Tag Archives: Propaganda

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What was the context of Michele Bachmann’s “armed and dangerous” comment?

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Rep. Michele Bachmann
Rep. Michele Bachmann

Recently, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a column blaming conservatives for creating a “climate of hate”.

Excerpt:

The point is that there’s room in a democracy for people who ridicule and denounce those who disagree with them; there isn’t any place for eliminationist rhetoric, for suggestions that those on the other side of a debate must be removed from that debate by whatever means necessary.

And it’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.

So what he is saying is that Michele Bachmann wants conservatives to arm themselves and eliminate their opponents violently. This was in the New York Times.

So, let’s take a look at what Michele Bachmann actually said.

Transcript:

Really now in Washington, I’m a foreign correspondent behind enemy lines. And I try to let everyone back here in Minnesota know exactly the nefarious activities that are taking place in Washington.

But you can get all the latest information on this event. This is a must-go-to event with [the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s] Chris Horner. People will learn. It will be fascinating.

We met with Chris Horner last week, 20 members of Congress. It takes a lot to wow members of Congress after a while. This wows them.

And I am going to have materials for people when they leave. I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax: because we need to fight back.

Thomas Jefferson told us, “Having a revolution every now and then is a good thing.” And we the people are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country.

And I think this has the potential of changing the dynamic of changing freedom forever in the United States. And that’s why I want everyone to come out and hear [Chris Horner]. So go to Bachmann.house.gov and you can get all [of] the information.

See, in context, it’s quite clear that by armed, she means armed with material from Chris Horner on energy taxes (e.g. – the cap and trade bill) and by dangerous she means winning arguments using “all the information”.

If you do a search for “armed and dangerous” and “michele bachmann”, you will find that everybody and their mother on the left is taking the quote out of context in order to smear Michele Bachmann. And I hope that will be a lesson to you about dealing with the claims of people on the left. They hear these things on talk radio or MSNBC and they take them uncritically.

John Hinderaker at Powerline explains the problem with taking Michele Bachmann’s “armed and dangerous” quote out of context. (H/T Hyscience)

Excerpt:

Here is a rule of thumb: any time a liberal quotes a fragment of a sentence, or, as in this case, a three-word phrase, a red flag should go up. When liberals quote sentence fragments, they are usually misleading when they aren’t out-and-out fabricated.

My guess is that Krugman has no idea when Michele referred to being “armed and dangerous,” or why, or what the rest of the sentence was. Krugman’s biggest problem isn’t that he is stupid. His biggest problem is that he is lazy. He is incapable of doing even the most rudimentary research, which is why his columns rarely contain many facts, and when they do, his “facts” are often wrong.

As it happens, I–unlike Krugman–know all about Michele’s “armed and dangerous” quote, because she said it in an interview with Brian Ward and me, on our radio show. It was on March 21, 2009. The subject was the Obama administration’s cap and trade proposal. Michele organized a couple of informational meetings in her district with an expert on global warming and cap and trade, and she came on our show to promote those meetings. She wanted her constituents to be armed with information on cap and trade so that they would understand how unnecessary, and how damaging to our economy, the Obama administration’s proposal was. That would make them dangerous to the administration’s left-wing plans.

The interview illustrates quite well the difference between Michele Bachmann and Paul Krugman. Krugman is a vicious hater. He rarely argues any issue on the merits, but prefers to smear those who disagree with him. Bachmann is infinitely better informed than Krugman. All she wants to do is debate her opponents on the facts. Unlike Krugman, she doesn’t hate anyone; her irrepressible good humor is considered a marvel by everyone who knows her.

You can listen to the whole interview at that post on Powerline. I do occasionally listen to the Northern Alliance Radio show.

Is Paul Krugman civil with his opponents?

Of course not!

He writes:

A message to progressives: By all means, hang Senator Joe Lieberman in effigy.

This is the first sentence in one of his New York Times columns. I put the link for context, so you can check it out yourself. If I were a leftist journalist, I would have left out the “in effigy” and then spread all over the Internet and on MSNBC. MSNBC edits the news to suit their narrative all the time – it’s not really a news channel at all, it’s just propaganda for the far-left fringe.

