"Don't hurt people and don't take their stuff" - Matt Kibbe

11/28/15

Settled Science?

By Grant Davies

Can science be emotional? You bet it can. Can a dry scientific presentation hold our interest long enough to for us to be gut punched by the uncomfortable notion that we don't always know what we think we know?

As a type 2 diabetic and a person who believes in always questioning forgone conclusions, this one really hit home.

For those inclined to watch I suggest watching all the way to the end. It's worth it.

          

11/25/15

Being Thankful For Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams

Editor's note:
A guest post from our good friend Seth at the OUR DINNER TABLE blog. We have much to be thankful for but here are a few people Seth is thankful for. I wholeheartedly agree.

By Seth

From Thomas Sowell’s latest Random Thoughts column:

Some Americans will never appreciate America, until after they have helped destroy it, and have then begun to suffer the consequences.

Racism is not dead. But it is on life-support, kept alive mainly by the people who use it for an excuse or to keep minority communities fearful or resentful enough to turn out as a voting bloc on election day.

From Walter Williams column, Education Disaster:

Many of these poorly performing youngsters gain college admission. The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education reports, “Every year in the United States, nearly 60 percent of first-year college students discover that, despite being fully eligible to attend college, they are not ready for postsecondary studies.” That means colleges spend billions of dollars on remedial education. Many of the students who enroll in those classes never graduate from college. The fact that many students are not college-ready takes on even greater significance when we consider that many college courses have been dumbed down.

If their books and weekly columns are not a part of your reading list, they should be.

Entry-level college econ classes should be taught from Thomas Sowell’s book, Basic Economics.  It’s much cheaper than the Econ 101 course I took in college and worth more.

I’ve learned more economics from these two gentlemen than I did from my college econ professors and a lot about the world, too.

11/9/15

Trump Sucks....Us In

By Grant Davies

When I first began to write this short lead-in to the video below the word "gullible" was the first one that came to mind for a possible title. I even typed a few possibilities into that space.

I thought about the people who are having a political flirtation with Donald Trump and I thought about how gullible they are. That word is terribly insulting to them and unlikely to get them to change their minds. It also implies that I'm not gullible myself. Of course gullibility is always an unflattering trait found in other people, never ourselves.

So gullibility is out, kinda. The point is, all of us have the potential to be gullible if we are hearing what we want to hear or if someone is telling us something we already think and convincing us they are agreeing with us, instead of us agreeing with them.

Perhaps the word manipulation is a better choice. Yeah, that's it! We are being manipulated. It certainly is no revelation that politicians and the media are trying to manipulate us. Both do, and all the time. So what's the point of the video below? Just this: we are being manipulated by a guy who is exceedingly good at it. And he does so without giving any hint that he is clever enough to do so without us realizing it.

Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) sees it though. And he's going to explain it in this presentation. I learned a few things and I'll bet you will too. Could "The Donald" actually be nominated? I shudder at the notion.

 

One more thing. I haven't written anything for quite a long time. I haven't lost my passion for the freedom philosophy but my passion for sharing it by writing for blogs may have waned. I guess I still have something to say even if I have been confining it to my public Face Book page. Perhaps I'll begin to share it more formally again. If Trump and Obama are qualified to run the country maybe I'm qualified to write this stuff.