Category: Lies and Untruths

No Shit

Lies and Untruths, Numbers & Statistics

What would we do without science?  From Italy:

A raft of new research shows that watching junky cable and other lowbrow TV is actually making people dumber — literally lowering their IQs.

Of course, some may say that this finding only applies to Italians — who were the ones studied — but somehow I’m pretty sure that it’s a universal phenomenon.  (Of course, I’m no scientist, so feel free to disagree with me.)

But as always, there’s an agenda:

“The language codes that were popularized by TV also made people much more susceptible to the populist party because they used very simple language,” Ruben Durante, one of the paper’s coauthors, said. “They used accessible language. And that can potentially be very powerful.”

I love that term:  “accessible language”.  In other words, people are more likely to be influenced by language they can actually understand, instead of by the circumlocution and orotundity found in, say, academic writing.  So those bloody ignorant peasants are going to respond more positively to “Build a wall!” than to “Multiculturalism can be fraught with a multiplicity of challenges”.

Quelle surprise.

I am reminded of the wonderful zinger (and I paraphrase):  “That argument is so indisputably, miserably wrong that it could only have been made by an intellectual.”  In this case, the statement is so blindingly obvious that it could only have been made by a scientist.

Robbing Peter To Pay Someone Else (TBD)

Elections, Lies and Untruths, Marxists, Politics

Now that the dust has settled from the first of the Clown Car Debates featuring the complete (so far) slate of Socialist presidential candidates for 2020, one fact has emerged:  the Socialists want to give everything away:  education, health care, cash, transport, forty acres and a mule… I think I got it all.

To which everyone with an IQ higher than the average refrigerator setting will be asking, “But how are they going to pay for all this free stuff?”

As always, one looks across the Pond for inspiration because the entrenched socialists Over There are full of “new” ideas.  Here’s one:

The Shadow Chancellor said he was interested in replacing the current levy with a ‘lifetime gifts tax’ on cash or homes given to children.
He claimed the plan, which the Tories say would affect 10 million households, could ensure ‘wealth is more fairly distributed’. At present, the inheritance tax threshold is £475,000, or £950,000 for couples. Only 640,000 households end up paying the tax each year.
But a lifetime gifts tax (LGT) would see each child paying tax on everything their parents gave them – either during their lives or after their deaths – above £125,000. The two children in a typical family would, therefore, only be able to inherit an estate worth £250,000 tax-free.
Once an individual exceeds the threshold, any further gifts would be taxed annually at income tax rates.

And if you think our home-grown Marxists wouldn’t consider a scheme like this, think again.

And as Thomas Sowell (PBUH) just turned 89 over the past weekend, what better reason to post this:

When non-sequiturs become policy, you’ll find a Marxist.

Glueball Wormening Warning #3,572

Lies and Untruths

Apparently everyone who lives within fifty miles of a beach is soon going to be drowned because of rising sea levels caused by SUVs, the Koch brothers and plastic straws, etc.  At best, yer house is going to float away.

The oceans could swell nearly seven feet by the end of the century – destroying the homes of almost 200 million people, according to new research.
It would wipe out over a million square miles of farming and other food producing lands – having ‘profound consequences for humanity.’
This is over twice as much as previous ‘doomsday’ predictions – suggesting the world really is facing a global warming ‘apocalypse.’
The shock finding is based on a technique called structured expert judgment (SEJ) that pooled the knowledge of 22 climate change specialists.

…none of whom have any kind of agenda or may derive government funding to further their “research”, of course.  [/sarc]

As for “structured expert judgement”:  can anyone think of a better euphemism for average guesswork  than this one?

And here’s where the fun begins.  Apparently, SMOD is now a glacier:

Global sea levels could rise as much as 10ft (3 metres) if the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica collapses.
Sea level rises threaten cities from Shanghai to London, to low-lying swathes of Florida or Bangladesh, and to entire nations such as the Maldives.
In the UK, for instance, a rise of 6.7ft (2 metres) or more may cause areas such as Hull, Peterborough, Portsmouth and parts of east London and the Thames Estuary at risk of becoming submerged.
The collapse of the glacier, which could begin with decades, could also submerge major cities such as New York and Sydney.

