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Never Fails to Disappoint

“News media bias is real.  It reduces the quality of journalism, and fosters distrust among readers and viewers.  This is bad for democracy.”  So says Timothy P. Carney in an op-ed in the New York Times back in 2015 as the Republican presidential primary season was heating up.  If it was true in 2015, the presence of Donald Trump has etched it into granite as Moses’s missing eleventh commandment.

My window into this state of affairs in the broader media is National Geographic Magazine.  Under the generalship of Susan Goldberg, the magazine never fails to put on full display its Left bonafides.  I’d say “liberal”, but in today’s America “liberal” ropes in “Left”, “socialist”, and “progressive”.  These folks aren’t about “freedom” – the old and forgotten Latin root of the word – since they can’t resist feeding more power to the state.  If they can’t tax it, they want to control or ban it, and sometimes own it – and, more likely, all of the above.  For them, the only solution for life’s troubles, real or imagined, is another dollop of the state in the form of a New-Deal-This-Or-That.  It’s their go-to fix.

The unveiling of the “Green New Deal” on Feb. 7, 2019.

But I digress.  As is my habit of reading the magazine cover-to-cover, the August 2018 issue (I’ve fallen behind) had right out of the gate what would have been an old-fashioned newspaper op-ed in more bucolic times.  Augustin Fuentes’s “Are We as Awful as We Act Online?” raises a poignant question.  He’s right for asking the question if he means that much online conversation takes a detour into the sewer.  The only problem is that his answer to the question is “No”.

Augustin Fuentes, Notre Dame Anthropology prof, National Geographic explorer alum, and magazine contributor.

How does he get to “no” when he could have gotten to “yes”?  Maybe a clue is found in the postscript bio at the end of the article.  Leveraging his credential as a Notre Dame anthropology professor, he authored Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths About Human Nature.  It seems that he’s determined to set the record straight on “human nature” lest the rubes (of which he might consider me one) continue to think it’s real.  In the land of the unawares where we find Mr. Fuentes – the GPS setting is a college faculty lounge – human beings are as fungible as Playdough.  The ideologically partisan notion is cemented in his head as Jimmy Hoffa’s cement gollashes were to his feet.  There is a fixedness (“hard-wired”, his words) to us in the form of cooperation, but that evolved.  The whole thing is contingent on physical and social circumstances.  So, it really isn’t fixed.  It’s forever fungible.

The counterpoint to the Fuentes weltanschauung is two thousand years older.  Humans are flawed … by nature.  Christians call it original sin.  And those failings apply to Mr. Fuentes and his colleagues at Notre Dame.  It applies to the civil-service protected and unionized government employees who will be increased and empowered to manage more of life according to the preferences of Mr. Fuentes, et al.  A paper credential or government office doorway don’t magically confer a free pass from our defects, be it ignorance, prejudices, emotional excesses, or the Peter Principle.  To think otherwise is to channel Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, the National Socialist goons, and every other utopian despot who has soiled our recent times.

Excavation pit filled with skulls of people killed by the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia.

The “nurture” bias in the age-old nature/nurture debate is a ruling banality in ed schools and the host of the other soft sciences, with emphasis on “soft”.  It’s become the favorite weapon for the politicized professoriate.  The target is anyone who dares to challenge the hokum.  Take a look at Mr. Fuentes’s screed in NGM.

When mentioning the trolls, he chronicles only examples of the crazies on the “right”, from the Twitter abuse of a feminist professor to the glorification of Martin Luther King’s assassin.  Of course, he couldn’t leave Pres. Trump out of the deplorables file.  When it came to his prescription for the proper response to the brutes, his models for proper comportment, not surprisingly, were #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and gun-controlling high school students in Florida. They were praised by Fuentes because they “acted to collectively to punish and shame … bullying and abuse”.  Translation: they hounded opposing viewpoints into silence.

