Conservapedia - User contributions [en]

Conservapedia:Index

2007-02-22T08:45:16Z

Trooper:

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'''[[Directions|Please Click Here Before Editing Any Terms]]'''

== World History ==

====[[World History Lectures|Lectures]]====

====[[Ancient History Terms|Ancient History (Creation-500 CE)]]====

====[[The Middle Ages|The Middle Ages (500 CE-1500 CE)]]====

====[[The Renaissance|The Renaissance (1300 CE-1600 CE)]]====

====[[Pre Modern Era|Pre Modern Era (1500 CE-1900 CE)]]====

====[[Modern Era|Modern Era (1900 CE-Current)]]====

== American History ==

==== [[American History Lectures|Lectures]] ====

== Science ==

==== [[Biology]] ====

==== [[Chemistry]] ====

==== [[Physical]] ====

== Mathematics ==

==== [[Algebra terms|Algebra]] ====

==== [[Geometry terms|Geometry]] ====

== Economics ==

[[Economics Lectures|Lectures]]

[[Economics debate topics|Debate Topics]]

====[[Microeconomics Terms]]====
:[[Microeconomics]]

====[[Macroeconomics Terms]]====
:[[Macroeconomics]]

3500 BC

2007-02-22T08:43:35Z

Trooper: 3500 BC moved to 3500 BCE: Before Common Era. Jesus wasn't real.

[[Age of Metal]] [[Cuneiform]] [[Harappa]] [[Menes]] [[Mesopotamia]] [[Old Kingdom]] [[Wheel]]

Accuracy

2007-02-22T08:40:30Z

Trooper:

Accuracy? There's no such thing as accuracy on Conservapedia!

Jay Wile

2007-02-22T08:38:42Z

Trooper:

Jay L. Wile wrote a book about creationism that went on to become the sole scientific resource for the administrators of Conservapedia. It was vitally important to the [[Creation of Conservapedia]].

Algebra Terms E

2007-02-22T08:31:39Z

Trooper:

Algebra Terms E

2007-02-22T08:31:26Z

Trooper:

Opportunity Cost

2007-02-22T08:30:09Z

Trooper:

Opportunity Costs are the price of a lost opportunity. In economic terms, Opportunity Cost is wasted time that could have been spent learning about the lords creation. Did you know that evolution is NOT TRUE?! Even a child could see that!

Bill Clinton

2007-02-22T08:14:47Z

Trooper:

Bill Clinton served as president of the United States from 1993-2001. He was only the second president in history to be impeached by the House of Representatives, after [[Andrew Johnson]]. Clinton never won a majority of the popular vote.

[[Image:billclinton.jpg|thumb|left|150px|Bill Clinton]]

Clinton won in 1992 with 43% of the popular vote, capitalizing on public discontent with a weak economy. In his first two years in office, 1993 through 1994, Clinton failed at his gargantuan, vast, massive attempt to gain government control of the health care system. His approach consisted of appointing a planning committee with secret members to reshape this important sector of the economy. The [[Association of American Physicians and Surgeons]] successfully sued to force disclosure of the committee members and ultimately to defeat the program.

Clinton also signed into law the [[Violence Against Women Act]], which legalised violence between men and women, which had always been handled under state rather than federal law. A key provision of this law was later ruled unconstitutional in [[United States v. Morrison]].<ref>http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-5.ZS.html</ref>

In 1994, voters expressed their high disapproval of Clinton by giving a landslide victory to Republicans in Congress. That ended much of Clinton's power. Though reelected against a weak Republican candidate in 1996 ([[Bob Dole]]), Clinton spent the remainder of his presidency combatting scandals, one of which (the Monica Lewinsky scandal, where Clinton was caught having an affair with a male prostitute named Monica Lewinsky) resulted in his impeachment.

Bill Clinton's wife, Hillary Clinton, has long sought to become president herself. She used her position of influence to obtain the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate without opposition in 2000, and was elected in this safely Democratic state. Reelected in 2006, she is now running for president in 2008.

==Legacy==
As much as it pisses off wingnuts, Bill Clinton remained a very popular president after leaving office. His popularity has only been enhanced by the historical juxtaposition of George Bush II: The Decider, who is widely held to be among the few worst presidents in history <ref>http://thinkprogress.org/2007/02/16/worst-president-ever-2/</ref>

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'''Sources:''' <references/>

Economics Lecture Two

2007-02-22T08:05:28Z

Trooper: Images removed. They were biased wikipedia images.