So, SUVs etc. are going to cause the Thwaites Glacier to melt away and drown us all?  Before we all start to panic, exchange the old F-150 for a Prius and head for the Appalachians, let’s acknowledge that said glacier is melting — just not because of anything we’re doing.  According to the Oracle Watts:

The Thwaites Glacier has been the focus of considerable attention in recent weeks as other groups of researchers found the glacier is on the way to collapse, but more data and computer modeling are needed to determine when the collapse will begin in earnest and at what rate the sea level will increase as it proceeds. The new observations by [University of Texas Institute of Geophysics] will greatly inform these ice sheet modeling efforts.
Using radar techniques to map how water flows under ice sheets, UTIG researchers were able to estimate ice melting rates and thus identify significant sources of geothermal heat under Thwaites Glacier. They found these sources are distributed over a wider area and are much hotter than previously assumed.
The geothermal heat contributed significantly to melting of the underside of the glacier, and it might be a key factor in allowing the ice sheet to slide, affecting the ice sheet’s stability and its contribution to future sea level rise. [my emphasis]
The cause of the variable distribution of heat beneath the glacier is thought to be the movement of magma and associated volcanic activity arising from the rifting of the Earth’s crust beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Put simply, for Men Of Simple Brain such as myself:  the Thwaites Glacier is melting, but there’s sweet fuck all anyone can do about it.  Unless swapping the F-150 for a Prius will prevent tectonic plate shift, that is.  (I’m going to shut up now before I give these climate loons any ideas.)

Frankly, any natural event which drowns all of NYFC, Lawn Guyland and Joizee City can’t be all  bad…

Panic? Nazzo Fast, Guido

Bad News, Lies and Untruths

So… according to “Science”, a million species are going to become extinct in the next x years, Unless We Do Something About It.

There’s a word that describes sweeping statements like this.  What is it?  Ummm, nearly there, tip o’ my tongue… oh, that’s right:  it’s bullshit.  Let’s look at some of the numbers, courtesy of Mr. Jack Hellner:

Faunalytics, a group that helps save endangered animals, has only 3,000 animals on its endangered species list, so there’s reason to ask questions. Start with this: where does the one million number come from?
The public has repeatedly been told that humans are causing thousands of animals to go extinct each year, yet a study by National Autonomous University of Mexico in 2015 found only 477 identified species that have gone extinct since 1900, or around four per year.

There’s a lot more at the link;  go and see some even greater lies.

Here’s the takeaway, though:  every time — I mean every single time — that some organization starts screaming hysterically that We’re All Gonna DIIIIEEEEEE!!! Unless We Do Something NOW ! (and usually that “something” will be against our best interests, by the way), we should pull out our whips (both literal and metaphorical) and start beating these assholes like a dirty carpet.

And if those doomsayers are from any U.N.-related organizations, we should substitute spiked clubs* for whips.

*Waddya mean, you don’t have a spiked club?  Sheesh, do I have to do everything around here?

 

News Roundup

Lies and Untruths

Wherein I comment on news items not worthy of their own post.  This episode:  sexy stuff.

1)  Sex doesn’t have to hurt — but where’s the fun in that?

2)  Friction Burns — as I keep reminding women:  pubic hair has an actual purpose (as a dry lubricant), so shaving yer pubes is eventually going to cause trouble.  Now “science” proves me right.

3)  Dick Enhancements Don’t — just about anyone with an IQ over 50 could have told you that;  but no, we needed “science” to prove it.  (And a piece of caustic advice for any man who gets criticized for his ummmm shortcomings:  tell her it’s not that your dick’s too small, it’s that her box is bigger than the Lincoln Tunnel.  Instant neuroses, guaranteed.)

4)  Russkis need help with sex — I would have thought they had that pretty much under control, considering that the phrase “like a Moscow street whore” has entered the popular vernacular.  On the other hand, it may just be the older, Soviet-era women who have the problem:

…in which case, gawd help us all.

What’s The Fuss?

