In response to the violence that occurred at Representative Russ Carnahan’s town hall meeting held in St. Louis on August 6th 2009 the Service Employers International Union or SEIU posted a video on YouTube suggesting we get back to more peaceful and respectful debate on the issue of Health Care Reform.While I would agree with that basic premise there is a problem with their video.
The video they posted shows union demonstrations as completely peaceful and nice while opposition to reform as being ugly and violent.They even used portions of the video of the incident that followed the Carnahan event.The problem is they edited out significant portions of the video including all portions that show people wearing SEIU shirts behaving erratically, cursing, and threatening other people on scene and finally at least one union member being arrested.
Who actually started the violence and what lead up to it is not entirely clear by any reporting I have seen to date.I am sure there will be law suits over this and the courts will have to decide who is at fault but it is clear the SEIU wanted no part of the embarrassing video of their members behaving in a manner that befits the label of union thug which they took strong offense to apparently.
Here is a link to the union website posting on the incident and the video.
You be the judge of what really happened but what is hard to deny is there was more to this than the union wanted to acknowledge on their site.
It’s been awhile since I have put together a video on a political subject.
The news and events surrounding the health care debate recently have caught my attention.Public concern about expensive plans that no one seems to know all the details on and mixed messages on what government options will mean and what the ultimate goal of reform is have caused a great deal of this concern.
What has caught my attention however is the propaganda on both sides of this debate but in particular that coming out of the white house.I find their constant labeling of citizen concern and participation disturbing.The recent addition of an email to report “fishy” claims about health care is even more disturbing.
The white house claims this email address is only to help them combat disinformation but the appearance is otherwise that that coupled with misrepresentation of some of these crowds by the White House and members of congress adds to the suspicious nature of a system to report fellow citizens to the government.It all starts smell like suppression of free speech and intimidation tactics.
People showing up for town hall meetings expressing their point of view have been compared to Nazis and Brown shirts by members of our government.This is different than commentators or talk radio making outrageous claims this is your government labeling fellow citizens and claiming they are all members of an organized mob effort.
A long-standing rule of thumb for me has been that the first person to bring up Nazis lost the debate.I am not sure who that is in this case but for me the rule stands.
I also have never supported shouting people down.As someone who believes in free speech I believe that means it goes for everyone.Everyone has a right to express a point of view and people have a right to agree or disagree with that point of view.Shouting people down to shut down debate or prevent someone from expressing their point of view is not respectful and does not support the free flow of ideas.This goes for left wingers who have used shout down tactics against people on the right for years and it goes for people opposing the current big government big spending trends whether they are right wing, libertarian or even normally left leaning people who are simply tired of over taxation and under representation.
The fact that the Government is not respectful of the citizenry and is not listening to the voters is no excuse to adopt thug tactics that shut down free expression and debate.Let people talk then respond to them.If they are lying I have no problem with telling them they are lying but back it up with facts.Be respectful but also stand up for what is right.That is how debate should be conducted.Sometimes raising your voice to be heard in a town hall may be necessary but allow the speaker to make his or her points then you make yours.If they try to shut you down let everyone know.I think recording events is more than called for right now and I am glad many people are doing so.This also helps protect free speech and it gets information out to people who want to make informed decisions about what is going on. That I can respect and that I can support.
There have been a lot of indications lately that our elected officials are not listening to the voters.Most polling data shows the majority of Americans are happy with their health insurance and do not want the massive reforms being pushed through congress.It is also frustrating that for years now we have heard this figure of 47,000,000 uninsured Americans who need coverage.That number is artificially high due to the inclusion of some illegal immigrants as well as a number of people who for one reason or that other have chosen not to have insurance.
The proposals being made by Democrats would require every American to have health insurance whether they want it or not.If you take out people who chose not to have insurance and illegal’s the figure of uninsured that cannot get insurance by no fault of their own but would like coverage is actually between 10,000,000 and 15,000,000.This is important because if we start with an artificially high number how can we arrive at a sensible solution?
