Get your own Free Home PageIf you are bored with politics and news, may I suggest that you play the game ``Spot the Fallacy.''
A fallacy is a misleading or unsound argument, and today's public discourse teems with fallacies. So make a list and, as you read or listen to the news, see how many you can spot.
America's national fallacy is ad hominem -- attacking the person rather than dealing with the issue that person raises. Most of public discussion today consists of this tactic. For example, Paula Jones accused President Clinton of exposing himself. Rather than dealing with the issue, the White House attacked Jones as ``trailer trash.'' This is classified as a fallacy of relevance because whether Ms. Jones is trailer trash or British aristocracy has no bearing on the question: Did Clinton expose himself?
The next most popular fallacy is guilt by association. An example of this is: Ken Starr, the special prosecutor, was offered a job by Pepperdine College; Pepperdine College has received donations from Richard Scaife, a wealthy man not especially fond of our president; therefore Ken Starr is a tool of Richard Scaife.
This sleazy tactic is used by both the left and right.
A third fallacy is vested interest -- the assertion that, because a person has a vested interest, everything that person says must be discounted. An example would be: A teacher says education needs more financing, but let's dismiss that because the teacher has a vested interest in increasing the amount of money spent on education. It's a fallacy because the fact that a teacher might also benefit from more financing does not mean that education doesn't actually and truly need more money.
Straw man is another fallacy. Here, you set up an easy-to-refute argument that someone has not made and attack it rather than the more reasonable argument that individual did make. This is a favorite tactic of the Israeli lobby. For example, I once compared the attitude of the current German government toward Jewish refugees with the attitude of the Israeli government toward Palestinian refugees. The Zionists set up a straw man by accusing me of having compared Israel to Nazi Germany, which, of course, I had not done. However, it is easy to prove that Israel is not like Nazi Germany, and it's not easy at all to justify Israel's treatment of Palestinian refugees.
Another fallacy is an appeal to authority. For example, Dr. Hotairum Storm is an expert. Therefore whatever he says is true. As the song says, `` 'Tain't necessarily so.'' Purported expertise and credentials do not prove an argument.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc -- after this therefore because of this -- often crops up. An example would be, Bill Clinton was elected president; the economy got better; therefore, Bill Clinton made the economy get better.
Thinking flaws are as numerous as flies in August, but those ought to get you started. Once you begin to realize how flawed the thinking of our leaders is, you will really get worried about the future. Recently I heard a U.S. senator, arguing in favor of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, say that even though the Russians say they are upset by the expansion, they really aren't upset. I would sure like to know what psychic powers that politician has that allows him to know the Russians better than they know themselves.
Remember the formula for human survival: mind, reality, adapation. Our brain is our tool of survival, and we survive by correctly identifying reality and adapting to it. To do that, we need accurate observation and correct, logical thinking.
You should take note of something: The Clinton administration is attacking one of America's greatest entrepreneurial successes, Microsoft, on the patently specious grounds that it has a monopoly.
Yet, the same administration has said nothing as giant banks and giant communications corporations have merged. These mergers eliminate competition in two fields where there is practically no real competition left anyway.
Why the different approaches?
Well, look who the president hangs out with. You don't find him hanging out at a computer club. He hangs out with the people, the very rich people, in the communications, entertainment and banking industries. The central government, like the old monarchies, no longer deals in justice -- it deals in favors and influence. Fairness or even the welfare of the people of the United States is the least of its concerns.
Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly and will never be able to establish one, because it competes in a knowledge business. It takes a huge amount of capital to start a newspaper or an automobile-manufacturing business. It takes capital and political pull to start a bank.
But some bright person working part-time in a garage can write a software program that could knock Microsoft for a loop. And Bill Gates knows it. That's why he's the most worried-looking billionaire I've ever seen. He knows his field, and he knows that Microsoft can't afford to become complacent. People buy Microsoft's Windows system because it works, and it sells at a fair price -- not because they have to. There are other operating systems, including Apple's. But if someone ``pulls a Bill Gates'' and creates a better system, people will buy it in a nano-second.
The assertion that Microsoft's bundling its net browser with its operating system, Microsoft hurts competitors is nonsense. Furthermore, Netscape, which is one of the complainers, has more of the market than Microsoft's Explorer and, furthermore, cuts deals to bundle its browser with other software products.
Well, as insignificant as my business is, I deleted Netscape from my computer and switched to Explorer. I will not do business with people who want the central government to beat up their competitors.
My guess is that Gates' real problem is that he's an independent entrepreneur who isn't part of the old-money establishment and probably hasn't contributed enough cash to enough crooked politicians to become a FOG -- friend of the government.
Americans who value a free market should be alarmed at the growing tendency of government to attack successful, law-abiding businesses. After all, what prosperity we have is entirely the result of the private economy, not government.
