Political Talk Show Reviews (The ones I listen to)

Most people assume that I'm a little more to the right than Genghis Kahn.  I don't know why people say that because that's assuming that Genghis Kahn was conservative.  I think all we really know is that Genghis Kahn was a very successful military and political leader.  Of course his military strategy involved creating as much terror in his enemies as possible and that's given him a bad name in history.  He was also a very shred politician that was able to hold together the lands that he conquered.  I guess the term is really meant as a side ways insult to being conservative, meaning that all conservatives are really cold hearted killers.  It certainly can't mean, with the current Repubicans, that are generally considered conservative, that they are shrewd politicians.

I'm really probably more libertarian than any other political view point but for libertarianism to work the worlds going to have to become a much better place.  Until that time I believe that we need to have have a little government as possible, but a very strong military to protect the US interest around the world, and maintain the pax Americana.

The point is that I'm a consumer of radio talk show hosts.  I sit at a computer for most of my work day and my work lets me listen to streaming shows at work as long as I don't bother coworkers.  So I've decided that I'm going to rate the talk show hosts that I personally listen to.

For a long time I was listening/watching Glenn Beck's new internet network called The Blaze.  The main reason that I did that is that sometimes Glenn and his cohosts Stu Burguiere and Pat Gray along with Jeffy Fisher are hilariously funny and can have me choking back my laughter.  Lately though Glenn goes off on serious rants that can get tedious, and those hilarious moments are getting fewer and farther between.  However, Pat, Stu and Jeffy have a show called "The Pat and Stu Show" that is constantly funny while talking about serious subjects as well.  The Blaze also had some other shows that I liked -- the Real News, and The Wilkow Show -- but for some reason the network kept canceling them and wouldn't say why, and the replacements were not as good.  I constantly streamed  the shows on demand so that I could bypass the commercials which was extremely annoying but I guess was a selling point for those who purchased the commercials.  Usually when you purchase the ability to stream programs you don't have to have commercials.  I always had problems with streaming the show, but could usually get it to work.  One day the show just stopped working on my computer and the help desk only said I had to stop streaming the show on a Chrome browser.  For technical reasons I wouldn't do that so I canceled my subscription.  I do miss the "Pat and Stu Show" but really nothing else.  Which meant that I had to go back to listening to other shows.

Here's how I currently rank them.

Mark Levine #1.  Mark is the newest talk show host that I listen to.  He's a mad man but he tells it like it is and doesn't hold back.  He's also extremely intelligent and is still a practicing lawyer.  He runs the Landmark Legal Foundation and from what he says they've been involved in some landmark legal cases.  Mark likes to talk about himself a lot, the whole time saying that he doesn't like to do it which can be annoying.  Mark has some guests but not a lot of them and his interviews are usually about five minutes.  Overall though I really enjoy his show, and he make his show available for streaming for free and very easy to get.

 ThePat and Stu Show with Jeffy #2.   I don't watch it anymore but this is where I'd rank them.  If the streaming still worked I'd probably still be watching The Blaze, but alas.  They talk about serious topics all the time, but in a hilarious way.  They also cover light topics, and they do food reviews.  They're just funny and the dynamics between the three are great.

The Rush Limgaugh Show #3.  Rush is obviously a great talk show host and is responsible for the popularity of the political talk show format on radio.  He showed the way and is still the top ranked show.  The funny thing about the political talk show format is that liberals are terrible at it.  There has not be a liberal talk show that is anywhere near as popular as any of the shows I'm talking about here.  One great thing about Rush's show is that his guest hosts are fantastic, and many of them have gone on to success with their own shows like Sean Hannity and Michael Medved.  My all time favorite guest host is Walter Williams, who is not that great of radio show host, but is a professor in economics at George Mason University and he always as interesting points of views and stories to show.  His books are also very good.  Rush sometimes talks about himself, and often he says very bombastic things, but in Rush's case I always think that he's doing it tongue in cheek to annoy liberals that listen to him.  My wife hates the way he talks about himself.  You have to pay to be able to stream Rush's show, which is the way I listen to him so that I don't have to listen to his advertisements for which he charges "confiscatory rates".  Rush does do some commercials during the show which you can't skip.

