# Stuff and Things > HISTORY, veterans & science >  Conservatives and Science....

## patrickt

We hear a lot about how conservatives reject science. That's nonsense, of course. We do reject political predictions from people posing as scientists. Consider the following:

"No, folks, we have no quarrel with science.  But we have a serious problem with something masquerading as science: the manipulation of facts and data to create fearful predictive models.  These "scientific" statistical models often tend to cast the freedom we enjoy in a negative light, and they almost always end up being wrong.  Let us amble down the Memory Lane of five decades and revisit some of the terrifying events the learned practitioners of this branch of science once assured us would occur.  No doubt, you will recall many of them:

By 1980, city-dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution.



By 1985, air pollution will block 50% of the sunlight reaching Earth, causing global cooling.



By 1989, the population explosion and resulting food shortages will result in mass starvation ("The Great Die-Off"), in which 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, will perish.



By 1990, all lead, zinc, tin, silver, and gold reserves will be gone.



By 2000, global crude oil reserves will be gone.



By 2000, global temperatures will be 11 degrees cooler, and we will be in a new Ice Age.



On January 1, 2000 ("Y2K"), computers will go haywire and plunge the civilized world into chaos.



As the 21st century progresses, stronger Katrina-like hurricanes will occur more frequently.



In 2016, Hillary Clinton will win the popular vote by double digits and defeat Donald Trump in an Electoral College landslide.



By 2050, consistent with rapidly rising global temperatures shown in a hockey stick graph, 15 U.S. cities will be under water.



In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic will possibly result in as many as 2.2 million U.S. deaths.



Admittedly, the jury is still out on COVID-19, but given that the current U.S. death toll  depending on which CDC website you visit  is either about 47,000 or 78,000, it is highly unlikely fatalities will reach 2.2 million.  Indeed, they may not even surpass the 100,000 Americans who died of seasonal flu in 1968 or the 116,000 who died in 1957.  (Note: The U.S. economy did not shut down in either of those years, and we survived.)



It is important to emphasize that these ill fated prognostications were not made by carnival hucksters or Times Square loons in sandwich boards; they were the work of highly respected scientists and statisticians, widely publicized in the national media.  All were taken seriously at the time."
https://www.americanthinker.com/arti...s_science.html

Liberals are the ones who think a fetus at seven months isn't a baby. The daughter of a family here in Mexico needed an abortion for a medical emergency and they had no money. I paid for the abortion. She was five months pregnant. When they finished they had a four-pound baby girl--since she was crying and eating and pooping I guess I can call her a baby girl--and, since we were in Mexico, no one consider killing her. The doctor's guessed she was close to seven-months. Now, she's 21-years-old, in nursing school, and has a two-year-old son. Not bad for someone who wasn't a baby.

Liberals are also the ones who look at a baby with a penis and testicles and asks, "Has it told you yet whether it's a boy or a girl?" Liberals are not bright.

One prediction the liberals skipped was predicting over 40 million deaths from removing DDT from the world market and coercing malaria-ridden countries to not use DDT to control mosquitos. The pro-mosquito forces have yet to accept responsibility so they are obviously liberals.

Pairing liberals with science makes as much sense as pairing religious fanatics with science. In fact, liberals view science as a faith and will eagerly follow frauds and charlatans like Al Gore and Rachel Carson.

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Conservative Libertarian (05-10-2020),dinosaur (05-11-2020),East of the Beast (05-10-2020),Hillofbeans (05-10-2020),Jim Scott (05-10-2020),Lone Gunman (05-10-2020),Mainecoons (05-10-2020),nonsqtr (05-11-2020),RMNIXON (05-10-2020),Rutabaga (05-10-2020)

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## Captain Kirk!

Y2K was very real and would have crippled us had they not fixed it before hand.

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## East of the Beast

> Y2K was very real and would have crippled us had they not fixed it before hand.


Have my doubts about that.That's just me though.You'd have thought computer geeks would have had enough foresight to program beyond 1999.

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Call_me_Ishmael (05-11-2020),ruthless terrier (05-11-2020)

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## Big Dummy

Rejection of science is a liberal disease. Global warming or chromosomes are science they completely reject. I could go on but I don’t have all day.

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East of the Beast (05-10-2020),Lone Gunman (05-10-2020)

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## JMWinPR

> Have my doubts about that.That's just me though.You'd have thought computer geeks would have had enough foresight to program beyond 1999.


