Wednesday, November 17, 2004
4 GREAT LIARS AFFECTING ALL OF US
by Dan Shanefield
.
Who has had the most influence on our modern culture? Well, the philosophies we absorb from TV and popular novels, and the beliefs we get from our schooling, have been strongly influenced by just a few intellectual leaders. For example, our laws and morals have certainly been liberalized by the influence of Alfred Kinsey, drastically changing what is now legally acceptable. This even extends into the popular music that now has deep effects on young people. However, he managed to keep secret that he was an extreme (and I do mean extreme!) masochist, pedophile, and not someone who was likely to be an objective scientist when studying other people.
The trouble is, several of these intellectual leaders, who were supposedly teaching us facts derived from their scientific studies, were really just clever liars. They wanted to prove something, usually to make excuses for their own craziness, and they ignored any data that didn't fit into their conclusions. In some cases they simply made up the data that did fit. They got away with it because the news media and our college professors wanted to believe the new conclusions, so they told us it was all valid science (or economics, psychology, etc.), and we should all "get with it" and accept these modern ways of seeing the world.
Some scholarly books have now been published, which expose previously-accepted intellectual leaders as being nothing but frauds who completely falsified their conclusions. A really FAST and easy way to get a short SUMMARY of these iconoclastic books is to skim through their Customer Reviews in amazon.com. Being a retired university professor, I can't resist listing a selection of such summaries in outline form, as follows.
(1.) Sigmund Freud --- (A.) Search amazon for "torrey freud," then click on Torrey's title, "Freudian Fraud..." (Hardcover) and look at the Customer Review by LostBoy (probably the second review). It's shocking to see how such a complete liar and cheat (as Freud certainly was) could have such enormous influence on Broadway plays, doctors, and our whole society. (It's absolutely tragic that so many mothers were blamed for their children's autism, schizophrenia, etc.!)
(B.) Search amazon for "dolnick madness," then click on Dolnick's title, "Madness On The Couch..." (Hardcover) and see the Customer Review by Platek (probably the second review).
(2.) Alfred Kinsey --- (A.) Search for "jones kinsey" and click on the blue book title (Hardcover), and then look at the Customer Review "An excellent insight..." by A Reader (probably the sixth review). You will be reminded of the broad influence of Kinsey, and also how he tightly selected the interviewees to eliminate any that did not have a "liberal" attitude toward sex. Kinsey managed to hide (until recently) the fact that many of his interviewees were prisoners and prostitutes. He also hid the terrible injuries that he got from his own masochism. (Note, however, that quite a few reviewers still want to "believe," and they ignore the criticisms of Kinsey.)
(B.) Search for "judith reisman," then click on her title, "Kinsey Crimes..." (Paperback) and see especially the Customer Review by Patti Romero (probably the seventh review).
(3.) Margaret Mead --- (A.) Search for "mead sex" and click on "Sex and Temperment..." Then read the Customer Review by A Critical Reader, which tells how later anthropological studies did not confirm any of her important conclusions. One of her main points was that women are dominant, not men, in some primitive ("natural") cultures. However, the truth is that there is not a single primitive culture in the world where women are dominant. In the Encyclopedia Britannica, if you look up any of the tribes that she studied, there is no mention of female dominance. Also, Mead claimed that adultery was openly accepted among some South Sea Island tribes --- but later studies reported that it is punished by death in those same tribes ( ! ). Mead was bisexual and had an afair with her professor, Ruth Benedict, but she managed to hide that until Mead's daughter later published the fact. This was at Columbia University, from which the hippie movement of Kerouac and Ginsberg emerged in the 1950s. (I was a Columbia student then, and I became a hippie myself. However, I soon realized that it only made you poor and dependent on parents and Government welfare, so I quit that lifestyle and went to work. ) The hippies had great influence on our present youth culture, in many ways. And Mead's fraudulent claims became major foundation stones of the hippies, as well as foundation stones of Women's Liberation (partly through Bella Abzug, a Columbia Law School grad). But her "scientific" claims were really quicksand, not stone.
(B.) Search for "caton samoa" and read the Customer Review of Hiram Caton's book, "The Samoa Reader" (Hardcover). See the Customer Review by A Critical Reader.
