50 major Rush Limbo sponsors go silent

[Byker]

We need to end the liberal bullying epidemic. 20th century history has
proven that the liberal bullying epidemic is far more deadly than the
childhood obesity epidemic.

A couple of months ago, a petition bearing more than 110,000 signatures was
delivered to the Washington Post, demanding a ban on any article questioning
global warming. It perfectly illustrates the argument that the Left is
entering a new phase of ideological agitation -- no longer trying to win
the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse
any and all opposition.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
110K Call on The Washington Post to End Climate Change Denial in its
Editorial Page

February 20, 2014

WASHINGTON, DC-This afternoon, activists delivered a petition signed by
110,000 people to the editors of The Washington Post, calling on the
newspaper to implement a policy that refuses to publish editorial content
denying climate change. The Post routinely prints inaccuracies on climate
change and is home to prominent climate change deniers George Will, Charles
Krauthammer, and the Volokh Conspiracy blog.

Sponsored by Forecast the Facts and CREDO, the petition urges the Post to
follow the The Los Angeles Times' lead by refusing to publish letters to the
editor that deny climate change. However, the Post has yet to extend this
policy.

"Every scientific academy in the world accepts that humans are warming the
planet, yet the editors of The Washington Post still provide a platform to
climate change deniers," said Brant Olson, campaign director of Forecast the
Facts. "There ought to be rigorous standards at the Post disallowing
editorial content featuring misinformation, especially on an issue as
important as climate change."

In recent years, its website has invested in a fact-checking apparatus that
includes "The Fact Checker" page, maintained by Glen Kessler, and "Truth
Teller," a system to fact check speeches in real time. However, the Post no
longer has an ombudsman on staff or reader representative.

Despite the fact the Post considers itself a home to objective news, it
still fails to fact check opinion pieces including climate change denial.
For instance, on July 5, 2013 the Post published a letter to the editor
entitled "Obama Takes Climate Change Rhetoric Too Far" by Tony Strom, who
wrote, "Ask 100 scientists to quantify the human effect on 'climate change'
and you'll get 100 answers. This is not science; this is opinion."

In actuality, only 24 of the 13,950 peer-reviewed scientific articles on
climate change (published between January 1991 and November 2012) reject
man-made climate change. According to the National Academy of Sciences, 97
percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends from the
past century are likely due to human activities.

"Newspapers and other media outlets play a critical role in our political
process by providing a check to unscrupulous politicians, corporations and
others who intentionally lie to the populace. But "by 'reporting both sides'
and giving climate change deniers space to promote lies, this particular
enclave of the news media is not doing its jobs of informing the public,"
said Corporate Action Network Co-founder Brian Young, who started a petition
with CREDO.

The petitions are available here:

http://act.forecastthefacts.org/sign/tell_newspapers_stop_publishing_climate_denial/

http://www.credomobilize.com/petitions/tell-the-washington-post-and-new-york-times-don-t-promote-climate-change-denial



http://forecastthefacts.org/press/releases/2014/2/20/110k-call-washington-post-end-climate-change-denia/

[Mr. B1ack]

Post by Byker

We need to end the liberal bullying epidemic. 20th century history has
proven that the liberal bullying epidemic is far more deadly than the
childhood obesity epidemic.

A couple of months ago, a petition bearing more than 110,000 signatures was
delivered to the Washington Post, demanding a ban on any article questioning
global warming. It perfectly illustrates the argument that the Left is
entering a new phase of ideological agitation -- no longer trying to win
the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse
any and all opposition.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
110K Call on The Washington Post to End Climate Change Denial in its
Editorial Page
February 20, 2014
WASHINGTON, DC-This afternoon, activists delivered a petition signed by
110,000 people to the editors of The Washington Post, calling on the
newspaper to implement a policy that refuses to publish editorial content
denying climate change.

How come the "liberals" are the only ones using
such pressure tactics ??? If they're "too undignified"
for non-libs then the non-libs are gonna LOSE.

[BeamMeUpScotty]

Post by Mr. B1ack

Post by Byker

We need to end the liberal bullying epidemic. 20th century history has
proven that the liberal bullying epidemic is far more deadly than the
childhood obesity epidemic.

A couple of months ago, a petition bearing more than 110,000 signatures was
delivered to the Washington Post, demanding a ban on any article questioning
global warming. It perfectly illustrates the argument that the Left is
entering a new phase of ideological agitation -- no longer trying to win
the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse
any and all opposition.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
110K Call on The Washington Post to End Climate Change Denial in its
Editorial Page
February 20, 2014
WASHINGTON, DC-This afternoon, activists delivered a petition signed by
110,000 people to the editors of The Washington Post, calling on the
newspaper to implement a policy that refuses to publish editorial content
denying climate change.