None of this is being considered and when people try to get answers on this they are not forthcoming from Senators, Representatives or the Obama Administration.There is no acknowledgement that the most recent polling data still shows people do not want massive government reforms and after having had huge bailouts and stimulus plans pushed through in a hurry before anyone even read the bills or listened to the American people it seems that the citizens are just fed up in many cases and will go to great lengths to have their voices heard on this issue.
To have our government call that brown shirt tactics, suggest people are thugs, unruly mobs or somehow paid representatives of the insurance industry or organized by the GOP is frankly insulting.Setting up email addresses and putting messages on the White House page suggesting citizens start informing on each other is down right un-American.
Governor Chester of Iowa was asked what he thought of the California Supreme Court ruling in fairness it was probably because some idiot reporter in Iowa actually thought he would have something interesting to as on this so they asked him.
The ruling essentially was that they decided not to blatantly strike out sections of the constitution that had been passed according to the process laid out in the California Constitution, in short they chose to follow the law but exercised great arrogance in even hearing a case on the constitutionality of a constitutionally passed amendment but very few people seem to be pointing that out.
Regardless of the arrogance of the court, they did decided not to overturn the people and frankly since for a period of time the state operated as if same sex marriage was legal I think they did they only thing they could in ruling that same sex marriages that were performed during the time would be allowed to stand. This was what was expected to happen for some time so the only real news made was that they didn’t do something outrageously outside the bounds of their authority.
Chester however had to do the typical Chester thing and say something completely idiotic, totally wrong, and in general make a fool of himself while pretending to be a grown up with grown up views. Chester said that every state has their own constitution and the courts rule based on the law. Wow that’s brilliant isn’t it? I mean Chester’s opinion on this seems to be that the court would rule according to the constitution if you listen to what he said which should be obvious. The problem is that is not what happened in Iowa.
In Iowa the court made it up as they went along changing the meaning of our equal protection clause to suit their needs and the Legislature and Chester are allowing a ruling in one case with specific parties to apply to all 99 counties by not doing their jobs. This is a long way from courts ruling based on the law and within constitutional bounds and is really the problem with how this has been handled in Iowa. Regardless of what people think on the issue of what marriage aught to mean this is not how the system is supposed to work. Like Vermont and New Hampshire if Iowa wants to recognize same sex marriage as equal under the law then the legislature aught to pass it through the legislative process but they did not do that in Iowa.
In Iowa the legislature had passed and the Governor Vilsack signed a law that said the opposite. What we are existing under in Iowa now is judicial tyranny allowed by cowards in the legislature and the Governor's office and Chester has the nerve to tell that idiot reporter that courts rule based on the law which makes him seem to support constraint but in practice he allows tyranny and lawlessness.
Today in every state thousands of people turned out to protest high federal and state taxes and ever increasing government spending. These protests turned out far more people than any anti-war protest had in the past four years but because the message was against what the current President is trying to do and what many states are doing which is frankly popular with the legacy media it was mostly ignored and often mocked.
MSNBC, NBC and CNN and even the White House Press Secretary mocked the people who turned out to protest the way their money is being used. We cannot ignore that the bailouts began under George Bush but President Obama for all his bluster about the mistakes of the previous administration during the campaign has not changed direction and in fact has increased spending and federal intervention in private industry.
The release of a Homeland Security report suggesting the danger of increasing “right wing radical” organization activity and the dishonest media coverage of these protests in comparison to all the attention and importance they assigned significantly smaller anti-war protest activities is not a coincidence in my opinion. This is a coordinated effort to paint anyone opposing the current state and federal trends in this nation as nothing more than wing-nuts that at best are to be ignored and at worst may be “dangerous.”
This has the appearance of a coordinated attempt to silence the message by unfavorable media coverage and mockery of US Citizens by appointees of President Obama. In my view this falls far short of conspiracy but it really smells like political coordination by much of the legacy media and the White house to mock taxpaying citizens who are exercising rights guaranteed them by the constitution.