Apparently, the fact that legions of trolls inhabit the environs of his favorite causes never crossed his mind.  Nicholas Sandmann and his fellow Covington students were slandered in the media and Twitter.  Self-proclaimed Muslim activist Reza Aslan alluded to Sandmann, “Honest question.  Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?”.  Comedian Ben Isaac Hoffman expounded, “I know I have fans in Paris Hills, Ky.  If you know this little s????, punch him in the nuts and send me the video of it and I’ll send you all my albums on vinyl, autographed.”  StreetCorner Music owner Uncle Shoes tweeted, “IF WE COULD WIPE THESE FAMILIES OUT WE WOULD BE IN A MUCH BETTER PLACE. F??? THIS S???”, followed by “LOCK THE KIDS IN THE SCHOOL AND BURN THAT B???? TO THE GROUND”.  The Twitter universe is littered with lefty trolls, and many have super-rich/coastal zip codes.

Lest we forget, what about Judge Kavanaugh’s treatment in the Left’s production of Orwell’s “The Two Minutes Hate”?  Wild and unsubstantiated stories of gang rape were leveraged into more than Twitter incontinence.  Mobs roamed the streets and hallways of DC.  “We Believe [the women]” became the rallying cry for the Left’s version of vigilante justice.  The digital form of the hate was bad enough, but the zealots went in for the physical form as well.  Talk to Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, and Joe Manchin.  Fuentes found it easy to ignore the Left because he’s a man of the Left.

I maintain my National Geographic Magazine subscription for many reasons, and none have to do with aboriginal nudity.  Honest.  For one, I do so to monitor the intellectual bankruptcy that afflicts our media.  Some sectors can no longer be trusted.  After a while, people begin to turn them off.  That’ll hit them in a sensitive spot: their pocketbook.  For the time being, I’ll continue to monitor National Geographic‘s mimicking of Mother Jones.

RogerG

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A 16-Year-Old Vote?

Here’s a thought, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (waitress/batender/sophmore class president) makes it easy to imagine: AOC is proof of the mistake of extending the vote to 16-year-olds.  With the exception of age, what’s the difference between her and Molly Ringwald’s character in “Sixteen Candles”?  Answer: not much.

RogerG

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The Real Bigotry

Gov. Jay Inslee (D, Washington State)

Did you hear what the governor (Washington State) and Dem presidential aspirant, Jay Inslee, had to say on Monday about the “deplorables”, aka Trump supporters?  He called them people from “non-enlightened area[s]”.  What are they “non-enlightened” about?  Why of course, it’s the chic hobby horses of the beautiful people: something called “implicit bias”, the climate-change apocalypse, and Green New Deal Stalinism.  More directly, he connected the word to the hidden bigotry of “implicit bias”, a form only perceived by mystics on the Left, like him.  Interesting.

Bigotry exists in America.  Dah!  And it exists in many places, including the heads of Washington State governors.  A bigot can have “non-enlightened” thoughts about more than skin color and mosques.  Sometimes, it can be directed at people who like a good macro-brew, NASCAR, pickup trucks, and live in farm country.  My guess about Inslee is that his blue-collar familiarity is limited to SNL skits – or at least he became that way.

Inslee and company don’t hesitate in slamming folks who don’t accept their poorly-thought-out ideas.  If he can’t find racist actions in an opponent’s behavior, then he’ll do a whirlybird incantation on their opinions with the magical words “implicit bias”.  Thus, any view that runs counter to three-quarters of the ladies on The View is contorted into the Left’s long list of isms and phobias.

Bigotry reigns supreme, and it is abundant in our cultural “commanding heights”, to borrow from Lenin (which the Dems are fond of doing anyway).

RogerG

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A Nothingburger

I know. I know.  The title engages a noun that has entered cliché territory.  Still, it applies to Mueller’s tome after an expedition of the likes of Alexander the Great’s invasion of Persia to the ends of the world.  In the end, after $40 million and almost 2 years, all Mueller got was indictments of a bunch of foreigners who’ll never face an American judge and questionable actions against bit players for after-the-fact infractions/crimes.  The whole rectal exam was about “collusion” – even the “obstruction” barking – and, in the end, there’s no there, there.

The brouhaha proved an old axiom that if you intensely look long enough, you’ll find something – even if that something amounts to … nothing.  Turn a building inspector loose on my property for 2 years and he’ll find “something”.  How many violations of law did you commit after waking up (maybe before), knowingly or unknowingly?  We live in a world of a straightjacket of laws and regulations.