How come the "liberals" are the only ones using
such pressure tactics ??? If they're "too undignified"
for non-libs then the non-libs are gonna LOSE.

The Church tried to control Science and was determined to jail the
people telling the truth for heresy......


How'd that work out for the Church?


we can all see who's closed minded.

[bleak_fire_]

on the great fire of Sat, 12 Apr 2014 23:01:39 -0400, BeamMeUpScotty leapt

Post by BeamMeUpScotty

Post by Byker

We need to end the liberal bullying epidemic. 20th century history
has proven that the liberal bullying epidemic is far more deadly than
the childhood obesity epidemic.

A couple of months ago, a petition bearing more than 110,000
signatures was delivered to the Washington Post, demanding a ban on
any article questioning global warming. It perfectly illustrates the
argument that the Left is entering a new phase of ideological
agitation -- no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate
altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Post by BeamMeUpScotty

Post by Byker
110K Call on The Washington Post to End Climate Change Denial in its
Editorial Page
February 20, 2014
WASHINGTON, DC-This afternoon, activists delivered a petition signed
by 110,000 people to the editors of The Washington Post, calling on
the newspaper to implement a policy that refuses to publish editorial
content denying climate change.

How come the "liberals" are the only ones using such pressure
tactics ??? If they're "too undignified"
for non-libs then the non-libs are gonna LOSE.

The Church tried to control Science and was determined to jail the
people telling the truth for heresy......
How'd that work out for the Church?
we can all see who's closed minded.

Except the Church learned from its mistakes and changed. Modern liberals
have yet to accept that communist re-education tactics don't work.

[Byker]

Post by bleak_fire_
Except the Church learned from its mistakes and changed.

Too bad the Muslim world has yet to experience its own Renaissance,
Reformation, and Age of Enlightenment. It's still stuck in the Middle Ages,
about where Europe was c.1400.

If I remember right, there was a great astronomer named Ulug Beq of
Samarkand, who predated Galileo by fifty years, and he even had an
observatory. But his observations about the universe clashed with the
Islamic clerics and so the mullahs had him murdered. It's been downhill
ever since.

At least in Europe science and religion were able to split apart and go
their separate paths, otherwise we too would have been forever stuck in a
medieval time warp. In Islam there is only one path, and as long as that
idea persists, the Muslim world will forever be an impovershed economic
backwater. The one shining exception is Indonesia, but it's essentially a
secular state that permits Islam as long as it doesn't turn fanatical.

[Mr. B1ack]

Post by Byker

Post by bleak_fire_
Except the Church learned from its mistakes and changed.

Too bad the Muslim world has yet to experience its own Renaissance,
Reformation, and Age of Enlightenment. It's still stuck in the Middle Ages,
about where Europe was c.1400.
If I remember right, there was a great astronomer named Ulug Beq of
Samarkand, who predated Galileo by fifty years, and he even had an
observatory. But his observations about the universe clashed with the
Islamic clerics and so the mullahs had him murdered. It's been downhill
ever since.

Islam expanded and flourished ... for a time. When that
time was over it turned in on itself, fragmented, became
simpler and more fundamentalist. Western/euro science
and culture will follow suit, just a bit time delayed.

[Byker]

Post by Mr. B1ack
Islam expanded and flourished ... for a time. When that
time was over it turned in on itself, fragmented, became
simpler and more fundamentalist. Western/euro science
and culture will follow suit, just a bit time delayed.

Here's a little something that I posted to all the dot-islam NGs about ten
years ago, under the title "Why the Islamic world is so primitive". All the
links have since gone dead.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Want to know why the Arab world is so fucked up, and will STAY fucked up?
I'll let an Arab explain it. It takes about three minutes to read:

http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020909/asalem.html

These two paragraphs in particular:

*In my part of the world, the Arab Middle East, a great tragedy results from
our governments' well-intentioned attempts to cure society of extremism
through education. These leaders, however, don't teach what they should to
produce the values they want. They seek moderation and enforce piety. They
seek citizens who value life, yet their school curriculums exalt the value
of science and ignore philosophy and history and the liberal, humanistic
values they embody. That is why those who excel in such a system are no less
immune to the call of extremism.

