Down with Polls and the lying Pollsters who make them!

 Posted by at 18:09  Down with
Jul 292014
 

Polls are everywhere these days.

Everywhere you look there are polls telling you what other people think and suggesting that you do likewise. They always look so trustworthy and reliable. But how good are they really and why should I care what they say? What am I? A lemming!

I’ve always been suspicious of poll numbers. It’s not that I don’t understand how numbers work. I’ve studied sampling and statistics and I believe that the theories pan out, so long as they really do what they are supposed to. But how can you really know?

What I’m suspicious of is who the polling companies actually call and whether the people they finally talk to bear any resemblance to the general population. There are many ways to cook the books and steer the conclusions your way by manipulating the sample. But even if the polling company is honest and unbiased, I still was uncomfortable with polls. What really gave me pause was that with all the polls being conducted over my lifetime, never did one of them call me.

Sure the sample numbers are small and it’s a big country we live in but not only have I never received a call from a pollster, I don’t know anybody who ever received a call from a pollster. Despite seeing representatives of polling organization on TV from time to time, I have no evidence that proves to my satisfaction that polls are real. For all I know they may be just as phony as the moon landing. From my perspective it is just as likely that polls are nothing but an elaborate hoax on the general public, intended not to inform but to manipulate behavior.

I think its a scam!

I can’t help wondering if polls are nothing more than a subversive scam on the general public. Behind the facade of statistical theory and polling questions is there nothing more complicated than hard core marketing designed to manipulate the minds and hearts of the unsuspecting public. Inquiring minds want to know.

After all, who can really know for sure that 37% of right handed voters in southern North Carolina really prefer candidate X? And what happens if 15% of those right handed voters in southern North Carolina lie? Supposedly from statistical theory this all washes out so long as you ask enough people but I still wonder how rigorously the machinery works in the back room- or if it is working at all. Who would know?

I used to be more tolerant.

In my youth, I was more respectful about our institutions. They were good enough for my parents generation, surely they would be good enough for mine. Something happens when you get old, however. I find myself more suspicious and less charitable. Part of it may be that I am now older than the people running these institutions. I can no longer make the excuse that they have more life experience or even wisdom. I flat our don’t trust those young whippersnappers. It’s pretty clear that they don”t have any mysterious wisdom and maturity.  And nothing suggests that they have my well-being in mind.

So I’m just not willing to grant any respect to polling numbers anymore. I don’t believe them. I don’t trust the integrity of the people running them and I absolutely and categorically hate the organizations that hire the pollsters to create lies, confusion and misdirection for the voters. So much for credibility.

There are liars, damned liars and statisticians but worst of all there are pollsters.

The Jury is back and I’m Outraged!

 Posted by at 18:09  rants
Jul 292014
 
Women at work on bomber, Douglas Aircraft Comp...

Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

It’s unconscionable!

I just heard the clerk for the Casey Anthony trial read the verdict. It’s an outrage. I’m livid. It’s hard to get control of my emotions. It’s a travesty- willful and shameless sabotage of something vital and important to American life. It sticks in my craw and gives me pains in my gut. I just plain can’t get over it.

It’s not what you think. I have an opinion about Casey- who doesn’t after all these years of emotional and highly biased coverage. I have to confess that I was surprised at the verdict because Nancy Grace and the legal pundits had tried and convicted Casey many times over the last few years. That’s the American courts system for you.  Experts don’t count!  The people have the last word.  Experts don’t determine the verdicts. It’s real people. No other aspect of American governance is so down to earth.

We don’t even get real people to represent us in government these days. Everybody has to be a professional to even make the ballot and that means that representing real people is their number two or maybe three priority. But I digress. I was surprised at the verdict but that wasn’t what made me outraged. Casey in jail or Casey writing a book about her travails, life will go on. I don’t think she will be making a career of getting pregnant and killing the resulting children. My outrage is from something else entirely. What’s got me outraged today is the willful destruction of the English language by political correctness. If I hear the word foreperson one more time, I may go postal.

Who’s protecting our language?

Foreman is a time honored word in the English language. It means, very simply, the person in charge. Yes, it’s true that in the past, most of the time the people in charge were men. Then came the feminist revolution and white became black and night became day. I don’t want to give those looney women a bit of credit for changing the world for the better. Long before I ever heard of Germain Greer or any of those other bad tempered, ugly and talentless women, real women of talent were changing American life by using their talents and abilities to occupy positions of power and influence. Those ugly, unloved and talentless feminists merely followed their ascent and claimed credit creating a lot of collateral damage along the way.  And men were too embarrassed for them (and a bit cowed at their crude, shrill attacks) to point it out. Sometimes, chivalry may be misplaced.

