A physics education does however seem to have given them some faint attachment to the scientific method, so they go to considerable lengths to substantiate their claims. But do they turn to physics to substantiate their claims? Not at all. Far from offering any comparison of male and female work in physics, they turn to sociology! Like sociologists they have faith that questionnaire surveys will tell them something about reality. I did such surveys for many years and eventually concluded that they don’t.

Their anti-scientific orientation is most clearly revealed by “the dog that didn’t bark”, however. They ignore over a hundred years of research that repeatedly reveals women to have better verbal ability and men to have better mathematical ability. And since physics these days is little more than applied mathematics, that datum could hardly be more relevant. It suggests that not many women have what it takes to be good physicists.

They could of coures disagree with what is one of the most replicated findings in science but instead of disagreeing with it, they simply ignore it — thus violating one of the most fudamental canons of science: That you must have regard for what others before you have written on your subject.

So their own writing suggests one very good reason why there are not many women physicists: They are just not very good scientists. Their own work suggests that hormones take the place of rationality.

And in the end why does it matter that most physicists are men? I can’t see that humanity is badly served by that reality but the case that it does matter is presumably arguable. But they make no attempt to argue it. They just resort to that terminally destructive and totally unrealistic Leftist obsession with “equality”. They are very poor intellects indeed. Procrustes would be proud of them.

For reference, I reproduce below the concluding section of their article:

The global survey follows a body of work that has examined the importance to career success of access to resources and opportunities. The survey found that women are less likely than men to report access to various resources and opportunities that would be helpful in advancing a scientific career. It also confirmed, consistent with cultural norms, that men are more likely than women to have a spouse who will shoulder the burden of housework. We noted the cultural expectation that women are responsible for child care and documented survey results showing that parenting affects the careers of women more than it does the careers of men.

Admittedly, our results are derived from the testimony of survey respondents, and it is conceivable that the sex differences we have found exist not because women are treated differently but because they differ from men in their expectations about work. However, the results reported here will come as no surprise to the researchers who have already found that resources, opportunities, and family responsibilities affect women’s careers.4,6 We believe the results reflect an underlying reality of disadvantage—not differing work expectations—and that all the sex-based differences documented here adversely affect the careers of women physicists.

The low representation of women in physics is a problem the community needs to address, but the community also needs to address inequities in access to resources and opportunities. Cultural expectations about home and family also inhibit the progress of women physicists; those, of course, are much more difficult to change. Nonetheless, we look forward to a future in which science truly means science for all.

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

Hat tip to Allahpundit that who says:

A constitution is as good as the political culture that surrounds it. Ginsburg would have been better off reminding Egyptian TV of that.

Please! This is one of the main reasons that you need to vote against Obama when it is time. I don’t want him to have the chance to appoint another justice as liberal as this one! Perhaps she should recuse herself from any rulings based on Constitutional grounds since she isn’t so fond of our Constitution. Or maybe she should move to South Africa!

Others: Jeff Goldstein

Skip ahead on the video to 9:28.

There’s a short excerpt of a 1988 C-SPAN video purportedly showing Newt Gingrich bashing Reagan when talking about how Bush, Sr. should run. As I suspected, it’s edited to give a false impression. What you don’t see is immediately after when Gingrich praises Reaganism and the Reagan platform. If you can’t watch it all, it begins at about 2:30 in to confirm it’s the same segment. It’s the minute or two afterward you also need to hear to understand that Newt wasn’t bashing Reagan at all.

Drudge and others are pushing an edited version to attack Newt today. Make sure you share the real version so people are not decieved.

Jeff Goldstein:

Incidentally, there are many with ties to the Reagan years who are supporting Gingrich and telling a different story. But apparently these folks have escaped the attention of National Review, Ann Coulter, and now, Mr Drudge.

Probably just an oversight, though. Because otherwise we’d almost have to conclude that Drudge, Coulter, NRO, et al are working actively against the man who engineered the Contract with America that gave the GOP the House after 40 years, and working actively for a candidate who continues to support his individual mandate, is for mortgage bailouts (provided you are financed through a GSE), and has hinted, through his advisors, that we can’t really repeal ObamaCare, because there are some really good parts to it that are worth saving and tweaking.

And that would be surreal.

The frog and the polar bear: The real reasons Americans aren’t buying climate change

In the fall of 2008, Leiserowitz conducted a poll gauging Americans’ thoughts on the matter. Seventy-one percent of respondents said they believed global warming was happening, while 57 percent said humans were causing it. Fast forward two years, and only 57 percent of respondents to Leiserowitz’s poll believed global warming was real, while just 47 percent blamed humans.

Why can’t Americans seem to get their heads around climate change? While the recession, the Tea Party, a lack of media coverage, and other forces have taken a bite out of public support for the issue recently, the problem has its roots in human nature, researchers say.