This is just another in a recent string of very troubling events by federal or state governments. If any anti-war protests during the Bush Administration had been this large and this wide spread it would have been the lead story for weeks as smaller protests usually were. A few dozen people camping in Crawford Texas was national news for weeks if you recall. It is very difficult to look at the difference in coverage and not see the bias proudly on display now. Any illusions left that we had fair media in the United States ought to be reconsidered.
Not long ago while listening to the radio in one of the cities I work in I tuned into a local talk show that was featuring a local “paranormal” team that morning. This of course peaked my interest but I had little time to devote to it while the show was on. The host does provide podcasts on a daily basis of his show however so I made the effort to check the show out later on when I had more time to listen. I am not going to offer counter points and suggestions to everything discussed on the show but I will comment on many of their major claims.
The guests on the show were from the Carroll Area Paranormal Team a self professed group of “experts.” On their website www.carrollareaparanormalteam.com they state their mission to be “To give a complete professional investigation to the client covering any and all bases set by those we assist. To provide this service free of charge and to never conclude an investigation until the client is 100% satisfied with the findings. To keep the client's best interests and feelings in mind and to provide proper professional conduct with the public at large.”
That sounds fair enough right? They are professional and they do this for free. It is very nice of them to provide such services at no charge. It is free of charge but they are somehow managed to become a 501(3)c tax exempt organization so they can take donations and the donor can write them off on their income taxes. How nice… Moving on from there they also state they provide quality scientific based investigation. Really? Science based eh. Now that is interesting in light of the things they said on the air.
My favorite statement from the website was, “CAPT provides a quality scientific based investigations platform in which CAPT attempts to explain claims of activity through natural means. What that means is by de-bunking the claims of activity through natural or man-made things, "After all the obvious reasons have been exhausted, whatever is left no matter how impossible must be the answer."
Oh, Really?
Well let’s compare these statements to some of the things stated on the radio show.
The main “evidence” provided by the paranormal team was a series of recordings that paranormal investigators call EVPs. EVP stands for Electronic Voice Phenomena but it is anything but a phenomena. This is where the claim of scientific background becomes important because the members of this team in particular demonstrate no understanding of electronic recording or the science behind it. On the CAPT website the team has listed the equipment they use. Missing from this list are any references to the kind of recording equipment a person might want to set up in a house to make sure they were able to record the sounds in the room without any interference or distortions from the room itself such as plaster walls and hardwood floors which reflect sound or by picking up hum and ambient noise off machinery or electronics in the home.
Three EVP samples were presented on the radio show none of which were in any way remarkable and one at least which had been highly over processed by someone I would suspect is a complete armature at sound editing. I found it interesting that these clips would be ones they would chose to present on the air as evidence until I listened to clips on their website and found that they were no better.
While discussing these recordings the member of the group that did the most talking also stated that their digital recorders were able to “hear” sounds that are inaudible to the human ear. This is of course utter nonsense and so clearly fallacious on many levels that a person wouldn’t even need a shred of technical knowledge to see the problems. If the sounds are not audible to the human ear how can you hear them when played back? On the surface this is just absurd but a friend of mine who has far more experience and technical knowledge of recording processes explained to me that what the paranormalist claims is not even technically possible.
I was told to look into something called the Nyquist sampling theory. Simply put the theory states that the frequency range of any recording will only be half the sample rate of the recording device. For example the early CDs were recorded at 44.1 KHz since it was believed that the human ear could not hear frequencies over 22Khz. It is now believed that depending on age and health some people may be able to hear at frequencies higher than that so higher end recordings use sample rates of 96 KHz and 192 KHz. All that is important because I looked at the list of equipment used by CAPT and found three recorders listed.
