A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Author: RogerG
I am a retired teacher and coach, Social Science Department chairman, community college instructor in Physical and Human Geography. I have attended 4 colleges with relevant degrees and certificates in History, Religious Studies/Philosophy, Education, and Planning and Community Development. I am also a 3rd generation native Californian, now refugee living in northwest Montana.
STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. And, if given freedom of choice and abundant opportunities, more women prefer other fields. Conversely, straitjacketing women through poverty, and cultural and legal devices, ironically means more STEM women (More or less is a percentage of a study population). The upshot: depressed countries meet the modern feminist ideal more than free, open, and prosperous ones. So, should we adopt the Sub-Saharan African model of social and economic organization to boost our female STEM numbers? And/or, should we continue our efforts to artificially construct the new woman according to recent Hollywood stereotypes?
Check out the articles:
** “Countries with greater gender equality have lower percentages of female STEM graduates MU study finds”, News Bureau, U. of Missouri, 2/14/2018, https://munews.missouri.edu/…/0214-countries-with-greater-…/
** A good synthesis: “Gender equality paradox: fewer women in developed nations go after STEM degrees”, Philip Perry, BigThink, 3/1/2018, http://bigthink.com/…/the-downside-to-greater-gender-equali…
3/24/18, Washington, D.C. Demonstrators fill Pennsylvania Avenue in preparation for the March for Our Lives Rally in Washington, D.C. on March 24, 2018. (Gabriella Demczuk / TIME)
Things ain’t what they appear. A Washington Post analysis of the crowd at DC’s March for Our Lives shows that the youth were akin to albino gorillas. They were there but swallowed in a sea of adults, mostly middle-aged, college educated women.
While only slightly less skewed to lefty activism, last Saturday’s crowd would still be simpatico with the lefty, anti-Trump hordes of recent memory. Here are some of the numbers: 70% women, 72% BA degree, 10% under age 18, 49 average age of adults. The high number of BA degrees shouldn’t warm your heart since today they have little to do with wisdom.
Not surprisingly, following the political DNA of other lefty gabfests, 79% self-identified as left and 89% voted for Hillary.
At the March for Our Lives, 3/24/2018.
Even more interesting was the dissection of the first-timers, 12% of the swarm. They were even more aroused by “peace” or anti-Trumpism. The former is a staple of lefty activism since Vietnam; the latter is the incitement du jour; both have only a glancing relation to gun control.
The uproar after Parkland might have some relation to its location. Broward County went for Hillary by 35% (Ballotpedia.org). Now we’re in California territory. Remember the Sutherland Springs, Texas, church massacre in Nov. 2017 – 47 casualties, 20 dead? That went down the memory hole.
Both episodes were evil on parade. But our legacy media chew on stories longer if they are birthed in certain places, and are pitches right into the leftist wheelhouse.
While the young-ins are a great face, many of the usual suspects of adults lurk behind the scenes.
A partial gallery of adult contributors to the collection plate for this latest lefty spectacle:
Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for March For Our Lives
After all the speechifying, would any of it do any good?
A dose of reality:
RogerG
** “Here’s who actually attended the March for Our Lives. (No, it wasn’t mostly young people.)”, Dana R. Fisher, The Washington Post, 3/28/2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/03/28/heres-who-actually-attended-the-march-for-our-lives-no-it-wasnt-mostly-young-people/?utm_term=.77bc981ec327
Columbine High School massacre, April 20, 1999, at 11:10 am. Shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold upper left.
Here’s a thought: What effect does passing laws have on curing the ills of the human condition? A partial answer might be related to this distinction: “Passing laws” must be distinguished from “enforcing laws”. All too often we bludgeon ourselves with personal invective into passing laws and then walk away patting each other on the back on a job well done. But wait. The new edicts will have to be enforced with the non sequitur of “government efficiency”. The reality is that they won’t be effectively executed. And even if they are, they probably won’t change things one iota.
