Dissecting an American Conservative Spin Master – Part 3/4

November 6, 2011

Dennis Prager says that liberal and/or leftists tend to trust experts more, are more likely to revere and even “worship” nature, while fearing death more than a conservative. Does this sound like a stereotype?

Pay attention to the emotional words Prager uses to drive his fans to accept his opinions. To a conservative, born again Christian reading that someone “worships” nature over God is a mortal sin and unforgivable.

This is how Prager manipulates the emotions of those that believe what he preaches. Has any expert studied if conservatives fear death less than liberal-leftists? I doubt it.

Then in Why Liberals Fear Global Warming More Than Conservatives Do, instead of focusing on Global Warming, Prager changes tactics to play on the emotions of his fanatical followers to drive emotional support for his opinions.

He infers that if we allow the leftist-liberals to focus too much on reducing carbon emissions to deal with the potential threat of Global Warming, which he infers is a hoax, we will “lose the war” against “Islamic fascism” that threatens the free world.

Wow!  That is HUGE leap of flawed logic. Imagine how “lose the war against Islamic fascism” is going to inflame the emotions of his conservative audience driving them to believe his opinions.

In addition, how is this going to happen? Well, by too many of us wasting our time working to cut back on carbon emissions reducing pollution so Global Warming may not threaten the world we live in.

To discover more of Prager’s fraud, I suggest watching To Hell and Back and discover that only one percent of the American population is fighting the war in Afghanistan and Iraq—to stop Prager’s “Islamic fascism” from taking over the world.

In addition, if we develop alternative forms of energy and break our Middle Eastern oil habit, won’t that help defeat Prager’s “Islamic fascism” by cutting off the West’s money from flowing into the Middle East?


Prager Claims “Equality” Isn’t American (because controversy is the bread and butter of talk radio)

If only one percent of Americans are fighting the war against Prager’s “Islamic fascism”, then why can’t the other 99% deal with the potential threat of Global Warming “possibly” caused by carbon emissions as supported by facts gathered and interpreted by many experts—In 1997, Science Daily reported that more than 1,500 of the world’s most distinguished senior scientists, including the majority of Nobel laureates in science, signed a consensus declaration urging leaders worldwide to act and prevent potentially devastating consequences of human-induced global warming.

However, in his Global Warming essay, Prager urges us to ignore these experts—that is unless we want to be seen as a hysterical, death fearing leftist-liberal.

In addition, if you click on that link To Hell and Back, you will discover from the video that many of America’s troops believe the wars (in Afghanistan and Iraq) is wrong.

A recent Pew research poll found that a third of American veterans who served after 9/11 believe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not worth fighting.

Did you know that in Townhall.com, Dennis Prager wrote, “The president (of the US) does not wish to annoy China’s dictators prior to his upcoming visit to Beijing.”

However, Prager is wrong again. If we use the accepted definition of a dictator, one does not rule China. It is a one-party Republic and China’s leaders are selected by the consensus of 70 million Communist Party members—a decision based on the merit of the individuals running for the position (instead of the popularity contest of American politics), which I wrote about in Dictatorship or one-party-republic.

It is obvious why Prager used the word “dictator” to describe China’s government—to stir emotions driving his fanatical followers (Prager’s Parrots—used as a metaphor) to accept his opinions.

Continued on November 5, 2011 in  Dissecting an American Conservative Spin Master – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Dissecting an American Conservative Spin Master – Part 2/4

November 5, 2011

To understand Dennis Prager and his flock of Parrots (used as a metaphor), one must know the difference between facts, theories and opinions.

A fact has undisputed evidence to support its truth and is driven by rational thought. In science, “fact” is an objective and verifiable observation. For example, several centuries ago, many in the West held an opinion that the earth was flat and that the sun and stars revolved around the earth until explorers (such as Christopher Columbus) and scientists proved that wasn’t true.

A scientific theory is a well-confirmed hypothesis that explains a large body of facts inspired by a large body of research. When the body of research is convincing, many people accept the theory as a potential fact.

Since most of our objective and verifiable observations come from experts and/or scientists, according to Dennis Prager, if you believe these experts about Global Warming, you would be a hysterical leftist-liberal that trusts what the traditional media reports as news.

An opinion is based on a belief or personal view and varies according to an individual’s knowledge, experience, culture, beliefs and is driven and reinforced by emotion. An opinion may also be a simple, uniform message designed to be acceptable to a large number of people.  An opinion is not a fact, because opinions have not been proven or verified.

If you click on this link and read Why Liberals Fear Global Warming More Than Conservatives Do, you will discover that what Dennis Prager preaches in his essays is driven and reinforced by emotional terms.