The results of these first three gigantic frauds have been the vast spread of "sexually transmitted diseases," of out-of-wedlock childbirths, of divorces, and of drug addiction, even among middle class people. (Note that unwanted pregnancy and divorce rates now are each approximately 50% in the U.S,)
[To see my essay on Feminism, click on colored word "Lib" below:
WomensLib ]
(4.) Karl Marx --- Rather than one or two books, just note that Russia has given up on Communism. Although a few of Marx's ideas were pretty good, such as our Social Security backed up by Government bonds, most countries are becoming less and less socialist. The policies of Mao caused 30 million deaths in China, according to books such as "Hungry Ghosts," by Jasper Becker, reviewed and summarized in the N.Y. Times Book Review, February 16, 1997. (Search amazon for "becker hungry" and read any review there.) China has now become more capitalist in the coastal cities, but Vietnam has not. China is therefore "outsourcing" some of its lowest-cost labor to Vietnam, which "remains one of the poorest countries in the world," according to the N.Y. Times, September 30, 2004, page W1.
Should intellectuals support bloody revolutions to bring about Marxism in poor countries? No, because there is not a single example of a successful Marxist government, anywhere. The vast farmlands of China are still desperately poor, and the only prosperity is among privately owned "capitalist" enterprises in the coastal areas. Many of these are branches of U.S. or Taiwanese or Japanese companies. And China now has a stock market!
On those amazon.com pages, if you look at some of the Customer Reviews that I did not cite, it's obvious that plenty of people STILL believe what the Four Famous Frauds claimed. Why? Because they desperately WANT to believe such things --- it makes them feel better. People (including many writers, professors, etc.) want to believe (1) that they understand unusual human behavior, (2) that unusual sexual desires are OK, (3) that the hippie lifestyle is OK, and (4) that a perfect economic system is possible. But these Four Famous Frauds have been causing us to make things much worse, not better, and it's about time we faced the truth.
---------------------------------------------
To read about interesting people I knew personally (but most of them were not frauds at all ! ),
click on:
PEOPLE I KNEW
----------------------------------------------
To see some things about ancient history (around 1,000 BC), click on:
ANCIENT
----------------------------------------------
To read about the author of this, search google for "shanefield" and then click on "CV" near the top.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
(Following is another political essay by me:)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Iraq Deaths Perspective: 1,000/yr In Peacetime Army"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
(Already was e-published at www.useless-knowledge.com and copyrighted)
By Dan Shanefield
Dec. 6, 2004
Every few days, one or more U.S. military people dies in Iraq. The liberal news media such as the New York Times and CBS TV usually give it headline emphasis, often with a grisly photo, and figuratively rubbing our noses in the blood. Periodically they remind us that a little more than 1,000 Americans have died in Iraq since the present invasion started (March 20, 2003, almost two years ago).
Of course, it's a truly terrible thing if even one person dies in such events, especially for a relative or friend of the casualty. However, this is a big, country, populous and rich, and we need a huge military effort to protect ourselves in this dangerous world. Plenty of other countries would love to kill or enslave us, and take the great lands and resources that we've got --- or just kill us because they hate us. The military protection that we vitally need involves big costs of all kinds. One of these is that, even in peacetime, about 1,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors die every year from accidents, which is much higher than the per capita civilian accident rate. That's right, it's every year, in peacetime! (The reference for this is an item by Princeton University professor Jeffrey Herbst, on page A22 of the August 4, 1994 New York Times.) I'm not trying to say that the present death rate in Iraq is something to ignore, but it is a load that our big, rich country must bear, in order to stay free and safe.
Was the Iraq invasion justified? I claim that it was, because the U.N would eventually have to withdraw its expensive WMD search team, since no such weapons were being found (N.Y Times, Sept. 30, 2004, page A29). Afterwards, Saddam was planning to use the world's second largest oil reserves to finance a reconstructed war machine (N.Y. Times, Sept. 17, 2004, page A1). His plans included buying Scud missiles from China again, but this time it would be the improved long range type (N.Y. Times, Oct. 8, 2004, page A-1). He also planned to obtain them from North Korea or Pakistan. The warheads could easily contain poison gas and/or TNT plus nuclear waste powder (N.Y. Times, Sept. 26, 2004, page WK-12), when his oil money became freely available for purchasing such materials from impoverished but aggressive countries. It would then be too late for us to stop the juggernaut.