Is Paul Krugman seen as reliable?

Not by a bunch of non-conservatives:

Always read the New York Times with a skeptical eye.

You need to watch Fox News and listen to Hugh Hewitt

I really recommend that if any of you who are watching MSNBC and listening to NPR stop that and try an experiment. Switch to watching Special Report on Fox News at 6 PM Eastern every day for an hour. Bret Baier is fair, and you will see him do an amazing thing. The entire second half of the show is a panel discussion with people on the left present, and they get equal time. And if you can watch Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace on Sundays, you get another panel discussion with TWO leftists, usually Juan Williams and Mara Liasson – who work for NPR!!!! (Yes, I know NPR fired Juan) Neither Juan nor Mara are insane – in fact they are quite sensible leftists. Sometimes Bret will have other leftists on, but even they are not too crazy. Do you know why? Because they can’t be crazy when there are conservatives on the panel who get to hold them to account. And the conservatives can’t be crazy, either. That’s how you get the truth – each side corrects the other, and they all get along well – laughing and joking. That’s what Fox News is famous for – fair and balanced. Balanced means you get BOTH sides. Fair means both sides get equal time to talk. It’s a debate every night.

I do not recommend watching the O’Reilly Factor or even Sean Hannity, and especially not Shepherd Smith, who is a radical left wing extremist.

News

Why does the news media exaggerate some scientific discoveries?

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What does it take for a planet to be habitable by complex life?

Excerpt:

Complex life in particular probably needs many of the things that we Earthlings enjoy: a rocky terrestrial planet similar in size and composition to the Earth, with plate tectonics to recycle nutrients, and the right kind of atmosphere; a large, well placed moon to contribute to tides and stabilize the tilt of the planet’s axis. That planet needs to be just the right distance from the right kind of single star, in a nearly circular orbit–to maintain liquid water on its surface.

It also needs a home within a stable planetary system that includes some outlying giant planets to protect the inner system from too many deadly comet impacts. That planetary system must be nestled in a safe neighborhood in the right kind of galaxy, with enough heavy elements to build terrestrial planets. And that planet will need to form during the narrow habitable window of cosmic history. (This is to say nothing of having a universe with a fine-tuned set of physical laws to make stars, planets, and people possible in the first place. But that’s another long and complicated story.)

That’s a tall order and it’s not even an exhaustive list of all the requirements.

Now keeping that list in mind, Christian apologist Peter Williams explains how the latest discovery of an exoplanet that might support life was presented to the media by the excited scientists.

Excerpt:

Nasa scientist and Nobel laureate in physics John Mather’s recent comment about ‘Earth-like’ planets was rather timely. Mather said: ‘We know there are earth-like planets out there, but what we don’t know is whether any of them are capable of supporting life.’ Well, Nasa have announced that: “If confirmed, [Gliese 581g] would be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet discovered and the first strong case for a potentially habitable one.”

Thus far we have an unconfirmed report that Gliese 581g might be rocky (since it may be too small to be a gas giant – although the mass given is a minimum figure) and that it seems to be in the right ‘goldilocks’ temperature zone for liquid water – that’s if there is any water there and if the atmosphere is of the right composition!

Of course, the phrase ‘Earth-like’ is being used with some lattitude here: the gravity on Gliese 581g is higher than on earth (because its about three to four times the size of Earth). Moreover, the planet is ‘tidally locked’, meaning it doesn’t rotate (i.e. no seasons). This probably means that there’s only a narrow ‘twilight zone’ of the planet that’s even potentially habitable; assuming, of course, that the atmosphere (if it even has one) hasn’t frozen out over time to the night side of the planet!

At most (it’s hard to extrapolate here), this discovery may indicate that rocky planets in the habitable zone of stars aren’t all that rare; but consider this interesting passage from The Hiffington Post article on the discovery:

‘Vogt and Butler ran some calculations, with giant fudge factors built in, and figured that as much as one out of five to 10 stars in the universe have planets that are Earth-sized and in the habitable zone. With an estimated 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, that means maybe 40 billion planets that have the potential for life, Vogt said. However, Ohio State University’s Scott Gaudi cautioned that is too speculative about how common these planets are.’