Columbia psychology professor Elke Weber was among the early researchers to look at why the seriousness of climate change was not getting through to the American public. She and her fellow scholars have pointed out that climate change is intrinsically challenging to understand: Its main causes are invisible, its impacts are distant and far off for most Americans, and its signals are often hard to detect.

See? It has nothing to do with falsified data, cherry-picked data, fake data, politicized data, politicization of the “science”, unhinged and alarmist pronouncements, prognostications of things that might happen 50-100 years down the road, blaming everything on mankind, blaming every weather event on someone driving an SUV, oh, and a failure of Warmists to live their lives in accordance with their beliefs, not to mention living high on the carbon hog. Nope, it’s because you can’t see the effects of a trace invisible gas that has been at much higher levels for most of the history of the Earth, which will Destroy All Life or something this time, unlike the rest of Time.

In other words, he found that most people think “It’s the polar bear’s problem, not mine — and as long as it’s not my problem, I frankly have more pressing things to worry about.”

And why not? When we watch tens of thousands of True Believers hop on fossil fueled planes to head off for yet another climate vacation in a far off exotic spot at the ends of the Earth, why should we believe? When the temperatures are stagnant for 13 years, despite CO2 going way up, why should we believe?

In fact, two or three degrees would be a huge deal. Experts project sea levels in Florida will rise by three to five feet by 2100. With a two-foot rise, water would cover 28 percent of South Florida and wetlands would be lost as far from the coast as Homestead, about a 125-mile drive from Key West. Miami would become a barrier island.

So what, even if true? Things change. At one point, the central portion of the US was covered by an inland sea. During the last ice age, the Mediterranean was mostly empty of water. The Earth is not static. They grew reportedly excellent grapes for wine in England during the last warm period.

Some (including Grist’s own climate hawk, David Roberts) say that in order to startle Americans out of their apathy about climate change, we need to ring the alarm bells even louder. Some scholars, however, warn that approach could backfire. Tomorrow, we’ll discuss how they think it could be done differently.

Personally, I take the view that there are two reasons why the warmist religion is dying out. First, is because they are seeing the actual science, and find it lacking in reality. They are seeing through it and realizing that it is simply a manner to push fascistic controls on people and economies. Second, they are tired of the “alarm bells being rung”. They are tired of every single thing that happens being blamed on someone driving an SUV and living a modern life. They are tired of people who are CO2 hogs telling them that they need to change their lives, while the CO2 hogs live the high life and enrich themselves.

I meant to get to this last week, but “historian” Douglas Brinkley is so forgettable as a writer that it all slipped my mind. But, it’s a slow news day, so let’s take a look at the temper tantrum this hack threw when he visited the House Natural Resources Committee on Nov. 22, shall we?

Brinkley was there to provide his, uh, “insight” into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, testimony that Alaska Rep. Don Young called “an exercise in futility” because the hearing wasn’t going to be changing anyone’s mind about the subject. I’d have to agree that anything including hack Brinkley truly is an exercise in futility. He’s one of the worst writers of popular history out there.

The fireworks began when Rep. Young accidentally called Brinkley by the wrong last name. This sent the scribbler off into paroxysms of pique and spurred him to interrupt not only Rep. Young, but also Committee Chair Doc Hastings when he tried to restore order.

Rep. Young later told the Washington Post’s Amy Argetsinger that he thought that Brinkley was just trying to get publicity with his outburst.

But I disagree with the Congressman. Brinkley is a hack of the first order and has a left-wing agenda. He likely went into that committee hearing with a chip on his shoulder already and was looking for anything to show that he was the newest Captain Planet that wanted to keep drilling for oil out of his wildlife refuge.

Writer Douglas Hackley has also urged President Obama to use his fiat powers to turn the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge into a national monument. This would take any possibility of drilling for oil right off the table.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Obama does this, too. President Obama has shown a fondness for simply “declaring” things into law and is not fond of actually following the law making process. He’s said on numerous occasions that he is looking for ways to get his agenda put into action “without Congress,” and that means without YOU, the people. Let’s face it, you, Mr. and Mrs. America, you have sent your congressmen to Washington and if Obama is pushing his agenda without those duly elected representatives he’s doing so without your input as voters. He cares neither for your opinion nor that of your elected representatives. This is the single most arrogant man we’ve ever had in the Oval Office.

Anyway, back to Brinkley, it should not surprise anyone that he was hot to display his own arrogance and lack of decorum. He is well known as one of the worst writers of popular history in the field. It should also not surprise that he is appealing directly to Obama over your representatives — including those that actually live in the state that Brinkley wants millions of acres declared off limits to use.

It should be remembered that this writer of hackneyed hagiography was one of the cadre of historians that Obama invited to a secret dinner at the White House only months after he assumed the throne. Obama was obviously trying to influence these historians to write the proper history of his regime when all is said and done.

