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PBS, Intellectual Fraud, and Immigration

I watched PBS’s Frontline “The Gang Crackdown” on MS-13 till I couldn’t take it anymore, roughly ¾ of it.  The program was a goulash of logic that raised more questions than it answered.  And when it tried to answer some, the explanations resembled Alice going down the rabbit hole.  The thing was an affront to common sense.

The broadcast tried, in the tradition of the world’s best sleight-of-hand magicians, to associate the presence of MS-13 to reactionary American public officials.  As they did so, anyone watching it would be blinded by one basic question.  Where do we find these MS-13 miscreants?  They reside within the suddenly blossoming enclaves of immigrants, many of them “undocumented”.  Suddenly blossoming!  We wouldn’t have this problem if we hadn’t lost control of our borders.  Dahhh!

MS-13 murder scene.

Such logic apparently never dawned on the script writers – or at least there’s no evidence of it.  Instead, they steered the viewer into a sojourn of the crime and poverty of third world countries, the reactions of law enforcement, and the unchallenged opinions of open-borders activists.  Clearly, the program could have benefited from more of the kind of pushback that was only reserved for Trump and federal and local law enforcement.

Activists protest the Trump administration’s approach to illegal border crossings in Washington, Thursday, June 28, 2018. (AP File Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The lambasting of American authorities was partnered with an unstated inference.  Call it innuendo with a light touch.  Bad conditions everywhere in the world obliges the US to accept nearly anyone needy.  Why else the hackneyed reference to the plight of El Salvadorans, et al?  Everyone living in a dirt floor hut is now to be recast as a “soon-to-be-American”.  Emma Lazarus’s poem is sentiment, but it is also suicide as public policy in the era of a gargantuan welfare state.

Frontline added nothing to the immigration debate but the tired Democratic Party talking points on the issue du jour.  A little more honesty would help, as well as a little more rationality.

RogerG

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Totalitarian Mind Control in Academic Jargon

Implicit bias is all the rage in social policy circles.  The rationale for the crusade is based on the assertion that we do something more than overtly act like racists (homophobes, Islamophobes, etc.).  We harbor hateful prejudices deep in our subconscious.  It’s not enough, it is said, to control the racist behavior.  We must expunge the lurking bad thoughts swimming around in those vast unconscious reservoirs in our brains.  The field is more than a rich source of consulting income for the high priests of the endeavor.  The dogma branches off into innumerable calls for the checking of privilege and other forms of sloganeering.  But is it true?  There’s good reason to say wowwww!

David Berreby

This came to mind while reading in my April 2018 issue of National Geographic Magazine the article, “The Things That Divide Us” by David Berreby.  A natural logic could lead one to rightly assume that evil behavior has tentacles in evil thoughts.  Fair enough.  The problem lies in ferreting out the purported bad biases.  Further, there appears to be a tenuous connection between the lurking prejudice and behavior.

And there’s good reason to question the attempts to measure the hidden bias.  Please read the following article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Can We Really Measure Implicit Bias? Maybe Not”, by Tom Bartlett, Jan. 5, 2017, https://www.chronicle.com/…/Can-We-Really-Measure-Im…/238807.

What we have in the National Geographic article is another non-scientist author claiming the certitude of a scientist with, in reality, an ideological ax to grind. Berreby has nothing but a BA in English from Yale to his credit.  He uses the tendentious claims of some psychologists to support what is in essence his political crusade.

Since the 19th century, we have experienced the attempt to marry science to politics.  The regions of the world laid waste by Marxism, eugenics, and National Socialism are a testament to its abject failure.  Informed decisions are one thing; totalitarianism is another.  It’s amazing that we have discovered a new way to construct Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Love.

RogerG

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Mussolini, Progressivism, and a Missing Link

PBS’s “Dictator’s Playbook: Mussolini”, my assessment: very misleading.  If you haven’t seen it but plan to, don’t!  There are better biographies out there.  The thing exudes with the ideological partisanship that grips today’s academic and media hothouses.  The program says more about them than Il Duce.

One of the contributors to “The Dictator’s Playbook: Mussolini”.

Politically corrupted academics littered their commentary with derogatory parallels to anyone who has serious doubts about multiculturalism, the many tentacles of political correctness, and the fantasyland socialism of the green movement.  In the intro, the creators set the stage by connecting Mussolini to the modern rise of populist and nationalist parties in Europe.  They couldn’t help but boil their beliefs down to “xenophobia”, as if there’s nothing to worry about in the sudden influx of millions of unassimilated immigrants.  Check the crime stats and terror cells coming out of Scandinavia’s “especially vulnerable areas”.

Watch the clip of violent Muslim youth confronting Swedish police in Stockholm.