Classic example: The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and its ban on “assault weapons”.
Pres. Bill Clinton signs the bill into law on September 13, 1994.
The ban on “assault weapons” was in effect from 1994 to 2004, when it was allowed to sunset. What effect did the law have on Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on April 20, 1999 at Columbine High School?
Eric Harris, left, and Dylan Klebold, carrying a TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol, are pictured in the cafeteria at Columbine High School, in Littleton, Colorado, during their April 20, 1999 shooting rampage where they killed a teacher and 12 students. (Associated Press/Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department)
Answer: None that I can perceive. Klebold and Harris still entered the campus almost as well-armed as Seal Team Six. Gun controllers popped the champagne corks in 1994 and later Klebold and Harris popped untold rounds into the Columbine student body in 1999. 39 casualties later – 15 of them dead, including the shooters – and we were still as unsafe as before Clinton’s 1994 self-congratulatory signing ceremony.
These laws rely on two things for their effectiveness: (1) government employees and (2) the corresponding belief in an end to criminal creativity. As a matter of fact, criminals don’t stop thinking after a law is passed if they are bent on criminality. Set the rules at gun bans or age limits, for example, and the means will be devised to achieve the desired ends: steal the guns; inherit them; resort to other non-banned rapid-fire weapons; heck, load up a pressure cooker if need be.
Passing a law will not end human frailty and the human capacity to do evil. Chances are, they’ll do nothing to correct for our toxic modern culture, the thing that lies at the root of many of our problems.
Crowds of people hold signs on Pennsylvania Avenue at the “March for Our Lives” rally in support of gun control, Saturday, March 24, 2018, in Washington.
One in the flurry of gun control proposals in the wake of the Florida school shooting is raising the age to purchase a rifle to 21, either through state or federal action. The suggestion is a clown-car of inconsistencies and undigested logic.
Right alongside with this latest bullet point of Michael Bloomberg advocacy is the 26th Amendment, the 18-year-old right to vote. If the controllers’ idea is adopted, maturity for voting lives side-by-side with immaturity for buying a gun. What? How does this work?
The NRA might raise the irony of an 18-year-old being issued a gun in the Army but can’t be issued one on purchase once the person steps off base. “Right”, gun controllers will respond as they contend that the “kid” is under supervision on base. Well, the controllers now present the ungainly circumstance of the 18-year-old not being able to buy a gun unsupervised as they exercise the vote unsupervised. Try to square that circle.
The idea has all the earmarks of feelings clouding sensible judgment. If adopted, the proposal sets the ceiling for “immaturity” at 21 for a gun while, at the same time, still allowing the newly-defined “immature” to inflict their choices on the rest of us at the voting booth.
The 26th Amendment grants to the newly-defined “immature” the right to vote; an age-21 gun law also excuses the skeptic for scoffing as the newly-defined “immature” line up to vote. Go figure.
Radicalizing the youth: People arrive for the March For Our Lives rally against gun violence in Washington, DC on March 24, 2018.
That’s right, this whole march in DC has all the trappings of a leftist jihad for a grand social revolution. Do you really think this is only about gun control? Lefty platitudes were wafting through the air like pot smoke in a Denver park. Demonization was rife, and lefty banalities had pride of place. Prudence and caution are not the stuff of youth politics.
Why is it so? Young people are flash-point thinkers. Thought seasoned with knowledge and experience is lacking. They think in extremes and superlatives, and react strongly to what they last saw or heard – very understandable for a witness to a massacre. But wise policy doesn’t arise out of the traumatized and incompletely schooled.
Half-digested buzzwords like “restorative justice” and “white privilege” were bandied about like a beach ball on the Florida sand. These kids are in the process of being mentally scarred from anything approaching serious contemplation. They will react with harsh words and contempt for anyone who disagrees, and it may forever stay with them. There are few things more dangerous than a young person filled with poorly-understood righteousness.