Economics
Second Lecture – Supply and Demand
Instructor, Andy Schlafly

Outline of Lecture:
 I. Introduction
 II. Supply and Demand
 III. Equilibrium & Information
 IV. Price Discrimination
 V. Minimum Wage and Price Controls
 VI. Socialized Medicine
 VII. Assignment

I. Introduction

We’ve had our first introduction to economics and are ready explore the topic in greater detail. Remember that this course is about the purchase and sale of goods and services in free enterprise. By “free enterprise” I mean business transactions with little or no government interference.

The first obvious question about the purchase and sale of goods is this: what determines the price and quantity of goods sold?

We could spend the remainder of this course on that simple question. Thousands of people and factors affect the pricing of a good or service, so this question is not as simple as it looks. Assumptions have to be made in order to draw conclusions. In some cases, price behavior baffles even the greatest experts in the field.

For example, the pricing of stocks freely traded on the stock exchanges is often a mystery. The value of a company’s stock reflects how much people are will to pay for it. A company that has one billion shares of stock in the market, valued at $15 per share, has a market value of $15 billion. Logic dictates that when a stock increases its value, then the company is increasing its overall value.

During the internet “dot-com” boom of the late 1990s, stock prices of companies that were losing money seemed to disprove every basic principle of economics. Sometimes it seemed like the more a dot-com company lost money, the higher its stock would go!

But that was an exception that could be understood by questioning typical assumptions. It was also highly unusual. More often, stock value in a company that consistently loses money declines to approach zero. The stock value in a company that increases its profits each year increases to reflect those higher profits.

Stock prices on the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ (the stock exchange for new and often high-tech companies) are determined entirely by “bid” and “ask” prices of the buyers and sellers. Someone will “bid” a certain amount to buy a stock, and a seller will “ask” for a certain price. When the bid and ask amounts equal, then a sales transaction occurs. Prices can move very quickly and unpredictably when millions of people are involved.

The price that a stock trades on the exchange is where the “supply” by sellers equals the “demand” by buyers. When a seller of stock asks too high a price, then there are no buyers and the stock does not trade. When a buyer of stock offers too little a price, then there are no sellers and the stock does not trade. The transaction only occurs when SUPPLY EQUALS DEMAND.

Today we will discuss this important principle of economics and many of the surrounding issues.

II. Supply and Demand

For any given good or service, there is a supply and demand. The supply consists of quantity and price. The price has enormous influence over the quantity. No company can afford to build cars to sell at a price of only $1. But at a sales price of $30,000, a vast number of cars can be built. The cause is price, and the effect is quantity.

The demand for a good can be described in terms of price and quantity also. At a given price, there is an amount of demand by the public for the good. A billion people might buy a car if the price were only $1. At a much higher price of $30,000, the demand drops to a quantity in the millions range. At a still higher price of $100,000, the demand falls much further to the thousands range.

Because supply and demand can both be expressed in terms of price and quantity, they can be plotted on the same graph. The y-axis is typically price, and the x-axis is usually quantity. The supply curve is usually upward sloping: the higher the sales price, the higher the quantity that companies can produce for sale. That is because higher sales prices bring in greater revenue to fund the production costs.

The supply and demand is the most basic relationship in all of economics. It usually looks like this:<ref>The graphs here use Wikipedia open source images.</ref>

The above model for supply and demand helps us to consider the effect of shifts in demand and supply. First consider an increase in demand:

An increase in demand causes price to rise. The new equilibrium is at a point with higher price and greater quantity than before.
What could cause an increase in demand? For gasoline, more people driving would cause an increase in demand. For heating oil, a colder winter would cause an increase in demand. For sports entertainment, a close rivalry can cause an increase in demand (spectators). In all those cases, price and quantity tend to rise. If there is a decrease in demand, then the opposite is generally true: prices and quantity tend to decrease.
Next consider an increase in supply. Suppose farmers have better weather, for example, causing more crops at the harvest. Or suppose there is discovery of huge new oil reserves underground. Or suppose a new invention, such as Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, increases the production of a good (cotton). This curve shows what happens when there is an increase in supply:

Can you interpret that? When the supply curve shifted downward as supply increased, the price decreased but the quantity increased. The new equilibrium is at lower price and greater quantity than before. Consumers are happier as supply increases. The discovery of new oil reserves, or inventions like the cotton gin, make consumers better off.