But of those agenda driven writers, Brinkley is the worst of the crew. And it’s not just my biased opinion, either. Even left-wingers have said that Brinkley’s work leaves a lot to be desired.

Brinkley Is well known for having belched out a wholly uncritical take on John F. Kerry’s life during the Senator’s doomed run for the White House against George W. Bush in 2004. The book was little else but sunny campaign puffer that was worthless as a work of history. Before that, Brinkley prostituted himself all over TV as the chief mourner for John Kennedy, Jr. when he flew himself to his death in 1999. Brinkley’s over-the-top celebration of Kennedy and the writer’s ubiquity on TV during those days were so bad that Kennedy’s George Magazine even removed him from their masthead as a contributor. Brinkley was so ridiculous that even the lefty Slate.com once wrote, “Even amid this week’s staggering hyperbole, Brinkley’s emotional profligacy has distinguished him.”” Not a compliment, to be sure.

Brinkley is also one of those slavishly devoted Obamaites that constantly compares Obama to the most famous men of history — even though Obama has done little to rate the praise. In 2011, for instance, Brinkley said that Obama was somehow just like Martin Luther King.

In all, given his history of political activism and his penchant for loosely sourced hagiographic fiction, none of Brinkley’s lack of civility at a mere Committee hearing should surprise us. The only surprise here is that anyone takes him seriously at all.

On November 30, CNN’s T. J. Holmes gave us a great example of how the Old Media is soft peddling the law breaking going on at the Occupy events in order to make these events seem far less dangerous and illicit than they are. Like many in the Old Media, Holmes seems desperate to give lawbreaking Occupiers as much cover as possible — a benefit they never offered the Tea Partiers.

In an interview with an L.A. city police commander about the clearing of Occupy Los Angeles, Holmes did his best to minimize the number of arrests of members of the Occupy protest. The actual number of arrests was 200, but Holmes repeatedly characterized that numbers as “dozens.”

Now, I don’t know about you but when I hear “dozens” I think of the number 24. Being generous I might even say three dozen (a healthy 36) could be thought of as “dozens.” On the other hand, when someone tells me “200″ the word “dozens” doesn’t at all come to mind. I just don’t think of 18 dozen as “dozens.” I think of them as hundreds!

Of course, Holmes was desperate to make hundreds seem less imposing. So, to him, two hundred arrests became minimized to “dozens.”

It must be pointed out here that even after two years of Tea Party protests featuring millions of Americans and often seeing many thousands appearing at any given event never saw 200 arrests during the whole time! In fact, there weren’t even 100 arrests in two years with millions of protesters. Not even 50 or 25 arrests, for that matter.

This soft peddling of the Occupy-Whatevers, though, is of a piece with the penchant of the entire Old Media to ignore the lawbreaking going on at the Occupy events. The truth is simply being ignored by the media. A recent tally by John Nolte shows 364 serious incidents to date of criminal actions — one short of one for every day of the year — at the various Occupy events across the country. And this list doesn’t count the many thousands of local laws, ordinances, and permitting rules that have been flouted by these Occupy protests.

Speaking of permits and other local ordinances, laws that nearly every Occupy event in the country has broken with impunity, the Richmond Tea Party complained that they were charged thousands of dollars by the city of Richmond to be allowed to hold their events (including being forced to take out a $10 million insurance policy) while the Occupy-Whatevers were not charged a cent for their protests. Because of their complaints, the City of Richmond is now auditing the group’s taxes! This is far, far different treatment than the lawbreakers of the Occupy events are being lavished with, isn’t it?

The sad fact is that the Occupiers are being afforded every break, given excuses from complying with every law in order to enjoy their freedom of speech while the Tea Party events were required to observe every dot and crossed “t” of the law to be allowed to observe their First Amendment rights.

But, getting back to CNN’s T.J. Homes, he wasn’t done trying to raise sympathy for the Occupiers by just downplaying the arrests seen in L.A. He even indulged a little fantasy scenario by trying to get the policeman he was interviewing to “admit” that his officers really, really loved those nice hippies.

As chronicled by Newsbusters, Holmes asked a question backed by no evidence and containing no newsworthiness.

“In some ways, uh, maybe a couple of your officers, that I’m sure, around the department, maybe this conversation came up, where you know in some ways you sympathize with the protesters and maybe some of the officers even conflicted about having to grab some of them and pluck them out of there because I’m sure some of your officers may feel like maybe they could wish they could be out there protesting in some way. Did you find that some of your officers do have that conflict?”

Out of what body orifice did Holmes pull that nonsense? And did Holmes ever ask any police officers if they had sympathy for the Tea Party participants? My guess is that he never did.

In any case, Holmes’ positive spin on the Occupiers is a great example of how the entire Old Media establishment is glossing up the Occupy events to make them seem legitimate and elicit sympathy for them.