Lies and Untruths

Possibly because my Sensitivity Antenna isn’t dialed up to 11, I actually don’t think this cartoon is So Bad It Causes Cancer:

When I first saw it, I saw an attempt to paint the (blind) Trump being guided (in his foreign policy) by Israel’s Netanyahu.  I thought the cartoon was stupid, but not especially offensive.  Stupid because it paints Trump as a Jooo — or a Joooo-sympathizer — by wearing a yarmulke*, when he isn’t Jewish at all — and because it uses a dachshund to represent a guide dog.  (Why a dachshund?  Oh yeah, a Lab / Alsatian is a big dog, and we can’t have Israel represented by big, powerful dog, can we?)  Like I said, it’s stupid, and it’s also kinda simplistic.

It’s also not true.  But that’s unimportant.  If truth was important to cartoonists, then Ted Rall would be mopping floors at the Hollywood YMCA.

Is it inflammatory?  Of course it is:  that’s generally the whole purpose of political cartoons.  Is it anti-Semitic?  Maybe if you’re ultra-sensitive to anti-Semitism — which, by the way, I usually am — but to my eyes, the cartoon is clumsy, the cardinal sin of cartooning.

And OMG!  the cartoonist had a Jew represented by a DOG! (Shades of Julius Streicher everywhere! ) — well, what other animal could he have used?  Last time I looked, there was a distinct shortage of guide-cats, guide-bears, guide-pigs (now that  might actually have been anti-Semitic) and seeing-eye squirrels around.

Was it a sin for the poxy New York Times  International Edition to publish the thing?  No more than it was sinful for the Danish Jyllends-Posten to publish their Mohammed cartoon.

And we all know who got so bent out of shape about that.

Here’s my First Amendment take on the whole episode:  the more a media outlet publishes bullshit (anti-Semitic, anti-Black, anti-male whatever), the more it can be identified for the disgusting piece of shit that it is.  In this case, the New York  fucking Times stands exposed for being horribly anti-Israel (Zion) and anti-Semitic (the two are not  the same, although Anti-Zionism is generally the camouflage behind which anti-Semites lurk).  And the fact that it published the cartoon in its international edition simply shows me how anti-Semitic the Europeans continue to be (Europe accounts for a large proportion of its sales), and is very much of a piece with all the shit their editorial pages contain on a daily basis.  (Today, Jews;  tomorrow, Christians;  the day after, gun owners… and the band plays on and on.)

What’s delicious about this is that the oh-so politically-correct NYT  (which, by the way, has more than a few Jews working for it, and was once even owned  by Joooos) is being crucified [sic]  at the altar of its own political correctness.  It is, as my kids say, to LOL.

I don’t buy for one moment that the stupid cartoon is going to fuel the fires of anti-Semitism, or give cover to anti-Semites to perpetrate atrocities towards Jews, any more than the Mohammed cartoons would cause the same among anti-Muslims.  All this is a classic case of ultra-sensitivity in the Snowflake Age, where everyone is triggered by someone saying “nigger”, “rag-head”, “fag”, “cunt”, “lesbo”, “trannie” or even “snowflake”, and the minute one says anything outside the P.C. canon, one will immediately be labeled a Nazi or [shudder]  a “hater”.

I’m more upset that the P.C. “priesthood” seems to have tossed anti-Semitism out of its canon.  (Does this make them  Nazis?  Discuss. )

But hey, sooner or later (and I suspect sooner), everything we say or think will be streng verboten… which is what the totalitarian mental midgets in government, academia and the mainstream- and entertainment media are aiming for anyway.  Otherwise, how else can they control us?

Here’s my opinion of the whole stinking outrage:

I’m so sick of the Perpetually-Outraged, of whatever persuasion, deciding what can and can’t be said.  They’re children, the whole fucking lot of them.

*to me, “kippah” (the way I pronounce “kipper”) means kippered herrings, such as what one has for breakfast

I grew up calling the Jewish skullcap thingy a “yarmulke”, and that’s what I’m going to continue to call it.  Otherwise I’m going to think of observant Jews wearing a smoked fish on their heads, and giggle.