*Our governments assume that people need to understand Islam in its purest
form to stay religiously moderate. The result is the mass production of true
believers, not good citizens. Because people initially welcome the imposed
piety but then gradually realize it doesn't equip them to meet the
challenges of getting through life, life becomes a morbid burden. To shake
off this burden, some of them, usually young men, can't wait for natural
death and decide instead to take a short cut to heaven.*

Yeah, man, bowing toward Mecca five times a day and doing anything and
everything according to holy scriptures works in a medievel society, but the
rest of something called the REAL WORLD is in the 21st Century, and
adherents to the will of Allah are utterly and totally unprepared to deal
with it. Once upon a time we in the West were in the Middle Ages, but then
the Renaissance and the Reformation sent science and religion down their
separate paths. The Islamic world had a great astronomer -- I think his
name was Ulug Beq of Samarkand -- who predated Galileo, but he was put to
death for his *blasphemy* and Europe all but left the Muslim world in the
dust. It's been that way ever since.

*Despite their vast oil reserves, the combined GDP of all 22 Arab countries
is less than that of Spain's. In other words, for the equivalent of
one-third of the cash traded on the currency markets daily, you could buy
everything produced in the entire Arab world in a whole year.*
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-lacey060503.asp


Dubai's Crown Prince Shaikh Muhammad bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, in a statement
read out to the conference, declared that the Arab world must *raise
standards of accounting and transparency and move aggressively to identify
business opportunities if it is to come up to speed and win foreign
investment*. Investment opportunities, he said, *must be nurtured*,
commenting that Arab nations were *lagging sorely behind their potential*.
This potential lies in their natural resources, but also in tourism, and in
the fact that their combined population exceeds 300 million. The 22 Arab
countries, he said, have a GDP of only $700 billion, and in 2001 attracted
less than one percent of the total global amount of $735 billion direct
foreign investment.
http://www.saudiembassy.net/press_release/03-spa/05-04-Arab.htm


State of the Arab World
http://www.undp.org/rbas/ahdr/

This is a very revealing (and very long, about 500 pages) document, *Arab
Human Development Report 2002*, put out by the UN and released in Cairo. It
took about 18 months to produce and it is surprisingly self-critical
considering that it was produced by about fifty Arab scholars. Some amazing
facts include the following:

-- Circa 23% of the population (of 65 million Arabs) is illiterate,
two-thirds of those women

-- *Governments in the Arab world are legal, but their legitimacy is
questionable and that cannot be sustained*

-- Spain's GDP is greater than all of the 22 Arab countries combined

-- Of the Arab youth aged between 13 and 20 polled by the report, fully 50%
want to emigrate to the West (especially Britain and US)

-- Only 1.2% of Arabs can access a computer, and half that use the internet;
this is below sub-Saharan Africa

-- The Arab world translates about 300 books annually, one fifth of the
number that Greece translates

-- Scientific expenditures in the Arab world was less than 0.5% of the GDP
in 1996, lower than Cuba

http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/update/02-07-18.html

The report makes clear that there is no freedom, no opportunity, much
corruption, and excuses a-plenty ---

[Mr. B1ack]

Post by Byker

Post by Mr. B1ack
Islam expanded and flourished ... for a time. When that
time was over it turned in on itself, fragmented, became
simpler and more fundamentalist. Western/euro science
and culture will follow suit, just a bit time delayed.

Here's a little something that I posted to all the dot-islam NGs about ten
years ago, under the title "Why the Islamic world is so primitive". All the
links have since gone dead.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Want to know why the Arab world is so fucked up, and will STAY fucked up?
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101020909/asalem.html
*In my part of the world, the Arab Middle East, a great tragedy results from
our governments' well-intentioned attempts to cure society of extremism
through education. These leaders, however, don't teach what they should to
produce the values they want. They seek moderation and enforce piety. They
seek citizens who value life, yet their school curriculums exalt the value
of science and ignore philosophy and history and the liberal, humanistic
values they embody. That is why those who excel in such a system are no less
immune to the call of extremism.
*Our governments assume that people need to understand Islam in its purest
form to stay religiously moderate. The result is the mass production of true
believers, not good citizens. Because people initially welcome the imposed
piety but then gradually realize it doesn't equip them to meet the
challenges of getting through life, life becomes a morbid burden. To shake
off this burden, some of them, usually young men, can't wait for natural
death and decide instead to take a short cut to heaven.*

Modern Islam has problems ... no question. As to whether
it CAN get past them is not clear at all. Islam started as a
fundamentalist flame - much as western Christianity - and
then moderated once it was widespread and secure. It was
during that period that Islamic scholarship blossomed. Then
Islamic cohesion came apart, the "empire" wasn't returning
its previous profits (fiscal & intellectual), infidels were
applying pressure ... an implosion resulted. Back to the
more primitive version of the religion, of civics too.