As we know, Google returned to China on China’s terms.  Did Prager later apologize for his praise of Google’s Sergey Brin after Goolge backed down?  Prager says he suspects China needs Google more. Wrong again.  China has Baidu, which is a search engine with about 76% of the search traffic in China.

In the Global Warming essay, Prager says, “Observers of contemporary society will surely have noted that a liberal is far more likely to fear global warming than a conservative.”

In the previous opening sentence of his essay of Global Warming, Prager defined the difference between liberals and conservatives in a simple generalization, which is an opinion and he has no facts to support what he claims.

However, to Prager and his fans, if you fear global warming, you are a leftist-liberal and are prone to hysteria. He then goes on to say that leftists also believes what The New York Times and other liberal news sources report, which means if you are a liberal, you will believe almost anything you hear or read in the mainstream media.

However, Gallup reported in September 2010 that “Distrust in U.S. Media edges Up to Record High” saying, “For the fourth straight year, the majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.”

The Gallup study also reveals that 33% of conservatives had a great deal of trust in the media while 46% of liberals had little or no trust.

Hmm, if we return to Prager’s opinion (I meant essay), we see that he said, “Liberals rarely question the authority of the mainstream media,” but when we examine the facts gathered by experts working for Gallup, this isn’t true.

Do you see the difference between Prager’s opinions and the facts, and how he relies on reinforcing his opinions by using terms that manipulate emotions?

Did you know that Prager wrote in the Jewish World Review that Mao “butchered” 60 million Chinese? But there are no facts from eye witnesses to support the claims and opinions that Mao deliberately “butchered” any Chinese. To discover more, I suggest you read China’s Great Famine – Fact or Fiction.

Continued on November 4, 2011 in Dissecting an American Conservative Spin Master – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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Regarding Mao and China-Recommended reading on this topic for those who seek the unblemished truth: From the Monthly Review, Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward? by Joseph Ball

From Griffith University, Australia, Poverty, by David C. Schak, Associate Professor

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Dissecting an American-Conservative Spin Master – Part 1/4

November 4, 2011

In February 2010, Gallup reported, “In general, the larger group of Asian-Americans tend to be more Democratic and more liberal than average Americans. Exit-poll data from the 2008 presidential election generally confirm this, with Asian-American voters having supported Barack Obama over John McCain by roughly a 2-to-1 margin.”

In fact, Asian Week says Chinese-Americans voted for President Obama by more than a 3-1 ratio.

Now that we have discovered that more than 75% of Chinese-Americans vote Democratic and are considered liberal, they may be surprised to discover that  they fear Global Warming, trust what they read or hear in the traditional media, trust (scientific) experts more than emotional opinions, and are prone to hysteria.

If you are Asian-American or Chinese-American, does that describe you?

I am not kidding. This is what one of American’s most popular radio talk-show hosts preaches, and his name is Dennis Prager.

In Environmentalism in China, I mentioned that an “old” friend of mine all but “worships” this man. In fact, my “old” friend sounds as if he were a “Prager Parrot” (used as a metaphor).


For more about this embedded video, click on  HIV/AIDS Global Pandemic

In this four-part series, I will dissect an essay Prager wrote for Real Clear Politics, Why Liberals Fear Global Warming More Than Conservatives Do.

Dennis Prager is an American syndicated radio talk show host, syndicated columnist, author and public speaker noted for his conservative political and social views.

In addition, Prager graduated from Brooklyn College in 1970 with a major in Middle Eastern Studies and History. He then studied at the Russian Institute at Columbia University.

He started broadcasting on radio in Los Angeles in 1982. Today, his talk show appears on about 100 radio stations across the nation influencing the opinions of millions of people that believe if you vote Democratic and/or believe Global Warming “may” be caused by carbon emissions, you are a hysterical leftist-liberal.

Continued on November 3, 2011 in Dissecting an American Conservative Spin Master – Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Environmentalism in China – Part 4/4

November 3, 2011

To discover more of how diverse this environmental awakening is in China, the October 2011 issue of Smithsonian magazine introduces us to the Bird Whisperer, a Buddhist monk named Tashi Zangpo, who is saving one of the world’s rarest birds, the Tibetan bunting.

“Tashi, now 41,” Phil McKenna writes, “has crisscrossed the Tibetan plateau drawing 400 bird species. He is currently compiling a field guide that evokes the work of John James Audubon or Roger Tory Peterson. He wears prayer beads on one wrist and a digital watch with altimeter and compass on the other.”

However, in America, regardless of what is happening in Asia, China is often criticized in the media and by the public (after reading about it in the media) for air pollution blowing more than 6,000 miles across the Pacific to the United States.


