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Wikipedia as Elite Propaganda Mill

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  • Wikipedia as Elite Propaganda Mill

    Another excellent analysis from The Daily Bell.

    The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm. The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD. The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world - Wikipedia - in the wholesale rewriting of this history. - National Post

    Dominant Social Theme: None. A crack in the wall?

    Free-Market Analysis: We are shocked by this article in the mainstream Canadian press and can only explain it as part of the (admirable) Canadian irritation with global warming in general. Canada and its strange people - entrepreneurial, tough-minded and communitarian (if there is such a thing) - really don't like the global warming crowd. Much of Canada's industry has to do with raw materials and in typical Canadian fashion, the country signed on to Kyoto and then promptly ignored its dictates. The article is part of a larger series, apparently, exposing the sham of global warming.

    This article is also a most injurious and scathing attack on Wikipedia. It is astonishing because it shows how easily the entire fabric of elite propaganda could be ripped away in about, say ... a month, if the mainstream press put its mind to it. The entire, global-political deceit hangs by a thread in our opinion, and that thread is mainstream communication. Here's some more from the article:


    But the UN's official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had. Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn't have if they were to save the globe from warming.


    Instead, the band members turned to their friends in the media and to the blogosphere, creating a website called RealClimate.org. "The idea is that we working climate scientists should have a place where we can mount a rapid response to supposedly ‘bombshell' papers that are doing the rounds" in aid of "combating dis-information," one email explained, referring to criticisms of the hockey stick and anything else suggesting that temperatures today were not the hottest in recorded time. One person in the nine-member Realclimate.org team - U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley - would take on particularly crucial duties.


    Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known - Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia's articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world's most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.


    All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn't like the subject of a certain article, he removed it - more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred - over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley's global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia's blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.


    Who is Connolley?


    Connolley holds a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford for his work on numerical analysis. Connolley has authored and co-authored many articles in the field of climatological research. Connolley served as a parish councillor in the village of Coton (near Cambridge, England) until May 2007 ... Connolley has worked on confronting the notion that "all scientists were predicting an ice age in the 1970s" (known as global cooling). He authored extensive literature reviews, concluding that a majority of scientific papers in the 1970s actually predicted warming, not cooling. Connolley's main research work focused on sea ice measurement and modelling, and global climate models (GCM) such as HadCM3. Since direct observations of Antarctic sea ice are sparse, satellite Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSMI) based observations are used instead. Inconsistency in sea ice predictions from the variou s GCM algorithms in use makes verification of GCM output difficult. Connolley has worked on the validation of SSMI data against more direct upward looking sonar observations in the Weddell Sea area. His results indicated that Bootstrap data produced a better fit than data produced by NASA, prompting the conclusion that GCM predictions are more realistic than previously thought. In 2005, an article in the scientific journal Nature compared the reliability of Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. It discussed Connolley as an example of an expert who regularly contributes to Wikipedia. (Wikipedia)

    Rest here.

    http://www.thedailybell.com/683/Wiki...anda-Mill.html
    Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -Groucho

  • #2
    Re: Wikipedia as Elite Propaganda Mill

    Yes science should be outlawed, all these elite people with educations thinking about stuff...

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    • #3
      Re: Wikipedia as Elite Propaganda Mill

      I read on Wikipedia that the Earth was ROUND!!

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      • #4
        Re: Wikipedia as Elite Propaganda Mill

        Originally posted by MulaMan View Post
        Yes science should be outlawed, all these elite people with educations thinking about stuff...
        Non-sequiteur, which is par for the course with you. What you should be upset about is the debasement of science in pursuit of or in adherence to a political agenda. Google "Trofim Lysenko."
        Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -Groucho

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        • #5
          Re: Wikipedia as Elite Propaganda Mill

          Google "Trofim Lysenko."
          Becoming crippled by rejecting science and adopting non-scientifically based ideologies is not just a Soviet pastime. The US has had its share of such things, too.
          Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.......... snip .....Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stamford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.
          Politically expedient distortion of science has continued around the globe as long as there has been science. Invariably it is conducted in the public arena and provides justification for the most distorted of behaviors.