It’s hard to believe but Frank Rich’s latest exercise in the fantasist’s art comparing JFK to Obama is a wonder to behold. It really is. One might think it satire if Rich had never been presented as a serious essayist by the New York intelligentsia. If this were to be his first public writing, one might think him the new Jonathan Swift for its central premise is simply amazing for its utter deviation from reality. Rich, it seems, thinks that Obama is just like John Kennedy because Kennedy was somehow killed by the “hate that ended his presidency,” or something.

The part that is so fantastic is that Rich devolves to a long ago discredited theory that Kennedy was killed that dark November day in 1963 somehow because of right-wing hate for him. What is so absurd about Rich’s fantastic claim is that he wholly discounts the fact that Kennedy’s killer was a communist. In fact, Rich never even mentions that Lee Harvey Oswald was an avowed communist. He hints at it obliquely but does so in a way that dismisses the ideology as in any way important.

It has been a long time since I’ve read a piece on a public figure that is one part hero worship, one part discounting of that same figure, one part pure fantasy, and one part baseless comparison to the life of a whole other public figure that is also worshiped as a hero without a legitimate reason. But Frank Rich has done it here in a way that brings to mind J.R.R. Tolkein’s intricate and complicated plotting.

There’s so much wrong in this one piece that it’s hard to figure out where to start first, but Rich’s central premise is that JFK was killed because of a climate of “hate” engendered by the blindness of Kennedy’s detractors on the right. This, Rich seems to think, is somehow just like Obama. Well, except that Obama is still alive and no one has even made a single attempt to kill him (God forbid), of course.

Interestingly, Rich does seem to notice that John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s presidency did not live up to its hype. Rich notes that historians have basically rated JFK’s short tenure in the White House as a wash, neither good nor horribly bad. But even with that admission, Rich writes glowingly of Kennedy. It is still all “Camelots” and “brief shinning moments” with little justification for any other reason than mere hero worship. With that, though, Rich succumbs to the worship like so many starry-eyed members of his deluded generation.

But for all his glorious filler — one wonders if Rich has ever had an editor — here is his raison d’être for bothering us with his hagiographic blather:

What defines the Kennedy legacy today is less the fallen president’s short, often admirable life than the particular strain of virulent hatred that helped bring him down. After JFK was killed, that hate went into only temporary hiding. It has been a growth industry ever since and has been flourishing in the Obama years. There are plenty of comparisons to be made between the two men, but the most telling is the vitriol that engulfed both their presidencies.

I guess it wasn’t the communist that killed him, eh? It was the “the vitriol” what dunnit. I’ll tell you what, I’ve been writing these op eds and been plying my particular brand of journalism since early in 2001 and if “the vitriol” could kill, I’d have been killed by liberals years ago! I’d submit that even Rich would have been pushing up daisies long ago if mere “vitriol” was so deadly.

Rich makes all sorts of illogical assumptions in this piece of… well, fiction I guess one must call it. The piece is ostensibly a book review of sorts of three new Kennedy books that are on the shelves just in time for Christmas along with some allusions and snippets of past Kennedy tomes.

One of the nonsensical assumptions he makes in this thing comes after he introduces his absurd “vitriol” premise and begins to talk of one of the books. Rich pens this line: “America’s contemporaneous love of JFK is vivid in its pages, but no less so is the equally American storm of gathering political anger that prefigured his murder.”

“Prefigured”? Look, there is vitriol for every president. Lincoln was called a baboon by his detractors. Jefferson was called a godless atheist. John Adams was called “his rotundity.” Andrew Jackson was portrayed as an uncultured boob, and not without good reason. Conversely, there wasn’t much of an atmosphere of vitriol against James Garfield, but he sure didn’t last long before nutcase Charles J. Guiteau hunted him down and ended his life. And what mounting “vitriol” against the hapless Jerry Ford caused Squeaky Fromme to make an attempt on his life? Heck, even Ronald Reagan was only just getting going in his first term before he was gunned down by John Hinkley. Sure the left hated Reagan, but he’d hardly been around enough to engender any great atmosphere of “vitriol.” Still, to suggest that political vitriol automatically “prefigures” assassination is simply ridiculous and simple-minded.

The fact is, Rich started with a premise and then went looking for “evidence” to prove his point.

Certainly Rich is right to note that Kennedy’s presidency was all fluff floated by a “Technicolor movie star.” Upon examination Kennedy’s actual work as president doesn’t live up to his reputation as a star. Rich has that right. “Kennedy was more “comfortable giving speeches on behalf of civil rights,” he writes, than throwing himself into battle.” Sadly, Rich doesn’t catch that this, and this alone is what makes Kennedy and Obama similar. Neither president is much of a doer. Both are campaigners in chief. Empty suits with “amazingly white” teeth.

Rich continues to see “ominous” portends of Kennedy’s assassination around every corner when he reviews history. “The hatred he aroused, while from a minority of voters, was heated and ominous,” he sonorously intones. Sorry, but to engender assassination, this “hatred” would have to have been angering more than just “a minority of voters.”