Trump illusions pervaded, like two profs’ summary of Il Duce’s program as one of “making Italy great gain”.  It’s repeated often enough to make sure you get the idea.  But think about it: what leader would be opposed to making their country great, from George Washington to Obama?  If they weren’t about that, they would have to keep it secret or nobody would entrust them with the keys to the White House.

Mussolini’s political platform is reduced to violence, love of war, violence, nationalism … and did I say violence?  One glaring plank missing from the script is summed up in the Fascist Party motto, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”.  The Fascists’ love of the state was conspicuously absent from beginning to end.  I suspect that modern Progressives are a bit uneasy knowing they share the same love.  When you’re too busy lambasting Trump, sometimes you muff the more obvious connections.

Elizabeth Warren and Ocasio-Cortez might very well have a Mussolini problem.  All you have to do to see the line of descent is substitute “free” (for all the stuff that they want to give people: healthcare, college, reparations, high wages, you name it) for “the state”.  And, indeed, nothing is to be outside “the state”, as Hobby Lobby, Jack Philips, and any traditional Christian who takes 2,000 years of church history and the Bible seriously should now know.  Today’s Dem-Left would be uncomfortable with the marching, uniforms, and martial vigor, but not much else.

FDR didn’t have much of a problem with Mussolini’s corporatism.  He tried it in the National Industrial Recovery Act and its commissariat, the National Recovery Administration.  Likewise, the Dems of today are marching toward a greater fulfillment of the motto with state-aggrandizement in the Green New Deal.  Could that be the reason for the slipshod treatment of Il Duce?

RogerG

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Warning: Opinion Journalism Rampant at National Geographic Magazine

A sad scene at National Geographic Magazine headquarters after the 2016 election …. Not!  It could have been given the way these people write.

Distraught Hillary campaign workers on election night, 2016.

I’m not sure how much more I can stomach of the corruption of science in popular publications like National Geographic.  The magazine is not about the furtherance of geographic knowledge.  It’s opinion journalism. It’s newfound mission is the chaining of the subject to a political agenda.  The agenda is one that could be found among the babblings of campus social justice warriors or The Resistance.

“Social justice warriors”, also referred as the “Resistance”, protesting the Trump administration in New York City, 2017.

Time and again, issue after issue, the magazine never fails to disappoint.  Pior issues led with cover stories like “Why We Lie”, “Gender Revolution”, and “Black and White”.  “Why We Lie” came hot on the heels of the howling from the Left about Trump’s exaggerations and misstatements.  Come on, when has hyperbole become unusual for politicians and activists?  “Gender Revolution” pushed the “T” in LGBTQ. “Black and White” advanced Marxism with “people of color” replacing the oppressed and alienated proletariat.  A favorite hobbyhorse is what I like to call “totalitarian environmentalism”.

  

What chaps my hide is the complete absence of peer review. Claims are made without any caution.  The words “scientists” and “experts” are used without modifiers like “some” (I saw it only once in the cover story in “Black and White”).  Opposing views are treated as if they don’t exist.  Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised since the articles are written by non-scientists with an all-too-often reliance on politicized scientists.  Going back to the aforementioned cover story, the author – Elizabeth Kolbert – was a literature major at Yale.  Surely she has great interest in the study of race, but she is no scientist and has a definite ideological bias.  There’s no filter of the scientist as she writes.

If you sit on the left side of the political spectrum, by all means, subscribe.  In this instance, you would be approaching National Geographic as you would Mother Jones.  Indeed, there’s not much difference between the two.

RogerG

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Another Puff Piece Within the Society of Progressive Mutual Admirers

The “Society” in the title refers to a loose body of people and organizations who have similar backgrounds and enough of a common orthodoxy to distinguish as an identifiable social element, like, for instance, Protestants. In this case, it’s the background identifiers of degreed/middle-to-upper-class/urban/seemingly-professional and progressive/left in their philosophical orthodoxy. The “Puff Piece” in the title is the all-too-familiar journalistic softball interview with overtones of saccharine flattery that’s reserved for prominent people in the news who confirm the Society’s biases.

Case in point: “Seeking a Safe, Green Colombia” in National Geographic Magazine of January 2018 about Colombia’s ex-president, Juan Manuel Santos. He gets the treatment because he’s said to be about “peace” and he chants the clerisy’s doctrines on “climate change”. He knows the lingo and says all the right things. Thus, he’s beatified. Look at the magazine’s saintly photo from the article.

Saint Juan Santos

The “peace” part of his beatification has to do with his cramming down the throats of Colombians a detested agreement with FARC, the narco-terrorist organization. When put on the ballot, Colombians rejected it despite the weight of the world coming down on them to approve it. So, Santos got around those pesky voters with a jam-down in the legislature.

