Posted on

Disinformation Within Disinformation

Adams Schiff (D, Ca.), Chairman of the House Intelligence (?) Committee, and key champion of impeachment.

Are you as tired as I am of the endless incantation of “Russian attacked our democracy”?  I was going to write about the Dems’ call for a takeover of healthcare or Romney’s Trump-bashing.  Instead, I talked myself into this topic after running into the hackneyed charge for the zillionth time since before Trump placed his hand on the Bible, Jan. 20, 2017.  I feel like the Peter Finch character in “Network” when he shouts, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”.  Enough; please, enough!  Put it to bed.

The reason is obvious.  This is disinformation about a commonly-used disinformation campaign.  The Russians have been at it for a long time, and so have we.

The ex-veep Dick Cheney fed the monster of overheated rhetoric by calling Russian campaign interference an “act of war”.  But the monster had already been unleashed in the interregnum between the Obama and Trump presidencies (more about this is likely to come from the “investigation of the investigators”).  It became the established Democrats’ tag line to explain Hillary’s loss.  From the gitgo, it was a ruse to muddy the winner and exonerate the loser.  Apparently, the Democrats aren’t supposed to lose elections.

Do I really have to recount the long roll call of Russian attempts to influence western electorates?  The tactic was done through espionage by comrades in the various national chapters of the Communist Party (“Witness” by Whittaker Chambers) and “agents of influence” in the chancelleries of the West (Research our government’s Venona Project).  It was done by financially feeding fellow-travelling activists in the anti-nuke, anti-war, and anti-capitalist movements west of the Iron Curtain.

Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts addresses pro-freeze demonstrators on Capitol Hill, 1981 or 1982 (?).

Reagan faced a full fusillade of these “acts of war” in the 1980’s when he moved to counter the Russian medium-range nuclear missile threat in Europe.  Anti-war sympathizers went nuts in Congress, the media, and the streets.  Thank God he stuck to his guns … er, missiles.

Shenanigans in western elections were, and are, a staple … and it includes us.  Our interference in Israeli elections is less than unusual.  Obama sent some of his campaign veterans to Tel Aviv to assist Labor.  The smell of hypocrisy is rich in the air.

Jeremy Bird, a former Obama campaign organizer, who assisted the Left-leaning parties’ effort to oust Benjamin Netanyahu, 2015. (Melina Mara/Getty Images)

We could do much worse for humanity than doing more of this in places like Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.

The Democrats are desperate to remain politically relevant by any means at hand.  The means at hand, though, are patently ludicrous.  The crazy plot requires a god-like omniscience on the part of the Russians.  Russians are seemingly more adept at electioneering than Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign tsar.  Maybe that’s true.

The scheme demands a Russian crystal ball to foresee how to precisely calibrate their phone bank of basement bots and Facebook ads to tilt the election to Trump.  But there’s a fly in the ointment.  They don’t need a crystal ball or time machine if their goal is to sow discord regardless of who wins.  Their objective was to sully the winner, who everyone, including the Russians, expected to be Hillary.

They succeeded beyond their wildest imagination.  The winner was falsely covered in mud.  Shockingly, it happened to be Trump.  If it had been Hillary, the story would end up in the same place as the Ark at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.

The place of storage for the collusion plot if Hillary had won? (“Raiders of the Lost Ark”)

The only successful part of the subterfuge was the Hillary-Steele-Russians element.  The product of the cabal – the Steele Dossier – was fed to the mandarins of the Obama administration, and used and leaked to soil the real electoral winner.  For over two years, the country, the president, his family and helpers, were subjected to a drawn out nothingburger.

A lot of people have egg on the face from their nothingburger (sorry for the mixed metaphor).  The “egg” is ruined reputations and more business for defense lawyers.  The sorry affair was always a Dem disinformation campaign rooted in a Russian one.

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”

John F. Kennedy

RogerG

Posted on

A Little History to Soothe the Savage Beast

Jerrold Nadler (D,NY) on MSNBC, Jan. 09, 2019

The Democrats in charge of the House side of Congress, and their long media retinue, are in high dudgeon over the Mueller Report and the whole Russia mirage.  Their epileptic seizures could be calmed by the application of a little history.

A huge part of the problem is their hatred of Trump which has deluded them into going whole hog on the Trump Manchurian candidate story.  It was always an illusion, but illusions must be kept alive in the quest for power.  Remember John C. Calhoun’s twisted logic in defense of slavery to keep the slavocracy in power in the South?

Remember the 1934 persecution-by-prosecution of William Insull – the man, more than any other, responsible for the creation of the nation’s electrical grid in the 1920’s – by FDR’s Justice Department as the scapegoat for the Depression and to further FDR’s grand scheme to place the economy, and much of life, under bureaucratic control?  If you’re interested, after a 7-week trial, it took a jury only 2 hours to acquit Insull and his 16 co-defendants of all charges.

Examples abound.

Insidious illusions will be always, like the poor, with us, especially if power is at stake.  For the Resistance true believers, Trump has to be guilty for him to be dethroned.  Belief cometh before proof.  So, Nadler and company are issuing subpoenas and contempt charges like a mad counterfeiter, as the media ballyhoo the latest round as Fort Sumter.

