The following is an email exchange with a dear friend over my post, “The Disease That Knows No ‘Red’ or ‘Blue’ Boundaries”.
My friend complimented the post but wanted some specific recommendations.
My response:
Yep, you’re right. No recommendations. Yet, it’s purpose was to establish the existence of a fiasco, much like the 1986 Challenger disaster. If everyone had blinders attached to their eyes, we’d continue to shoot people up into space without repairing the design flaw. NASA’s graveyard (if they have one) would be more heavily populated. Same with our nation’s systems of schools. Do we really recognize the thoroughness of the rot? Quite understandably, parents desperately search for the best options for their kids. The problem: the best options are mostly window-dressed routes to, once again, mediocrity. It’s everywhere from pre-school to grad school, from the ghetto kid living among the social chaos to the legions enrolled in the college curriculum’s assault on classical instruction and the relentless infusion of the identity nonsense and calling it scholarship. The situation cries for a storming of the Bastille.
Here’s some recommendations … if you want them:
If a classical education is desired, look for a school – secondary to college – with a curriculum based on the great books.
Electoral politics gave us the people who sanctioned and produced the nightmare, and electoral politics is the essential route to the antidote. Elect people who will work to decertify the ed schools and force a return to a classical instruction. No greater advance in education can be accomplished than to remove the monopoly power of the college ed schools. Leave John Dewey to rot in the grave, and stop trying to resurrect him in the naive minds of the young.
Don’t start, right out of the gate, with any reform with utopian titles like “No child left behind” or “All students will succeed”. Anything implying “all” should be reserved for thoughts of heaven and the pew. Fact: “All” students won’t succeed! The attempt to do so has led to unending reforms and a never-ending teat for the consultancy class. If nomenclature is your thing, “all” should be replaced by “removal” of some. The school must be made safe for the scholar and the scholar-to-be.
Speaking of scholars, let’s produce some and place them in the front of the classroom. Of course, “scholar” should be a reference to one with his/her head screwed on straight, with feet planted in the here-and-now. A school is no place for the airy effete with pretensions of an ethereal and secular paradise. To produce adult scholars, out goes [fill in the blank] Studies Departments – and with it, all the tolerance/multicultural crap. Real minds require an introduction to the great minds. Sorry, they aren’t distributed according to the likes of Maxine Waters and the Congressional Black Caucus.
Not everyone is cut out for formal, classroom instruction and its subsequent route to slipshod cognitive development. Recognize that some kids like working with their hands. Better a cutting torch in their hand than a knife at the throat of a convenience store owner. I’ve always been a strong advocate of professionally-approved apprenticeships with the trade unions and businesses.
Let’s stop the feminization of pedagogy and the curriculum. Make education more attractive to boys. Cut out all the grouping; end co-ed PE; and return to instructing the natural inclinations of a discipline. Those “natural inclinations” are obvious. History should be taught with an eye to the great men/women, great events, and littered with the great stories that define us. Instructional periods might have to be limited to 45 minutes to avoid the male ants-in-the-pants syndrome. For the Language Arts, classical literature should be the touchstone. The Iliad and the Odyssey is a great war story. Teach a vernacular version. The same is true of much of Shakespeare. It’s better to a know a few great books well than the cover stories of Time magazine. Of course, these old authors are a bit prickly to the ears of your average snowflake in the staff, desk, and professoriate. To hell with ’em!
Back-to-School Night should be reserved for teaching the ins-and-outs of being a tiger mom. Lock up the video games. Better yet, do a buy-back thing like the one for guns. All tekkie communication stuff should be embargoed and computers placed in the community section of the house. One parent must be home at all times. Parents should read, read anything so they can be seen by the kids. TV should be limited to a single planned-for program, like a person does with a movie. After that, it’s turned off. It should never be allowed to be a constant background noise.
Just some ideas … if it’s recommendations that you want.
Unsurprisingly and generally speaking, parents strive to grease the skids for their kids’ future success. Particularly, middle class parents will drive themselves to near bankruptcy in order to guarantee their offspring’s advancement. Yet, when they buy into a nicer neighborhood to enroll junior in a “better” school, are they really getting a “better” school? There’s good reason to doubt that proposition. Much of the corruption in our schools has deep tentacles, and is no respecter of “red” vs. “blue” states, public or private schools, inner city or suburban schools, parochial or secular, and even reaches down into home-schooling. It’s equal-opportunity corruption.
