Soccer Mom: Unplugged

Remember the game six degrees of separation?  Who needs six degrees?

Hugo Chavez warns private schools...

Hillary Clinton denounces vouchers...

Notice the incredibly similar fear-inducing rhetoric. 

Chavez:  "We can't just allow private schools to do whatever they want," Chavez said during a ceremony marking the start of the school year that was aired by state television in El Tigre, Mercopress reported.  Chavez, who already has nationalized Venezuela's oil, electricity and telecommunications industries, said schools must stop using textbooks containing what he called "lies" about the European conquest of Latin America.

Clinton: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton slammed private-school voucher proposals yesterday, predicting that vouchers would eventually lead to the creation of taxpayer-financed white supremacist academies - or even a government-funded "School of the Jihad."

Walking through Target this afternoon with the kiddos and happened to catch a glimpse of the book section.  Anyone else see the humor in how this shelf was staged?  With the words Giving, The Quickie and Bill Clinton that close together I thought I'd been transported to 1998.

This has been out a while but I wanted to post it for my nieces and nephews who haven't seen it yet. 

I love the intensity on the face of "Christ" as he holds back the demons at the end of the video but unquestionably, my favorite aspect of this skit is the crowd reaction.  All of those teenagers shouting and clapping and celebrating ... "all the sons of God shouted for joy" (Job 38:7)

LifeHouse - Everything

Who says the global warming eco-nazis are stupid?  Weren't they the first to warn us of the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide? 

Public Education + Hollywood celebrities + a little bit of knowledge.... be afraid.  Be very, very afraid!

Lest you think I am leveling charges of eco-hysteria haphazardly, let me refer you to the 1997  Washington Post article in which James K. Glassman coined the term "zohnerism" (i.e. the use of a true fact to lead a scientifically and mathematically ignorant public to a false conclusion).  Below are the concluding paragraphs of Glassman's Dihydrogen Monoxide: Unrecognized Killer: (emphasis mine)

Environmental hysterics -- Vice President Al Gore springs to mind  -- and ideologues in such fields as race, women's issues and economics are adept at using Zohnerisms, with help from the media, to advance their agendas. A few examples:

The breast-implant mania. Dow Corning was driven into bankruptcy through lawsuits over its silicone implants -- even though science doesn't support claims that they're dangerous. Marcia Angell, executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, cites the problem jurors "have in thinking in terms of probabilities, or in acknowledging the possibility of coincidence."

Research, she says, has consistently failed to find a link between silicone and disease. Yes, women who have implants get sick, but, in a typical study, "the implant group was no more likely to develop connective tissue disease than the group without implants."

White flight. In the headline above an article Sunday about population growth in rural areas, the New York Times claimed, "Hint of Racial Undercurrents Is Behind Broad Exodus of Whites." Steven A. Holmes, the reporter, wrote that studies by demographer William Frey "show that of the 40 fastest-growing rural counties, virtually all are at least 70 percent white."

Shocking? Well, according to the Bureau of the Census, 83 percent of the U.S. population is white.

Finding Zohnerisms in the press, Congressional Record and speeches of administration officials makes a great parlor game. One place to start is the collected speeches of EPA chief Carol Browner, who has used Zohnerisms masterfully to promote expensive, disruptive new standards for particulate matter and global warming -- despite evidence from scientists that is, at best, inconclusive.

That's a shame. In a land where technical ignorance reigns and susceptibility to Zohnerisms is high, it's the duty of politicians, journalists and scientists to present facts responsibly and in context.

After all, think what would happen if the EPA really did ban dihydrogen monoxide.

You've got to love the quote by the Journal of Medicine's Marcia Angell.  Basically, 21st century jurors (judges, politicians, journalists also) are no smarter than the men who sat behind the bar at the Salem witch trials.  So, who is your Cotton Mather?