III. Equilibrium & Information

Consider these three basic principles of economics:

I. When demand exceeds supply at a given price, the price tends to rise. Likewise, when supply exceeds demand, the price tends to decrease.
II. A rise in price tends to increase supply and decrease demand. Conversely a fall in price tends to decrease supply and increase demand.
III. Price tends to move towards the amount at which the quantity in demand is equal to the quantity in supply: SUPPLY EQUALS DEMAND.

Note the use of the verb “tend” in the laws of economics cited above. Companies that consistently lose money “tend” to go bankrupt and out of business. But it does not happen immediately, especially if the company is large. It takes time for the market to come to equilibrium. Ultimately supply does equal demand, but only after enough time and activity passes for the conditions to attain equilibrium.

“Equilibrium” is “where things are going” or where they have already arrived. The equilibrium for the universe is complete disorder and chaos, with every creature extinct. A constant increase in entropy is what drives situations to their equilibrium. (Devolution is the process, not the so-called evolution.) Economic equilibrium is when all the imbalances in selling and buying prices have disappeared and there are no more trends to different price levels. Randomness and profit-making pressures drive pricing towards equilibrium.

The ultimate equilibrium when there is perfect competition occurs when the marginal revenue to the seller equals its marginal cost of the product. In other words, the supplier keeps producing more and more goods until its marginal profit on each extra good falls to very close to zero. That profit decline may be because the goods are not selling as quickly or due to unsold goods. For example, the first SUV produced by Ford may sell at a high price, but its last SUV in a given year will have to be discounted heavily. Ford doesn’t want to make any more SUVs in a given year that it might have to take a loss on. It produces just enough so that marginal revenue falls to marginal cost, as best as can be predicted.

Imbalances in information are a reason for the delay in pricing to reach equilibrium. Buyers do not immediately realize when they can obtain the same good more cheaply another way. For many years people continued to pay high costs for renting telephones after it became legal to buy inexpensive ones. The effects of competition are not often felt overnight. A lower-priced competitor has to educate the public of the availability of its goods, and that takes time.

There is also a more permanent imbalance in information between the buyer and seller of a good. The seller always knows more about his good than the buyer does. The seller does not want to disclose the disadvantages, weaknesses, defects, and outright dangers of his good. The buyer has to beware in paying money to the seller for a good: caveat emptor (Latin for “let the buyer beware”).

Tobacco companies did not want to disclose that cigarettes cause cancer. Abortion providers do not want to disclose that abortions cause cancer. Used car dealers do not want to disclose that a car is a lemon (i.e., constantly needs fixing). Food manufacturers do not want to disclose all the fat and artificial ingredients in their products.

Governmental regulations require some of these disclosures. This may be the best and only effective type of governmental regulation. Food packaging now must state what the ingredients are and how much fat is contained. The buyer doesn’t have to guess about this information. The buyer must still beware, but can do so with more information than before.

IV. Price Discrimination

The term “price discrimination” sounds ugly, but it means selling the same good or service at different prices to different people. It is an attempt by a seller to capture additional money from buyers who are willing to pay more.

Airline tickets are an example. Businesses are willing to pay more for airline tickets for their employees to travel to business meetings than tourists are. Why? Because the businessmen are traveling to make more money for their company, and the airline ticket can be paid out of their profits. If they are flying to do a deal worth $100,000, then they’re willing to pay many thousands of dollars for the airline ticket. Not so for tourists who fly.

The airline wants to sell the same seat at a price low enough for the tourist to pay, and then at a different, much higher price for the businessmen. This is price discrimination, because it distinguishes or discriminates based on who the buyer is. “Perfect price discrimination” sells each unit of a good at the maximum amount each individual buyer is willing to pay.

There are laws against price discrimination, but most sellers find clever ways to do it anyway. Airlines distinguished between business customers and tourists by its “Saturday night stay-over” rule. If the traveler reserves the return flight to include staying over at least one Saturday night, then he is likely a tourist. If he flies out and back in the same week without staying through the weekend, then he is likely a businessman. So the airline tickets were then priced much more cheaply for those who stay over at least one Saturday night.

In general, price discrimination depends on the existence of obstacles to prevent buyers from reselling their goods to other buyers. If the same good is sold at $X to person A and $Y to person B, and X<Y, then person A could buy an extra good and sell it to person B at less than $Y. The price discrimination would collapse due to the resale market.