Arguments about all this can go on forever, because we can never prove what "would have happened" if we had waited longer. The best we can do is look back once in a while, and consider what probably would have happened if we had waited before confronting Hitler, until after he conquered Russia. We do have to make tough decisions in the face of such threats. It's a "damned if you do an damned if you don't" situation, where either choice has penalties. The penalty from our choice in Iraq is about a thousand deaths in two years, plus an enormous monetary deficit. However, we certainly must consider these things with the perspective that America is a big country, with big penalties and rewards.
Our news media practically never points out the accidental death rate of a thousand per year in our peacetime military. It is also important to realize that, in our big country, we have more than 100 deaths EVERY DAY from automobile accidents (now amounting to about 40,000 per year). Do we hear about this in the morning news, to compare with Iraq? It's part of being in a big country --- a penalty that unfortunately comes along with the tremendous utility and convenience of our automobiles.
Do our news media remind us that deaths from CIVILIAN GUNS (hunting, murders, suicides, accidents) in the U.S. also adds up to about 40,000 per year? (This was reported on page 18 of the Oct. 17, 1999 New York Times, with whom you will realize I have a love/hate relationship. They do give us the raw information, but not the emphasis needed for an intelligent perspective!) Anyhow, that's another 100 every day, from guns here at home.
How about deaths from MISTAKES in U.S. hospitals? That depends on whom you believe, the medical establishment, or the insurance companies and other data collectors. The Harvard Medical School Health Letter (a little monthly magazine) said "at least 44,000 Americans die every year from preventable medical errors" (June 2004, page 1). The good old New York Times, however, reported that "medical errors are killing 195,000 people a year in American hospitals" (Aug. 1, 2004, page WK-11). Whatever is the truth, it's more than 100 a day. It's a big country.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OPINION LEADERS
by Dan Shanefield
.
Who has had the most influence on our modern culture? Well, the philosophies we absorb from TV and popular novels, and the beliefs we get from our schooling, have been strongly influenced by just a few intellectual leaders. For example, our laws and morals have certainly been liberalized by the influence of Alfred Kinsey, drastically changing what is now legally acceptable. This even extends into the popular music that now has deep effects on young people. However, he managed to keep secret that he was an extreme (and I do mean extreme!) masochist, pedophile, and not someone who was likely to be an objective scientist when studying other people.
The trouble is, several of these intellectual leaders, who were supposedly teaching us facts derived from their scientific studies, were really just clever liars. They wanted to prove something, usually to make excuses for their own craziness, and they ignored any data that didn't fit into their conclusions. In some cases they simply made up the data that did fit. They got away with it because the news media and our college professors wanted to believe the new conclusions, so they told us it was all valid science (or economics, psychology, etc.), and we should all "get with it" and accept these modern ways of seeing the world.
Some scholarly books have now been published, which expose previously-accepted intellectual leaders as being nothing but frauds who completely falsified their conclusions. A really FAST and easy way to get a short SUMMARY of these iconoclastic books is to skim through their Customer Reviews in amazon.com. Being a retired university professor, I can't resist listing a selection of such summaries in outline form, as follows.
(1.) Sigmund Freud --- (A.) Search amazon for "torrey freud," then click on Torrey's title, "Freudian Fraud..." (Hardcover) and look at the Customer Review by LostBoy (probably the second review). It's shocking to see how such a complete liar and cheat (as Freud certainly was) could have such enormous influence on Broadway plays, doctors, and our whole society. (It's absolutely tragic that so many mothers were blamed for their children's autism, schizophrenia, etc.!)
(B.) Search amazon for "dolnick madness," then click on Dolnick's title, "Madness On The Couch..." (Hardcover) and see the Customer Review by Platek (probably the second review).