And what of the agreement? First off, Colombians hate FARC. Next, the settlement gave amnesty to murderers, bribed the killers to stop the killing and mayhem, and rewarded them with seats in parliament. For millions of FARC’s victims, what’s not to like?

Victims of FARC protest in Colombia during the peace talks with FARC.

And for that, the guy wins the Nobel Peace Prize. But what really earns his elevation to sainthood is his expressed worship of the clerisy’s iconography of “climate change” with statements like “… we are destroying Mother Earth”. For the Society’s parishioners, that’ll do it.

No such treatment was accorded the previous president, Alvaro Uribe, the winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. But he doesn’t sing the Society’s doctrines and he opposed the terrorist cave-in. What a flawed world we live in.

Ex-Colombian President Alvaro Uribe receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Pres. George W. Bush in 2009.

RogerG

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Millennials With Another Black Eye?

I know, I know, it’s faulty thinking to draw grand conclusions about an entire generation on a sample of one or a few individuals. For millennials, they’ve been given a bad rap for a host of alleged sins. Yet, a certain type is beginning to recur among them in my explorations of news and information: the ill-informed college-educated in positions of societal influence. A classic example of the phenomena appeared yesterday in an interview of Luke Zaleski by Hugh Hewitt.

Luke Zaleski with son.
Hugh Hewitt in his broadcast studio.

Zaleski seems to be in his mid-to-late 30s, a U. of Delaware graduate in Philosophy, and is currently Legal Affairs Editor for Condé Nast publications. He exhibits much of the hyper-progressivism of the deeply-entrenched left in today’s media, replete with a dislike for Trump and Republicans, an embrace of identity politics, and rampant victimology. And its all wrapped in a thin verneer of knowledge and understanding.

For example, here’s Zaleski on Hewitt’s lack of “diversity” in the previous day’s guests – Mike Lupica (sports writer), Sen. Tom Cotton (R, Arkansas), and Sen. John Cornyn (R, Texas):
“I feel like the sports world … would benefit from having more people of color and women … prominent in the conversations.” The diversity schtick on parade, eh? As for Cotton and Cornyn, he says, “… these guys are kind of the enemies of progress”.

Zelaski on his level of understanding of history as it relates to today’s issues and climate of opinion:
Hewitt asked him, “…was Alger Hiss a communist spy?” Zaleski dodged the question by mentioning Wikipedia and “I’m not a historian. I’m not an expert. I’m not interested in conspiracy theories. I’m not interested in debating Alger Hiss”. Mmmmm.

Another example of more recent history, Hewitt asked him, “Have you read The Looming Tower?” The quick and short of it, No! Since he didn’t mention any other book on the rise of international terrorism, I can assume he doesn’t read in depth, particularly on that topic.

Zaleski’s unfamiliarity with the principal characters involved in Iran’s export of its brand of Islamic extremism was evident when Hewitt asked him, “What is your opinion of Qasem Soleimani?” Zaleski’s answer: “I’m not familiar with that person.”

Remember that this guy, Zaleski, is an editor in a major media organization (look up Condé Nast).

Zaleski showed profound ignorance of nuclear weapons. Hewitt asked him, “So which part of the nuclear triad needs fixing the most?” Zaleski jumped to an unresponsive generality, “I’d like to see global denuclearization.” Related questions about our weapons systems were similarly met with befuddlement.

As a “Legal Affairs Editor”, one would think Zaleski has some legal training or even a law degree. Well, no. His background is as a “fact checker” for 20 years. Since “legal” is his beat, you’d think that he would be aware of the Supreme Court’s recent 8-0 smackdown of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for its abuse of the Endangered Species Act. But no.

I could present more on the interview but I think that you get the idea. A modern college education does not, ipso facto, dispel ignorance, let alone promote wisdom.

RogerG

Here’s the link to the transcripts of the interview:   http://www.hughhewitt.com/luke-zaleski-legal-affairs-editor-at-conde-nash-former-director-of-research-at-gq/?fbclid=IwAR3Scthy-2tCxV5gKtPCKq5A79eMp-FkG7mK5R0n7UrtrbZSDqtqBEhiq3A

 

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The Monoculture: Google Therapy Session After Hillary’s Loss

Watch this scene of traumatized Googlers trying to make sense of the fact that a good chunk of the country doesn’t have their “values”, and it showed by putting Trump in the White House. By all means, Googlers, don’t question the universality of your peculiar beliefs; question the motives of those who disagree with you. Heck, Googlers can’t even recognize their views as “peculiar” since they aren’t likely to rub elbows with those who think different. They get their prejudices reinforced, and reinforced ….