The main push was to end the "Lifetime" warranties on some products. And to get people to replace systems and appliances that were reaching the end of there service life.

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Big Dummy (05-10-2020),East of the Beast (05-11-2020)

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## RMNIXON

Prediction models to promote an agenda are not science. Large sums of grant money given to prove a PC idea or theory are not science. Nor is direct government funding to do the same like NASA being subverted for Global Warming studies............

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Jim Scott (05-10-2020),Lone Gunman (05-10-2020)

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## donttread

> We hear a lot about how conservatives reject science. That's nonsense, of course. We do reject political predictions from people posing as scientists. Consider the following:
> 
> "No, folks, we have no quarrel with science.  But we have a serious problem with something masquerading as science: the manipulation of facts and data to create fearful predictive models.  These "scientific" statistical models often tend to cast the freedom we enjoy in a negative light, and they almost always end up being wrong.  Let us amble down the Memory Lane of five decades and revisit some of the terrifying events the learned practitioners of this branch of science once assured us would occur.  No doubt, you will recall many of them:
> 
> By 1980, city-dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution.
> 
> 
> 
> By 1985, air pollution will block 50% of the sunlight reaching Earth, causing global cooling.
> ...


Well it's long after 1980 but to be fair people are wearing mask in the streets?

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## Captain Kirk!

> Have my doubts about that.That's just me though.You'd have thought computer geeks would have had enough foresight to program beyond 1999.


I don't doubt it at all. Got a new credit card in 98 that expired in 2000. First time I used it card reader terminal said invalid date. My excel spreadsheet I used at work failed also when I put a cash sale into my sales spreadsheet and gave it a date of 2001 (it was 1998) and sorted all the entries, the 2001 sale entry came out at the top of the list instead of being the last entry. Other things as well but it's pointless to list them.

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## Captain Kirk!

> The main push was to end the "Lifetime" warranties on some products. And to get people to replace systems and appliances that were reaching the end of there service life.


No, the problem was that many operating systems could not properly read a date past 99 because the date format was only 2 digits, assigning it a value of 1900 instead of 2000. This would have caused many many chips, pc's, controllers, etc, to malfunction. The US military reported one on it's satellites crashed after midnight on 12-31-1999 and was down for a long time before they were able to fix it. It made me wonder how many more screwed up we didn't hear about. 

I guess I was lucky that the software I had written for auto repair shops used a 4 digit date format. I would have had to give a lot of money back.

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## Rutabaga

well, truth be told,,these are the same "scientists" who think males can menstruate and have babies,,,soooooo....grain of salt kinda thingy...

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East of the Beast (05-11-2020),patrickt (05-11-2020)

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## jirqoadai

i thought the ozone hole would only slow its rate of getting bigger. now its closed up entirely. no greenhouse gasses can escape now. thankyou JFK, for making GE pay the $3,000,000 fine for all the PCBs that were made from lighting ballasts. that sure showed them.

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## East of the Beast

I always wondered how greenhouse gases could escape the earths' gravity

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## Gator Monroe

I always thought the Rocket scientists at Stennis Space Center were Jewish Liberals & Closet Socialists from a long line of Marxists dating back to Sacco & Vanzetti & the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire ...

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## nonsqtr

Which of these is more likely to result in a scientific experiment?

Liberals: "I believe everything I hear on CNN".

Conservatives: "I don't believe a word those lying bastards spew into the airwaves".

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## UKSmartypants

> Y2K was very real and would have crippled us had they not fixed it before hand.


Nah it was never that big a deal. I worked in IT in a large company at the time , we knew it was coming ,and we had all the systems checked, patched, and tested with dummy rollovers months before. Me and three others still got $600 tax free ex-gratia payment  for being 'on call' for dec 31/jan 1/jan2  in case it went wrong. OFC we knew it wouldnt, but as no one specifically asked us how sure we were, we would have told them ....  honestly.....   :Big Grin:

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patrickt (05-11-2020)

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## UKSmartypants

> i thought the ozone hole would only slow its rate of getting bigger. now its closed up entirely. no greenhouse gasses can escape now. thankyou JFK, for making GE pay the $3,000,000 fine for all the PCBs that were made from lighting ballasts. that sure showed them.