(2.) Alfred Kinsey --- (A.) Search for "jones kinsey" and click on the blue book title (Hardcover), and then look at the Customer Review "An excellent insight..." by A Reader (probably the sixth review). You will be reminded of the broad influence of Kinsey, and also how he tightly selected the interviewees to eliminate any that did not have a "liberal" attitude toward sex. Kinsey managed to hide (until recently) the fact that many of his interviewees were prisoners and prostitutes. He also hid the terrible injuries that he got from his own masochism. (Note, however, that quite a few reviewers still want to "believe," and they ignore the criticisms of Kinsey.)
(B.) Search for "judith reisman," then click on her title, "Kinsey Crimes..." (Paperback) and see especially the Customer Review by Patti Romero (probably the seventh review).
(3.) Margaret Mead --- (A.) Search for "mead sex" and click on "Sex and Temperment..." Then read the Customer Review by A Critical Reader, which tells how later anthropological studies did not confirm any of her important conclusions. One of her main points was that women are dominant, not men, in some primitive ("natural") cultures. However, the truth is that there is not a single primitive culture in the world where women are dominant. In the Encyclopedia Britannica, if you look up any of the tribes that she studied, there is no mention of female dominance. Also, Mead claimed that adultery was openly accepted among some South Sea Island tribes --- but later studies reported that it is punished by death in those same tribes ( ! ). Mead was bisexual and had an afair with her professor, Ruth Benedict, but she managed to hide that until Mead's daughter later published the fact. This was at Columbia University, from which the hippie movement of Kerouac and Ginsberg emerged in the 1950s. (I was a Columbia student then, and I became a hippie myself. However, I soon realized that it only made you poor and dependent on parents and Government welfare, so I quit that lifestyle and went to work. ) The hippies had great influence on our present youth culture, in many ways. And Mead's fraudulent claims became major foundation stones of the hippies, as well as foundation stones of Women's Liberation (partly through Bella Abzug, a Columbia Law School grad). But her "scientific" claims were really quicksand, not stone.
(B.) Search for "caton samoa" and read the Customer Review of Hiram Caton's book, "The Samoa Reader" (Hardcover). See the Customer Review by A Critical Reader.
The results of these first three gigantic frauds have been the vast spread of "sexually transmitted diseases," of out-of-wedlock childbirths, of divorces, and of drug addiction, even among middle class people. (Note that unwanted pregnancy and divorce rates now are each approximately 50% in the U.S,)
[To see my essay on Feminism, click on colored word "Lib" below:
WomensLib ]
(4.) Karl Marx --- Rather than one or two books, just note that Russia has given up on Communism. Although a few of Marx's ideas were pretty good, such as our Social Security backed up by Government bonds, most countries are becoming less and less socialist. The policies of Mao caused 30 million deaths in China, according to books such as "Hungry Ghosts," by Jasper Becker, reviewed and summarized in the N.Y. Times Book Review, February 16, 1997. (Search amazon for "becker hungry" and read any review there.) China has now become more capitalist in the coastal cities, but Vietnam has not. China is therefore "outsourcing" some of its lowest-cost labor to Vietnam, which "remains one of the poorest countries in the world," according to the N.Y. Times, September 30, 2004, page W1.
Should intellectuals support bloody revolutions to bring about Marxism in poor countries? No, because there is not a single example of a successful Marxist government, anywhere. The vast farmlands of China are still desperately poor, and the only prosperity is among privately owned "capitalist" enterprises in the coastal areas. Many of these are branches of U.S. or Taiwanese or Japanese companies. And China now has a stock market!
On those amazon.com pages, if you look at some of the Customer Reviews that I did not cite, it's obvious that plenty of people STILL believe what the Four Famous Frauds claimed. Why? Because they desperately WANT to believe such things --- it makes them feel better. People (including many writers, professors, etc.) want to believe (1) that they understand unusual human behavior, (2) that unusual sexual desires are OK, (3) that the hippie lifestyle is OK, and (4) that a perfect economic system is possible. But these Four Famous Frauds have been causing us to make things much worse, not better, and it's about time we faced the truth.