Real women of talent didn’t need artifice and manipulation to make their way. They could cope with generic pronouns which as I have discussed elsewhere hurt men far more than they hurt women. They understand that a foreman can be of either sex, just like a congressman, assemblyman or councilman. But ugly, talentless and unloved woman have campaigned tirelessly for the ridiculous depersonification of pronouns that made me so outraged today. I can’t count the number of times today my ears were stabbed with that terrible made-up word, foreperson. I need my ears washed out to remove the irritation.

Protect the endangered pronouns!

How anybody can believe that the destruction of the English language is in anyway justified is beyond my understanding. It is meaningless manipulation, touchy feely  rather than substantial. And it is all because ugly, talentless and unlovable women with nothing else to justify their existence invented feminism and wrecked this societal damage on modern life.

There isn’t much I can do to repair this damage which has driven the sexes apart and destroyed the harmony of family life but there is one small thing I can do. I will never let the word foreperson escape my mouth. Feminists have done great damage to society. They have been given credit for doing good which I believe is competely unjustified. Time will probably correct their ego inflicted stupidity as people return to what works instead of what they would like to think works. Language, however,  doesn’t recover so easily from disaster. The damage to our pronouns may not so easily be corrected . Please join me.  Take up my cause and vow that you will never use politically correct pronouns. Make foreperson a four letter work in your household.

 

Down with responsibility- It just doesn’t pay any more!

 Posted by at 18:09  Down with
Jul 292014
 
Modern Day Hobos sleeping at the Hobo Jungle o...

Image via Wikipedia

I was watching TV last night.

Yeah, I know that it makes my brain rot but sometimes after a hard day trying to make my computer behave and write coherent sentences, it’s great to throw off the mental activity and watch a mindless crime show. This one started off simply enough but it soon got more complicated. It was about some evil middle class home owners who murder homeless people and their law student enabler.  This enabler who took time from his law classes to work at a homeless soup kitchen (in Malibu, where else) was suing the homeowners because they were mean to the homeless . (Naturally it is mean to expect the homeless to obey the laws and, of course it annoys the law enforcement community no end to be expected to enforce them.)   Everybody loves sweet homeless people and hates the money grubbing middle class. Right? Naturally the poor homeless people were just trying to get by. It was a hard life because once they finished eating at their ocean front food kitchen, they had to climb the hill to their sylvan homeless camp and darn if there wasn’t a small subdivision in the way.

Bummer!

No matter that they were breaking the laws by camping in the woods without permits. They have rights , you know. They were just doing what God made them to do. Rousseau would be proud. It was the homeowners who were evil. It made me realize that this whole country is going down the tubes when the popular media glorifies lawless, irresponsible behavior and demonizes hardworking people who actually work to earn a living, own property, pay taxes and raise their kids to do the same. What are they thinking?

Nobody rewards responsibility these days.

According to this TV show , those of us with money should pay $50k a year to send our kids to law school so that they can make the world safe for free spirits who take responsibility for nothing. My wife was incensed and excused herself to read in bed. “Stick around ,” I urged her. “You know its only fiction.” At this point the district attorney was emotional as he described the rage of ordinary middle class people seeing someone defecate on their yard. His condescension was unmistakable. “How dare they expect homeless people to behave responsibly?” he seemed to say. Elected public servants demonizing the people that pay them to maintain civilization. That has to be fiction, right?

Well I’m not so sure.

California is bankrupt, spending way more money than it takes in. The tax burden in California is one of the highest in the nation. You would think that this would provide plenty of money for government services but our elected leaders tell us it’s not true. It turns out that we spend too much money on law enforcement and public safety so to balance the budget, we either need to pay more taxes or wait two days for a fire truck or the 911 operator to answer. It seems that public safety is expendable. Government’s real function of to take care of people who can’t or won’t take care of themselves and demean the folks who do. The little secret is out. The state is run to make life pleasant for homeless people and other folks who refuse to take responsibility for their lives.

Responsibility: the new silent minority.

The only people making any effort to solve this problem are the ever shrinking minority of people who actually earn a living . And what do they get for this selfless act? They get the pleasure of being taxed into poverty just so the irresponsible can live the lifestyle they want. I don’t get it. Why do we bother? We are still living in the past, remembering the old days of responsible government, working hard and getting ahead. We can still remember when taxes were only 20% instead of the 60% today and the world was safe, the schools were good and you never saw homeless people defecating in public spaces or in your own yard.