Watch this clip of the shouting down of Professor Bret Weinstein for emailing his disagreement about an activist-led “Day of Absence”.
Or this famous display of close-mindedness and shrieking directed at Yale Sociology Professor Christakis.
Don’t think for a moment that the March is a kids-and-their-parents thing. This isn’t youth soccer. It is big money and big adults ginning up the whole affair. If the kids are the spokesmen, they deserve to be challenged. As for the adults cheering on the spectacle, they need to be outed.
My rights are too important to be left to the immature and brazenly self-righteous.
Check out the photos of the ubiquitous outstretched clenched fist of David Hogg and others throughout history. The emphatic, incendiary gesture commonly goes with youth activism. It usually indicates a troubling stridency.
David Hogg after “March For Our Lives” speech, 3/24/2018.Hugo Chavez, socialist dictator of Venezuela, salutes after a speech.In the midst of the horrific Cultural Revolution, a youthful speaker of Mao’s Red Guards thrusts the communist clenched-fist salute.More youthful partisans of Mao’s brutal Cultural Revolution.People’s Climate March, NYC, 2014.CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA – AUGUST 12: Anti-fascist counter-protesters wait outside Emancipation Park to hurl insluts as white nationalists, neo-Nazis and members of the “alt-right” are forced out after the “Unite the Right” rally was declared an unlawful gathering August 12, 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia. After clashes with anti-fascist protesters and police the rally was declared an unlawful gathering and people were forced out of Emancipation Park, where a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee is slated to be removed. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Data mining on Facebook was placed on the list of evils by anyone traumatized about the 2016 election. Since Trump’s campaign momentarily dabbled in it, it’s satanic, conveniently forgetting St. Obama did it in 2012. The difference between the two approaches is matter of degree, not kind.
A photo illustration depicts the mining of Facebook data after allegations that a British political consultancy had accessed users’ information to build profiles of American voters. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic
I’m referring to the 2016 election in the title. If you happened to be a loser, the election drove you to madness. Some couldn’t get over the numbers and fled into escapism. For them, the whole thing was as legitimate as the finishes at a mob-run racetrack. In psychology, it’s called “denialism” – a rejection of reality.
For the psychologically marred, nearly everything is recruited to deny the victor his spoils. Regarding the 2016 result, it was Russia “stealing our election”, Comey’s testimony on Hillary’s awkwardly unlawful behavior, the rise of the “deplorables”, and now Facebook skulduggery.
Somehow, data mining on Facebook has joined the ranks of numbers running. Obama’s people did it in 2012 and they were called wunderkinds. Trump’s people do it and it becomes one of the dark arts. Yes, in 2012, people volunteered their friends’ lists while 2016 Cambridge Analytics bought their’s. In both cases, no friends were asked, and it was simply like ending up on a direct mail or phone list. It’s much-a-do about nothing.
Russia didn’t turn the election. They succeeded, though, in sowing the discord exhibited by Nancy Pelosi and company. As for Hillary’s Comey problem, that was self-inflicted. As for Facebook, Trump’s people found it wanting and used the better RNC data.
Don’t worry about Facebook, they will find way to monetize data mining.
Eventually, for all the enraged Dems out there, you’ll have to come around to accepting that a sizable chunk of the electorate in 2016 had enough of Obama’s revolution. Now, you’ll channel your rage for the midterms and vote to misgovern yourselves … and ourselves. And so it goes.
Protest against Donald Trump. Photo: Socialist Alternative.
Comments from readers provide opportunities to further expand on a point. Brevity can lead to leaving some terms obscure – the “reprehensible ideas” for instance in a previous post. In the following exchange, I gave some sense about what I might mean by “reprehensible ideas”.
Respondent: Right now, the most important thing is character and decency. Period. No Faustian bargains with the likes of DT.
