The Crowhill Journal

… making Biden among the worst presidents ever.

INTERVIEW | Kimberley Strassel on Why Biden Presidency Looks a Lot Like Jimmy Carter Administration

I hope that you recoil in unbelief when you hear stories about a deep government conspiracy to traffic children for sex. It seems so outlandish that your natural reaction should be to dismiss it.

But then you hear about Epstein and his apparent suicide, you see coordinated efforts to keep people from watching “The Sound of Freedom,” and media efforts to assure us that sex trafficking isn’t such a big deal, and you start to wonder what the heck is going on. Isn’t everybody against child sex trafficking? It’s certainly possible (actually, likely) that the numbers aren’t as bad as the advocates want us to believe, but they’re certainly bad.

In a similar vein, I was speaking with a family who had a child in the hospital. After he got out of the ER, there was a mix-up about medicines, which lengthened his hospital stay for several days. Someone questioned whether the “mix up” was intentional to keep him in the hospital longer so they could make more money.

I scoffed at the suggestion. Doctors and nurses are trying their best to help these kids. But the skeptic reminded me that doctors and nurses are promoting so-called “gender affirming care” for children precisely because it’s such a big money maker, and the pharmaceutical companies are promoting vaccines for children (who don’t need them) so they can make more money.

Last night I listened to a recent Tucker Carlson speech where he mentioned a similar phenomenon. He (like most of us, I hope) doesn’t want to believe that people are tampering with our elections. But a friend said, “look, people kill each other over insurance claims, certainly they cheat when it comes to who runs the free world.”

The pattern is the same in all these cases. We want to believe that people are basically decent, and that complicated, evil conspiracies don’t happen.

But then we keep getting evidence that people very clearly are doing dastardly things, and it makes it harder to laugh away the conspiracies.

Politicians and tobacco companies misled people about smoking, something similar happened with sugar, the government intentionally poisoned alcohol during Prohibition, and the medical establishment experimented on black people with syphilis. And as much as I hate to credit Alex Jones with anything, he might be at least partially right about how chemicals are affecting frogs.

The bottom line is that people lie to us all the time to promote their agendas, or to make money, and that these lies are often supported by people in power. But most of us are usually reluctant to believe it.

Consider so-called “forever chemicals.” It’s at least possible that we’re being poisoned by near constant exposure to plastics. Almost everything you eat and drink has been in contact with plastics, and there’s some evidence that it’s very bad for you.

But if you’re a news organization, and you start to run a story about that, guess what happens?

Yes, it is hot, but here are a few things to keep in mind as you read the breathless articles about the recent heat waves.

• When they say “hottest on record,” you should be curious what “record” they’re talking about. If it’s the thermometer record, that only goes back a little more than 100 years. There are other records — like ice core data — that tell a different story.
• The planet has been warming for 10,000 years because we’ve been transitioning from a glacial period to an interglacial period. It’s not a straight line trend, but the trend is clear over that time frame.
• Don’t be fooled by graphs that mix proxy records with thermometer records. IOW, they reconstruct / estimate past temperatures using proxies, but then append the thermometer record at the end. That’s a trick. If they start with proxy data, the whole chart should be proxy data.
• We’ve done this before. Ice ages have glacial and interglacial periods. The last interglacial was called the Eemian. It was from about 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. It was most likely warmer during the Eemian than it is today.
• Nobody knows whether — when this interglacial is over — we will plunge back into a glacial period or come out of the ice age altogether.

By the way, we are currently in an ice age, which is usually defined as a time when there is ice at both poles. For lots of Earth’s history there has not been ice at the poles. And in other times, the whole Earth seems to have been covered in ice. (“Snowball Earth.”)

A Researcher Says the Expansion of the Universe Is Just a Mirage. He Might Be Right.

I am far from an expert on cosmological matters, but I’ve always had a suspicion that our grand models about the universe are missing something important. For example, I think it’s not wise to put your trust in a theory that says we’re missing 80% of the mass in the universe (or whatever the number is) and then to have to theorize about where all that mass is hiding. The idea that the theory is missing something really important seems a lot more likely.

The article above says the assumption that the universe is expanding at an increasingly rapid pace might be an illusion. I have no idea if he’s right, but that’s precisely the sort of “you forgot something here” explanation that I’ve been expecting.

But cosmology doesn’t particularly interest me. What came into my twisted mind as I read that article was to wonder how many people bought into the idea that “science proves” that the universe had a beginning, that the beginning had to have a cause, and that cause was God.

The problem goes something like this. Proposition A leads to Belief B. Then Proposition A becomes dubious, but Belief B remains. (The problem is not unique to religion.)

You could see it as “undermining the foundation,” or “sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.” People have an amazing ability to believe one set of things that undermine some other set of things they believe, and not be particularly bothered by it.

The problem with beliefs that got a kick in the pants by some big “Proposition A” scenario is more complicated than that.

What actually happens is something like this. Proposition A has enough force to disrupt the person’s current view. He then goes through all the pieces and tries to create a new vision that incorporates Proposition A.

You can’t think of Proposition A as the bottom row of Jenga blocks, or anything like that — as if a belief system depends on one foundation stone. It’s more of a hub in a web-like matrix. Even if one hub is destroyed, the matrix can keep its basic shape.

If enough hubs are destroyed, the matrix will collapse, and the person will have to build a new one.

This way of looking at beliefs makes sense of confirmation bias. A person believes he has a tidy little matrix of beliefs that all work and play well together. Contrary data is like a little stone thrown against a fortress.

If something big comes along and knocks gaping holes in the fortress, that’s another matter. Then, suddenly, all those little stones the person had previously swatted aside with ease take on a different character, and some of them become parts of the new structure.

The number of “not even remotely credible” things we keep hearing is getting to be too much.

The Secret Service can’t identify who brought the cocaine into the White House?

The FBI isn’t trying to protect Joe and Hunter Biden?

The Justice Department hasn’t been on a crusade against conservatives?

It’s possible that these things are true, but we have no reason to believe them. In fact, the default assumption should be that the people with power are lying to you.

If they want to establish any sort of credibility, they’re going to have to let people see their work.