Today's Real Criminals, and the Massive Damage they Cause

off of Huntington Post ...

A long-running Ladies' Home Journal column that started in 1953, called "Can This Marriage Be Saved?," features real-life couples and the juicy details of their marital issues. 

The columns were split into three parts: a wife's perspective, her husband's take and then final judgment by a counselor from the American Institute of Family Relations. AIFR was a successful, but now defunct, center founded in the 1930s by "Dr." Popenoe. He wasn't actually a doctor or a psychologist but a eugenicist with an honorary degree. Very often, Popenoe's counselors found a way to pin problems on the wives, calling them "childish," "juvenile," "emotionally immature" and "frigid," for example. 

Early "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" columns, which continue today at Divine Caroline without the sexist overtones, show us how far women's equality has come -- but also how far we have to go. Here are five horrifying pieces of advice from the magazine.

... Then five 'columns' describing women being abused in various and serious ways are listed in the Huntington Post article: Awful '50s Marriage Advice Shows What Our Mothers And Grandmothers Were Up Against -- and they are... awful.


What caught my attention however, was not the tales of tragety -- I grew up in a home like that, so I could have wrote them myself -- but who the people in the comment sections were focusing on. Each of them had some good things to say, but they were all focused on the woman, or the man in the relationship. ... so ... here is where my mind goes...

This is still going on. 

It is just as abusive as it has always been. In fact, more so. The criminal acts pile up every week, in fact, daily. -- and no one seems to give a single glance to the criminal in these articles. 

Ladies' Home Journal, who was trusted and promised women they could be trusted, who advertised their trustworthiness, hired a man who was not a doctor, and published this highly offensive garbage, which likely resulted in years of further abuse, and perhaps even a few deaths. 

Our media does the same, exact thing, every week. Over and over again, yet they are not looked at as the perpetrators or instigators of the violence and suffering they cause. 

Two Fox News men,  Mr. Bolling and Mr. Gutfeld, made Women Jokes on the air during a segment honoring the Syrian female fighter pilot. Has anyone given those men reprimands for perpetuating abuse on women? 

No. Not a word. The dismissal of the pilot's courage was absolute. The disregard for the woman doing the story, was purposeful and direct. Message: You are a woman, you don't matter. [Update: A Group of Veterans got the back of Air Force Major Mariam Al Mansouri and wrote to her a Public Apology for the actions of these "immature boys"]

People are passed off as experts who have no degrees or experience in the field. They are given air time and paper space. Not because they are right, but because they cause strife 

JOSEPH BAST is given page on the Wall Street Journal, touted as an expert in the Climate Change area. Bast has no degree at all (unfinished). Joseph Bast studied Economics as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Which of course makes him an expert in Climatology - and smoking apparently -- In a report entitled, “Please Don't Poop in My Salad,” (PDF) released by Heartland and written by Bast in July of 2006, Bast was quoted on page 57 (pg. 65 in PDF format), “A fourth lie is that even moderate smoking is deadly. Several experts (including two who are very anti-smoking) have told me that smoking fewer than seven cigarettes a day does not raise a smoker's risk of lung cancer.”

In the article on the Wall Street Journal -- The Myth of the Climate Change '97%'

What is the origin of the false belief—constantly repeated—that almost all scientists agree about global warming?  Bast goes through a history of the meme that 97% of scientists have all agreed that Climate Change is real. He write clearly, and his points sound good. And if I hadn't been taken so many times in the past, I would have read the article and let stand on it's own. He cites many studies and polls. 

Trouble is, he's full of crap, and in several areas of that post, he flat out lies.

He refutes Naomi Oreskes' project of gathering the information from Climatologist papers which were published in journals with no factual argument at all. Just that she is wrong and never mind that the industry journal Science (probably the top of the heap, but don't quote me) published. Then he throws in some names which she obviously chose to ignore: Richard Lindzen, John Christy, Sherwood Idso and Patrick Michaels suggesting that their census was ignored by her. FALSE -- easy to see it in that she came up with 97% not 100%. Never mind that, her logic is flawed, end of story.

It gets worse from there. With similar off-handed ill-logic he works his way through several over consensus efforts, ruling them flawed with odd and meaningless arguments. Like one is disregarded because not all of the sources were Climate Scientists... when the phrase is "All Scientists" so.. ? They are still scientists with good brains on their shoulders and were involved with the area of study in some fashion, or they wouldn't be writing journal papers on the subject, right? Then he pulls this out of his hat. 

Of the various petitions on global warming circulated for signatures by scientists, the one by the Petition Project, a group of physicists and physical chemists based in La Jolla, Calif., has by far the most signatures—more than 31,000 (more than 9,000 with a Ph.D.). It was most recently published in 2009, and most signers were added or reaffirmed since 2007. The petition states that "there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of . . . carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."

This was so contrary to what I experienced myself in talking with these men and women that I used the link he provided to check out the study myself. My first stop is Qualifying Signers.. off the menu at the bottom. 