But what of Eric Holder?

AG Eric Holder held in contempt of Congress, June 2012.

Obama’s AG refused almost any information and documentation on the DOJ’s still-murky 2010 Fast and Furious operation.  17-21 Democrats in 2012 joined Republicans in approving civil and criminal contempt charges against Holder.  The story barely lasted one news cycle in the mainstream media.  That’s because contempt of Congress claims are essentially censure votes.  These aren’t “contempt of court”.  If anything, the targets are holding in contempt the excitable and riled partisan majority in the House.

And there are differences in the Barr and Holder cases.  Barr released the whole report with the exception of parts falling under long-established rules and laws, like Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure (FRCP) 6(e) regarding the secrecy of grand jury proceedings.  The law’s secrecy mandates were recently confirmed by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (McKeever v. Barr).

The Dems are trying to hang their hat on the exceptions to non-disclosure, but that would stretch “intelligence” and “counter-intelligence” officials to include power-hungry politicos and their staffs as they distort jury deliberations for political ends.  How long would it take for the pipeline to the WaPo and NYT to be turned on and the mud to flow?

By the way, the full unredacted Mueller Report is available to selected House members at the DOJ’s skiff, if they want.  But they don’t want.  They want power and that means Trump’s scalp.  This isn’t about the truth.  It’s about naked, raw power.

In contrast, Holder ignored and dissed Issa’s House Oversight Committed request for information.  Barr gave to Congress and the public almost the whole thing.  Holder is free to go on the lecture circuit and bash anyone with a “R” after their name.  Barr is daily pilloried on CNN, MSNBC, and the rest of the brooding media big sisters.  Go figure.

In some cases, we may have to wait for the afterlife to get justice.  Humanity’s “crooked timber” holds sway in this life.  In the meantime, a little bit of history may help us get beyond the worst that lies within.

RogerG

Posted on

Neocons

Tucker Carlson of Fox News.

Tucker Carlson on Fox News lately gave his audience another dose of his skepticism of American military “adventurism” – bashing our ventures in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and future ones in places like Venezuela – and couldn’t resist another wack at his favorite whipping boy, “neocons”.  But what are “neocons”?  His definition appears to be a cartoon.

First, his variant of “neocons” has more to do with his need for a label to affix to advocates of something loosely called “nation-building”.  “Neocon” is readily available as it had most recently become the buzzword bogeyman for peacenik groups of the early 2000’s like Code Pink.  To understand Code’s orientation, they couldn’t have chosen a better word than “pink”.

Oh, Tucker’s no pinko.  He’s just got an antifa rendering of “neocon” implanted in his head, or Mick Jagger’s “My Sweet Neocon” on an endless loop.

That’s the cartoon translation of the term.  The reality is quite different.  To be blunt, neocons were liberal idealists of the 60’s who were mugged by the realities of the 70’s.  I’m old enough to remember it.

Many were part of JFK’s “best and brightest”, rolling up their sleeves to conquer society’s worst social problems.  Along came LBJ’s Great Society and within a decade things unraveled.  Crime, family breakdown, out-of-wedlock births, a drug epidemic, lifestyle diseases (AIDS, Hep C, Syphilis, Herpes), etc., hit the roof.

In the international arena, the hopes of “peaceful coexistence” with the Soviets, welfare for the Third World (foreign aid and the Peace Corps), bountiful negotiations, and UN-love were dashed by a Soviet arms buildup, Soviet/Cuban adventurism, the UN General Assembly’s descent into demagoguery, the fall of Saigon, and the frantic attempt by populations to escape the ravages of communism’s advance.  Remember the Boat People and the Killing Fields?

A Cambodian man walks past one of the many killing fields sites.
A group of boat people escaping Vietnam aboard their sea vessel, 1978 or 1979.

On the intellectual side, a grand rethink began. Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground”, James Q. Wilson’s “Broken Windows”, George Gilder’s “Wealth and Poverty”, Charles Krauthammer’s writings, and publications like Commentary Magazine laid out the devastation and what to do about it.  In a nutshell, they advocated a return to older values and institutions.  Sounds like the “con” part of “neocons”.

Internationally, these ex-liberals realized that John Lennon’s “All You Need Is Love” wasn’t a mature foreign policy.  They pressed for a military build up and a stance against the communists and other anti-American actors who would turn the world into their personal playground.  No more American self-doubt.  Sounds like Reaganism … and it is.

Ronald Reagan delivers his historic speech at the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987.

There’s something to be learned from all of this.  Don’t let cable news personalities be your sole window to the world.  Sometimes they get it horribly wrong.

RogerG

Posted on

Biden Bends a Knee at the Altar of Saint Anita

Anita Hill testifies at the Senate confirmation hearings of Judge Clarence Thomas. 1991.