The Laura Ingraham Show #4.  Laura's show is pretty good.  She talks about a lot of popular culture topics, and she can be very funny.  Laura is a single mother who has adopted three children from other countries and she likes to talk about her kids, which can sometimes be tedious.  Laura has a lot of guests on her show which are usually very interesting but she usually doesn't interview them very long.  She has a lot of conservative authors on her show which usually don't get a chance to promote their books on the normal praetorian press shows.  I pay for the ability to stream Laura's show and their are no commercials.  Laura went to school to be a lawyer and she clerked for Clarence Thomas.  I believe that clerking for a Supreme Court Justice is a great honor and only very good lawyers get a chance to do so.   I believe that you can stream Laura's show but it seems like it was difficult to do so which is why I pay for it.

The Michael Medved Show #5.  When I rate Mike's show last it's not that I don't enjoy it, it's just that I find Mike a mouth piece for the Repubican Party.  While the other talk show hosts are taking the Repubican Party to task for being a bunch of sell outs, Mike defends them.  That's interesting in some ways because it explains what must be going on in their minds, or what passes for their minds.  Mike has a lot of guests, and the thing that I like about Mike is that he often has his guests on for an entire hour and interviews them in more depth than I've seen on any other show.  He will also have liberals on with whom he disagrees.  Mike is also a lawyer by schooling but has mostly made a living as a writer, movie reviewer and lately a talk show host although he still writes and does movie reviews on his show.  Mike does special history shows for holidays which I find fantastic and always interesting.  These can also be purchased.  When Mike was in college he was a hard core democrat and part of the Vietnam anti-way movement.  The way the Demorats convinced Mike to become a Republican (I can't bring myself to call Mike a Repubican.) was the way the Demorats turned their back on the South Vietnamese and ignored the US Treaty obligations.  The Demorats learned well from how the US Treated the indigenous Americans of North America.  He counted this in one of his history shows on the Vietnam War, and wrote a book about it called "Right Turns" which I haven't read but have considered reading it.  I pay for a subscription to Mike streaming services as well.  You can get his show for free but I thought it was a hassle, and you had to listen to the commercials as well.

So that how I rate the political talk show hosts that I listen to regularly.  It might be a little misleading to rank them because I really like them all equeally.  The ones I don't like so much I don't listen to or I can't easily listen to their shows like I can these.

My Intellectual Journey Pt. 3

For years I had what the secular world would call cognitive dissonance between what I had been taught in school about science and what I learned in church about religion and creation.  Cognitive dissonance is when you try to believe two things that are true but are mutually exclusive.  One example is God is good and all powerful.  There is evil in the World.  A good God would not allow Evil. This is the problem of Theodicy and has been struggled with for millenia by all kinds of philosophers and theologians.

My problem was that I was taught in school that science is TRUTH and that part of science is evolution and evolution said that everything arises through natural means and there is no need for God.  Plus the world has existed for billions of years old and homo sapien history is at least 12,000 years old therefore the account in Genesis cannot possibly be correct.  This is what I believed after getting a degree in Engineering from BYU which is an LDS school.

There's a number of ways people deal with this situation.  We can say that the "day" in Genesis means an indeterminate amount of time.  The Lord used evolution to lead up to Adam.  There are others as well, but none seemed very good to me, so I spent my time wondering if I was a dupe to believe in the Bible.

In getting my engineering degree I had to take a lot of physics and math, and ended up studying a lot of natural systems and analyzing them.  It always kind of made me laugh at how often after learning complex math formulas and how to apply them we would in the final instance always have to use a safety factor because most of the formulas were just best guess estimates.  In other words once you really start studying systems you realize how much you don't know.  For some reason it never occurred to me that this could be applied to all science, not just hard sciences and engineering.

After college I started attending a Christian Toastmasters Club in Albuquerque NM.  One day a member who was PhD and worked at Sandia National Laboratory did a presentation on how the account in Genisis could be reconciled with a Young Earth Creation view.  His account had to do with the relativistic effects of space and time when close to a black hole and lots of other goodies.  To be honest I didn't understand lots of the talk and I'm not sure that I would have agreed with it  if I had.  (Of all creation accounts I think the Young Earth Creationists are the most dubious, but they have they have their points.  If in heaven I find out they are right I will be surprised, but not a surprised as the hard core evolutionists are going to be.)  The thing is that I'd never heard anything about creation science in my life!  The next day I was down at the public library checking out anything I could find about creation science.  Here were explanations of the historic evidence that I'd never heard about and I was pissed -- er very upset.