Now 15 state attorneys general want to get into the act and prevent consumers from buying Windows 98. That makes me mad. I don't need some cheap, grand-standing lawyer-politician telling me what software I can or cannot buy. That is my business.
If we don't clean house from the court-house to the White House, these bozos in public office are going to run this country right into the ground. I never dreamed I would ever see an American government so opposed to the free market and to freedom in general and so corrupt.
Politicians seem to be intent on reproducing the Soviet Union in the United States -- with an oppressive, intrusive federal police presence, with centralized planning, and with the party-mandated orthodoxy in political beliefs.
Old Gen. Robert E. Lee was right when he said, `` ... the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ... ruin.''
Next time you're feeling low, instead of popping a Prozac, go find a squirrel.
The squirrel people are sort of the children of the animal world. I find it impossible to watch squirrels and not feel cheerful. Their bright eyes, their bubbling energy and their curiosity make me smile.
And unlike squirrelly people, an epithet that I think insults the real squirrels, these little people are very competent. When it comes to squirrel business, which is mainly finding something to eat, they are tireless, daring and ingenious. If we pursued our own goals with the same cheerful determination, we would all be so successful that we probably wouldn't recognize ourselves.
When I was boy, I made the mistake of catching a squirrel with my bare hands. If you wish to know why squirrels can navigate trees so easily, I can tell you. It's because their claws are needle-sharp. They can also move those claws more quickly than a blender blade. It had taken me a long time to catch that squirrel, but I couldn't uncatch it quickly enough. Catching that squirrel proved to me that success isn't always what it's touted to be. Failure would have hurt a whole lot less.
There was a time when I used to shoot squirrels with my .22 and eat them. They are tasty. Some people think they are too much like rats to eat, but having never eaten a rat (at least not knowingly, but, if you eat out, you never know), I can't say if the flavor resembles roasted rat or not. You'll have to find an ex-Green Beret who was with the Montagnards and ask him. The 'Yards often ate roasted rats as appetizers.
I can say that squirrel meat tastes somewhat like rattlesnake, which tastes somewhat like alligator tail, which tastes somewhat like chicken.
Today, I would have to be mighty hungry before I would shoot a squirrel. They are at the bottom of the list of things I would shoot, way below certain humans and other bad critters. Guess you could say that I have mellowed out and made my peace with the squirrel folks.
The main reason I keep a bird feeder is to watch the squirrels steal the birdseed. I suppose I ought to call it a squirrel feeder, and then the birds would be guilty of stealing the squirrel seed. That's a good example of how you can perceive the same thing differently.
When I was a reporter years ago in a coastal city, a man called and said he had trained a wild dolphin and wanted me to come out and take his picture. I asked him what he had trained the dolphin to do.
``Well, every day at 4 o'clock I go down to the end of my pier, hold a fish up in the air, and the dolphin leaps out of the water and takes the fish,'' he said with a sort of smug pride.
I replied, ``How do I know whether you trained the dolphin to take the fish or the dolphin trained you to walk out onto the end of your pier every day at 4 o'clock and stand there, holding a fish over the water?''
The guy was perplexed. It seemed not to have occurred to him that the dolphin was training him to feed it, but I think that was the case. It has been my experience that dolphins are a lot smarter than people who want to have their pictures in the newspaper. I declined to take his picture.
Looking at things from multiple perspectives is a useful habit. There is a human tendency to take much of the world for granted. It is never true, for example, that if you've seen one of something, you've seen all of them, because all of them are different.
In the meantime, be kind to squirrels. Think of them as little Prozac substitutes hopping about. They are a nice gift from God.
I wish, just for the sake of novelty, Congress would do one thing right this session. No luck so far. In fact, the Senate has just won the international dummy award by voting to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
You will be happy to know that it pledged the lives of your sons and daughters to defend the borders of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.
This was a foolish move for the following reasons:
1. NATO is a military alliance, and there is no enemy. It should be abolished rather than expanded.
2. The expansion will cost billions of dollars. The three countries, for all practical purposes, are broke. Guess who will pay to upgrade their military forces: ye olde American taxpayer. What this vote really amounted to was a welfare program for the arms industry.
3. The only real security for Eastern Europe is a democratic Russia tied to the West. The expansion makes this more iffy than it already was. Wear Russian shoes for a moment. The Warsaw Pact, the old Soviet Union's military alliance, ended with the end of the Cold War. But NATO expands to Russia's borders. Is this a hostile move or what? It will be seen as hostile.
4. The Baltic countries want to join. How do you say yes to Poland but no to Lithuania? Because the Baltics are only a few miles from Moscow, there's no way Russia will sit still for their joining a Western military alliance aimed at Russia.
5. Because Russia is the only conceivable country that might invade Poland and because the United States and Russia will never fight a conventional war, the expansion will create a new danger of nuclear war in the future. You can kiss nuclear dis-armament goodbye.
