Sometimes I feel like Agent K from the Men in Black. You know the part where he says:
Except instead of rallying to save the planet from Death Rays or Plagues we Men in Red seek to stop the political equivalent of giant bugs with freakish strength (aka the Democrats) from using fraudulent statistics to goose over-hyped 'crises' to snaffle ever more money and power from the people and ship it in box car lots to their vile home world, Washington, DC where they use it to commit unspeakable acts of bureaucracy, acts so depraved that propriety prohibits their description on this blog.
Indeed there are three particular statistical plagues or 'memes' roaring their way through the DC hive mind right now. Each of them purports (in the timeless words of top bug Al Gore) to be an 'inconvenient truth' that 'demands action' or life as we know it will end - you know the drill. But in fact all three numbers do no such thing. Indeed, to anyone with common sense and detachment from the eternal buzzing, roaring pressure of the hive, they are obviously ridiculous. Nonetheless these 'statistical memes' are useful in that they give us insight into the peculiar workings of this alien race's brain pods where 2+2=3 if you carry the 1 past a ten year CBO projection window or 3-5=0 utilizing the standard Obamacare 10 years revenue - 6 years costs scoring rule.
So without further ado, I present for your mortification the current Memes infecting the Corporatist horde that rules us.
20% also known as the "One in five"
Which purports to represent the proportion of college women who have been sexually assaulted. A number that exceeds other statistical estimates by the less politically motivated by between 30 and 100 fold. In the reality based community sexual assault and rape are considered the same thing and result in long prison sentences for their perpetrators. Prison sentences that ironically include far more rape than the rapists got in their pre prison raping days. Who says God doesn't have a sense of humor? Or is that god - our glorious uber powerful state? There are so many gods to rule over us these days.
But I digress. Sexual assault at college, at least according to the
survey that came up with this 'truth' defines a wide range of ambiguous behaviors including touching a woman's clothed breast without first explicitly asking: "excuse me, ma'm, may I touch your clothed breast area?". If that's the case them I'm a serial sexual predator. Please President Obama, stop me before I squeeze an un-consent formed boob again.
Of course if President Obama and Majority Leader Reid were honest men they would have to turn themselves in for serial boob squeezing and probably ass slappery as well. And this, of course, would mean they wouldn't be eligible to be the standard bearers for a party who in sexual matters appears to be ruled by a coalition of neo puritan/victorian blue stockings and gay men - who apparently are the only people allowed to have consensual sex without recourse to legal counsel in the entire Demosphere. It's enough to turn any jammie wearing neo marxist Organizing for America homeboy gay. So where did common sense go? Heck if I know.
But the President of the United States and the rest of his under magistrates
publicly say that the 20% is Truth and they believe it. Or at least in its power to frighten young women into pulling the 'D' lever in November. That's why it's so important that these be college women being raped/sexually assaulted/ - ok, ok: boob and clothing touched - because for the gag to work, the perps must be college men and of course we all know that college men are really just white frat boy Republicans. Fear of hordes of 19 year old honky hound dogs in Weejuns keeps the junior blue stockings on the plantation where they belong totin' them collectivist bales and reading execrable feminist poetry to each other.
97% Agree
Which according to our President, represents the proportion of scientists who agree that man caused global warming is real, rampant and 'dangerous'. OK, so you're an adult and someone comes up to you and says "Do this really expensive thing that means that you have to move into a cheaper house, send your kids to worse schools, buy a cheaper car and vacation at home because 97% of us say so. Oh and that money that you don't spend on yourself: a bunch of it is coming to us or to the companies that we consult with or own shares in. Chop-chop, be quick about it - we're all going to die unless you do this now..and I've got to make my plane to Bali for the next global meeting. Business Class. Singapore Airlines. Hyatt Regency Resort." What do you do?
Now if you're an award winning Democrat journalist like, say Nina Burleigh* you would gladly orally pleasure the President who protected you from such a fate, no questions asked - apparently in public God help her. No, this time I mean the
real one because the Federal god will be busy literally 'doing' to us what he will be figuratively 'doing' with her if we were to believe such nonsense.
Because, of course, the 97% is a fraud. First of all the original 'survey' didn't say anything about 'dangerous' climate change - that was Barack Obama's unique intellectual addition to the wheeze. Second of all, the survey that came up with the meme didn't even address the areas where there is disagreement. Andrew Montford explains:
The consensus as described by the survey is virtually meaningless and tells us nothing about the current state of scientific opinion beyond the trivial observation that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet to some unspecified extent. The survey methodology therefore fails to address the key points that are in dispute in the global warming debate." The 'authors' might as well have surveyed the cheese eating practices of scientists and announced that they supported the UN's climate change panel because 97% of them hate that nasty smelling brown Limberger crap.
