Vast Left Wing Conspiracy

[Tigermike 3,053]

Are the Swift Boat Vets actually part of the Democrat's election machine? Are all of their charges merely an attempt to conceal and distance attention from John Kerry's long and mediocre senate career and the liberal vision behind that record?

People are not focusing on how truly liberal the Kerry record really is. Kerry and the Democrats are attempting to and doing a good job of presenting Kerry as a centrist. When quite the opposite is true, Kerry is no where near to being a centrist. Compared to John Kerry, Al Gore & Bill and Hillary Clinton would have to be considered true conservatives.

Power versus knowledge

Thomas Sowell

August 11, 2004

Despite clever and hard-working political handlers who have done a masterful job of concealing and distracting attention from John Kerry's voting record in his long Senate career, and the liberal vision behind that record, glimmers of reality still break through now and then.

Senator Kerry himself has said that he was for spending more money on education with "no questions asked." The teachers' unions no doubt loved hearing that, but blank checks are precisely how our schools have produced the most expensive incompetence in the world.

Then there was another glimmer of reality breaking through recently, courtesy of wife Teresa Heinz Kerry. While her husband was addressing some midwestern farmers, Teresa passed a note to him, which led him to ask her to address the group.

Her message? Organic hog farming is "economical" and there is "a huge market" for it.

A hog farmer in the audience was immediately on his feet, objecting. That this sheltered rich woman from Boston would have the nerve to try to tell hog farmers how to raise hogs is a classic example of the liberal vision.

What is liberalism all about? Regardless of whether the particular issue is race, agriculture, housing, or a thousand other things, liberalism is about the government telling people what to do in their lives and work.

Most of the liberals who are for ordering other people around know as little as Teresa Heinz Kerry. But they don't have to know.

It has been said that knowledge is power but, politically, power trumps knowledge.

When government agencies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or the courts take statistical differences in the "representation" of various ethnic groups in an employer's workforce as evidence of discrimination, they don't have to prove their belief to anyone. They have the power. Employers have to try to prove their innocence to them.

When the people who run our schools and teachers' colleges prefer the "whole language" and "whole math" approaches to teaching English and mathematics, it doesn't matter how many studies show that these approaches don't work. The education establishment has the power -- and power trumps knowledge.

Back in the 1960s, when judges began buying into new theories about the "root causes" of crime and about "rehabilitation," it didn't matter that the old approach which they cast aside had led to declining crime rates -- and it didn't matter that the new approach led to skyrocketing crime rates.

Nowhere does power trump knowledge more than when those with a particular preconception are in charge of handing out money.  Foundations can back any fashionable notion that strikes their fancy, whether in art or environmentalism or anywhere else, and what anybody else believes -- or even proves -- doesn't matter.

The very process of acquiring knowledge requires money and those who hand out the money can decide whose studies they will finance and whose studies they won't, just as the media will decide whose results they will publicize and whose they won't. There are many kinds of power.

Like swallows heading for Capistrano, liberals are drawn toward those institutions where they have the power to impose their beliefs and ignore any knowledge that says otherwise. Such institutions are usually dominated by the left.

Only belatedly have people with other ideas begun to challenge the liberal dominance in these institutions. Among the fiercest battlegrounds are the courts. Here anyone who challenges the liberal dominance is certain to be not merely criticized but targeted for a whole campaign of smears, a process that put a new verb in our language, "to Bork."

The left understands that power trumps knowledge. The question is whether the rest of us will realize that too -- and try to keep such power from becoming or remaining a monopoly of the left.

We don't need limousine liberals telling farmers how to farm, builders how to build, and everybody else how to live their lives. That power is too dangerous to let it trump knowledge.

LINK

[TrueBlue72 0]

If Mrs. HEINZ Kerry is so convinced that organics are economincal and have such a huge market (I am all in favor of organic foods), she should exert her power within the HEINZ organization to move it in that direction. The HEINZ corporation is just like all major food manufacturers; they use the cheapest ingredients that the public will buy!!! Read their labels and you will be discouraged from eating their products.

The only way that organic foods will become the standard is when enough people realize their worth and insist on them instead of the garbage that is available in most stores.

There are many sources of organically grown products in Alabama, but they are more expensive and hard to find. I did so because of health issues that demanded it.

[Bottomfeeder 244]

  The only way that organic foods will become the standard is when enough people realize their worth and insist on them instead of the garbage that is available in most stores.

There are many sources of organically grown products in Alabama, but they are more expensive and hard to find.  I did so because of health issues that demanded it.

http://www.seasonssnacks.com/seasons_sweet...tail.cfm?cat=18

I found some of these at a Super Walmart recenty here in Mobile, Alabama. I think they sold for like $1.78 and they are great. White Cheddar Cheese Curls.

[DKW 86 7,440]

Thomas Sowell is a great American, and scarily intelligent.