The current list of petition signers includes 9,029 PhD; 7,157 MS; 2,586 MD and DVM; and 12,715 BS or equivalent academic degrees. Most of the MD and DVM signers also have underlying degrees in basic science.

All of the listed signers have formal educations in fields of specialization that suitably qualify them to evaluate the research data related to the petition statement. Many of the signers currently work in climatological, meteorological, atmospheric, environmental, geophysical, astronomical, and biological fields directly involved in the climate change controversy.

Many of them do? How much is Many? That's not really a scientific measurement. What is Many? -- Turns out that Many = 1%

Then you get down to the real information. That most of the signatures are from General Engineering & General Science (10,102).  The means of discovering if the person was "qualified" was "we asked." Pressed from this discovery I was prompted into digging some more and I discover many people complaining that their name was on this list and they had no idea how it got there. They filed complaints to get their name removed. 

There is a lot more but Kevin Grandia on the Huffington Post does an in depth job and writing about it is beginning to give me an eye-twitch.

The upsetting thing is, that the Wall Street Journal, who I had always thought of as being outside the circle of Fox News (where anything can happen) gave his man a forum to spread inaccuracies about an important subject -- one that has far too many deniers out there on the Internet as it is.  

Now, you can disregard me. I'm a Fiction Novelist. Which is why I have all of these quotes and links in this article. I couldn't read a Climate study and tell you if it was accurate or not. I am skilled at Internet Research and I know where to find good sources of information, which is how I put together this little factoid. 

As of 2007, when the American Association of Petroleum Geologists released a revised statement, no scientific body of national or international standing rejected the findings of human-induced effects on climate change. There are fringe people, most of whom do not show their processes or give peer review evidence, who continue to cry out differences, but no serious group has any doubt that Climate Change is happening, and that it is human-induced. 

If you find a national or international scientific body that does refute this -- a real one because I'm going to check -- I would like to hear about them.

Bast is simply a con-man with no authoritative credentials at all, who is paid by the Koch brothers to continue his anti-science campaigns. The WSJ knows this, and still they print his false, bias and harmful advice. Why? 

Jay Lehr is now the “science director” at the Climate Change science denying organization called The Heartland Institute, which receives money from coal mining company Murray Energy and many others.

Jay Lehr, was sentenced to six months–serving three–in a minimum security federal prison back in 1991, and his organization at the time was fined $200,000 for Defrauding the EPA.

So... Fox News brings him in as an expert on the Global Warming issues and the current actions of the EPA.   ???  

Fox News John Stossel did not mention Lehr's fraud conviction. Perhaps he didn't know his guest defrauded US taxpayers, but Stossel and Lehr share a flair for denial of global warming for distracting viewers from polluting corporations like Koch Industries, which has financial ties to both men. Heartland is part of the Koch brothers-funded State Policy Network. Jay Lehr did write many papers and books on Ground Water. He has several others which are self-published books on Global Warming (Not peer reviewed) and how it is not happening. He also wrote a five-year plan on getting rid of the EPA. The science in his Climate Change books is .. ludicrous. He brings up points without reference, or logic in many cases. But he sounds good, and he is intelligent enough to walk around me in a science argument. I would need days and my computer to figure out that he was lying to the world -- and it did take days and my computer to do so. 

If all you get is a sound bite from him, and no one around to suggest that he's making it up, you're going to believe him. After all, he's an expert right? And let's face it, Climate Change is scary stuff. We're not even sure we can reverse it (that I know of... this maybe old news and wrong) so having someone who sounds like he knows what he's doing authoritatively offering the tease "Naw, we just left the heater on you silly people" is tempting to believe. Many people want to believe him.  But he doesn't, care and his only concern is getting his pay check from the Koch brothers. And their only concern is the EPA -- who recently convicted  Koch Industries of six felonies and numerous misdemeanors; paid out tens of millions of dollars in fines; traded with Iran, and have been so reckless in their business practices that two innocent teenagers ended up dead. Jay Lehr is not an expert in Climate Change. He is not a Climatologist. He doesn't want to help you.

Just like Dr. Popenoe, who really isn't interested in you having a good life, only that you breed well.

So, who is to blame here? Millions of Americans who are still confused and distrustful about issues, which are not even issues? 

• You don't hit women! 
• If it is not consensual, then it is rape!
• You don't defraud the government! 
• Climate Change is Real! 
• Smoking will end your life and destroy your health! 

-- Or the media who touts people who are not experts, who are only con-men and have been paid to debunk with propaganda using false reports.

The women in these "Can This Marriage Be Saved?, articles  took huge risks to reach out for help and were offered a con, and so far, the only people we are focusing on for the result of their efforts, are the women and the men who were given the green light By Experts to continue their abuse. Those women undoubtedly continued to be abused, and lost hope. Some of them probably even died from their abuse.