Then Rich makes another one of those laughable rhetorical backflips with which to attack the right. Speaking of a “slash-and-burn” anti-Kennedy book that was on the shelves the very month Kennedy was assassinated, Rich gives us this amusing bit of doggeral: “Lasky’s thick slash-and-burn Kennedy book, which even questioned his World War II heroism as the skipper of PT-109, was a precursor of the Swift Boat hatchet job on John Kerry.”

Seriously, Mr. Rich? Lasky’s book being a “precursor” to the swift boating of John Kerry suggests some material connection between the two. Do you have such evidence, Mr. Rich? Just because both JFK and Kerry were once on a small naval boat in a war does not mean that the attacks on them concerning that service were linked. I’d bet that none of the Swift-boaters ever even heard of Lasky’s book attacking Kennedy’s service on PT109! If you have no evidence there is no direct line of succession. Lasky’s book merely become a predecessor, merely “came before” the Swift-boater’s work against Kerry. No connection.

But Rich’s fact free attempt to connect Lasky’s book with the swift-boaters book is precisely the sort of mental gymnastics that Rich makes to “prove” his points.

Speaking of fact free connections and mental gymnastics, after describing the “inferno of seething citizens,” the “anti-Semitic” atmosphere, and the air of “equating racial integration with communism” that novelist Stephen King steeps his Kennedy fantasy piece in, Rich notes that the “Tea Party Society” in King’s book is an anachronistic and partisan jab at modern conservatives which is a “mischievous invention” of author Stephen King.

Got that, Tea Partiers? Despite that all the hate for Jews being seen in America today is coming from the left (see the Occupy Wall Streeters) Frank Rich and Stephen King say that you are the haters! How convenient for Rich’s thesis eh? But what is amusing for both novelist King and Rich’s focus on the conceit of a faux 1963 era “Tea Party Society” is that it fits in with their skewed notions of Kennedy’s era and ours. Anyone trying to seriously compare the atmosphere of Dallas in 1963 and that surrounding Barack Obama today would likely leave out the “mischievous inventions” of fantasy novelists. But not Rich. He’s got a point to prove, ya know?

And now for some pop psychology to rear its ugly but inevitable head.

Quoting the sensationalistic and slightly mystical writings of one William Manchester from his 1967 book The Death of a President, Rich treats us to the sort of divining of the impenetrable that only comes with the regrettable penchant of revisionist “historians” to resort to that aforementioned pop psychology.

… He writes that “individual commissioners had strong reservations” about exonerating Dallas but decided to hedge rather than stir up any controversy that might detract from the report’s “widest possible acceptance.” While Manchester adds that “obviously, it is impossible to define the exact relationship between an individual and his environment,” he strongly rejected the universal description of Oswald as “a loner.” No man, he writes, is quarantined from his time and place. Dallas was toxic. The atmosphere was “something unrelated to conventional politics—a stridency, a disease of the spirit, a shrill, hysterical note suggestive of a deeply troubled society.” Duly observing that even the greatest presidents have been vilified in their time—Lincoln as a baboon and Jefferson as “Mad Tom”—Manchester saw something “more than partisan zeal” at work in this case. He detected “a chiaroscuro that existed outside the two parties, a virulence which had infected members of both.” Dallas had become the gaudy big top for a growing national movement—“the mecca for medicine-show evangelists of the National Indignation Convention, the Christian Crusaders, the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies.”

Yes, yes, yes. “No man is an island,” so obviously the raving commie that killed the president was busy soaking up the attitudes from the other side of the political aisle from which he sat and this, you see, made him kill a president.

I don’t know about you but when I am driven to do something, it isn’t because I was inspired toward action by what my political enemies want me to do! Are you? Is anyone? I mean, aren’t you driven to do the opposite of what your political enemies are calling for?

Ah, but let’s not let logic get in the way of Frank Rich’s agenda, shall we? He sees a right that “has tried to deflect any connection between its fevered Kennedy hatred and Oswald’s addled psyche with the fact that the assassin had briefly defected to the Soviet Union.”

The logical fallacies of this line of nonsense is staggering.

Now, there is another thing that one is struck by with Frank Rich’s latest anti-conservative, anti-Tea Party screed. One cannot help but notice that, to prove his central thesis, Rich is relying on the assumed veracity of a fantasy writer’s plot points for his sci-fi oriented story where a guy goes back in time to stop an assassination of a president.

Rich takes the fantasy land that leftist writer King created out of thin air to “prove” that the “hate in the air” in 1963 is somehow just like today not to mention that said “hate” was really responsible for killing Kennedy — as opposed to the mental disease of the communist, lone-gunman who did the deed.