---------------------------------------------
To read about interesting people I knew personally (but most of them were not frauds at all ! ),
click on:
PEOPLE I KNEW
----------------------------------------------
To see some things about ancient history (around 1,000 BC), click on:
ANCIENT
----------------------------------------------
To read about the author of this, search google for "shanefield" and then click on "CV" near the top.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
(Following is another political essay by me:)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Iraq Deaths Perspective: 1,000/yr In Peacetime Army"
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
(Already was e-published at www.useless-knowledge.com and copyrighted)
By Dan Shanefield
Dec. 6, 2004
Every few days, one or more U.S. military people dies in Iraq. The liberal news media such as the New York Times and CBS TV usually give it headline emphasis, often with a grisly photo, and figuratively rubbing our noses in the blood. Periodically they remind us that a little more than 1,000 Americans have died in Iraq since the present invasion started (March 20, 2003, almost two years ago).
Of course, it's a truly terrible thing if even one person dies in such events, especially for a relative or friend of the casualty. However, this is a big, country, populous and rich, and we need a huge military effort to protect ourselves in this dangerous world. Plenty of other countries would love to kill or enslave us, and take the great lands and resources that we've got --- or just kill us because they hate us. The military protection that we vitally need involves big costs of all kinds. One of these is that, even in peacetime, about 1,000 U.S. soldiers and sailors die every year from accidents, which is much higher than the per capita civilian accident rate. That's right, it's every year, in peacetime! (The reference for this is an item by Princeton University professor Jeffrey Herbst, on page A22 of the August 4, 1994 New York Times.) I'm not trying to say that the present death rate in Iraq is something to ignore, but it is a load that our big, rich country must bear, in order to stay free and safe.
Was the Iraq invasion justified? I claim that it was, because the U.N would eventually have to withdraw its expensive WMD search team, since no such weapons were being found (N.Y Times, Sept. 30, 2004, page A29). Afterwards, Saddam was planning to use the world's second largest oil reserves to finance a reconstructed war machine (N.Y. Times, Sept. 17, 2004, page A1). His plans included buying Scud missiles from China again, but this time it would be the improved long range type (N.Y. Times, Oct. 8, 2004, page A-1). He also planned to obtain them from North Korea or Pakistan. The warheads could easily contain poison gas and/or TNT plus nuclear waste powder (N.Y. Times, Sept. 26, 2004, page WK-12), when his oil money became freely available for purchasing such materials from impoverished but aggressive countries. It would then be too late for us to stop the juggernaut.
Arguments about all this can go on forever, because we can never prove what "would have happened" if we had waited longer. The best we can do is look back once in a while, and consider what probably would have happened if we had waited before confronting Hitler, until after he conquered Russia. We do have to make tough decisions in the face of such threats. It's a "damned if you do an damned if you don't" situation, where either choice has penalties. The penalty from our choice in Iraq is about a thousand deaths in two years, plus an enormous monetary deficit. However, we certainly must consider these things with the perspective that America is a big country, with big penalties and rewards.
Our news media practically never points out the accidental death rate of a thousand per year in our peacetime military. It is also important to realize that, in our big country, we have more than 100 deaths EVERY DAY from automobile accidents (now amounting to about 40,000 per year). Do we hear about this in the morning news, to compare with Iraq? It's part of being in a big country --- a penalty that unfortunately comes along with the tremendous utility and convenience of our automobiles.
Do our news media remind us that deaths from CIVILIAN GUNS (hunting, murders, suicides, accidents) in the U.S. also adds up to about 40,000 per year? (This was reported on page 18 of the Oct. 17, 1999 New York Times, with whom you will realize I have a love/hate relationship. They do give us the raw information, but not the emphasis needed for an intelligent perspective!) Anyhow, that's another 100 every day, from guns here at home.
How about deaths from MISTAKES in U.S. hospitals? That depends on whom you believe, the medical establishment, or the insurance companies and other data collectors. The Harvard Medical School Health Letter (a little monthly magazine) said "at least 44,000 Americans die every year from preventable medical errors" (June 2004, page 1). The good old New York Times, however, reported that "medical errors are killing 195,000 people a year in American hospitals" (Aug. 1, 2004, page WK-11). Whatever is the truth, it's more than 100 a day. It's a big country.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OPINION LEADERS
