Year end usually means a wrap-up but I really dislike retreading the same roads and rehashing old news. Still, I can maybe get one person to think outside the box.

The trouble with our liberal friends
is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just
that they know so much that isn’t so.
–Ronald Reagan

University of Vermont professor Henry Perkins’ eugenics courses and his “Vermont Eugenics Survey” — well supported by his own empirical evidence — led directly to the Vermont sterilization law of 1931. Vermont’s 253 sterilizations on poor, rural folks as well as Abenaki Indians, French-Canadians and others put that state only half way up the scale of eugenics providers nationwide. Millions of true believers had blind faith in eugenics.

An investigation by the Wall Street Journal earlier this month reported that “lobotomy’s most dogged salesman,” the late Dr. Walter Freeman, performed some 3,500 frontal lobotomies during the 1940s and 1950s including Rosemary Kennedy’s at the age of 23. He was so confident that he once demonstrated his procedure by hammering an icepick into each eye socket of a patient and “toggling” the picks around certain that he was severing the brain tissue “correctly.” Millions of true believers had blind faith in the science of lobotomies.

Astrology has shown through extensive experimentation that the positions of celestial bodies influences, divines, or predicts personality, human activities, and other terrestrial matters. Millions of true believers still have blind faith in the science of Astrology.

Three stories from Facebook this week illustrate my point about blind faith.

“OMG,” my friend Ashley Proctor wrote. “We all must come to the realization that eating anything out of the Pacific Ocean (let alone swimming in it) is a thing in the past.”

She was responding to the headline, All Bluefin Tuna Caught In California Are Radioactive.

“It’s never going away,” she wrote. “Not in our lifetime. Not ever. WE SCREWED UP THE PACIFIC OCEAN, people. We screwed up the OCEAN.”

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I basked (briefly to be sure) when one of my teaching moments appeared to bear fruit: Dr. Jon Friar, my earnest, apparently data driven liberal friend wrote in a Global Warming thread, “This blind race toward ignorance is especially galling when it’s run by people like Dick, who really should know better.” Unfortunately, that and the hope “that reason and facts will convince and even convert, when in fact they don’t do either” have been my own arguments about Dr. Friar and his friends for some years now.

“A more likely truth is that they’re simply feeding your words back to you as a (pretty decent) troll,” Liz Arden said.

~~~
“Climate scientists got their funding from the NSF and NASA,” Dr. Friar said. “You can’t get better data than that.”

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“Congratulations, Dick!” my friend Lee Bruhl wrote in response to Delay Is Not Working. “You have joined a few million other Americans in signing up for more extensive medical insurance than you had before and you did it through Healthcare.gov!”

Our liberal friends obviously take only what confirms their prejudices out of any report.

Delay Is Not Working as well as the bulk of data-driven reports (including mine) about health care reform show that it is neither reformed nor viable. It does pointedly mention that I was never able to make Healthcare.gov work and that I “signed up” via three long phone calls.

Here’s the bulletin: A few million Americans have indeed signed up for new policies under the mandate of Obamacare. Most are the people like me whose policies the ACA forced insurers to cancel. And it appears that fewer Americans will be insured as of January 1 than are insured today. Still, millions of true believers have blind faith in Obamacare.

The liberal argument for Anthropogenic Global Warming goes something like this: “Man causes it so we have to uncause it. I know this because noted scientists like Al Gore told me so.”

That same liberal argument trots out a bunch of data that shows global temps have risen and some computer predictions say that our continued existence will drive its continued rise. “The science is fixed,” they say in contradiction to the actual scientific method. In fact, when other scientists offer data like solar activity that disputes their flat-earth belief, our liberal friends put their thumbs in their ears.

Here’s the bulletin: the Earth heats and the Earth cools. Since we have both limited resources and limited political will, it would be a whole lot smarter to devote those scarce resources to adapting to the changes than to marketing a costly political measure built on junk science. Still, millions of true believers have blind faith in Global Warming and the idea that we can fix it just by eliminating man’s influence.

The liberal argument for research funding goes something like this: “If the government says so, it must be impartial.” Interestingly, many of the scientists studying or performing phrenology, eugenics, lobotomies, and tobacco did so with government funding.

Here’s the bulletin (this is an analogy): Bernie Sanders likes us to believe the PAC campaign funds he raises from unions and American Crystal Sugar are somehow less corrupting than PAC campaign funds his opponents get from ExxonMobil. Still, millions of true believers have blind faith in scientists on the government payroll. As long as those moneys are for a “good” cause.

The radioactive liberal argument starts from a report that “every bluefin tuna tested in the waters off California has shown to be contaminated with radiation that originated in Fukushima. Every single one.”

Never mind that most reports show the Fukushima radiation in Pacific tuna is equal to about one twentieth of a banana (the Forbes article is most readable). Doesn’t matter. Millions of true believers have blind faith that “We screwed up the OCEAN.”

Here’s the bulletin: OMG! WE SCREWED UP BANANAs people! We screwed up BANANAS. I’ll never eat fruit again!

One last try.

The scientific method is the technique true scientists use to investigate phenomena, acquire new knowledge, and (this is key) correct previous theories. Scientists systematically observe, measure, experiment, and test, their hypotheses. Most importantly, scientists support a theory as long as they can confirm its predictions but they challenge a theory when even one experiment or bit of data proves its predictions false.

The political scientists of the liberal left have shown that they find a theory like radioactive tuna, find some data like periodically rising temperatures that supports the theory, and declare the theory fact as they do with the “success” of the ACA in reducing the cost of health care. Then they drink the Kool-Aid.

I’ll never eat fruit again!

Happy New Year.