Close to the end of his article Rich indulges another absurdity trying to compare Kennedy and Obama. They are both “centrists in the Democratic parties of their respective eras,” he claims. This is guffaw worthy. Kennedy was not a doctrinaire, far left-winger, to be sure. He was certainly liberal, but not an extremist. Kennedy was in keeping with the Democrat Party of his day. On the other hand, Obama most clearly is an extremist. That Obama is also a proponent of crony capitalism does in no way make of him a “centrist.”

One has a sneaking suspicion that with this piece, Frank Rich is praying for an Obama assassination so that the utter failure that is Obama can be ignored while his acolytes can make a martyr of him. Just like they did with the increasingly failing JFK presidency whose assassination enshrined him forever in “Camelot” quite regardless that his actual work in the White House was only middling at best.

Rich finishes this amazing retreat from reality with this:

On the other hand, read Manchester or 11/22/63 or any other account of that time, and the vitriol that was aimed at Kennedy in life seems as immediate as today. It’s as startling as that “You lie!” piercing the solemnity of a presidential address like a gunshot—or the actual gunshots fired at the White House last week by another wretched waif. In the end, that political backdrop is what our 44th and 35th presidents may have most in common. The tragedy of the Kennedy cult is that even as it fades, the hothouse brand of American malice that stalked its hero stalks our country still.

It’s a nice summation of his premise, if entirely built on a foundation of lies. I’d say that it really is too bad that Frank Rich isn’t shooting for a Swiftian production with this thing. He has all the reality-on-its-head elements, after all.

Finally, isn’t it interesting that all hate always comes from “the right” to these people? Writing in the midst of the Occupy “movement” where such hate has daily been on egregious display — with rapes, property destruction, even deaths as a result — Frank Rich only sees warning signs coming from the right. He truly is living in a fantasyland, isn’t he?

I have long pointed out on my sidebar on GREENIE WATCH that, just as “The Jews” were once blamed for every ill, so Global Warming is nowadays blamed for every ill. I will not try to spell out the similarities in any further detail but I think readers will see for themselves areas of similarity well enough. Even the first sentence could well apply to Warmism.

“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” are perhaps the best proof that the Nazis’ “Big Lie” theory — tell something long enough and loud enough, and some people are sure to believe it is true.

A fabrication of the Russian Secret Police between 1897 and 1903, the documents described a putative Jewish plot to take over the world. Their speciousness repeatedly proven over the years, they continue to fuel anti-Semitism: in Nazi Germany, in communist Russia, in anti-Semitic Arab countries, in the writings of Western racists and so on.

And “The Protocols,” translated into scores of languages, continue to live on in popular culture — a 2005 documentary, a new novel (“The Prague Cemetery”) by Italy’s Umberto Eco, a new nonfiction book (“License to Murder”) by Alex Grobman, director of the America-Israel Friendship League. The Jewish Week spoke with Grobman this week about “The Protocols.”

Q: More than a century after “The Protocols” were written — and discredited as a fraud — why are we still talking and worrying about them?

A: The myth of an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world as advanced in “The Protocols” has been exposed by historians, journalists, politicians, police and religious leaders. Yet this has not stopped “The Protocols” from being part of a view held by many people. The potential danger of “The Protocols” in shaping public opinion is real and should not be underestimated. When Jews are portrayed as manipulators who seek power over other people’s lives, they come — only naturally — to be perceived as severe dire threats.

It is thus particularly disconcerting that this false and harmful perception of Jews is embraced even today by the leadership of the Arab-Muslim world, where “The Protocols” continues to be published in vast quantities, and cited in the writings of mainstream academics, who lend credibility and legitimacy to this falsehood and utter fallacy.

Q. Who takes ‘The Protocols’ seriously today?

Aside from many in the Arab world, the belief that Jews have an inordinate amount of power in the world can also be found throughout the West as well. In September 2007, The Financial Times reported that “Currency Wars,” a Chinese bestseller, claimed “The Battle of Waterloo. The deaths of six U.S. presidents. The rise of Adolf Hitler. The deflation of the Japanese bubble economy, the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis and even environmental destruction in the developing world,” which occurred over two centuries “have a single root cause: the control of money issuance through history by the Rothschild banking dynasty.”

Every time a friend returns from international theological conferences, he laments how pervasive the underlying belief in “The Protocols” is among leading theologians. Were you to confront them, they would be highly insulted, yet they accept the basic premise.

Jewish history is full of bogus accusations against Jews, like the blood libel. Why have “The Protocols” had such a lasting influence?

The notion of the Jew as a demonic character is still prevalent, allowing anti-Semites to use “The Protocols” to incite against Jews, particularly during times of political and social unrest. Conspiracy theories are attractive because they absolve the individual of any personal responsibility for failures, reverses and suffering. In this moral universe of “us” and “them,” the victim is not responsible at all for what has occurred. The conspirators are the ones who are culpable.