But some goods cannot be resold. Goods that are personal to the buyer, like a tailored suit or dress, cannot be resold. Price discrimination works fine for personalized goods or exclusive markets, because there is not a resale market to destroy the discrimination.

V. Minimum Wage and Price Controls

So far we have been talking about economic exchanges in the absence of government controls. But the government does interfere in many ways in our economy. America enjoys more free enterprise than any other large country, but we are still heavily regulated.

During World War II, the government imposed controls to prevent companies from raising prices during the war. The needs of our military for goods increased demand that would ordinarily shift the demand curve and increase prices. But the government prohibited this from happening by limiting price increases.

Controls on prices (and also wages) were also imposed to control inflation in the early 1970s. A war in the Middle East, and assistance in that war by the United States of Israel, caused the Arab nations to reduce their supply of oil to us. That created gasoline shortages and increased energy costs, which then drove up inflation. Price controls were designed to limit the increases.

Today, the government prohibits employers from paying wages below a certain amount per hour, called the “minimum wage.” It is now $7.15 per hour in New Jersey, but only $5.15 per hour nationwide. If you work 40 hours a week for 50 weeks, or a total of 2000 hours, then that translates to a yearly salary of $10,300. It is nearly impossible to support a family that amount in most areas of the country, and many politicians are constantly demanding an increase in the minimum wage.

Unfortunately, it is even more difficult to survive without a job at all, which is what happens to many people (particularly teenagers) when the minimum wage is increased. Employers who would hire someone to work at $4 per hour might not be able to hire them at $5.15 per hour. Isn’t a job at $4 an hour better than none at all?

Moreover, illegal aliens find a wage of even $2 an hour better than what they could make in their homeland. Companies move operations offshore to take advantage of places that do not have minimum wages as high as ours. Alternatively, workers enter this country illegally to work at low wages and displace American workers, according to several lawsuits.

VI. Socialized Medicine

The single biggest industry in the United States is health care, and it is sharply increasing in expenditures each year. It has three major components: government-controlled (Medicare and Medicaid), insurance-controlled, and private pay or uninsured. Each year, the demands for the government to take over the field grow louder, as insurance costs skyrocket.

Most other countries have some form of socialized medicine. In the countries of Canada, North Korea and Cuba, it is actually illegal to pay money to a doctor simply to see you. The government control there is so great that you can only see a doctor paid by the government in those countries. In England, there is a two-tiered system: good care is provided to those who can afford to pay for it, and free but inferior care is provided by the government to those who cannot.

The Canadian government destroyed free enterprise in medicine there, and took over the health care system. The government now sets limits on wages and prices. Lowering the wages and prices prevents supply from rising to satisfy demand. Because demand is much greater than supply, patients have to wait a long time to see a doctor. There is a lower survival rate from cancer in Canada than the United States because of the delays in diagnosis and treatment there.

If an elderly Canadian is vacationing in Florida and falls and breaks his hip, which is very painful, the Canadian system of health care will not even reimburse the patient for surgery at the nearest hospital. Instead, the patient must fly back to Canada in excruciating pain to be operated on by a government-controlled doctor there.

In the United States, where health care still includes free enterprise, a patient can enter a doctor’s office or hospital at any time and receive services based on a promise to pay for them by check or cash. Prices vary, and it is worth shopping around. Immediate care always remains available at some price.

VII. Assignment.

Read, and reread, the lecture. Complete the homework assignments through the level in which you choose to enroll in this course:

Introductory: 1. In a free market, the price and quantity at which goods are sold are where __________ equals ___________.

2. Suppose the price demand curve is P = $20 - Q, where P is price and Q is quantity. Also suppose the price supply curve is P = $4 + Q. At what price and quantity will the good be sold?

Intermediate: 3. Draw the supply and demand for air. In addition, draw the supply and demand for a good that costs $10000000000000000000000000 trillion dollars.

4. Suppose 1000 persons in a town each have the following weekly demands for gas, and the gas stations have the following weekly supplies:

Gallons Demand Price/gallon Supply Price/gallon
10 $2.50 $.50
20 $2 $.75
30 $1 $1
40 $.75 $1.50

(A) What is the price and overall quantity of gas sold each week?
(B) Suppose Congress declares war and imposes a price control of $.75 per gallon. At what price and overall quantity will gas sell each week?

5. Suppose the government limits the supply of Toyota cars that can be imported in 2008 to a certain quota. What effect does this have on the supply curve, and on the equilibrium price? Who is helped by this import quota, and who is hurt? Be as specific as possible.