Please read Mollie Hemingway’s piece in The Federalist, “Joe Biden on Anita Hill in 1998: ‘She Was Lying’”.  At the time in 1991, there was good reason for 58% of polled Americans believing Clarence Thomas and 24% Anita Hill.  All this is forgotten in the recent resuscitation of Anita Hill as the patron saint of #MeToo.  The history of the time paints a radically different picture, and exposes Joe Biden to the charge of craven political groveling.  Ironically, the lightweights of deep thought on The View brought it to light.

Joe Biden with the ladies on The View, Friday, 4/26/19.

Hemingway compares Biden’s comments on The View with Sen. Arlen Specter’s account from his 2000 memoir.

Sen. Arlen Specter on the Judiciary Committee from 2007.

Specter (deceased in 2012) and Biden were on the Senate Judiciary Committee considering the 1991 Thomas nomination to the Supreme Court.  Specter quotes the Biden of 1998 contradicting the Biden of 2019.  The 1998 Biden confessed to Specter, “It was clear to me from the way she was answering the questions, [Hill] was lying”.  The 2019 Biden confessed to leftie high priestess Joy Behar, “I believed her from the beginning”.

So, we have A and not-A, matter and anti-matter, and I still don’t know how to bring the two together without exploding.

Anita Hill receives counsel from Charles Ogeltree while testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on October, 1991. (Greg Gibson/AP)

Hill’s liberal beatification doesn’t come out of this unsoiled either.  Her answers before the committee on cross-examination were, to put it mildly, disturbing, even to those anxious to “Bork” Thomas.  She tried to deny prior complimentary comments of Thomas that were corroborated by multiple witnesses.  She denied that she knew one witness who said that Hill’s charges “were the result of Ms. Hill’s disappointment and frustration that Mr. Thomas did not show any sexual interest in her”.  Later she was forced to admit that she knew the witness after others were willing to come forward with confirmation.

The contradictions don’t stop with denials of knowing people.  Her statements before the committee were far more colorful and dramatic than those given to the FBI, something she had trouble explaining.

Then she was asked about a USA Today article that described an arrangement proffered to her by a Senate Democratic staffer for her to make a deposition against Thomas and it would be discreetly divulged to Thomas resulting, presumably, in him asking to withdraw his nomination, all done with anonymity for Hill.  It’s a repeat of the 1987 play against Reagan’s nomination of Judge Ginsburg.  She denied any knowledge of the offer and became evasive.  This is what prompted Biden in 1998 to confess to Specter that she was lying.

Robert Bork at his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on September 18, 1987. (CNP/Getty Images)

Remember, the Thomas nomination came just 4 years after the Robert Bork and Douglas Ginsburg fights.  The Democrats were beginning the slide into the political tar pits for Supreme Court nominations.  What worked against Ginsburg was redeployed against Thomas and later against Kavanaugh.

Sen. Joe Biden confers with Sen. Edward Kennedy. Kennedy would lead the fight to defeat the nomination of Robert Bork.

Anita Hill isn’t a saint.  The 1998 Joe Biden was correct in catching the putrid smell of her testimony.  The 2019 Joe Biden shows another side of the man. He’s a craven politician.  If he has to be a SJW (social justice warrior), he can do that.

Joe Biden ain’t “lunch-pail Joe” since the real lunch-pail Joes are the “basket of deplorables” to today’s “woke” Democratic Party.  Call him shape-shifter Joe.

Kudos to Mollie Hemingway for removing the vail obscuring both the real Joe Biden and the real Anita Hill.

RogerG

Posted on

A Tale of Two Articles

Lesson: Fashionable ideas frequently fall into the category of “too good to be true”.

Compare Amy Harder’s Axios piece from yesterday, “The key to unlocking wind and solar: Making it last”, and Michael Shellenberger’s Forbes article from 2018, “We Don’t Need Solar And Wind To Save The Climate — And It’s A Good Thing, Too”.  The former is a puff piece about another alleged “breakthrough” for solar and wind energy.  The latter is a healthy splash of cold water on the whole ploy.  In today’s media, almost anything chic among the beautiful people, popular with the rulers in deep blue states, championed in thousands of public service ads, and exalted in high school science fairs, should be taken with a ton of salt.

Here’s a few takeaways from the analysis:

* Solar and wind, especially solar, have always been on the cusp of the next will-o’-the-wisp big breakthrough since the 19th century.  Shellenberger recounts the history; Harder unwittingly provides another example.

* Solar and wind are expensive.  They sound like a great idea since the sun shines and the wind blows without our help.  Check out the electricity rates of countries who have bought into solar and wind.

* The environmental damage of wind and solar is immense.  They use up and mar vast tracts of the landscape, disrupt and threaten the natural flora and fauna, and the production of their devices begets toxic wastes and land scarring.

* Nuclear is an obvious alternative but gets no mention in the rush to the solar-and-wind utopia. It’s better, more efficient, more cost effective, produces no CO2, and recycles much of its waste.  What’s there not to like … if we can look away from the scowls of the beautiful people?

The China Syndrome (1979), directed by James Bridges. Shown from left: James Hampton, Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas.

The real world can’t be boiled down to Sierra Club talking points.  I wish that our media would stop repeating them and our kids weren’t taught the baloney.

RogerG

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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

Posted on

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