The fact that it was allegedly written by Jews makes the work more authentic. Reliance on contradiction— that to succeed Jews employ capitalism and communism, philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism, democracy and tyranny — made it possible for “The Protocols” to reach out to all: rich and poor, right and left, Christian and Muslim, American and Japanese.

Debating the advocates of “The Protocols” doesn’t work. Showing that “The Protocols” is a fraud doesn’t work. Banning the book — as some countries have tried — doesn’t work. What works?

Certain portions of the population will never be convinced that “The Protocols” are a forgery or that Jews are not an evil force trying to control the world. Logic and reason have little or no place in their way of thinking.

The purpose of [Grobman’s new book] is to inform those interested in historical truth why this canard and other lies against the Jewish people are so pervasive, and why they pose a danger not only to the Jewish people, but to all those who cherish a democratic way of life. If we do not respond to the canards, the assumption will be that we have no answers.

SOURCE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

Talk about making a mistake everyone can see! Atheists in California have done a disservice to their own crusade to spread atheism by launching a new billboard campaign that ascribes a false quote to Thomas Jefferson. That’s right, they’ve essentially become liars for atheism.

In Costa Mesa, California a group of atheists calling themselves Backyard Skeptics have unveiled a billboard to sell atheism to the general public that features a quote they claim came from Thomas Jefferson, the Third President of the United States.

“I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature,” the billboard “quotes” the president as having said. “It is founded on fables and mythology,” this quote concludes.

That would be a stinging rebuke of Christianity, indeed… were it true. Unfortunately for this little atheist group it seems that their quote is a fake quote the group found on the Internet and assumed was real.

The atheist group thought the quote came from a letter that Jefferson wrote to a “Dr. Woods.” But there is one little problem. Jefferson scholars cannot find such a letter. The Jefferson Library confirms that no such letter exists. The library also notes that no such phrase or any combination thereof exists in any of Jefferson’s extensive collection of papers.

The atheist group, seems to shrug off their embarrassing mistake, though, telling reporters that they will look into it later. Worse, they told the Orange Register that even if the quote was fake it really represented Jefferson’s views anyway. Where have we heard “fake but accurate” before?

As the Jefferson library notes, it’s a bit hard to believe that Jefferson saw no “redeeming features” in Christianity since he spent months cutting and pasting and rearranging the Christian Bible to his own liking! If there was nothing worth the effort in there he had a funny way of showing it.

But talk about true believers, these atheists. They’ll let neither logic nor the word of all the scholars in the world that Jefferson never uttered their favorite quote deter them that he somehow despised Christianity anyway!

Sadly, Jon Cassidy, writer for the Orange Register, was also bamboozled by another atheist lie about Jefferson in his piece. He furthered the lie that Jefferson “was a Deist.”

Jefferson was a Deist, who believed in a hands-off creator, not a Christian, but he adored the humanistic aspects of Jesus’ teachings, according to the library. A library report cites his letter to William Short of Oct. 31, 1819, in which he called the teachings of Jesus the “outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man.”

This Jefferson-the-Deist business is has been a lie told by atheists for at least a generation. In fact, it is a calumny visited on most of our founders. It is also not true.

Never in his life did Jefferson call himself a Deist. He called himself a Unitarian (what we might call a Unitarian Universalist today). He did not call himself a Deist. Why should we call him something he never called himself?

Additionally, while many modern atheists and half-informed hobbyists in things historical imagine that all or even many of the founders were “Deists,” the truth is that almost none of them were — at least not by their own admission. Washington wasn’t. Hamilton wasn’t. John Adams sure wasn’t. Neither was Madison or Monroe.

It is absolutely true that a large portion of our most famous founders had a great amount of disdain for organized religion and/or the priesthood. After all, students of history that they were, the founders knew that religious orders and churches were involved in some of the worst massacres in human history. Not only that but such monstrous actions were within recent memory of the founder’s era. It’s only natural that they were suspicious of organized religion.

But we simply cannot pretend that this country was not founded by thousands of extremely devoted Christians. Even if a few of our most well known founders were somehow secret Deists, not many of their peers and co-founders nor their supporters back in their home states were anything but sincere believers.

After all, religion was one of the first things that our founders strived to protect! Remember that whole “freedom of religion” thing?

Perhaps two leading founders at one time claimed themselves Deism for themselves, but that is all I’ve ever run across.

When he was a young man Ben Franklin once wrote that he was a Deist. But he was hardly a “regular” Deist — if there is such a thing. When he was young, Franklin thought perhaps every universe had its own god but that perhaps they did not involve themselves too much in their own little realms. Not very orthodox Deism, that.

The other was Governor K. Morris, the man responsible for helping write the Constitution of the United States. According to a book on Morris written by Richard Brookheiser, Morris claimed Deism for himself.

