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Nov 15, 2015:

"We're not at war with Islam.
We're at war with jihadists."

(Hillary Clinton). I guess it's sort of like saying that "We're not at war with Christians. We're only at war with people who believe that Jesus is Lord." (Odd, though, that the leftists have no problem really broadbrushing and then dissing the "right-wing crazies" who "cling to their guns and Bibles". How about instead we start dissing the terrorist crazies who adhere to the political blatherings of a primitive megalomaniac, yell "Death to America", and keep murdering people.) (Oh yeah, and gun control. French laws kept all the innocent people from having hand grenades, bombs, and "assault rifles". Clapclapclapclapclap.)

"If your first and only emotion after receiving news of the Paris terror attacks has been "compassion" for the French, then you may be part of the problem." -- Scott Ruppert.



Nov 03, 2015:

Childhood is not a mental disorder.



Nov 01, 2015:

Trust, but verify.

"Doveryai, no proveryai" is an old Russian proverb that famously was used by Reagan in connection with negotiations with the Soviet Union. It applies across the board -- politics, litigation, science, and everyday life, because even friends and those who have your best interests at heart can be mistaken. Falsehoods can be delivered in ways that are admirably articulate, in ways that make you laugh, and in ways that call up other emotions (all emotional responses tend to cloud thinking). Falsehoods can be the product of misinformation deliberately crafted to mislead you, can be purveyed as the result of negligence or indifferent ulteriorly-motivated discourse (e.g. the media), and also can be sincere and well-intentioned but still just wrong (especially when the source received its information from another source).

The reverse of the proverb is worth considering too. A source of information may be known by you to be frequently unreliable, or otherwise hostile to your interests. That does not mean that "this time" the information you are getting is incorrect. Don't close your mind.

The logic error of "appeal to authority" (argumentum ad verecundiam) is a corollary. A quickie from wiki:

A is an authority on a particular topic
A says something about that topic
A is probably correct

Fallacious examples include any appeal to authority used in the context of logical reasoning, and appealing to the position of an authority or authorities to dismiss evidence, as authorities can come to the wrong judgments through error, bias, dishonesty, or falling prey to groupthink. Thus, the appeal to authority is not a generally reliable argument for establishing facts.

Finally, it's worth bearing in mind that the best cons mix truth in with lies; that opinions and promises are never facts; that context and corroboration are the only "lie detectors" that exist; that no one has a crystal ball so however imperfect, there are no "facts" about the future (its best -- and only -- predictor is the past); and the most difficult lie to detect is the "lie by omission".



Oct 28, 2015:

Cruz versus the lib media assholes:

UPDATE Nov 01, 2015: Originally only Cruz's remarks were posted here in the above youtube. However, NBC, now upset because of the widespread condemnation CNBC received for its moderating performance (and also, perhaps, that the RNC has cancelled its debate relationship with NBC until further notice), the video clips have been blocked for "copyright". Of course this is nonsense, since the small clip -- which remains playing in "news" on multiple sources -- is, in fact, news, and tantamount to a small sourced quote, utterly encompassed under Fair Use, and not close to a "violation of copyright".

More:



Oct 19, 2015:

Muslim Frustration

Daniel Greenfield's article, Frustrated Muslims Can't Stop Killing, written today for Front Page Mag, is a must-read. [PDF] Some snips:

As Jews were being butchered in the streets of Jerusalem, Secretary of State John Kerry blamed them. "There's been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years, and now you have this violence because there's a frustration that is growing"...

Muslim "frustration" is an international problem.

9/11, according to the OIC, was caused by Muslim "frustration." Boko Haram's bombing of churches and mass murder of Christians in Nigeria is due to "frustration." When the Taliban blew up the Buddha statues in Afghanistan, their spokesman claimed that they did it out of "frustration" with the West.

In the UK, Jahangir Mohammed, director of the Centre for Muslim Affairs, says Muslims are "very angry and frustrated." A Home/Foreign Office report warned that Muslim terrorism was caused by "the lack of any real opportunities to vent frustration."

NPR tells us that French Muslims are "frustrated." Muslim migrants showing up in Sweden are also finding "frustration" there. In fact, as far back as 1995, the New York Times informed us that "Europe's Muslim Population" is... "Frustrated."

Are the Muslims frustrated in Australia? Yes, they are. They're frustrated in New Zealand. They're even frustrated in Canada. They're frustrated in Atlanta and Baton Rouge. Are Muslims frustrated in China? Newsweek warns us that "frustration" could "drive" Muslims in China to join ISIS. Muslims are even frustrated in Pakistan where they've managed to kill or repress all the non-Muslims...