My reply:You make much of “character” but say nothing of character-destroying policies. Unleashing an unaccountable administrative state sets the stage for unaccountable government and irresponsible conduct. Class warfare policies puts the power of government agencies into the incitement of envy and envy-based confiscation. Modern progressivism’s lifestyle fascism is the single largest organized threat to faith institutions. Trump’s episodic insults to particular persons creates a much smaller universe of victims than the state’s massive and broad social destruction. Don’t be so animated about Trump’s boorish behavior while refusing to recognize the much more serious assault on our national health from lefty policies. That’s the “reprehensible ideas” part of our current dilemma.
For one, “free” isn’t “free”. It’s shorthand for the government making somebody else pay. For another, the whole idea is a mess. If you want to ruin college, unleash public debt, and wreck the lives of many young people, make college “free”.
Two things stand out in this latest crusade for “free”. First, the idea defiles colleges by roping into them marginal students which turns colleges into something resembling failing high schools, and lets loose a form of hyper-inflation … of degrees. It’s like the idea of making a country richer (more educated) simply by printing more dollars (degrees).
Second, it’s as if we can suspend the laws of human nature, as if there are no such laws. Economics can’t exist without them. It’s economics that is really being ridden out of the picture. “Free” means “subsidies”, and subsidies make anything more expensive. Take dairy price supports, or ethanol subsidies, and apply to college. You’ll end up with warehouses full of degrees, many of which have more to do with political activism than practicality and enlightenment. Watch costs escalate.
More troubling is the greater acceptance of the nonsense among normally conservative constituencies. The popularity of the balderdash is proof of debased education and the ascent of the juvenile love for “free” into age groups that should know better.
*”Why States Should Abandon the ‘Free College’ Movement”, Jennifer E. Walsh, NRO, 3/19/2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/…/why-states-should-abandon…/
Nancy Pelosi (D, San Francisco), House Minority Leader
Reprehensible behavior:
Donald Trump, President of the United States
The results of the soon-to-be-defunct Pennsylvania 18th congressional district election signals a rising tide for the Democrats in November, but not because of any great love for their lefty ideas.
Conor Lamb (D), winning candidate in the 18th congressional district race.
Their (Dems) fortunes rose in direct proportion to the repulsiveness and churlishness of a president with a “R” after his name. Trump is the accelerant for this state of affairs, not love for SDS-type values. (SDS: the 60’s Students for Democratic Society – Tom Hayden’s, et al, group for bringing socialism to America).
This is an election year that will pivot on the choice between reprehensible ideas (Democrats) vs. reprehensible behavior (Trump). Trump has soiled the “R” label. It’s a sad situation when people react to deplorable conduct by turning to people with deplorable ideas.
Time to recycle the wisdom of the historian Robert Blake: ““The right to misgovern oneself is as valid as any other political right, and it is exercised more often than most.” We might see it play out in November, and maybe two years later.
Robert Blake, historian, Queen’s College, Oxford University.
Say good-bye to your tax cut and guns; say hello to incessant impeachment dramas and the Californication of the federal government.
Sorry, I can’t leave the gun debate alone. The reason: the people most stridently supporting gun-control are simultaneously most ignorant about them. They say stupid things like, “These guns [AR-15’s] are killing machines” (Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC, last week in a radio interview).
Stephanie Ruhle, MSNBC
Here’s a question: Comparing the 2 gun pictures below – #2 and #3 – which one is more likely to kill you? Answer: It depends on which one is pointing at you. Dahhhh! A bullet out of a “killing machine” (Stephanie’s words) acts the same way as one heading toward a deer.
Hunter with a bolt-action rifle.Sighting-in an AK-47.
Okay, one is a semi-auto AK-47 (pic #3) and the other is a bolt-action hunting rifle (pic #2). But many sport rifles are semi-auto. Depending on the direction of the barrel, either one could be a “killing machine” (Stephanie’s words). See below, pic #4, of a Browning semi-auto and an AR-15.