But even this is too complicated for evaluating the issue when your common sense module is operational. Because there are no topics worth talking about in the scientific community where there is a 97% consensus among informed scientists . Ok, so there might be that level of consensus on the fact that water is composed of 2 hydrogen and one oxygen atoms. Well except for heavy water where it is composed of the hydrogen isotope deuterium and an oxygen atom. So how much money is going into 'proving H2O and 2H2O are the only two waters out there and anyone who says different is a denier'? Ummm how about none? You see, that's what scientific consensus looks like. Everyone agrees and no one is studying the issue because there's nothing to prove. Yet 'climate change' and 'global warming' are the best funded science boodoggles since the invention of the compound boon+doggle. Why do the boffins need so much money to prove the hypothesis if everyone already agrees? If what they know is so 'settled' then there's nothing 'new' to learn that might unsettle it? So why all the heavy lifting? And why the need to loudly and publicly denounce 'deniers'? Nobody denounces water deniers.
Common sense says that the Great AGW Terror stinks to high heaven because of this dichotomy between rhetoric and demonstrated behavior and because everybody involved is making a lot of money off of the 'crisis'.
And common sense would be right.
Yet our First Magistrate and all his magistrate minions understand this and still they
blow numbers like 97% by us on a regular basis seeking to justify sending more boxcar loads of our wealth and autonomy to them so that they can increase their power and glory by 'saving' us.
1% sometimes known as The One Percent
This is perhaps the perfect liberal hive mind meme because it targets the most likely and effective opponents to centralizing all power and wealth in the Uberhive. The argument is that there is a small elite, a 'one percent' if you will that is steadily accumulating more and more of the wealth and power of the nation and therefore the Federal government must step in. Step in to confiscate the wealth of the 1% and instead concentrate it in a single institution in a single city that is already by far the richest, most powerful organization in the history of the world controlled by less than a thousand mostly old lawyers because it would be too dangerous to let that money and power be controlled by 1.5 million people of all walks and faiths and ideologies living all across the country.....hmmm.
OK, so this one doesn't even pass the smell test. And if you broaden your common sense sniffer you start smelling intellectual gangrene everywhere. For example, the so called 1% is in fact a churning chaos whereby
12% of the population spends at least one year at the top. For example, your average grossly overpaid corporate Chieftain only gets to wear the headdress and run the powwows for a handful of years before getting the chop and you only get to sell your successful business or Chiropracty practice once. So 1% is really 12% while the less than a thousand old lawyers aren't turning over nearly as fast, particularly when you take into account all of the Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons, Udalls, and apparently most every urban African American Congressman that has a kid old enough to inherit the seat.
Besides where is it said that taking the wealth and influence of a given 1.5 million successful Americans and centralizing it in the hands of, <1,000 Washington lawyers is
good for equality or diversity or frankly for anything other than the 1,000 power creeps that get to manipulate us with it? If we're
really worried about 'inequality' wouldn't it be better to address the inequality of political power which is far, far more concentrated than economic power (and readily translated into fortunes)? And wouldn't that mean breaking up the grossly obese Federal super state and returning its power and money to the states and the people? Wouldn't that spread the wealth and power around more than sending a bunch more boxloads of jack to the Federal borg?
When I hear statist, centralizing, corporatists squeak about inequality all I see is avarice and greed and lust for power. Why feed their sinful natures? I think we'll get more equality and diversity and justice from letting a wildly fluctuating 1% keep their money and use it as they see fit. I'd much rather see my neighbor have that money than Barack Obama or George W. Bush. This even applies to Warren Buffett who has
poured more than $1.2 billion of his wealth into the most extremist pro abortion organizations he can find. A viler use of wealth I cannot conceive yet I still would rather have that ukulele strumming plutocrat spew his money as he likes rather than give up the benefits of a free people making free choices.
Good News! The demise of the 77%
Yet it's not all darkness in the hive mind. Sometimes a small measure of reality breaks through and hive has to stop buzzing something. This has apparently happened with the ludicrous 77 cents meme whereby it is alleged that poor, put upon women make only 77% of what their male counterparts do. This is such a worn trope that even the drones of the Washington press corps won't buy it anymore. The
mockery of 77 cents is apparently what began Jay Carney's slide into his recent resignation: because when a press secretary spends too many hours telling obvious lies to his target audience, you know that he's done. It just goes to show: if you tell the truth enough, even the hive has to acknowledge it. If you can survive all the stings until they do.
So politicians hype questionable statistics to stampede the common herd in their direction, what's the big deal? Well first of all the President and the Majority leader among others are elected magistrates who have sworn to put the people before their party or career. Yet in each case here, the 'data' that they are presenting to the public, often in official, government funded reports is known to be flawed if not outright fraud. And in the case of rape and the 1% there is a clear intention to divide the nation in destructive ways. If one in five young women are truly victims of sexual assault then that means that young men are far more violent and dangerous than we believed and that justifies all sorts of draconian, punitive policies (including suspending presumption of innocence and traditional due process - rules that the Obama Administration have effectively mandated to all colleges upon pain of losing Federal funding) to keep the 'beasts' in check. To know that the statistic is a lie and still seek to 'rectify' it by oppressing young men is truly and profoundly wicked.
HL Mencken said it best:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."
*Who is a graduate of my fair college, the University of Chicago, which demonstrates just how damaging a U of C education can be to young femininity. Of course Big Dave Brooks also graduated from the U of C showing just how damaging...oh hell, never mind.