First is the Sony ICD B300 which boasts a whopping 8 KHz sample rate. Next is the Olympus VN-960PC which has three separate rates for different quality recordings 16 kHz, 10.6 kHz, 5.75 kHz. Next they have the Olympus WS-100 which is also capable of three separate sample rates 8 kHz, 12 kHz, 44.1 kHz and lastly is the RCA RP-5022B which I was unable to find exact specifications for however there is no reason to believe it is sampling at a rate higher than 44.1 KHz. All of this means that the ranges these devices are capable of picking up will result in playback well within the range of humans with very good hearing. True audiophiles believe sound at frequencies over 20-22KHz may be technically inaudible but are still somehow perceived and therefore add to the audio experience which is why digital recording is done a much higher rates for higher quality results but would not really add to anything that CAPT is trying to establish since the devices they say they use are not capable of “hearing” rages the human ear cannot hear.
Perhaps a bigger problem with their EVPs however is the purposes these small devices were designed for and how they are being used. For the most part these small devices are designed for taking audio notes or recording sound that is not intended for careful audio examination or high quality play back. They simply are not designed to do what ghost hunters use them for which is very typical of groups like this. Going on the radio and claiming these recorders “hear” at a range the human ear cannot is flat out fallacious and demonstrates the utter amateurish nature of this group on the surface and in my view totally debunks the claims of scientific backing. There is no science in this there is only nonsense.
They also spent a lot of time discussing their trained and qualified Demonologist. Sounds very impressive until you find out there is no place a person can go to study Demonology or obtain a degree in Demonology. In fact if a person wants to be a Demonologist all they need to do is read, study with someone else who claims they are a Demonologist or have a church declare that they are a demonologist or in fact, simply start using the term. That doesn’t sound very scientific to me what do you think? They did not explain where their demonologist received his training.
We can also consider the statement that after they eliminate all the obvious possibilities all that remains no matter how impossible must be the truth. I submit to you that they are excluding all obvious possibilities when it comes to the evidence. I cannot speak to things they claim to have witnessed since I was not there and therefore do not know what they did or did not see but I can speak to their EVPs that they played on the air and the ones on their websites. The obvious conclusions are that they picked up a boatload of low frequency noise and ambient sound along with distortions of voices from distances that are reflecting off several hard surfaces. And in the case of the third EVP they played it is a highly over processed disaster created by a rank armature trying to find something and applying very aggressive EQ to the recording to try and draw something out that was never there in the first place. I defy any of them to prove otherwise
Carl Sagan used to say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. He who makes the claim must provide that evidence the CAPT has not done this in the least. They claimed on the air that one sound they say is a female laugh repeated many times but provided a clip of it only once. They claimed one voice says OK good when it certainly seems there is more there than that and there is no evidence at all this was not someone in the room because there is no corresponding higher quality recording or video evidence of who was or was not in proximity at the time thus rendering all of this meaningless.
Another bit of bad theater was the obviously arranged call from California in to support their nonsense. This person was also a self proclaimed paranormal investigator and in familiar fashion presented unsubstantiated claims with no hard evidence to try and back up what the people on the air were saying. She claimed to have video of people who had received scratches and bruises, from ghosts presumably, but of course did not say she had video of these marks appearing from nowhere. Video of scratches that someone says are paranormal is not evidence of the paranormal. Evidence would be clear video of these sort of marks appearing with no visible means of creating them along with medical evidence that they were in fact wounds and not make up.
The problem with groups like CAPT is they use a collection of gadgets and produce results that they misinterpret as being far more significant than they really are. It is not a stretch to say that their own descriptions of what they are doing and how they think their equipment works reveals they are utterly ignorant about how to use any of it. I don't have to make wild guesses about any of this all I need to do is have some understanding of the technical capabilities of their recorders and listen to what they think they can do with them. The claims and the facts do not match up so either they are lying or they are ignorant.
They assign a great deal of importance to any result they can find and because they use real tools that can be used in science they call it scientific but it is not. There are no rigorous controls on their investigation and no serious peer review of their findings. I seriously doubt they would be at all interested in working with a team of experts who are trained to do the kind of recording they are doing or are educated in how to interpret the results shown on EMF meters or other equipment they bring on site. I doubt they would want a well designed recording set up alongside their own to create comparison video, audio and photography to pinpoint exact locations of everyone on site and we could even mic all the participants so corrisponding voice tracks could be compared to their EVPs. If they had such independent research on their investigations it might clear up a lot of questions.
