Once again I present the marvelous blogging of Mr. Alan Caruba.

How Expert Are the Experts?

By Alan Caruba

We live in a society that apparently has experts on everything stacked ten deep. You cannot turn on the television without being introduced to experts of every description about everything.

That being the case, why is the nation on the brink of insolvency despite the fact that I can order a product, receive email confirmation, and a tracking notice of its shipment without once having to talk to a living person?

That, I submit, is pure genius, whereas creating programs for the wasteful redistribution of wealth, mine and yours, is my definition of really, really stupid.

Why stupid? Because communism and/or socialism, sooner or later always fails. Because banishing the ownership of private property—this is MY stuff, not yours—runs counter to everything we humans strive to achieve and because people don’t want to interact with the government in some fashion every damned day, unless it’s the postman.

As Thomas Paine put it, “that government is best which governs least�?, calling it “a necessary evil.�?

I got to wondering how many PhDs there are in the United States and, it only took a bit of Googling to conclude there is a huge glut of PhDs, not just here, but worldwide. Considering that it takes from 7.5 to 10 years to nail the diploma to the wall that is a lot of time acquiring something that often does not kick open the door to prosperity, although it does look good on their resumes.

Let us grant that we want our physicians, Doctors of Medicine, to have spent a good stretch of time learning how not to kill us in the process of curing us. Other fields critical to our well being include engineers who design bridges, buildings, and such. We want smart people to ensure that the vast preponderance of dumb people don’t kill us prematurely.

Anyone who has spent any time around PhDs or, in my case, answering their emails, soon concludes that many of them are just nitwits. The greatest drawback of being a PhD is, apparently, concluding that you are smarter than everyone else and then wanting to make that point on an hourly basis, particularly with strangers.

So, forgive me if I have grown old and skeptical listening to or reading PhDs and the views of “experts�?, people who are supposed to know what they are talking about.

Permit me to cite just a few examples.

“So here is the Great Society. It’s the time—and it’s going to be soon—when nobody in this country is poor.�? – Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965.

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere, son. You ought to go back to drivin’ a truck.�? Jim Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, firing Elvis Presley after one performance on September 25, 1954.

“Get your feet off my desk, get out of here, you stink, and we’re not going to buy your product.�? – Joe Keenan, president of Atari, responding to Steve Job’s offer to sell him rights to the new personal computer he and Steve Wozniak had developed, 1976.

“There is not the slightest indication that (nuclear) energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.�? – Dr. Albert Einstein, 1932. (PS. He changed his mind).

Let me close this observation on expertise or the lack of it, by noting that all politicians lie. The best and most noble of them lie on occasion and the rest of them lie all the time. Our current President has managed to lie ceaselessly, with or without the aid of a TelePrompter. Other than the hardcore 25% of Liberals, most Americans have concluded that he is not to be trusted.

Likewise, far too many scientists have taken to lying a great deal as well and this has been particularly obvious as regards all those telling us that global warming is real, carbon dioxide is a lethal pollutant, and just about anything involving the use of a chemical is suicide.

In Proverbs it says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Let me amend that by suggesting that wisdom includes regarding all those experts on the television, radio and print media with a degree of skepticism. This is another way of saying take the time to do your own research. A republic such as ours requires people to seek the best answers to present problems.

The views of Liberals defy history, science, economics, and logic. They are wrong. Their experts are wrong. That is why we are struggling to put right, to eliminate, all their governmental “answers�? to our present crisis.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

From — Warning Signs: How Expert Are the Experts?

Wis. Assembly passes bill taking away union rights

MADISON, Wis. (AP) - Republicans in the Wisconsin Assembly took the first significant action on their plan to strip collective bargaining rights from most public workers, abruptly passing the measure early Friday morning before sleep-deprived Democrats realized what was happening.

The vote ended three straight days of punishing debate in the Assembly. But the political standoff over the bill - and the monumental protests at the state Capitol against it - appear far from over.

The Assembly’s vote sent the bill on to the Senate, but minority Democrats in that house have fled to Illinois to prevent a vote. No one knows when they will return from hiding. Republicans who control the chamber sent state troopers out looking for them at their homes on Thursday, but they turned up nothing.

Full Story Here:
Wis. Assembly passes bill taking away union rights

Let’s take a look at UNIONS, and a few other items that were considered to be a good thing in their time.

The best example of a Union that was needed is this: The Trucking industry.

Many years ago the trucking industry needed to be unionized. Drivers were expected to load and maintain the trucks they drove, and after loading they were expected to drive that truck to a destination, unload it, reload it and get back to the home terminal ASAP. And it didn’t matter if it all to 10 hours or 110 hours.

But Fred, ‘That’s just part of the job’, you say?

These drivers were expected to do all of this for very low wages and to do so with NO rest, NO break, and by God, don’t you dare be late with the freight. If you were, some other poor wretch was going to be making the next run while you were out looking for a new job.

Enter The Teamsters Union

In it’s inception the Teamsters was a good thing. They fought for the members, for the drivers and dock workers. The forced the employers to pay a fair wage and helped to get federal laws passed that regulated the number of hours a driver could be on duty, or driving, before that driver was required to take a mandatory 8 hour break, and to limit the number of total hours a driver could be ON DUTY for a 7 day period.

That was some good brought on by a Union. Then, the Teamsters were shown to be the crooks and thieves that they are still rumored to be to this very day.

The same can be said for most any labor union, they were, once upon a time, a much needed and useful entity. Then they all outlived their usefulness.

Let’s take a look at another item that was once considered to be harmless, and in many cases, touted as beneficial;

Cocaine

Its possession, cultivation, and distribution are illegal for non-medicinal and non-government sanctioned purposes in virtually all parts of the world. Although its free commercialization is illegal and has been severely penalized in virtually all countries, its use worldwide remains widespread in many social, cultural, and personal settings. SOURCE

Most people today KNOW that cocaine is a bad thing, it is highly addictive, it’s terribly expensive and there is NO good that can come from it’s use in it’s raw form in a social or recreational setting.

But did you know that in the late 1800′s and early 1900′s cocaine was a very accepted drug, and was thought to be beneficial to the user? Many over the counter products contained cocaine or opium and were sold as a cure-all with NO limits on how much you could buy and NO limits or dosage set for it’s consumption.

Surprising as it sounds, Coca Cola gets its name from one of its original ingredients - cocaine. And although the drug’s now illegal, this wasn’t always the case. But how did it become popular, what led to its downfall, and how does Coca Cola come in to it? SOURCE

And so it went, cocaine and opium were shown to have outlived their usefulness in the public domain.

Another group that was once believed to be useful and needed?

The Ku Klux Klan

Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement during the Reconstruction era in the United States. As a secret vigilante group, the Klan focused its anger reacted against Radical Republicans and sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder, against black and white Republicans. In 1870 and 1871 the federal government passed the Force Acts, which were used to prosecute Klan crimes. SOURCE

I am a serious student of history, I know what the Klan became, I know that in their evolution they became a HATE group and vile racists, but in their inception the Klan was a worthy organization. Their original intent was to stop the Yankee Carpetbaggers and EVIL Republicans from further punishing the Southern states.

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