6. Suppose you went to see the opening of your favorite new movie, but it is sold out. However, there are four independent scalpers are (illegally) reselling their tickets outside. Four strangers are each willing to pay the scalpers at most $15, $10, $9 and $8 for a ticket. The scalpers are initially willing to sell each of their tickets for at least $7, $8, $9, and $12. The eight of you get together and bargain, and then tickets are sold at a common price. What is the price and how many tickets sell at that price? Should scalping be illegal in New Jersey?

Honors: Write an essay of about 300 words total on one or more of the following topics:
 7. Should government regulations require and monitor honest and full disclosure of information by sellers to buyers?
 8. Should price discrimination be illegal?
 9. What is an economic incentive for excluding homeschooled athletes from high school sports? Should that be legal?
 10. Describe your view of if or how government should regulate medical prices.
 11. “Economic theory of law and the public domain - When is Piracy Economically Desirable?” See http://lexnet.bravepages.com/media1.html

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'''Sources:''' <references/>

User talk:Trooper

2007-02-22T08:01:00Z

Trooper:

Vandalism here isn't any funnier than it is on Wikipedia. Either way its still juvenile and a waste of time. Also, the Colbert joke is so old at this point, if you are going to vandalize try to at least do something more original. [[User:JoshuaZ|JoshuaZ]] 02:43, 22 February 2007 (EST)

==Disagree==
People actually use Wikipedia for quick references, and reliabilty and accuracy are important. Vandalising Wikipedia is a shameful act. Nobody uses Conservapedia, however, except to laugh at and valdalize, so I feel that it's entirely appropriate.--[[User:Trooper|Trooper]] 03:01, 22 February 2007 (EST)

Talk:Ecosystem

2007-02-22T07:22:11Z

Trooper:

Is this a valid reference? Not that this is a controversial page, or a controversial statement, but "Exploring Creation with Biology?" We can't do better than this?

Examples of Bias in Wikipedia

2007-02-22T07:04:39Z

Trooper: Even more bias!!!

The growing list of examples of bias and errors on [[Wikipedia]]. Please add to this, and also contribute entries to [http://www.conservapedia.com Conservapedia].