It is therefore my opinion that these people find willing subjects to allow them to do the investigations because they want to believe the kinds of findings they expect the team to return. The group claims they will not end the investigation until the client is satisfied with the results. I wonder what that means? Satisfied that the truth as been found or satisfied that what they wanted to believe has been reinforced? It would take a willing subject to be convinced by this kind of evidence.
To hear the three EVPs they played on the air click the embeded video at the top of this post.
Browsing around YouTube I have come across many videos lately expressing views on animal rights. These range widely from statements against cruelty to animals to outright militant views on vegan lifestyles.
One in particular is very militant in his vegan views and considers anyone who has differing opinion to be a “hater.”
I find the term hater as it is used online to be very disturbing. It doesn’t disturb me because I feel threatened by being called a hater on occasion. I am not bothered in the least by name calling online what bothers me is that it seems effective in backing down many people from what may be very logical and worthwhile counter opinion.
There are people who simply do not want others to think badly of them and that is precisely what the term hater is designed to do. Labeling any opposing points of view as hate is a tactic that has been used now for some time. Talk radio is often called hate radio by some. Even President Bill Clinton used the term Hate Radio to describe certain right wing political talk. President Obama has also used the term hate to describe opposing political points of view. It may seem harmless when you see it online but what about when your elected leaders use the term to describe what you think?
The name I use on YouTube and the logo you see here on this page says FreeThoughtPolice. I picked that name after some consideration because I knew that at times offering honest opinion on how I see things or what I believe to be true would result in having people call me a hater. Terms like hater are intended to be discussion stoppers. They are designed to end free flow of ideas and free exchange of opinion by backing down anyone who opposes your views. People in general do not like to have others dislike them or paint them in a negative light so when accused of being full of hate many will back off.
Attempts to silence free thinking and end critical thinking in my point of view is distasteful and I think many, such as President Clinton and some on YouTube, know exactly what they are doing when they throw terms like this around. It reminds me of George Orwell’s 1984 where anyone expressing views that opposed the ruling authority were charged with Thought Crime or crimethink in Newspeak. These people either arrested by the Thought Police and disappeared or were re-educated in the Ministry of Love (miniluv).
Today we are dangerously close to that kind of society and that is why people on YouTube are so comfortable calling any opposing views hate. In many countries it has simply become accepted that if you commit certain kinds of crime with intentions the legal system has branded as hateful you are not simply charged with a crime but a hatecrime. Hatecrime, crimehate, thoughtcrime crimethink. How far away is the Orwellian society?
It seems few people ever stop to wonder why an assault should be subject to a different criminal standard if it was motivated by intentions the state has decided are hate. An example of the absurdity of this would be if one citizen of Oceana murders another because there was hate between them but they both share the same skin tone this is not hatecrime however if the person who was killed has a skin tone that society identifies as indicating minority membership it may be a hatecrime. Understand someone is dead either way, someone murdered someone either way and both murders may have been motivated by hate but depending on superficial circumstances the motivation may make it subject to different standards. And few see a problem with this because they want to feel like we are being just in the face of racism or prejudice.
I will never use the term hater against anyone on my blog or on YouTube. I post things that are intended to generate thought and not all of it needs to be in agreement with what you perceive my point of view to be. What I want people to do is simply think about issues not accept what I say as being the truth. I try to be honest in my opinion and I try to present things in a way I believe gets at the truth but I honestly will get it wrong sometimes so people should question what I say or what I put in a video.
Instead of a ThoughtPolice that try to end opposition FreeThoughtPolice encourage and defend critical thinking and rights to free expression of ideas regardless of whether we all agree or not.
I may disagree with you but I don’t take it personally and I don’t consider it hateful to simply state your views in a strong manner. Maybe you are very angry and boisterously opinionated but I have a hard time assigning any more emotional meaning to it other than that. I also don’t really care if people I don’t know think I am an ass.
Think Critically
“Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim - when he defends himself - as a criminal.” - Frederic Bastiat