Bottom line: no collusion, and the charge of “obstruction” is silly – so says both Barr AND Rosenstein.  The point raised by Barr before his elevation to AG is dispositive.  If there’s no crime, for what reason could Trump be obstructing?  Key to obstruction is evil intent, something deep within a person’s mind.  If there’s no outward sign of it, and if there’s no reason for doing it, why put credence in it?

The reason for the Dem death grip on “obstruction” is politics.  The Dems want Trump’s scalp at any price.  They’ll pour over the encyclopedia-length full report to stitch together an impeachment indictment.  They’ll hang onto any language in the report to keep the issue alive.  “Do not exonerate” (in the Mueller summary) is an example.  “Exonerate” is a measly word when an investigator does not exonerate.  Either they recommend charges or they don’t.  To pass the buck to Barr as if there’s a hint of a case, in spite of the lack of evidence and sound Constitutional reasons to reject it, will stoke the Dems’ impeachment fire.

Adam Schiff and Andy Kaufman. Any similarities?

In the end, we went to the Mueller café and got … nothing.  It’s the equivalent of an air-burger on an empty plate.

RogerG

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The Fabrication of Narrow Perspectives

Christian persecution: Mourners carry coffins following an attack earlier this year (Image: GETTY)

The recent terror-horror in New Zealand reminds me of the blinkered outlooks that infects our urban centers.  Our cities, with very few exceptions, are essentially one-party (Dem) states enthralled by a left-wing zeitgeist.  Anything that can feed into the preferred phobia-angles of modern leftism will be disseminated by our urban-centered media.  Other news is ignored.  The result is a distortion of the mind.

The New Zealand episode fits the story line since Islamophobia has entered the approved list of the causes for chic resistance.  Clearly, the Christchurch act is detestable but rare is the word about actions against Christianity in parts of Africa and the Middle East.  Scarcely a word passes the lips at CNN/MSNBC/3-network-sisters and the scribblers at the WaPo/NYT/wire services. Recent stories of massacres of Nigerian Christians by Boko Haram and Fulani Islamists gets little ink.  The decimation of Christians in the Middle East is a saga with daily incidents of genocide.  Christians are entering the same list with the passenger pigeon in large parts of the world.  Again, that kind of inhumanity goes down the memory hole.

(Read here from the New York Post of April 14, 2017.)

But when a nut case blasts his way into a mosque, it’s a media circus.  I wish that our news-and-info organizations went back to being about news and information, and not furthering the ends of a narrow zeitgeist.

RogerG

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Wow! Blue America Cheats.

Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin

A few decades is more than enough time to evolve a system to game – or cheat – the rules.  With the so-called “undocumented”, it’s as simple as getting into the country by whatever means at hand and a network of fraudsters will greet you with jobs, crooked documents, sanctuary, and the open arms of sympathizers.  Maybe even before long, the right to vote.  For today’s haute couture mavens, it’s greasing the skids for their kids.  Well, they got caught.  A slew of blue-America’s finest were indicted in Boston federal district court on charges of bribery to advance their kids to the front of the line into America’s allegedly “elite” schools, ahead of any of the more meretricious hoi polloi.  Hypocrites, hypocrites, hypocrites.

(See here for more)

All the gnashing of teeth for the marginalized and oppressed is a mere pose that they mistake for virtue.  They do this as they steamroll a tiger mom’s child or a young family’s struggles with two jobs to save enough for their kids’ education.  It’s disgusting!

I understand the pull to cheat.  They want the prestige of an elite school’s piece of paper (degree), not necessarily wisdom, for their kid.  Chances are, the kid won’t get much enlightenment anyway.  The curriculums are too corrupted with ideologized nonsense.  It’s particularly true of the big-time schools with big-time sports and big-time endowments.

So, what are they cheating about?  It must be all about how to get the piece of paper.  No wonder we have kids flocking to socialism in spite of its history as a hot mess.  Go figure.