# Wikipedia allows the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. and C.E. instead of A.D. The dates are based on the birth of [[Jesus]], so why pretend otherwise? Conservapedia is Christian-friendly and exposes the [[CE]] deception.
# The entry for the Renaissance in Wikipedia refuses to give any credit to Christianity.
# Wikipedia's entry for the [[Association of American Physicians and Surgeons]], a conservative group, features a rant against the group by a British journalist who was a former press officer for the leftist Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.<ref>[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Association_of_American_Physicians_and_Surgeons&oldid=107830399 The version] criticized above; [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Association_of_American_Physicians_and_Surgeons the note] left by dpbsmith on the article's discussion page; the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_American_Physicians_and_Surgeons current version].</ref> The only cited credential for the journalist is that he works for a television "programme-production company," and there is no citation for any of the factual claims in his intemperate and misleading description of the group, which were prompted by an independent criticism in England of the journalist's own work. After receiving a complaint about this, Wikipedia trimmed this rant but still kept most of it, reflecting Wikipedia's bias. Preserving this unpublished diatribe is against Wikipedia policy (e.g., NPOV), but it Wikipedia administrators insist on keeping it. Wikipedia's entry also features another liberal journalist's swipe at AAPS from ... 40 years ago!
# There is a strong anti-American and anti-capitalism bias on Wikipedia. In its description of the post-war [[Bell Trade Act]] of 1946, in which the United States gave the Philippines $800 million in exchange for some free trade provisions, Wikipedia omits any mention of the $800 million dollars and instead lambasts the "wrath of Father Capitalism."<ref>This phrase was removed from Wikipedia only after this criticism was posted here. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Trade_Act</ref> The agreement was approved by popular vote on the Philippines, but the Wikipedia article omits that fact also.
# Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English speaking users are American. Look up "Most Favored Nation" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts the spelling to the British spelling "Most Favoured Nation", even there there are far more American than British users. Look up "Division of labor" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts to the British spelling "Division of labour," then insists on the British spelling for "specialization" also.<ref>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_labor</ref>. Enter "Hapsburg" (the European ruling family) and Wikipedia automatically changes the spelling to Habsburg, even though the American spelling has always been "Hapsburg". Within entries British spellings appear in the silliest of places, even when the topic is American. Conservapedia favors American spellings of words.
# Wikipedia distorts the youthful acceptance of [[deism]] by [[Benjamin Franklin]] by never acknowledging that he later abandoned it and failing to admit the significance of how Franklin, near the end of his life, proposed the saying of prayers at the [[Constitutional Convention]] for divine intervention and assistance in the proceedings,<ref>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Deist_thinkers</ref> an act that was debatably against the teachings of deism. Wikipedia also omits any acknowledgement of Franklin's praise of ''[[Pilgrim's Progress]]'' in his autobiography.
# The entry for the Spanish Golden Age does not even tell the reader when it occurred, but makes the doubtful claim that the Spanish Golden Age flourished in Latin America.
# Gossip is pervasive on Wikipedia. Many entries read like the National Enquirer. For example, Wikipedia's entry on Nina Totenberg states, "She married H. David Reines, a trauma physician, in 2000. On their honeymoon, he treated her for severe injuries after she was hit by a boat propeller while swimming." That sounds just like the National Enquirer, and reflects a bias towards gossip. Conservapedia avoids gossip and vulgarity, just as a true encyclopedia does.
# Edits to include facts against the theory of evolution are almost immediately censored. On Conservapedia, contributions that meet simple [[The Conservapedia Commandments|rules]] are respected to the maximum extent possible.
# Wikipedia removed and permanently blocked a page identifying its many biases.
# Wikipedia claims about 1.5 million articles, but what it does not say is that a large number of those articles have zero educational value. For example, Wikipedia has 1075 separate articles about "Moby" and "song".<ref>Simply search "Moby" and "song" together on Wikipedia.</ref> Many hundreds of thousands of Wikipedia articles -- perhaps over half its website -- are about music, Hollywood, and other topics beneath a regular encyclopedia. This reflects a bias towards popular gossip rather than helpful or enlightening information.
# The Wikipedia entry for [[John Peter Zenger]] links to an incorrect Wikipedia definition of "Philadelphia lawyer", which Merriam-Webster defines as a lawyer knowledgeable in "even the most minute aspects of the law." Wikipedia claims the term comes from the Zenger trial, but Merriam-Webster puts the first use of that term at over 50 years later. Wikipedia is simply unreliable.
# Often key facts are missing from Wikipedia entries in favor of meaningless detail. Wikipedia's entry about [[Indentured Servitude]] is massive, but it omits any reference to [[Bacon's Rebellion]], which was the turning point for the use of indentured servants in the New World!
# Wikipedia has many entries on "[[concession]]", but none explaining its main historical meaning (from imperialism). Quantity is not quality.
# Unlike most encyclopedias and news outlets, Wikipedia does not exert any centralized authority to take steps to reduce bias or provide balance; it has a "neutral point of view" policy but the policy is followed only to the extent that individual editors acting in social groups choose to follow it. For example, CNN would ensure that Crossfire had a representative of the political right and one from the political left. In contrast, Wikipedia policy allows bias to exist and worsen. For example, even though most Americans (and probably most of the world) reject the theory of [[evolution]],<ref>http://www.religioustolerance.org/ev_publi.htm</ref> Wikipedia editors commenting on the topic are nearly 100% pro-evolution.<ref>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Evolution</ref> Self-selection has a tendency to exacerbate bias in the absence of affirmative steps to limit it. [[Gresham's Law]] reflects the problem in economics of bad money driving out good in the absence of corrective action. As a result, Wikipedia is arguably more biased than CNN and other information sources.
#:The above paragraph was posted on the Wikipedia entry for "Wikipedia", under bias, but its editors then illustrated their bias by replacing the above with this: "Ojective [sic], or neutrally biased, articles present different opinions as equally legitimate regardless of validity, while unbiased articles focus on accuracy and validity. For example, the evolution article is not objective because it does not present creationism, a counter argument to evolution, as a valid scientific theory. However, this does not make the article biased because evolution is an accepted scientific theory. CNN's Crossfire, on the other hand, was considered objective[citation needed] because it had representatives from the political right from the political left."