The irony is diesel engines and some large muscle car petrol engines, which are currently the spawn of Satan, put out PM5 and PM10 particles that rise into the upper atmosphere and cause  global cooling, because they block sunlight......  so, ill continue to do my part in fighting global warming by driving my 1966 V8 5.2L Dodge Charger.....   :Big Grin:

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## ruthless terrier

> Have my doubts about that.That's just me though.You'd have thought computer geeks would have had enough foresight to program beyond 1999.



most of them did. and the problems would have been fixed very quickly if they did pop up. for me it was totally overblown nonsense but then again I was not a Cobol programmer.

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## Call_me_Ishmael

> No, the problem was that many operating systems could not properly read a date past 99 because the date format was only 2 digits, assigning it a value of 1900 instead of 2000. This would have caused many many chips, pc's, controllers, etc, to malfunction. The US military reported one on it's satellites crashed after midnight on 12-31-1999 and was down for a long time before they were able to fix it. It made me wonder how many more screwed up we didn't hear about. 
> 
> I guess I was lucky that the software I had written for auto repair shops used a 4 digit date format. I would have had to give a lot of money back.


I recall where I worked, an edict came out. "do not set the date on your computer ahead to 2000! " kinda like governor edicts today. I had to confess " already did that..nuthin bad happened"

Software people apparently got some overtime out of the whole deal though.

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ruthless terrier (05-11-2020)

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## jirqoadai

cc


> Which of these is more likely to result in a scientific experiment?
> 
> Liberals: "I believe everything I hear on CNN".
> 
> Conservatives: "I don't believe a word those lying bastards spew into the airwaves".


the first one. for a Harvard research grant is awarded to everyone who wishes to calculate the bra size of Ginger vs. MaryAnne on Gilligans Island

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## patrickt

> Y2K was very real and would have crippled us had they not fixed it before hand.


So it was put in the hands of that genius, Al Gore. The Y2K problem was caused by legacy software, we knew about it well in advance, and businesses simply updated their software. It was real only in the sense that if private corporations were as stupid as Washington politicians there could have been a problem.

The hysteria generated was purely the doing of politicians and their allies in the media. I know people who gave in to hysteria and were seriously harmed.

A friend of mine called me in a panic that his laptop would quit working on New Year's Day. I couldn't calm him so I suggest he reset the date on his laptop, reboot, and see what happens. "Nothing will happen because it's not really the millenium. The computer will know." 

An acquaintance converted everything he had invested into cash and bought gold shares. Not gold ingots, mind you, but gold shares. Through the month of January he was having me check the price of gold which was, of course, way down. I finally asked why and he was broke. All his money was tied up in "gold shares" which, if sold, would have cost him a bundle. I suspect there never was any gold behind the "gold shares". Sort of like an entrepreneurial fed.

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## patrickt

> Well it's long after 1980 but to be fair people are wearing mask in the streets?


Some are and it's not from air pollution, is it, @donttread?

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## UKSmartypants

> I recall where I worked, an edict came out. "do not set the date on your computer ahead to 2000! " kinda like governor edicts today. I had to confess " already did that..nuthin bad happened"
> 
> Software people apparently got some overtime out of the whole deal though.


we didnt per se, we spent a few unpaid evenings testing and patching all the systems, and i nfact we only found two (non critical) systems  that fell over when u rolled the date forward. But we took the $600 on call payment because that paid for the unpaid overtime, even though we knew they were paying us to be on call for nothing. Swings and roundabouts you see.

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## UKSmartypants

> So it was put in the hands of that genius, Al Gore. The Y2K problem was caused by legacy software, we knew about it well in advance, and businesses simply updated their software. It was real only in the sense that if private corporations were as stupid as Washington politicians there could have been a problem.
> 
> The hysteria generated was purely the doing of politicians and their allies in the media. I know people who gave in to hysteria and were seriously harmed.
> 
> A friend of mine called me in a panic that his laptop would quit working on New Year's Day. I couldn't calm him so I suggest he reset the date on his laptop, reboot, and see what happens. "Nothing will happen because it's not really the millenium. The computer will know." 
> 
> An acquaintance converted everything he had invested into cash and bought gold shares. Not gold ingots, mind you, but gold shares. Through the month of January he was having me check the price of gold which was, of course, way down. I finally asked why and he was broke. All his money was tied up in "gold shares" which, if sold, would have cost him a bundle. I suspect there never was any gold behind the "gold shares". Sort of like an entrepreneurial fed.


Well i suspect he was talking about either Gold Futures (where you buy at an agreed future price, and then sell when the time comes, but never take delivery) or Stored Bullion, where you buy gold but the broker stores it (and rents the gold out to people who need gold as security against a loan), until you want to sell it.

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