RogerG

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The Flavor of Bigotry in the Democratic Party

Ilhan Omar (D, Mn. 5th Dist.)

What’s the difference between Ilhan Omar’s (IO) comments about the Jews and the slurs of more famous vintage?  Not much that I can tell.  As a historian, she draws from the same scurrilous anti-Jewish tropes that would reach a crescendo of hate in National Socialism.

Here she is in comments before a microphone and in tweets:

“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

“It’s all about the Benjamins baby” – IO tweet, 2/10/2019.

“Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel. #Gaza #Palestine #Israel.” – IO tweet in 2012.

Take a look for yourself.  The Nazi posters below were typical of the disgusting genre, and are emblematic of a growing sentiment in the Democratic Party.

However, Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie would find objectionable the negative aspersions directed at the USSR in one of the posters.

Best of buds: Ocasio-Cortez and Omar.

For these rising stars in the Dem firmament, they might agree with Lincoln Steffens’s assessment in a visit to the USSR (1921?), “I have seen the future, and it works”.  The USSR is probably the “shining city on a hill” in the Bernie/AOC/Omar wing of the party.

RogerG

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Government as Parent

Case in point: Parenting Montana.

I begin with “crowding out”.  Crowding out occurs when so much money flows to one thing that other things die on the vine.  It happens in venues other than those based on mammon.  Big, really big question: Has the state become so huge that it’s sucking the blood out of civil society?  A vampire could work as a metaphor.

Nosferatu is phlebotomizing civil society.  What is the victim, civil society?  Our definitions are muddled.  The UN’s World Health Organization tries to pigeonhole civil society away from business and government.  To them, civil society is “collective action around shared interests, purposes and values”, and the third rail of life.  Sorry, that’s way too cute.  Sounds too much like something out of a snooze-inducing textbook.  Actually, much business is born of the interactions of those “shared interests, purposes and values”.  The same could be said of government, but civil society – and business, at least pre-Sanders – is voluntary.  Government isn’t about voluntary.  People in power have a quiver full of carrots and sticks to make you do something they want, and behind every carrot is a big fat hand holding that big fat stick.  Isolate government to itself while civil society since business share too much DNA.  Thus, in actuality, 2 rails exist.

Of side note, Ocasio-Cortez and her minions would like to gene-splice business and government together.  That’s the socialist thing at work.  They want 2 rails with this new hybrid Leviathan attacking the neck of a remaining and wilting civil society (in keeping with same metaphor).

This came to mind while streaming Pandora.  An ad for “Parenting Montana” appeared between the music, another one of those dot-org’s.  What the heck is that?  Smelling a rat, yep, it’s government. Go to the website and you’ll find in the fine print a scat trail to a federal block grant program to the State of Montana, CFDA 93.959.  Mind you, I find not much wrong with government helping to address the deeply troubled in our neighborhoods.  The fly in the ointment is that it is today’s government doing it.

Our present government isn’t a better one than great grandpa’s; it’s just bigger, way bigger, and beset by the ACLU, dominated by a narrow demographic, and addicted to fashionable causes.  The result is a mess.

I’m not sure what John Dewey and the rest of the Progressive leading lights of a century back, as pushers of big government, would think of today’s Leviathan.  They envisioned a government of technocratic know-it-alls guiding us to the promised land.  He probably couldn’t grasp the fact that the techs could lack wisdom and are infected with their own prejudices.  What they, the Prog’s,  produced is a government shaped around their experience of 16-plus years sitting in a classroom receiving curriculum.  Yes, curriculum.  For them, curriculum is the answer.  There’s nothing that couldn’t be cured by more curriculum.

Follow the steps, procedures, and factoids and you’re supposed to be a better person.  It is the chosen path for the representatives who made the law and the people who passed the civil service exam to get the thing up and running.  Do you get the picture?  The whole outlook is based on form (curriculum), not the substance (what’s in the curriculum).

Decamp to the website, ParentingMontana.org, and you’ll find curriculum and some referrals to nonprofits in government’s gravitational pull.  Watch videos, read the how-to links, and pay a visit to a counselor steeped in the curriculum – more people with degrees and certificates as Dewey preached.