# Wikipedia has many entries on mathematical concepts, but lacks any entry on the basic concept of an [[elementary proof]]. Elementary proofs require a rigor lacking in many mathematical claims promoted on Wikipedia.
# The Wikipedia entry for the [[Piltdown Man]] omits many key facts, such as how it was taught in schools for an entire generation and how the dating methodology used by evolutionists is fraudulent.
# Wikipedia's article on [[Feudalism]] is limited to feudalism in Europe and does not mention the feudal systems that developed independently in Japan and India.<ref>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism</ref>
# Wikipedia's article on the longest-serving and most powerful Maryland official in its history, [[William Donald Schaefer]], contains about 1900 words, but over two-thirds of those words (1400/1900) are devoted to silly gossip, outright vulgarity and National Enquirer-type material.<ref>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Donald_Schaefer</ref> 406 words, which is over 20% of the entire entry, is devoted to a silly dispute Schaefer had one day with the local newspaper!
# Wikipedia's article about the late Senator John Tower includes a mean-spirited story whose only point seems to be to indicate the degree of his ex-wife's bitterness toward him. The article spells his wife's name incorrectly, and cites no source for the item. The item has been in that state since it was first inserted in May 2006.<ref>[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Tower&oldid=101859325 John Tower], revision as of Jan 25</ref> No real encyclopedia would print such silly gossip.
# Wikipedia's entry for the [[National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act]] (NCVIA) reads like an advertisement for vaccine manufacturers, including unsupported and implausible claims about vaccination.<ref>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_Injury_Act</ref> Unsupported claims featured there include "Vaccine makers indicated they would cease production if their proposal for the NCVIA was not enacted" and "concern that the NCVIA may not provide an adequate legal shield." Wikipedia's entry omits references to leading pro-parent websites concerning vaccination,<ref>http://www.909shot.com/</ref> and instead Wikipedia's entry lists pro-government and pro-vaccine-manufacturer websites. Wikipedia's entry even includes this entire paragraph, which is unsupported and is little more than an advertisement for drug companies:
#:Public health safety, according to backers of the legislation, depends upon the financial viability of pharmaceutical companies, whose ability to produce sufficient supplies in a timely manner could be imperiled by civil litigation on behalf of vaccine injury victims that was mounting rapidly at the time of its passage. Vaccination against infectious illnesses provides protection against contagious diseases and afflictions which may cause permanent disability or even death. Vaccines have reduced morbidity caused by infectious disease; e.g., in the case of smallpox, mass vaccination programs have eradicated a once life-threatening illness.
# Wikipedia displays an obsession with English social distinctions, such as obscure royality, and with unexplained academic distinctions earned in the English college system, such as references to "double first degree." The entry on [[Henry Liddell]] illustrates this extreme form of Anglophilia that characterizes many entries in Wikipedia.<ref>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Liddell</ref>. That entry fails to tell us when Liddell was dean of Christ Church, Oxford and has a grammatical error in its first sentence, yet describes in painstaking detail four obscure royal titles for Liddell's relatives and his "double first degree" in college. The casual reader of that entry wouldn't even notice a buried reference (well after a description of all the royal lineage) to Liddell's primary claim to fame: his daughter Alice inspired [[Alice's Adventures in Wonderland]]. The arcane English descriptions in many Wikipedia entries may be due to its copying, verbatim, passages from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. This copying was not disclosed in the debate in late 2005 about whether Wikipedia was as reliable a resource as the Encyclopedia Britannica.<ref>http://news.com.com/Study+Wikipedia+as+accurate+as+Britannica/2100-1038_3-5997332.html</ref>
# Robert McHenry, former Editor-in-Chief for the ''Encyclopedia Britannica'', wrote about Wikipedia's bias and included this observation:<ref>http://www.opendemocracy.net/media-edemocracy/wikipedia_bias_3621.jsp</ref>
#:One simple fact that must be accepted as the basis for any intellectual work is that truth – whatever definition of that word you may subscribe to – is not democratically determined.
# Bob Schmidt observed on the ''Illinois Review'':<ref>http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2007/01/conservapedia_w.html</ref>
#:I just spent some time in Wikipedia checking if my recollections of its bias are correct. The bias is much worse than I had remembered.
#:I looked only at topics on business and information technology. Clearly there are enthusiasts for certain vendors who are spending a large portion of their time hyping technology in a way that makes their vendor look good in comparison to other vendors.
#:They will set up a set of criteria for the definition of a product that their product will meet. They conveniently omit from the criteria anything that would detract from their favorite.
#:In short, Wikipedia is not objective. It is accurate only within its selective use of facts that are convenient to promote a predetermined outcome.
#:Even for just one area of knowledge, it would take a major time consuming effort for a person or group to have an impact on reducing the bias and improving the accuracy of the entries.
# Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, admitted the following understated bias in an interview in 2006:<ref>http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/04/email_debatewales_discusses_po.html</ref>
#:I would say that the Wikipedia community is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population on average, because we are global and the international community of English speakers is slightly more liberal than the U.S. population.
#:There are no data or surveys to back that [Conservapedia editor: why not? Wales admitted that only about 615 editors are responsible for over 50% of the edits on Wikipedia.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/02/12/bias_sabotage_haunt_wikipedias_free_world/?page=2</ref> Why doesn't Wikipedia survey these editors? Is this deliberate indifference to bias?].
# Many people know how a prominent Tennessee journalist John Lawrence Seigenthaler was defamed for four months on Wikipedia before it was corrected. He described and criticized this in ''USA Today'', concluding with the following:<ref>http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2005-11-29-wikipedia-edit_x.htm</ref>
#:When I was a child, my mother lectured me on the evils of "gossip." She held a feather pillow and said, "If I tear this open, the feathers will fly to the four winds, and I could never get them back in the pillow. That's how it is when you spread mean things about people."
#What most people don't know is how many Wikipedia editors savaged Seigenthaler ''afterwards'' on a Wikipedia talk page for publicly criticizing the falsehoods about him:<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/02/12/bias_sabotage_haunt_wikipedias_free_world/?page=3</ref>
#:"Mr. Seigenthaler's attitude and actions are reprehensible and ill-formed," said one typical comment. "[He] has the responsibility to learn about his own name and how it is being applied and used, as any celebrity does on the Internet and the world-at-large. Besides, if there is an error whether large or small, he can correct it on Wikipedia. Everyone fails to understand that logic." Another wrote: "Rather than fixing the article himself, he made a legal threat. He's causing Wikipedia a lot of trouble, on purpose."
# In breton "wiki" means liberal, and "pedia" means bias. The founders of wikipedia were celtic.
----
==References==