The problem is that many historians ascribe Deism to our founders (even Morris was publicly an Episcopalian) based on those historian’s interpretations of the founder’s views. These claims based on historian’s feelings then get passed down from one generation to the next as “fact” even though it is not based in fact. Certainly it may be true that our founders harbored Deist ideas and it may be true that they feared a political backlash in a nation filled with Christians for saying so out loud, but if they didn’t call themselves Deists, how can we? The fact is, even in their private papers almost none of them accepted Deism as their own.

In all the years of reading on the founders I’ve done I’ve never seen any other founders calling themselves Deists. If someone out there has proof otherwise I’d love to hear it. But please don’t send me to a website. Remember what Abe Lincoln said: “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.” In fact, don’t even take my word for all this. Look it up yourself. If you can find words written by a founder claiming Deism for themselves, please let me see it.

But let’s not take the revisionism by decades of historians with an agenda as “fact.”

His expert tells him, rather predictably, that human induced CO2 steps in and does the warming when the Gulf stream is not doing much but how plausible is that? What is the switch that suddenly turns on human influences when the Gulf Stream takes a nap?

Black then attacks Anthony Watts and his well-known project of investigating the integrity of U.S. temperature measurements. Black has a bit of a crow — as the Berkeley temperature graph is similar to the existing big three. The Berkeley people however come to their conclusions by relying on “good” temperature measuring stations. But that is an intrinsically difficult enterprise — since Watts has found fault with about two thirds of all U.S. stations — and the U.S. measurements are “good” compared to most of the rest of the world. So it seems possible that the Berkeley people come to the same conclusion only because they use the same crappy data.

Black then asserts quite wrongly that most skeptics have always denied that warming is going on. To the contrary, Warmists have repeatedly pointed out that the recorded warming over the last century or so is trivial and of a piece with previous natural fluctuations. Why do skeptics make such a big thing about the Medieval Warm Period if they deny that there is any warming? Black is just trying to revise history.

As Lubos Motl pointed out in his article that I excerpted yesterday, the issue is the CAUSE of the slight warming we have seen. Is it natural or man-made? And “THE SCIENCE” is very much on the side of the warming being natural. Al Gore always speaks of “THE SCIENCE” as something that supports his extravagant predictions but science does no such thing. Science is all about prediction. Making accurate predictions is the test of any theory. But THE WAY scientists make predictions is by saying that things in the future will work just as things have worked in the past. So a continuation of a tiny warming trend is what “THE SCIENCE” predicts. It is the Warmists who are departing from science by saying that nature will suddenly do something quite different from what it has so far been doing and start generating big temperature changes. Warmism in highly speculative prophecy, not science. An excerpt from the Green Mr Black:

The Berkeley project poses a scientific challenge with its contention that water temperature changes in the north Atlantic – perhaps related to the Gulf Stream, as it’s commonly known – are driving year-to-year changes in global temperature.

Even more so, when the authors suggest that a greater part of the warming-cooling-warming history of the 20th Century could be down to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) than is recognised.

(Clarification for putative cherry-pickers; the scientific work behind the papers doesn’t examine this idea or even back it, but the authors suggest it as an avenue for further research.)

I had a chat with Michael Schlesinger, the University of Illinois professor who discovered the AMO along with Navin Ramankutty in 1994.

Research he and others have done since shows clearly, he said, that “while the AMO was the dominant influence on global mean temperature during 1904-1944 and 1944-1976, it is not the dominant influence over the entire observational record, 1850 to 2010.

“Over this time period, it is the increase in the concentrations of greenhouse gases caused by humanity’s burning of fossil fuels that is the dominant cause of the observed warming.”

That, I think, is the conclusion that the majority of climate scientists is likely to make, although the whole issue is made more complex by the fact that greenhouse warming can perturb natural cycles such as the AMO.

Claims that US weather station quality affected diagnosis of global warming was rejected. So it’s interesting to see what those who would shape opinion are making of the Berkeley results.

The sceptical blogosphere has been unusually quiet – disappointingly quiet, you might say. James Delingpole, Jo Nova, ClimateAudit… nothing.

One who has waded into the fray, inevitably, is Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That. I say “inevitably”, because his criticisms of weather station quality were among the factors that persuaded Prof Muller to get his project off the ground.

The Berkeley group concluded that although a high proportion of weather stations in the US might not be high quality – for example, if they’re situated in the middle of an expanding city – it doesn’t matter.

High-quality stations show the same warming trend as low-quality ones; so this issue can be taken off the table.

Mr Watts, in his recent postings, isn’t impressed. He argues that the Berkeley team used too long a time period for its analysis. He says it made a few other basic errors.

There’s a fair bit of revisionism going on too, some of it visible in the comments on my news story. “Sceptics don’t say the world isn’t warming,” this narrative goes – “we just debate how much of it is caused by greenhouse gases.”

There are some “sceptics” who do take this line, it’s true. But if the Earth’s temperature record wasn’t an issue, why has so much energy been expended in attempting to discredit it and the scientists behind it?

More HERE

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here