The Christians started pretty fundy, moderated a little, then
were faced with the new sciences, the new politics and the
protestants. The HRCC remained pretty hard-ass and corrupt.
The real 'advances' came from the protestants. Oddly now,
these days, certain protestant sects are the ones leading
the charge for fundamentalism ... is it a sign that the west
and Christianity are beginning to implode like old Islam ?

Seems like when the money runs low, when cohesion
begins to fail, when the future doesn't look as bright as
it used to .... then attitudes change, a disaster/bunker
mentality takes hold and a lot of people switch to the
fundy point of view.

So, regardless the specific religion or ideology, is
moderation and high-culture a "fair-weather" thing,
something that quickly vanishes when things don't
look so sunny ?

As for Islam ... it WILL be around for a thousand years,
no question. It's a strong 'meme'. But a "better" Islam,
like in the golden era .... nope. Confusion will continue,
the oil money will gradually run out - and not be replaced
by other sources of income - and it will be "asian" cultures
that will be the ones to excel.

[RichTrasky]

Post by bleak_fire_
on the great fire of Sat, 12 Apr 2014 23:01:39 -0400, BeamMeUpScotty leapt

Post by BeamMeUpScotty
The Church tried to control Science and was determined to jail the
people telling the truth for heresy......
How'd that work out for the Church?
we can all see who's closed minded.

Except the Church learned from its mistakes and changed. Modern liberals
have yet to accept that communist re-education tactics don't work.

No, they were FORCED to change.

[Byker]

Post by RichTrasky
.
No, they were FORCED to change.

It's a good thing they were. Once science and religion went their separate
ways in Europe, all other civilizations were soon left in the dust.

From the fourteenth until the twentieth century, almost all important global
advances in mathematics were European. I would be tempted to say that
European leadership was stronger in mathematics than in almost any other
scholarly discipline. Perhaps the simplest explanation for why the
Scientific Revolution happened in Europe is because the book of nature is
written in the language of mathematics, as Galileo once famously stated, and
Europeans did more than any other civilization to develop or discover the
vocabulary of this language.

The introduction of the telescope was a major watershed in the history of
astronomy, but we should remember that it alone did not create modern
astronomy. The birth of astrophysics in the late nineteenth century came
through the combination of the telescope with photography and spectroscopy,
all inventions that were exclusively made in Europe. Spectroscopy could not
be developed until chemistry as a scientific discipline had been formed,
which only happened in Europe. New fuels, engines and materials later made
space travel possible. Asian rockets were powered by gunpowder and weighed a
couple of kilograms at most. They could not have challenged the Earth's
gravity and explored the Solar System. The Saturn V rocket that launched
Apollo 11 on its journey to the Moon in 1969 used liquid hydrogen and
oxygen, elements which had been discovered in Europe. The very concept of
gravity, too, was developed only in Europe. The exploration of the Solar
System and the universe at large was to an overwhelming degree made possible
by a single civilization alone, the Western one.

What separates the West from cultures like China is the idea of progress. I
recommend "History of the Idea of Progress" by Robert Nisbet (1980). The
Chinese education system was oriented toward the study of the Confucian
classics so students could write "eight-legged essays" about them. There
there was no institution equivalent to a university where original research
was prized. The best a scientist could hope for was to create a gewgaw that
would amuse the emperor.

[Mr. B1ack]

On Sat, 12 Apr 2014 23:01:39 -0400, BeamMeUpScotty

Post by BeamMeUpScotty

Post by Mr. B1ack

Post by Byker

We need to end the liberal bullying epidemic. 20th century history has
proven that the liberal bullying epidemic is far more deadly than the
childhood obesity epidemic.

A couple of months ago, a petition bearing more than 110,000 signatures was
delivered to the Washington Post, demanding a ban on any article questioning
global warming. It perfectly illustrates the argument that the Left is
entering a new phase of ideological agitation -- no longer trying to win
the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse
any and all opposition.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
110K Call on The Washington Post to End Climate Change Denial in its
Editorial Page
February 20, 2014
WASHINGTON, DC-This afternoon, activists delivered a petition signed by
110,000 people to the editors of The Washington Post, calling on the
newspaper to implement a policy that refuses to publish editorial content
denying climate change.

How come the "liberals" are the only ones using
such pressure tactics ??? If they're "too undignified"
for non-libs then the non-libs are gonna LOSE.

The Church tried to control Science and was determined to jail the
people telling the truth for heresy......
How'd that work out for the Church?

Extremely well actually, for centuries ....