Here's just a few things that I remember learning about from those first books that I read.  You need to remember that "science" applies uniformitarianism which is the scientific belief that process that we observe in nature now are the only forces that we can assume have always been at work.  Well that's fine.  However, the best guess for how petrification takes place is that a dinosaur dies and silt infiltrates the porous material of bones and sometimes other soft materials, and then that silt hardens into rocks and we get fossils.  However, these books point out that the best places on earth that would replicate those conditions for forming fossils are swamps and when you put a corpse in a swamp it immediately starts to be devoured by bacteria.  The best guess for fossilization cannot be replicated.  Huh.  For fossils to form you need to encase the corpse in a way that precludes bacteria and oxygen.  Another point, for one foot of coal to be formed you need ten feet of vegetable matter to accumulate then get covered and compressed.  Where in the world is vegetable matter accumulating to the height of one foot? Much less ten feet?  In the Western USA coal is not mined unless the seam is ten feet or higher, some are much higher.  Where are there accumulations of vegetable matter of 100 feet, and then how will that be compressed?  None of this can be explained by uniformitarianism.

And a third point.  

Question: How do we know that deeper sedimentary layers are older than less deep layers?  

Explanation: Well that's obvious, or seemingly obvious, because naturally the older layers would be laid down before the younger layers.  It's like anything that's layered, like clothing you put on, or a cake.  

Response: Okay I buy that.  

Explanation: Then fossils that are in deeper layers are older than fossils that are in less deep layers.  

Response: Okay that makes sense as well.  

Explanation: Well sometimes we find that older sedimentary layers are found on top of younger sedimentary layers.  

Question: What how does that happen.  

Explanation: Well in geologic time and mountains are created by the movements of continents things happen etc...  

Question: Do things like that happen now?  

Explanation: No.  

Question: But wait, how do you know that the sedimentary layers are out of sequence?  

Explanation: Because of the fossils?  

Question: What?

Explanation: You see we have things called marker fossils that are wide spread fossils that are found in many areas and when we find a marker fossil we know how old the sediment it is found in is.

Question: Let me make sure I've got this straight.  Deeper layers are older because that's common sense.  Fossils that are in those layers are older because they're deeper?

Explanation: You've got it.

Question: But if the layers are out of order we know it because the fossils tell us?

Explanation: Exactly.

Question: Do you know what tautology means?

The most hilarious thing of all about this explanation is that one of the marker fossils that "was" commonly used was the Coelacanth.  Why is that hilarious?  Because the coelacanth was a fish thought to have been extinct for 66 million years, then it was found to be alive in 1935.  Obviously it's extremely rare, but that would throw off all usage of it as a marker fossil.  Was that done? No it was simply ignored.  Scientists often do ignore facts when they can.

These are just the things I learned at that time, and there were more.  The real thing that I learned is that there are many ways to interpret historical facts, like fossils and you can interpret them to fit your hypothesis, whatever it is.  If you believe there was a flood like in Genesis you can explain fossils that way (the example given in the book was at least that "could" account for a process that excluded oxygen and bacteria while no know natural process can), or coal or the increasing complexity of animals in the fossil record.  There doesn't have to be one way to do this.

This was like a burst of light to me.  I don't know why this had never occurred to me before.  I knew from college that science raises more questions than it answers, and that real scientists are searching for answers that account for the most facts, and in engineering the answers shouldn't kill people and should work as expected.  I now think that the reason that that I used to think that science was the TRUTH was that it was taught to me as the TRUTH in grade school and high school.  I love science and just ate it up.  Anyone that knows me knows that I love reading and one thing that I loved reading when I was young was popular science and science fiction. Since it was taught to me as the TRUTH that's how I accepted it, and all the reading I did reinforced it.  Darwin was a saint and everything that happens happens through natural processes.  Luckily for me I also read the scriptures and had had experiences that my religion taught me that I would have so I also knew that religion had the TRUTH except really science was telling me that religion was only a "truth".  Also, engineering had taught me some "truths".

In writing this I find it amazing that I could go so long with the embedded thoughts that Darwin and Evolution were the TRUTH and everything else I learned had to bow to it.  I was upset, as in very upset ,once I learned this.  Since then I’ve done a lot of reading about the real way science is done, and taught.  Science is knowingly taught this way because it makes it much easier to accept.  When someone is first learning something usually the nuances are not taught.  This is true in engineering, it’s as you go higher in your own field that you start to learn both the power of the scientific method, and the limits.  Apparently you don’t question the expertise of experts in other fields, and you accept the TRUTHS that you’ve learned as a youth and don’t think to question them.  

I’ve read that this happens I just didn’t realize that it had happened to me.  Until right now.  I guess blogging can be good.