          More recently, money and media have combined to elevate pseudoscience to quite a pinnacle. Big Tobacco's efforts kept consumption of deadly substances high for decades after it was unmistakable that the product was addictive and killed people. "Scientists" were recruited and funded to produce a flurry of baseless publications as a means to obfuscate the continuing scientific truth and stop progress to reduce the suffering.

          Funded with the last nickel their addicts had, Big Tobacco perfected a new means of discrediting science. Instead of just producing bogus studies and publishing them, they used a wide reaching media attack to make the perception of a controversy. That there really WAS an argument in favor of smoking, that fifty years of science was indeterminate in its outcome. That playbook wins games for a long time, so now, Big Food is pursuing the same strategy. And, of course, the approach was not lost on the Anthropogenic Global Warming Denial movement who got supported with huge infusions of cash from Big Oil

          Then there was Peak Oil which was vigorously rejected by oil companies concerned that the truth might lead to conservation and decreased sales, so only recently has it been allowed to reach the public arena. For decades they fought tooth and nail arguing that there was lots of abiogenic petroleum and we had no worry.
          Abiogenic petroleum origin is an alternative hypothesis to the prevailing theory of biological petroleum origin. Most popular in the Soviet Union between the 1950s and 1980s, the abiogenic hypothesis has little support among contemporary petroleum geologists, who argue that abiogenic petroleum does not exist in significant amounts and that there is no indication that an application of the hypothesis is or has ever been of commercial value.[1]
          And, of course, what discussion would be complete without at least a mention of Creation Science, that direct and vigorous attempt to protect young minds from being exposed to the evils of knowledge and reason resulting from the Enlightenment and its aftermath.

          All in all, a sorry mess we find ourselves in. The one tool in humanity's arsenal that might save it, science, has been distorted and blunted by corporations bent on pursuing profits through political intervention regardless of the effects on people. I have already decided that the only rational act I can do is to take shelter from the ignorance flying about the public arena lest I be hit with some and find my intelligence and rationality mortally wounded.

          Comment


          • #6
            Re: Wikipedia as Elite Propaganda Mill

            I am always suspicious when there is a 'swing' in temperament. It makes me feel that I am being herded or purposely confused. Whether its the internet bubble, the banking crisis, mortgages and MBS or climate change. The pattern rarely varies -you get a lot of BS for years about how 'sound' it is -and then you have a pendular shift to the other side.

            The fact that 'suddenly' we have reams of information about scientific fraud, email changes etc -EVERYDAY -after years of silence, consensus and agreement fro estabishmentarian hacks (and they are ALL establishmentarian hacks -esp-Brookings, Hudson, CFR etc etc ) -makes me want to step away and really look at this very very very carefully.

            Its almost as if we are being trained into reactionism what ever the cause -SARS/SwineFlu/Y2k -there is a lot to be said for Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine".

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            • #7
              Re: Wikipedia as Elite Propaganda Mill

              It makes me feel that I am being herded or purposely confused.
              You are.
              -makes me want to step away and really look at this very very very carefully.
              Exactly what the fossil fuel powers would like. If you're confused, you just need a little more "controversy" in your life. Remember, thousands dying of lung cancer with only one major cause can be resisted for 40+ years ... imagine how long resistance can last when the damage is less personal and obvious.
              Its almost as if we are being trained into reactionism what ever the cause -SARS/SwineFlu/Y2k -there is a lot to be said for Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine".
              Yes, we are ... an educated, rational, thinking populace is a terrible risk to those who want to keep the reigns of power and influence. But, with shock, the "controversy" tool first used by Big Tobacco, and lots of reactionary whipsawing, herds of frightened, helpless feeling followers can board busses, march in the capitol, and express their confusion with their feet. Hey, I even read that for your Christmas joy, Death Panels are being resurrected! Hooray!!!

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