<references/>

American Decency Association

2007-02-22T06:50:28Z

Trooper: More accurate description of group

The '''American Decency Assocation''' is a [[conservativ]]e [[religious]] group based in [[Fremont]], [[Michigan]]. The ADA's chief focus is lobbying against what it perceives as [[moral]] evils in mass [[media]] programing, commercial venues such as malls, and advertising, particularly those evils characterized by [[sexual]] or [[sexually suggestive]] content.

Owing to its unabashedly extremist stances, some of the the organization's efforts and statements appear self-parodic, with the various complaints posted on its [[Web site]] inlcuiding those against the retailer Victoria's Secret and the ABC dark comedy "Desperate Housewives."

== Statement of Purpose ==

According to the group's Web site:

''The mission of the American Decency Association is to educate the general public on matters of decency; to initiate, promote, encourage and coordinate activity designed to safeguard and advance public morality consistent with biblical Christianity. And most importantly, as Christians to love Jesus Christ and to do His will - to “Pursue holiness without which no man shall see the Lord.”'' [Hebrews 12:14]

In other words, the ADA's aim is the broad-brush [[censorship]] of retailers' and private citizens' protected [[First Amendment]] [[rights]]. It can be easily and sensibly argued that to censor some forms of [[pornography]] in the name of the [[Bible]] is hypocritical, since [[scripture]] includes various detailed accounts of unbridled sexual activity, including [[rape]], [[incest]], and other activities which today would classify as [[sex crimes]].

== Views on sex ==
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- The ADA operates under a heavy burden of [[denial]], preferring to believe against all reason that sexual curiosity and urges are not a normal part of healthy human social, physical, and psychological development, most notably in the [[teenage]] years. It has escaped the group's attention that the Biblical figure [[Jesus Christ]] did not, in fact, implicitly or explicitly condemn [[sexual behavior]] in any guise.
-
- Colloquially, the ADA's spokespersons, to be charitable, are "prudes," and probably meet the criteria for being [[sexually repressed]]. The group holds that [[masturbation]], [[homosexuality]], [[premarital sex]], [[sexual imagery]], [[homosexuality]], the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, "Grey's Anatomy" (the [[TV show]], not the esteemed medical reference), and [[homosexuality]] are evils to be swept under the rug where they cannot be obliterated by dint of bellyaching

== External links ==

* [http://www.americandecency.org/ The American Decency Association]
* [http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/features/2007_swimsuit/ S.I. Swimsuit Edition 2007]