplishments. The obvious suggestion: “what she’s selling is a religion”! 

But what stands out to me? Mr. Nissinen’s declaration of this year’s ceremonial theme: “Freedom.”

Ms. Thunberg has been pestering and entreating leaders of the world to “do something” to “save the planet” from “climate change.”

What she demands is not freedom, but more

  • taxes
  • mandates
  • prohibitions. 

Whatever the actual threat may be, there is no hint of freedom in her agenda. And if you want more of that message, consult the latest alarm from the IPCC.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a bizarre restatement of past pronouncements, warning “that we are almost half way through the ‘last chance decade’ to pull the brakes on climate change.”

“The world is only a few tenths of a degree away from the globally accepted goal of limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-​industrial levels,” explains The Guardian. “On current trends, we will shoot past the target within a decade.” 

Dooming the planet

Pushing this fake “global accepted goal” has a historical context. Many similar past warnings that haven’t come true. But, more pressingly, the worldwide panic over a pandemic that even to politicians increasingly appears to be a complete failure of the experts.

Why trust the Expert Climatologists when the Expert Epidemiologists have so disastrously failed us?

Just don’t ask Dr. Greta.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability meme responsibility

Governments and Experts

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national politics & policies

Bipartisan Daylight?

Is there a case for switching back and forth to “save daylight”? To me, it seems a typically dumb thing governments do.

I can quote experts who argue that Daylight Saving Time doesn’t save much, and causes no small amount of harm, while others could quote experts saying the opposite.

It really comes down to holding to respectable standards. The reason to oppose Daylight Saving Time is that our time zones should have a touch of truth about them. 

Before railroads stretched across America, words like “noon” and “midnight” and “ante meridiem” and “post meridiem” possessed clear meanings in every locality. The morning ended when the Sun was directly overhead (solar noon), and the afternoon began just after. 

The hours of the day corresponded to this.

But with railroads, traveling quickly west or east engendered chaos as engineers’ pocket watches provided no real manageable time to schedule trains and keep them to schedule. So time zones were invented, grouping longitudinal neighbors together to make it easy to know when to adjust moving clockwork mechanisms. Still, there was a connection between clocks’ noontime and true noon somewhere in each time zone.

Anyway, Daylight Saving Time (which I’ve written about before) was invented to nudge us to get to work earlier, allowing us more leisure time at day’s end. 

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to extend Daylight Saving Time the whole year around. No more “Spring forward/​Fall back” nonsense.

But also: no more true noon anywhere in America, ever again. Well, considering how gerrymandered the time zones are: far fewer true, solar noon locations.

Another chasm between Man and Nature, courtesy of Government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability First Amendment rights social media

The Expert De-Platformed

Dr. Robert Malone researched mRNA technology in the 1980s at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He helped develop mRNA vaccines. He is a founder of Atheric Pharmaceutical. He’s got plenty of credentials. 

So you might think social media companies would respect his voice in the area of his expertise.

But no: for disputing official government assurances about the super-​safeness of the vaccines, he’s been banned by Twitter (and copycat LinkedIn).

What precisely did he say that triggered the social media giants?

Well, Dr. Malone argues that for many youngsters the risks (like myocarditis) of being vaccinated outweigh the benefits of being vaccinated against what is a very low-​risk infection for most younger people.

“I may be one of the very few that has this depth of understanding of the technology that doesn’t have a direct financial conflict of interest,” says Dr. Malone, who is himself vaccinated. “If I’m not allowed to speak about my concerns, whether they’re right or wrong . . . who is a valid person to participate in the dialogue?”

Nobody, doc. It’s because you’re so credible that you finally had to be stomped by the likes of Twitter. You’re too credible.

At the strongholds of official government doctrine, it’s not about figuring out the truth, encouraging independent judgment of risks and alternatives, or logical persuasion. Argue all you want, as rationally or irrationally as you want — just as long as you hew to the protean prescribed dogma.

Unsure what the set-​in-​stone dogma du jour is, precisely, on matters pandemical and vaccinatory? That’s easy. Just look up the very latest utterances of one Anthony Fauci.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

When Experts Are Wrong

Standard theory has it that “mid-​term elections” serve as a “referendum on the President.”

In a typical article this weekend, a political scientist trotted out that common wisdom and then went on to say that “control of the referendum has shifted. It is now a referendum on leadership, on character … and that’s not good news for Donald Trump.”

My crystal ball is in the repair shop, but I have my doubts. The “experts” got the 2016 election so wrong in no small part because they were leveraging their expertise to influence the outcome more than understand the contest.

Academics, journalists and other Democrats want today’s votes to serve as a “referendum on leadership” because they yearn for their leaders and not Trump. 

In a Wall Street Journal op-​ed and a Slate follow-​up interview, Yale computer scientist David Gelernter explored the lack of “rapport between the left and what I consider the average American.” He also dismissed as absurd the idea that Donald Trump is racist — a mainstay of the Democratic critique of the president. What Trump is, instead, is “the average American in exaggerated form — blunt, simple, willing to fight, mistrustful of intellectuals” but completely without “constraints to cramp his style except the ones he himself invents.”

The Democrats, meanwhile, “have no issues” — except their hatred of Trump, argues Gelernter.

Thankfully, the mid-​terms often serve as a check on the power of sitting presidents. But if “average Americans” hear the reasons to vote for the opposition party as all about how racist and xenophobic Trump is, it may work no better than in the last election.

Prophecy’s a tricky business.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 


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Categories
education and schooling ideological culture meme too much government

The Ignorance of Experts

Richard Phillips Feynman May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-​Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.

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“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

—Richard Feynman

(address “What is Science?”, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966), published in The Physics Teacher, volume 7, issue 6 (1969), p. 313 – 320)