There’s more to habitability – let alone the origin of life – than a chunk of rock at the right temperature!

This is Peter Pan science. They believe what they want to believe.

Many people want to believe that we are nothing special simplifying the world so that they don’t have to worry that maybe, somehow, they were created for a relationship with a cosmic Creator and Designer. Because if that were true,then they might not be free to just do whatever they want without any moral rules in order to make themselves happy. What they really want is to have all the benefits of being created by a loving God, without any of the responsibilities. They like sex, but they don’t like being told how to use it. So they jump at any news story that breaks down the evidence for a Creator/Designer. And they praise moral evil to the skies in order while bashing moral good down, in order to obliterate any vestiges of the idea that there might be any way that they ought to act. They don’t want to be accountable to God. They don’t want moral obligations.

Now look at the latest news from the New Scientist.

Excerpt:

Last month, a team of astronomers announced the discovery of the first alien world that could host life on its surface. Now a second team can find no evidence of the planet, casting doubt on its existence.

The planet, dubbed Gliese 581 g, was found to orbit a dim, red dwarf star every 37 days, according to an analysis by Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in DC, and their colleagues.

Unlike the four previously known planets in the same system and hundreds of others found throughout the Milky Way galaxy, Gliese 581 g sits in the middle of its host star’s habitable zone, where temperatures are in the right range for liquid water to exist. It is also puny enough – weighing about three Earths – to have what is likely a rocky, solid surface.

But it might be too early to claim a definitive detection. A second team of astronomers have looked for signals of Gliese 581 g in their own data and failed to find it.

“We easily recover the four previously announced planets, “b”, “c”, “d”, and “e”. However, we do not see any evidence for a fifth planet in an orbit of 37 days,” says Francesco Pepe of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland. He presented the results on Monday at an International Astronomical Union symposium in Turin, Italy.

They wanted to believe we were cosmic accidents. Did they distort their data to prove what they wanted to believe? Like hiding the decline to “prove” that capitalism is evil?

We have to be careful about what some educated academic people want. Some educated academic people are sufficiently wealthy and powerful that they can avoid being hurt by most other people. So what they want is to pursue pleasure without being limited by moral rules. So they want to break them down because they view them as “speed bumps” on the road to pleasure in this life. Whatever they say has to be interpreted in light of this desire to get free from moral obligations and moral judgments by you and by your children. They want to normalize the idea that selfishness that causes damage to others is morally neutral. The breakdown of moral realism is what is behind many fads like Dan Brown, sex education, moral relativism, etc.

My previous article on what it takes to make a planet that is habitable by complex life.

News

NSF spends 2 million to create Darwin indoctrination lesson plans

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The NSF is, of course, the National Science Foundation. And the 2 million, of course, came from the pockets of taxpayers.

Here’s the post at Evolution News.

Excerpt:

The goal of the Evolution Readiness Project is to get “young children” to “believe in” evolution. According to the National Science Foundation’s website, they’ve spent $1,990,459 of taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation (NSF) dollars to bankroll this project. Welcome back to school.

The agenda of the project is further clarified in the NSF Grant Award Abstract which states that it aims “to support a learning progression leading to an appreciation of the theory of evolution and evidence that supports it.” That’s fine, but why only the evidence that supports evolution?

Only the evidence in favor of Darwinism? What about the evidence against Darwinism?

The project justifies its dogmatic approach by promoting the myth that there is no scientific dissent from the consensus view on natural selection:

Yet, essentially there is universal agreement among scientists that evolution by natural selection is the fundamental model that explains the extraordinary complexity and interdependence of the living world. Moreover, evolution by natural selection is a quintessential scientific theory, explaining an extraordinary collection of data, including much that Darwin himself was unaware of, with a small collection of powerful ideas.

Of course, it is not true that “essentially there is universal agreement among scientists” about evolution by natural selection. Over 850 Ph.D. scientists have now signed a statement expressing their skepticism of modern evolutionary theory’s “claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life,” and urge that “[c]areful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”

The rest of the article lists a stack of non-Christian, non-theistic scientists who doubt the efficacy of Darwinian mechanisms to explain macro-evolution.

Darwinism is “hide the decline” applied to the history of life.