The expansion is also hypocritical because a rational United States (OK, that's an iffy question, too; hence No. 5 above) would never risk nuclear war to defend Poland. It didn't at the end of World War II, and it didn't throughout the Cold War.
When brave Hungarians temporarily defeated the Russians in 1956, what did the United States do? Turned its back while Russian reinforcements came in and slaughtered them.
As I said, this is just a welfare program for the munitions makers and just one more example of how the politicians in Washington sacrifice foreign policy for domestic politics and domestic campaign contributions.
Military alliances should be formed only in time of war and disbanded with the coming of peace. Peacetime military alliances are an invitation to war, not a way of preventing them.
The last time somebody went to war to defend Poland's borders was in 1939. The result: Poland defeated, the British Empire bled to death, and a stack of rotting corpses millions of people high.
I have said before that Bill Clinton's legacy will not be the scandals but his scandalously inept conduct of foreign policy. Clinton managed to assemble the worst foreign-policy team in American history. He's blowing a chance for Middle East peace. He has American troops committed indefinitely to the Balkans. He's alienating the Russians. He's kissing the rear end of the Chinese Communists, who have U.S. cities targeted with their nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles. He has wrecked any hope of nuclear disarmament. He has got American troops posted in 100 foreign countries on United Nations errands, and he has cut the forces and destroyed their morale at the same time.
It seems pointless to say it while the American people are imitating a sleeping whale, but senators who voted to expand NATO ought to be bounced at the first opportunity. That decision is just too dangerously dumb to tolerate.
A handy-dandy antidote to overheated rhetoric about global warming is the little book Hot Talk, Cold Science by S. Fred Singer.
Singer is an atmospheric and space physicist. He designed satellites and instrumentation for remote sensing of the atmosphere and was the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, now part of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
He also predicted -- correctly -- that an increase in methane could lead to a depletion of ozone. In other words, this guy is a legit scientist and not a shill for industry.
Yet, he states:
``The United States and other industrialized nations are on the brink of adopting policies that will ruin national economies and drive manufacturing and other industries into less developed and less regulated countries (with the perverse effect of destroying their environments). Such policies will cost citizens literally hundreds of billions of dollars in higher production costs and lost wages -- all to mitigate climate `disasters' that exist only on computer printouts and in the feverish imagination of professional environmental zealots.''
Pooh-poohing the statements by politicians that climate science has ``settled'' the issue of global warming, Singer writes, ``The purpose of this book is to demonstrate that evidence is neither settled, nor compelling, nor even convincing. On the contrary, scientists continue to discover new mechanisms for climate change and to put forth new theories to try to account for the fact that global temperature is not rising, even though greenhouse theory says it should.''
This little book is chock-full of summaries of scientific studies, charts, graphs and enough reference material to satisfy anyone. It has been endorsed by Arthur C. Clarke, a scientist and author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and several other heavily credentialed scientists and professors. In other words, Singer writes as a scientist, not as a politician.
If you can't find it at your bookstore, you can get a copy from The Independent Institute (www.independent.org), 100 Swan Way, Oakland, Calif. 94629-1428.
Let's face it. Most of us know only what we read in the newspapers and hear on television about climate science. Unfortunately, that's a good way to be not only uninformed but misinformed. The best use of news about science is simply to take it as a cue to do further research because these days a lot of what passes for ``science'' comes out of the mouths of politicians and the fax machines of lawyers for environmental groups with axes to grind.
We live in an Age of Propaganda, and the irony is that, just as the technology of communications has reached superb heights, the task of sorting fact from fiction has gotten more difficult instead of easier. To use a radio metaphor, there is a lot of noise drowning out the signal of truth.
Singer's little book provides a real service. He provides you with an overview and the background. Interestingly enough, he points out that the ``father of the greenhouse warming,'' the late Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, wrote before his death, ``The scientific base for warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.''
After bringing you up to date on current research, he then discusses several potential outcomes and responses. The only certain outcome is the economic destruction should the Kyoto Agreement be ratified by the Senate and put into effect.
You may be asking how could the heads of industrial nations be so wrong? Well, history shows example after example of the high and mighty making mistakes. Heads of states are not only mere mortals with feet of clay, many today are professional politicians who are clay from head to toe.
Here's a little game of name the president. I'm going to cite several quotations from a past American president, and let's see if you can identify him. I think you will be surprised.
In one speech, this president said:
``Many principles exist which I have tried to represent and propose to support. I believe in the American Constitution. I favor the American system of individual enterprise, and I am opposed to any general extension of government ownership and control. I believe in a reduction and reform of taxation and shall continue my efforts in that direction. I am in favor of protection... . I am opposed to aggressive war. I shall avoid involving ourselves in the political controversies of Europe, but I shall do what I can to encourage American citizens and resources to assist in restoring Europe with the sympathetic support of our government. I shall continue to strive for the economic, moral and spiritual welfare of my country.''