Issues develop not with curriculum per se.  Curriculum is only a guide for what and how to teach.  The person doing the teaching most assuredly is important, but even more important is the “what”, what are they teaching?  The substance mentioned before.  Sadly, the spiritual is absent from the syllabus.  No room here for the faith.  A Bible study is replaced by your state-sponsored counseling group led by your state-approved counselor.  A referral to a church would be met by the hounds of the ACLU and years in court.  The experience produces a vanilla curriculum without God.

It competes with the kind offered by your priest or pastor, but with a distinct advantage.  Milton Friedman had it right when he said, “Nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program”.  Government draws strength from its access to everybody’s paycheck (the taxing power) and the Bureau of the Mint.  And politics is the measure of success, not bottom-line metrics, so a program has life long after it became rancid (ag subsidies anyone?).  Not exactly a level playing field here.

And government programs can be hip.  Your local priest or pastor, in contrast, will be bound to God’s word, the Bible.  Government is bound by politics, and politics is bound by money under the spell of any tight organization of commonly-oriented loud mouths.  If something gets popular traction, you bet that the authorities-that-be will take it in.  Consider gay marriage and transgender rights.  Look at the pot craze sweeping red and blue states alike (see Forbes).  The fashion-of-the-moment will find a place in government decrees on everything imaginable, including its “wisdom” on being a good mommy.

I saw the phenomena at work in a California high school.  California being so chic in thought and feeling, and personally as a teacher and department chair (Social Studies), the staff and I were frequently told of a new mandate from the state to honor one of the many “marginalized” in our lessons.  So, we went from unions to blacks to women to multiple ethnics to LGBTQ in its many variations, and back again.  Remember, the more time devoted to balkanized America, the less time for the Constitution, the Civil War, Supply/Demand, the Great Depression, etc.  “Crowding out” at work before your munchkins.  Welcome to politics flummoxing your kid’s school.

It’s no less true for “Parenting Montana”.  Scroll through the links.  Since many problems in the home can be traced to the desire for a high, a good part of the guidance will be consumed with booze and drug abuse.  Going to the links, I couldn’t find any mention of marijuana.  I found heroin, meth, alcohol, but no “mary jane”.  The words “abuse” and “reefer”, and its many equivalents, weren’t connected.  Could it be that marijuana has a constituency?  It’s fashionable whereas shooting up in a public bathroom isn’t.

But think about it: today’s THC-rich cannabis isn’t the stuff wafting through a 60’s Grateful Dead concert.  It’s jam-packed with maybe 3x’s more (though potheads hotly dispute the figure).  Hey, more bang for the buck, and with the “bang” comes all kinds of things attaching to your lungs as if you were lighting up a Marlborough (according to the American Lung Association).  Even more disturbing are the neurological and cognitive effects (see here).  It helps in germinating mental illness in the form of multiple psychoses like schizophrenia (see here).  The junk should not be given a free pass as “Parenting Montana” does.

But what are you going to do when getting high becomes “medical” … and fashionable?

I can only imagine the kinds of mischief that a hotbed of a lefty dreamscape like California can put the money to.  “Parenting” could be combined with “Heather Has Two Mommies” and how to teach your child to share a bathroom with someone of divergent genitalia.  The possibilities are endless.  If government is your mommy, you just found another way to inject politics into the family and the rest of civil society.  And then is civil society all that civil?  It certainly is more political.  Soon, we may be down to only one rail: government.  Sanders, AOC, and Marx would be smiling.

RogerG

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What’s Happening to Our News and Information?

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.  The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

Who said this? Bernie Sanders?  AOC in one of her Twitter fits?  Any of our “woke” college activists rampaging at a Charles Murray presentation?  Good guesses, but wrong.  The author is Karl Marx in his “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”.

In one sense, though, it sounds like the kind of thing they would say (maybe not AOC because that would ask too much of her facile understanding).  And it sounds like the kind of thing rattling the synapses of the vast majority of those manning our broadcast studios, newsrooms, and much of the publishing industry.  It’s a view of the world smothering the mental faculties of many in the chattering classes, whether chattering with the mouth or a word processor.