The breathing earth

From Where Does Our Pollution Go, we learn that “Winds can carry pollution around the planet, therefore, all nations are connected by air currents,” and then from MSNBC, we discover that the U.S. exports its air pollution to Europe.

When I Googled “air pollution from China to America”, the results were more than 9.4 million hits, but when I searched “air pollution from America to Europe”, there were more than 17 million.

MSNBC’s Michael Schirber of Live Science reported in 2005, that “On Nov. 14, 2001, a low-pressure system caused a large mass of air huddled over the eastern half of the United States to rise up several miles, where it was then carried by the jet stream to Europe,” which resulted in a 33% increase in ozone levels in the Alps.

In addition, Schirber says, “European pollution has been tracked to Asia, as well as the Arctic…” He compares the wind to a conveyor belt.

In fact, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research reported in October 2009 that when it comes to global air pollution, what goes around comes around. “Air pollution from factories, traffic, and power plants in Asia wafts over the Pacific Ocean to the United States, while pollutants produced in the United States wind up in Europe.”

Then there are those in America and Europe (and elsewhere in the world) that claim CO2 is not a pollutant and is not contributing to Global Warming.


Ocean Acidification — Changing Planet — As higher amounts of carbon dioxide become absorbed by the oceans, some marine organisms are finding it is a struggle to survive

For such naysayers, in January 2008, a Stanford Report written by Louis Bergeron reported on a study conducted by a Stanford scientist that linked carbon dioxide emissions to increased deaths.

“For the first time,” Bergeron wrote, there were direct links between increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increases in human mortality…

The study detailed how for each increase of 1 degree Celsius caused by carbon dioxide, the resulting air pollution would lead annually to about a thousand additional deaths and many more cases of respiratory illness and asthma in the United States.

So, next time you hear someone criticize China for air pollution crossing the Pacific Ocean to the US, consider the amount of CO2 and Black Soot China produced in the last thirty years of industrialization compared to the UK, Europe and America’s more than two centuries.

Once you know the facts and you were given a choice to live in Europe or America, where would the air probably be cleaner/healthier?

Return to Environmentalism in China – Part 3 or start with Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top right-hand side of this page and then follow directions.

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Environmentalism in China – Part 3/4

November 2, 2011

In China, the environmental movement started in recent years from the top down and the bottom up. Evidence of this fledgling movement appears in several Western media sources.

For a more detailed history, The China Daily’s Sun Xiaohua wrote A Legal Leap Forward, which starts with an accidental environmental disaster that took place the day before China passed its first ever draft of the Environmental Protection Law of the People’s Republic of China in 1979.

The man that caused the accidental environmental disaster was sentenced to two years in jail. As we all know, passing laws are easy compared to enforcing them, and it doesn’t matter if we are in the US or China. Some environmental disasters are accidents, as in this case, and some are intentional due to greed.

In The Atlantic, Christina Larson wrote China’s Nascent Environmentalism, and said, “Since 2007, I have been reporting in China (and elsewhere in Asia), looking at the efforts of China’s environmentalists, scientists, lawyers, and others to rein in their country’s enormous (I question the use of the word ‘enormous’ when we compare more than two hundred years of CO2 and Black Soot pollution in the US to China) pollution toll and related problems.

Larson says, “China may clean up its environmental mess eventually … but it almost certainly won’t do so in the same fashion as the West.”


Green Long March in China – 2009

 Then Arrol Gellner, writing for SFGate of China’s environmentalist ways, says, “At China’s current rate of progress, and despite its posturing to the contrary, industrial polluters may well be brought up to Western standards within the next decade.

“What’s more,” Gellner writes, “when China decides that it’s ready to tackle its environmental problems full force, it’ll move quickly. Unlike us fiercely independent-minded Americans, the Chinese people, for the most part, are far more amenable to sweeping change being imposed from the top down – a deep-seated cultural trait that stems, not from China’s trifling time under communism, but rather from its nearly 3,500 years under dynastic rule.”

Another example by Philip P. Pan appeared in the Houston Chronicle of an environmental grass roots movement to do away with disposable wooden chopsticks. A quote by Kang Dahu, a truck driver in China says it best. “The disposable ones are such a waste! We’re destroying what little is left of our forests to make them,” said Kang, 22, who does volunteer work with several environmental groups. “Just imagine, years from now, when my grandchildren ask me what happened to all of China’s trees, I’ll have to say, `We made them into chopsticks.’ Isn’t that pitiful?”

In addition, Zhang Zhe, 24, who works for an environmental education group supported by British zoologist Jane Goodall, says, “Chopsticks are just an example. People are beginning to ponder even ordinary things.”

Continued on November 1, 2011 in Environmentalism in China – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

To subscribe to “iLook China”, sign up for an E-mail Subscription at the top right-hand side of this page and then follow directions.

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