Why be responsible?  It doesn’t make any sense.

There is no reason for a reasonable person to behave responsibly today. Private property is a burden with few benefits and many problems. Working is slavery and then you get most of your income taxed away. When you complain, the government tells you that you are heartless. Who is the government to tell us anything? In the old days they did what we told them to do and the Constitution wasn’t a living document to be rewritten by mealy mouthed statist judges. This isn’t the America that offered endless opportunity and freedom to be whoever you want to be. This is a gulag where people who try to be responsible are beat up and sucked dry so that the free and irresponsible can live without making any effort.

I didn’t sleep very well last night.

Maybe those computer problems weren’t so bad.

 

On Hospital gowns and pain meds:

 Posted by at 18:09  Coot Smirk, principles
Jul 292014
 
Adequate ventilation has also been regarded as...

Image via Wikipedia

Hello all.  You may be asking yourself why Justin is writing this post instead of Bob.  Ok it is more likely you didn’t even notice until I brought it up.  Anyway, our good friend Bob has been having some rather serious health issues as of late and spent this past weekend in the hospital.

These are the times people hope they have the best nurses who are skilled and who have taken online nursing classes.

The details are his to share but let me say that in the medical field, even the most simple and straightforward of things can be the most dangerous.  He spent the weekend in the hospital and should be out soon for some recovery before he goes back in again.  He will be spending far too much time, heck he has spent far too much time in hospitals already.

He told us he took his laptop with him to keep up on what is going on, but, I know how hard it was to use the computer when I was a visitor in the hospital with my daughter, much less the patient in a morphine daze.

Anyway, Bob being Bob, I know he will try to log on and see where the internet is leaving him so I would ask all of you reading this post right here, right now, to comment and send Bob your get well wishes.  You can always email him as well, bob@cantankerousoldcoots.com.  Let him know you are thinking of him and we hope he will make a speedy recovery and get back to writing here and over at JuicyMaters.com.

Thanks for reading.

-Justin

A Thursday Interview: In Depth with Bob Hayles!

 Posted by at 18:09  Ask A Coot!, Podcast, videos
Jul 292014
 

Well folks we have done it, we actually recorded an interview with Bob!  We did record with video, but the video didn’t turn out very good.  there is still a video but it is not live, unless you want to have an epileptic seizure.  Let me know if you want the raw video, and get a pillow so you don’t hurt yourself during the seizure.  So enjoy either in a static video or as an audio, both are downloadable! (It takes a minute for the video to load, please be patient!)

[powerpress]

Click here to download the audio only version in wonderful MP3! (right click and save as…you know the drill)

 

 

Well now, here are the notes and links of things that we talked about.

First, Bob’s sites: http://juicymaters.com and http://commonsenseconversation.com.

Next we talked about the Pioneer Woman’s site http://pioneerwoman.com

After that came Dr. WordPress, Dave Doolin.  He has several sites but the one we talked about is at http://website-in-a-weekend.net  It is a great site to learn about wordpress and getting your own blog set up.

Next we plug Ralph’s site: http://ralphcarlsonblog.com and Justin’s main site http://justinsbrainpan.com.

If you are interested in the book we talked about, Essential wisdom of the Founding Fathers, click our affiliate link *HERE* and then click this link: http://www.amazon.com/Essential-Wisdom-Founding-Fathers/dp/1435111494/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310977614&sr=8-1.  We may as well make a few cents if you go ahead and buy the book.

Warren G. Harding was mentioned as a president that Bob admires, *HERE* is the Wikipedia page.  *Addendum* We were wrong.  Warren G. Harding was president in 1920 but not the guy that Bob admires.  The real admiree was Hardings Vice President and later President Calvin Coolidge.  Click *HERE* for his wikipedia page.

If you want to know more about the No Fly List, you can click *HERE* for the Wikipedia page, or you can go to http://www.no-fly-list.com and see if you are on the list too.

The Constitution of the United States is one of the most important Documents that we have in this country.  If you haven’t read it in a while, check it out:  http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution.html  While you are there Check out the Declaration of Independence as well, it is important.  http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration.html

This here is Bob’s Ford that I yanked off of one of his posts, not like it really matters, but I want to be thorough!

Bob has his Blubrry channel at http://www.blubrry.com/coffee_club/ but he would prefer you to listen at http://commonsenseconversation.com

Thanks for listening/watching, we will be having more interviews in the near future!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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