News review 2008: Reality returns to the White House

New Scientist ^ | 27 December 2008 | Peter Aldhous

[CE2949BB]

Barack Obama may have an impossible burden of expectation on his shoulders, but one fervent wish of many US scientists should be easy enough to fulfil: simply lead the nation back into the "reality-based community".

[nobama08]

Whose “reality”?

[nobama08]

Lost me at global warming.

[FlingWingFlyer]

“Reality-based community” is Washington lingo for more government grants.

[vets son]

You forgot the barf alert.

[A CA Guy]

Obama has the reality view that everything should be through the government, not in the hands of the individual.

I think he will work for that reality.

[CE2949BB]

Three seconds after I posted it, I thought “Oh, crap! Barf alert!”

I think most people will be able to figure it out. ;)

[Bryanw92]

It’s amazing what “reality-based” means to a liberal compared to a conservative like me.

I’ve been telling people for the past year that we need to confront reality. I had no idea that the libs had already taken the term and subverted it (read the Wiki article linked in the OP).

My version of reality-based community is:

Stop expecting others to take care of you.
Don’t spend more than you make.
If you think you don’t make enough money, work harder, or learn more valuable skills.
Conserve resources, but don’t kill the economy doing it.
Raise your own children.
Stop thinking you are the center of the universe.
Assume bad things will happen and plan accordingly. Be pleasantly surprised when planning makes bad things seem not as bad as you thought.

The liberal version is the exact opposite. It’s time to face facts that the libs and conservatives in this country need to split up and go our separate ways.

[Young Werther]

Alice in Wonderland was not a childhood story. Lewis Caroll wrote a story about the social, cultural and political atmosphere then and now.

Here's some quotes which are very telling today

1. The Mock Turtle:"Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with, and then the different branches of arithmetic -- Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision." (sounds lock Algore!)

2. Alice: "If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?

3. The Cat: "We're all mad here."

[RichInOC]

inaction on global warming

Overnight temps down into the twenties and thirties in Southern California. It apparently rained and then iced over on my car the other night. You were saying?

an approach to HIV that focused on sexual abstinence

Based on the evidence (or rather the historical record) of how it spread, it seemed a good idea to suggest avoiding the behaviors most likely to get people infected with it. Apparently all realities are equal, but some realities are more equal than others.

[steelyourfaith]

From the link:

"Scientists [sic] (read political prostitutes) were prominent among those cheering Obama's election victory on 4 November. A clear sign of the president-elect's new direction came two weeks later when he sent a video message to a conference on global warming in Beverly Hills, California. "The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear," Obama said. "Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high; the consequences too serious."

Hey BO, you too dim to notice the reality that the globe has been cooling for 10 years? There's no rush, other than to expand Big Government that is.

 

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[Technical Editor]

Here's some "reality" I wrote today to my senators and representative, along with all Repub senators. Please use it if you are so inclined: Dear : As of today, December 27, 2008, no legal authority in the United States has publicly stated that Barack Obama meets the constitutional requirement of being a natural born citizen. Many Americans will not accept that a man will be inaugurated as president who has not been shown to meet the constitutional requirements for that office. I expect you, as a defender of truth and decency, to take action on January 8, 2009 to establish once and for all whether Barack Obama is legally qualified to be president. Sincerely,

[Fresh Wind]

The money tree needs lots and lots of carbon dioxide to thrive.

[RightWingConspirator]

These idiots are the priestly class for the religion of "man-made global warming." The New Scientist has no credibility.

[RightWingConspirator]

Sounds like today's liberals. Taxation--the government seizing money from private individuals and companies--to spend on politicians pet projects is termed "investment". Giving special treatment to favored minority groups to the detriment of--discrimination against--the rest of the population that doesn't belong to the favored groups is called "affirmative action."

Liberals brag that they are champions of individual rights, yet their government actions place "group rights" above individual rights.

[marsh2]

We had a consultant review the “science” funded by American Rivers for the Klamath dams. Turned out it was junk. They used a non-recognized experimental model on sediment transport, made a biased analysis of data to project few economic impacts and concluded that the sediment behind the dams was not toxic, when the 3 samples they actually took showed a dioxin level leathal to fish and injurious to humans. The state based additional studies on the “science” - sort of like building castle on shifting sands.

Some math prof. over at Humboldt State just completed a study on one of our local tributaries -damning agricluture for impacts on stream flows. A careful review of his figures show that they did not jive with the historic data from the DWR. His study is cr+p and he has been rewarded with a huge grant to study another river.

Today’s science is no more empirical and sound than the politics that paid for the study. Decisions have to consider a variety of factors. They can’t be just “science based.”

[nomad]

If this “reality based community”is supposed to be based on observational facts,then why haven`t these liberals observed the fact that their fanatical insistence on the failed concepts of Marx/Engels place them in the same category as any of the most fanatical of religions? In fact,while the existence of God can neither be proved or disproved,the history of the 20th century has demonstrated that socialism is, perhaps, the most destructive and miserable of failures of all the socioeconomic systems ever developed.

But then again,its been observed that liberalism shows many of the hallmarks of a mental illness.Maybe these liberals need to sharpen their observational skills.

[Publius6961]

I don't understand this article at all.
Badly written propaganda, or a rejected script by the late Professor Corey.

It inverts the world and logic, by asserting that Bush policies were based on ideology, not observation and science.

The ongoing struggle (reality) is entirely the reverse, with assertions or smoke and mirrors (contrived computer models) displacing science solely for the benefit of ideology.

The result is well-meaning but destructive policies that spend gangantuan amounts on a socialist hunch, then invents a faux "science" to support the often uneducated guesses.