My Intellectual Journey Pt 2

I noticed one podcast on the FairCast called Mormon Discussion that was advertising it's own website and I started looking for it. I also noticed that the FairCast site stopped hosting Bill Reel who produces the Mormon Discussion.  Mormon Discussion is a site that claims to help LDS members struggling with their faith, which is also something that FairMormon is doing as well.  The motto of Mormon Discussion is "Leading With Faith" and is supposed to offer a way for people struggling with their faith to, perhaps, find a new way to look at things that will help them with their faith struggle.

One of the things they like to talk about is "Fowler's Stages of Faith" which is a concept developed by George W. Fowler who was a professor of Theology and Human Development at Emory University.  (He's retired now and is a Methodist minister.)  The basic idea is that humans go through 6 stages of faith development.  You don't have to go through all the stages, and Fowler says most people don't reach stages 4-6.  The pod-cast concentrates on the transition between stages 3 and 4.  Stage 3 is called Synthetic-Conventional it starts about age 12 and can last a lifetime.  A young person accepts their faith uncritically and ignores any discrepancies for "fear of threat of inconsistencies."  This is a stage that the pod-cast says most people stay in.  Stage 4 is Individuate-Reflective and starts at 21+ and is described as "...a stage of angst and struggle.  The individual takes personal responsibility for his or her beliefs and feelings. As one is able to reflect on one's own beliefs, there is an openness to a new complexity of faith, but this also increases the awareness of conflicts in one's belief."

According to the podcast people who enter into Stage 4 sometimes don't work through it and leave the faith but those who do seem to have a deeper faith.  Or that is the impression that the podcast gives it to me.  The only time that I really remember a struggle with my faith, other than what I did on my mission, was when I read a book called Medicine and the Mormons, by Robert T. Divett.  Bob Divett was the medical librarian at the University of New Mexico, and my home teaching companion when I was a teen ager.  When he published his book my mother bought it because he was a family friend that my mother respected.  I attempted to read it because Bro. Divett had had a great impact on me.  I started reading it and discovered that maybe Joseph Smith did not come up with the Word of Wisdom, Section 89 in the Doctrine and Covenants, sui generis.  There apparently were a lot of people talking about health and the types of diets one should follow around the time of Joseph Smith, and here I'd always thought that everything Joseph came up with was unique.  This was probably during my senior year in high school, a time I was not really testing Mormon orthodoxy but I was certainly testing Mormon othopraxy.

Sometime after that I started studying Mormon doctrine, or orthodoxy, and getting my life a little (okay a lot) more in line with Mormon othopraxy, and then decided, to almost everyone who knew my in Albuquerque, NM where I'd spent my teenage years, to go on a mission.  I guess that after I came home from my mission I had a more nuanced view of my faith, as they say on Mormon Discussions, because I recalled my reaction with my old home teaching companions book, found it, read it and had no problem with it this time.  It was pretty hard reading but I could understand it and it didn't shake my faith.  I guess by that time I realized that Joseph was a product of his time as well as a prophet that the Lord could work with.

I'm still not sure if I'm a Stage 4 Mormon but as I continued listening to Mormon Discussions I realized I was a Stage 4 believer in Science.  For this insight alone I'm thankful that I listened to the Mormon Discussion pod-casts.

To be continued.

My Intellectual Journey Pt. 1

I started listening to a podcast called Mormon Discussion Podcast.  It’s a convoluted way that I got to it but her it is sort of a round about way.  Since I have an iPhone I decided that I would start listening to podcasts since they’re free and some of them might be really good.  I’d been listening to the Great Courses Series, of which I have many, and I liked those because they are supposed to be college level courses by college professors.  However, I’ve reached the point where I’d listened – meaning bought – most of the courses that I’m interested in and I needed to try and find something else that I could listen to.  So I asked my son-in-law what he liked and then started looking for Mormon podcasts because I like all things Mormon.

And one of the Mormon things that I really like lately is Terryl Givens a writer, so I started looking for Terryl Givens interviews and I found some.  Some were on the Maxwell Institute and some were on the Mormon Faircast and I listened to them, then I started looking for podcasts on Polyandry which is one question that I’ve always had about Mormonism’s past, and then my son-in-law said that there was a good one on Mormonism and Masonry.  Anyway I started noticing that there were a lot of good podcasts on the Faircast.  Faircast  takes me back a long ways.  It used to be called FAIR, Foundation for Apologetics and Information Research, but now it’s called FairMormon.  Anyway it used to have a forum where people talked to each other about things Mormon and I joined way back when.  And they still have a forum but it’s not like the old days.  Anyway I started listening to all the FairMormon Podcasts and I liked them.

This will have to be continued later.