The notion has infected much of what we read, watch, and learn in our classrooms. It’s the idea that a hidden structure of oppression exists to ensnare us no matter what we do.  For Marx, the idea justified a complete revolution in the individual’s mind to the family to social relations to government.  Everything was to be managed, and that means big, really big government.  Sounds like the Green New Deal?

I’m reminded of Marx’s influence, now, almost every time I pick up my National Geographic Magazine (NGM).  The magazine reads like a series of op-eds in The Daily Worker.  A common tactic in its articles is to quote opinionated academics to buttress an opinion.  Add some stats and a few graphs, and, voilà, an opinion becomes “science”.  Marx also liked to say that his opinions were “science”.

Race is a field rich with possibilities for exploitation by those inclined to see the world as Marx did.  For instance, NGM’s April 2018 issue, “Black and White”, blathered about race as some “social construct” while veering off into Confederate statues and racial profiling.  The opinions of opinionated profs were replete in the issue’s articles.  The confusion of opinions with science has become a hallmark for the magazine, just like Marx.

Let’s examine the magazine’s treatment of racial profiling.  There’s more to the story than “racist” cops, but you wouldn’t know it from the piece.  Absent from the author’s angle on the issue is any recognition of something called “context” – context as in any other considerations.  What about the uneven distribution of chaos in the home, the uneven distribution of violent crime on the streets, the war on drugs, the debilitating effects of made-in-America welfare, other issues like the epidemic of illegal immigration to the tune of an accumulated 11 million to 21 million “undocumented” (Who knows?), and the attendant presence of the Sureños/Norteños/MS-13 and Crips/Bloods?  Circumstances exist beyond the hidden, unconscious prejudices of a police officer and the Man.

2 Sureños and 2 Norteños.

An interesting aside that’s never been adequately explained by the race hustlers: There was a time when NYC black cabbies would avoid fares from young black males. In advertising, it’s called branding.  Past experience can brand an entire demographic, even among black cabbies tired of being crime victims by the very same demographic.  I would think that something else is at work other than racism (hidden or otherwise) against blacks by black cab drivers.

Police are searching for answers after a Flash Cab driver was found shot to death inside his taxi in the Lincoln Square neighborhood. Feb. 23, 2016. (CBS Chicago)

Instead, NGM and its stable of writers traipse off into the fantasy of Marx’s world.  Evil has always resided in the souls of our species. Racism and general mayhem have always been there.  Marx’s non-stop revolution won’t change that fact.  An ever-bigger government to police human thought and conscience won’t either.  A healthy civil society – the very thing that the Left is systematically dismantling – with appropriate public sanctions is the answer.

Adopting Marx is a descent into the snake pit of totalitarian control.  Bad, very bad.

RogerG

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Hooray for Sen. Diane Feinstein … Kinda

I’m loathe to admit this, but a small dose of maturity was administered by the Senator to politicized youngins, a few older than 18 and most appear to be around 12 (watch the video below).  All mouthed lefty boilerplate in a visit to Feinstein’s office that couldn’t survive a serious high school debate.

It’s difficult to watch adults exploiting a group of tweens.  They were members of the Sunrise Movement whose purpose is to stampede the country into enacting the Green New Deal and its Soviet-style central planning by hiding behind kids.

The title’s “kinda” part has to do with appearances, which can be deceiving.  Today’s Democrats are in favor of more central planning. Yet, the presence of the Markey/Sanders/AOC Green New Deal makes the other Dems appear moderate.  The fact is, the whole party has lurched left, and to the left means in the direction of the Socialist International.  Some, like the Green New Deal sponsors, are just in a hurry to get there; others want to take a little longer and slower route to the same destination.

It’s much like the difference between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks of days of yore.  They both wanted socialism.  It’s just that the M’s were content with a more peaceful march to utopia while the B’s wanted it now, preferably with guns.  The “M” and “B” thing is playing out in the office of Sen. Diane Feinstein and Democratic Party congressional caucus.  Do you want your socialism straight (Bernie/AOC style) or diluted (Feinstein style)?

RogerG