Oct 11, 2015:

Behavioral Sciences Research: Making It All Up

Excellent article in The Weekly Standard this week -- Making It All Up -- The behavioral sciences scandal, by Andrew Ferguson [pdf]:

The most surprising thing about the Reproducibility Project, however -- the most alarming, shocking, devastating, and depressing thing -- is that anybody at all was surprised. The warning bells about the feebleness of behavioral science have been clanging for many years...

Statistical significance is the holy grail of social science research, the sign that an effect in an experiment is real and not an accident... It is indispensable in opinion polling, where a randomly selected sample of people can be statistically enhanced and then assumed to represent a much larger population.

But the participants in behavioral science experiments are almost never randomly selected, and the samples are often quite small. Even the wizardry of statistical significance cannot show them to be representative of any people other than themselves.

This is a crippling defect for experiments that are supposed to help predict the behavior of people in general. Two economists recently wrote a little book called The Cult of Statistical Significance, which demonstrated how easily a range of methodological flaws can be obscured when a researcher strains to make his experimental data statistically significant. The book was widely read and promptly ignored, perhaps because its theme, if incorporated into behavioral science, would lay waste to vast stretches of the literature...

Publication bias, compounded with statistical weakness, makes a floodtide of false positives.

"Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue," wrote the editor of the medical journal Lancet not long ago. Following the Reproducibility Project, we now know his guess was probably too low, at least in the behavioral sciences. The literature is...

"afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance."

Behavioral science suffers from these afflictions only more so. Surveys have shown that published studies in social psychology are five times more likely to show positive results -- to confirm the experimenters' hypothesis -- than studies in the real sciences...



Oct 01, 2015:

Some people are just cool.

 



Sep 28, 2015:

Ted Cruz speech on what's wrong with Washington



Sep 20, 2015:

An outrage: U.S. soldiers, Marines punished for not allowing our Afghanistan "allies" to sexually abuse boys, and told to respect their sick "culture":

The New York Times itself reports:

U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Afghan Allies' Abuse of Boys

    Dan Quinn was relieved of his Special Forces command after a fight with a U.S.-backed militia leader who had a boy as a sex slave chained to his bed...

In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

"At night we can hear them screaming, but we're not allowed to do anything about it," the Marine's father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. "My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it's their culture."

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally "boy play," and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene -- in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records...

The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages -- and doing little when they began abusing children.

"The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights," said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. "But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did -- that was something village elders voiced to me."...

Meanwhile, back home, Obama-controlled military politicos order our boys to undergo idiotic gender sensitivity trainings, and the media blares about sex harassment and rape in the military that is lower than in the civilian population. Political correctness is about to further denigrate our fighting forces. And inane rules of engagement have eviscerated the military's ability to accomplish the objectives it's told to accomplish.



Sep 17, 2015:

UPDATE 9/20/15: Brat exalted by Obama et al. built a fake bomb:

CJ tells it like it is about Ahmed and his fake invented clock.



Sep 02, 2015:

MOTuS at mOTUs's BeST: CIS*-GUSTING PRONOUNS!
MOTuS at mOTUs's BeST: CIS*-GUSTING PRONOUNS!

No longer constrained to he/she/it, you now have at least 182 (and counting) pronouns to choose from, in 6 different categories... I confess, I'm rather partial to the Royalty Themed assortment: que/quen/queens/queenself... So no matter how confused you might be, we've got a pronoun for you...

[motusnote: from "cisgender" -- def. A derogatory term used by members of the trans community to refer to all the disgusting people in this world who don't hate their genitalia: hetero sexuals.]
http://www.michellesmirror.com/2015/09/i-find-this-whole-pronoun-affair.html



Aug 25, 2015:

Peggy Hubbard tells it like it is re "blacklivesmatter":



Aug 20, 2015:

My new favorite pundits: webesisters.com

webesisters.com



Jul 30, 2015:

Enlightenment

Must read -- Frank Fleming's The Golden Age of Being Offended:

We are hurtling to new frontiers of tolerance and understanding that not even the most fevered imagination has ever conceived.

I am angry all the time. I am constantly upset to the point that I can't eat and can barely sleep. Just the sight of other people laughing fills me with painful rage. Because that's how tolerant I am.

We are in a golden age of progressivism. We are hurtling to new frontiers of tolerance and understanding that not even the most fevered imagination could have conceived of a decade ago...

I am now upset by more things before breakfast than a normal man used to be upset by all month. And every day, social scientists... come up with brand new things for the enlightened individuals in society to be offended by. It's thrilling...



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