Think for yourself, and you won't fall prey to propaganda

I specifically remember this wise old lady saying to me, "Think for yourself!" While she did not expound, in retrospect I'd imagine this was her way of encouraging me not to fall prey to propaganda.

It used to be that the goal of American schools was to teach critical thinking. They would provide for you piece of evidence A and piece of evidence B and let you decide.  This was their way of teaching you how to think for yourself, and therefore survive in the real world.

Today, however, the goal of American schools is to push forth the progressive agenda. So instead of providing evidence, they teach propaganda. For example, instead of teaching showing the evidence and letting the students decide whether or not they believe mankind is responsible for climate change, they just teach that we are the cause of climate change.

It gets to the point that some people are so unable to think for themselves that they read articles like Allister Doyle's article at "Reuters" called "Global Cooling: Antarctic Sea Ice Coverage Continues To Break Records," and they panic.  It's to the point that you almost have to feel sorry for these people.

The article notes:

Six glaciers, eaten away from below by a warming of sea waters around the frozen continent, were flowing fast into the Amundsen Sea, according to the report based partly on satellite radar measurements from 1992 to 2011. Evidence shows 'a large sector of the West Antarctic ice sheet has gone into a state of irreversible retreat', said lead author Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. 

Of course, then you read articles like Michael Bastasch's article in "The Daily Caller" called "West Arctic Ice Coverage Continues to Break Records," and you wonder why people are still so doom and gloom about the environment.

Bastasch's article begins:

Someone let Al Gore know the South Pole isn't melting. Antarctic sea ice coverage reached record levels for April, hitting 3.5 million square miles -- the largest on record. It was a cold summer down in Antarctica, with sea ice coverage growing about 43,500 square miles a day, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)." 

Not much is said about the Reuters story, probably because progressives control most of the media.  So you have young people, people who have been influenced by progressive thinkers their whole lives, writing on their blogs about how the world is coming to an end.  They are literally panicking.  And then you have guys like Doyle writing for Reuters saying, "Calm down, the world is not coming to an end."  But you don't hear anything about this beyond the conservative media.

Just to let people know, the four foot rise in sea levels over the next 100 years is only a guess; it's an estimate; it's a hypothesis; it's a theory.  It in no way means the world is coming to an end, and it in no way means there is truth to the global cooling/ global warming/ climate change theory.

A friend of mine asked why it is that people would want you to believe in global cooling/ global warming/ climate change when so much evidence shows it is not true.

The answer is: because they have so much invested into it.

So instead of accepting their theory is not true, instead of saying "mankind is not destroying the planet, they just change the name of their theory.  It was called global cooling in the 1970s, global warming in the 1990s, and climate change in the 2000s.

Progressives are known for changing names as people catch on to fallacies. For instance, once socialism developed a bad name in the 1930s, so they called themselves progressives.  Progressives developed a bad name in the 1950s, so they called themselves liberals.  Now people are catching on that liberalism is the same as socialism, so they are again calling themselves progressives.

Could you imagine what would happen to Al Gore if he said, "I'm sorry folks. I was wrong about global warming all these years?"  His career would be over. His credibility would be lost forever, or so he would think. I actually think it would improve his credibility, as it would show he's willing to change his opinion as new facts are learned.

But there continue to be many politicians and corporations who make a ton of money off people believing in global warming.  This fallacy also gives progressives an excuse to increase regulations and raise taxes.

Now, I have all the respect in the world for people who choose to believe in all this stuff about climate change, so long as they make their decision based on a review of the facts and not through propaganda.

So, in order to prevent that from happening, parents must encourage their kids to think for themselves, considering most teachers and journalists have already fallen for the propaganda and are repeating it to our kids.  We must use words such as, "Think for yourself!"

Further reading or viewing:

• Watch: Opinion Duel: Climate change
• French Foreign minister says we have only 500 days left to save the climate

Is thinking now obsolete?

One thing missing on this blog is someone to counter my arguments.  Yet in the meantime, Thomas Sowell seems to ring some of the same themes we argue here in his latest column "Is thinking now obsolete?"

He wrote.

Some have said that we are living in a post-industrial era, while others have said that we are living in a post-racial era. But growing evidence suggests that we are living in a post-thinking era.

Many people in Europe and the Western Hemisphere are staging angry protests against Israel’s military action in Gaza. One of the talking points against Israel is that far more Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli military attacks than the number of Israeli civilians killed by the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel that started this latest military conflict.

Are these protesters aware that vastly more German civilians were killed by American bombers attacking Nazi Germany during World War II than American civilians killed in the United States by Hitler’s forces?

Talk-show host Geraldo Rivera says that there is no way Israel is winning the battle for world opinion. But Israel is trying to win the battle for survival, while surrounded by enemies. Might that not be more important?

Has any other country, in any other war, been expected to keep the enemy’s civilian casualties no higher than its own civilian casualties? The idea that Israel should do so did not originate among the masses but among the educated intelligentsia.

In an age when scientists are creating artificial intelligence, too many of our educational institutions seem to be creating artificial stupidity.
It is much the same story in our domestic controversies. We have gotten so intimidated by political correctness that our major media outlets dare not call people who immigrate to this country illegally “illegal immigrants.”

Geraldo Rivera has denounced the Drudge Report for carrying news stories that show some of the negative consequences and dangers from allowing vast numbers of youngsters to enter the country illegally and be spread across the country by the Obama administration.

Some of these youngsters are already known to be carrying lice and suffering from disease. Since there have been no thorough medical examinations of most of them, we have no way of knowing whether, or how many, are carrying deadly diseases that will spread to American children when these unexamined young immigrants enter schools across the country.

The attack against Matt Drudge has been in the classic tradition of demagogues. It turns questions of fact into questions of motive. Geraldo accuses Drudge of trying to start a “civil war.”

Back when masses of immigrants from Europe were entering this country, those with dangerous diseases were turned back from Ellis Island. Nobody thought they had a legal or a moral “right” to be in America or that it was mean or racist not to want our children to catch their diseases.

This article impresses on our theme that the media should look at both sides of the coin, rather than just the one.