Here's a hint. This president never owned an automobile.
In an inaugural address, he said, ``I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. That is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can re-establish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very distinct curtailment of our liberty.''
Another hint: This president cut taxes four times, had a budget surplus every year in office and cut the national debt by one-third.
In a speech to a college, this president said:
``We do not need more material development; we need more spiritual development. We do not need more intellectual power; we need more moral power. We do not need more knowledge; we need more character. We do not need more government; we need more culture. We do not need more law; we need more religion. We do not need more of the things that are seen; we need more of things that are unseen. It is on that side of life that it is desirable to put the emphasis at the present time. If that side be strengthened, the other side will take care of itself.''
One more hint: He was the last president to write his own speeches and to greet visitors to the White House personally. He had only one secretary and did not keep a telephone on his desk.
This man never criticized an opponent in any of his political races and wrote to one man he defeated, ``My most serious regret at the election is that you cannot share the entire pleasure of the result with me. I value your friendship and good opinion more than any office and I trust I have so conducted the campaign that our past close intimacy and good fellowship may be more secure than ever.''
In another speech, this president said, ``We are all members of one body. The welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparately bound together. Industry cannot flourish if labor languish... . Laws ... must rest on the foundation of righteousness. The people cannot look to legislation generally for success. Industry, thrift, character are not conferred by act or resolve. Government cannot relieve from toil. It can provide no substitute for the rewards of service. It can, of course, care for the defective and recognize distinguished merit. The normal must care for themselves. Self-government means self-support.''
Well, the president was Calvin Coolidge, a far more complex, intelligent, humorous and compassionate man than the distorted image of him created by leftists who hated him. In June, a new biography will be published. It's Coolidge: An American Enigma, by Robert Sobol. It's well worth a read.
The U.S. reaction to India conducting five underground nuclear tests has been childish. Imposing economic sanctions, the United States is, in effect, saying, ``Bad, bad boy. We're going to take some of your toys away.''
The threat of economic sanctions was supposed to be a deterrent. Obviously it failed. To apply sanctions after the fact is pointless. Furthermore, with Great Britain, France and Russia declining to go the sanctions route, our sanctions will hurt Americans more than the Indians.
But what the tests ought to be seen as is a warning that the governments of the world, including ours, have been so busy being the handmaidens of corporate greed that they have failed to address the problem of peace.
Looked at from the Indian point of view, with Pakistan having nuclear potential if not already weapons, and China, which has already once invaded Indian territory, busily adding to its nuclear arsenal, the Indian government is probably telling the truth when it states that its move toward a nuclear arsenal is defensive.
Looked at from the Pakistani point of view, a much smaller country with a history of conflict with India, the Indian move is seen as a hostile threat. President Clinton's urging Pakistan not to overreact is as useless as his rebuke of India. Pakistan, like India, will no doubt see to its own security needs.
And, what, pray tell, made the existing nuclear powers believe that the rest of the world would continue to remain at their mercy and always ready to do what they were told to do? A little bit of racist ego left over from imperial days, I suspect.
Are we, the American people, ready to give up our nuclear weapons? No. Then by what right do we tell other countries that they can't develop them? I'm not advocating a proliferation of nuclear weapons but merely pointing out that if proliferation is to be stopped and existing nuclear arsenals eliminated, then serious thought has to be given to finding an alternative to war as a means of providing national security.
Rhetoric and hypocrisy won't work. Why doesn't the United States apply economic sanctions to Israel? It developed nuclear weapons and refuses to sign the non-proliferation treaty. Hypocrisy. Domestic politics. I mention Israel because the U.S. government has destroyed its credibility and moral standing by hypocritically exempting Israel from all the rules it tries to enforce against other countries.
The apparent alternative to war as a means of protecting national security is the United Nations, but, there again, the United States has wrecked the organization by rendering it powerless -- usually, but not always, to protect Israel from international sanctions. The United States uses the United Nations as a cover, for example, to make war on Iraq and to impose draconian sanctions for doing only and exactly what Israel has done -- invading other people's countries and building weapons of mass destruction. But when the Lebanese, the Palestinians or the Syrians seek U.N. help, the United States brandishes its veto and says no.
So, OK, if we emasculate the United Nations as a means of protecting nation states' borders and rights, if we prevent its use as a forum for resolving disputes without use of force, then what alternative does the United States offer the world? Sadly, the answer is none.
The American government is serious about domestic politics and serious about corporate profits, but it is not serious about foreign policy. Ergo, despite our size and power, we are not really a world leader. We bully small countries. We are ineffective in dealing with larger ones. The probable future consequences are all bad.
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