The leftist stream of consciousness on the Google campus stage on that November day of 2016 was littered with politicized code words. Take the word “values”, as in “our values” by Sergey Brin. The word is freighted with other words like “diversity”, and it ain’t the diversity of the opinion kind. For this monocultural groupthink, all diversity is limited to race, genitalia, and sexual appetites. Mix enough hijab-wearing lesbians into the workplace and, voilà, the only meaningful kind of “diversity” is created for this diversity-is-our-strength gang. Conservatives are tolerated … so long as they lie low. The other kind of diversity – as in diversity of thought – will be a casualty. In fact, it might be excised as “hate speech”.

 

James Damore, ex-Google senior engineer, after his 2017 firing for publishing on the company’s “free speech” forum an essay, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.

It’s as if Googlers found themselves rejected by the election results, and rejection is a powerful source of anxiety for those ensconced in their self-reinforced and pampered cocoons. How to make sense of it since the mind must still grapple with the reality? Well, brand your opposition as morally and intellectually deficient. The other side is said to suffer from “tribalism” and “fear”. It’s not that adversaries simply disagree, but their disagreement is a product of an unrestrained id, a libido run amok. People like our Googlers have such a high self-regard that no concession can be made to the validity of an opposing point of view. Therapy on the Google campus was reduced to fortifying the attendees’ sense of superiority and convincing them that Darwin’s missing link resides in red America.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the post-election confab.

There was an early light-hearted moment. A rousing cheer came from the crestfallen when Brin announced the success of pot legalization. Now that says something. Either intoxication is a preferred state of mind for Googlers, or many of them have all the seriousness of Animal House’s Bluto at a frat party. Or it could simply be a Brin joke. Anyway, it probably isn’t Joe Sixpack material.

The expected response came out of the Google inner sanctum after the video went viral. The declaration went along the lines of “we’re biased but trust us”. Here’s a good portion of it: “Nothing was said at that meeting, or any other meeting, to suggest that any political bias [we’re biased] ever influences the way we build or operate our products [trust us]. To the contrary, our products are built for everyone, and we design them with extraordinary care to be a trustworthy source of information for everyone, without regard to political viewpoint [trust us]”.

Maybe the word “monoculture” is inadequate. The Borg of Star Trek fame is gaining relevance as the more appropriate metaphor.

The Borg or Silicon Valley/blue America?
Borg drones or the Google workforce?

RogerG

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The Monoculture: The Zuckerbeg Testimony (April 2018)

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 11: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC. This is the second day of testimony before Congress by Zuckerberg, 33, after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

The term “monoculture” had its origins in farming with the production of a single crop. A monoculture does exist, but it isn’t a horticultural one or the type often measured by melanin counts or genitalia by hyperactive SJW’s. Socially speaking, we have a singular, smothering orientation to the world – a monoculture of the mind – chauvanistically present in the leadership and dwellers of our key social institutions: media, arts, entertainment, education, government agencies, foundations, etc., with tentacles deep into the corporate boardroom. Today’s left is obsessed over a monocultural patriarchy. Ironically, it is they, left-progressives, who have prevailed in creating an unacknowledged monoculture of the mind. In the video below, Zuckerberg admits to Silicon Valley being “an extremely left-leaning place”.

I bring this up not to parrot the crowd in the Sean Hannity zone. Heaven knows, Zuckerberg is in a difficult spot with Facebook’s problems with privacy and complaints of political censorship. Before the Senate, he looked like an exposed adulterous husband trying to keep his marriage together. Pity is only natural as he occupies the lonely seat in front of our elected publicity hounds.

Next comes the tortuous ritual of admitting the left-wing preeminence while denying any effect of it. It’s a claim of superhuman qualities once reserved for the heavenly host. Apparently, left-wing people don’t produce left-wing products. Mark me skeptical.

RogerG

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Just Saw it, Just Blew It

The Nike ad.

I just saw the full Nike ad on Thursday Night Football. It was repeated in college football broadcasts Saturday. It was a seemingly innocuous message mostly in homage to the “marginalized”, replete with a girl boxer wearing the mandatory hijab — I don’t know how that squares with the early feminist sacramental act of bra-burning. The whole kaleidoscope was emceed by a resurrected Kaepernick, the guy who soiled himself by soiling the flag. The message was never to be dissuaded from your “dreams”, an adolescent primal scream without an inkling of mature judgment if there ever was one.

Honor goes to Michael Ramirez for his capture of the ludicrous spectacle in a single image. Here it is:

RogerG

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Colossal Ignorance Abounds

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.

Top: Browning semi-auto hunting rifle. Bottom: AR-15.

I guess that we should expect a news anchor to be infatuated with cosmetics.

RogerG