I suppose that the issue hinges on what is meant by “better”.
Sure, avoidance of gang rape in the school’s bathroom, classrooms-as-battlefields, and the accidental straying beyond the school’s chain link fence into feral environs are legitimate parental concerns. Many parents would assign “better” to any school without these traits.
Under the belief that a geographic relocation might improve things for the munchkins, many parents can’t wait to hook up the U-haul and move to a richer zip code.
A moving truck is shown at a house that was sold in Palo Alto, Calif., Tuesday, June 19, 2012. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
However, zip codes of the affluent present their own problems, leaving aside the schools. Websites catering to the school-conscious parent have sprung up in places afflicted with a cost of living commensurate with Warren Buffett’s investment portfolio but many people possessing a net worth more in line with the denizens of 1950’s Levittown. California is a hotbed for these conversations. One site for Bay Area moms and dads, berkeleyparentsnetwork.org, is filled with advice such as “Of course, if you can afford to buy in a place with good schools then by all means buy.” (12) Though for most Californios, being able to make the rent, or mortgage, hangs overhead like the sword of Damocles.
Some have opted to jump ship and leave the state. For many, housing costs are just too big an obstacle to overcome in the quest for better family environs, including schools. From 2000 to 2009, the SF Bay Area registered a net outflow of 600,000 domestic migrants (mostly citizens, not immigrants). After a 5-year pause due to falling house prices from the Great Recession, the exodus resumed as shelter resumed its eye-popping California norm (house prices returning to 6x’s income, beyond the acceptable 3x’s). The 2016 losses for the whole state were on the order of 110,000, most of it from the heavily populated but very expensive coastal enclaves. (9)
Those “domestic migrants” – residents of one state moving to another – seem to be emerging from states with uniform ID: those with the adjective “high” before cost-of-living, taxes, crime, and regulation, and “low” for upward mobility and successful business formation. The usual suspects are California, Illinois, New York, et al.
Destinations are South and West — EXCLUDING CALIFORNIA! Look at the top and bottom of the chart below. The top is reserved for the welcoming states and the bottom for states that shed people like my dog does hair. (15)
Interestingly, the combination of escalating house prices and California’s hostility to suburban living is making for a return of feudal manorialism. A fleeing middle class, sensitive to rising prices for a family hearth, in combination with foreign immigration into the state (2.7 million “undocumented” live in the state – see 13 below), is resurrecting something resembling a lord/serf society. Two researchers characterized the situation like this: “Essentially, the model [for California] is that of a gated community, with a convenient servant base nearby.” (9)
“Convenient servant base”? Sounds much like “serf”, or maybe peasant, to me. “Gated community”? Sounds like “castle”, or chateau.
Is this a French manor from the Middle Ages or contemporary California?Gated development, Carlsbad, California.East Los Angeles neighborhood.
For many, moving for better schools and a more affordable roof most likely means leapfrogging the state entirely. But don’t delude yourself into equating a middle or upper class student body in a new state with a high quality education. Housing is cheaper but the vast majority of schools are likely, at best, to be only marginally better. The only real difference between the middle class kid and inner-city one is the poor kid’s path to mediocrity is a lot rockier. Yes, a mediocre curriculum and poor teacher training awaits all irrespective of better cars in the student parking lot or a student enrollment that’ll do the homework.
Students listening to Ernest Jenkins III in his Manhood Development class at Oakland High School. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York TimesSuburban school in school uniforms.
All schools draw from the same pool of teacher candidates and curricular resources. You’ll find the same textbooks on a home-schooler’s kitchen table as you will find in a Catholic school classroom and a suburban or inner-city public school. The vast majority of teachers are given a remarkably homogeneous college education and teacher training centering on the mind-numbing writings of John Dewey. The sameness is quite remarkable.
30 years worth of experience as a public high school and community college teacher has made me aware of the phenomenal uniformity of what is taught, how it is taught, and who is teaching it.
Two textbooks that were a staple of 20 years of high school instruction and widely adopted are displayed below.
A widely-adopted World History textbook.Ditto U.S. History text.
Over the years, textbooks have declined in narrative with a surge in graphics. Technical, thought-provoking theory has disappeared. Identity politics is amply displayed: for instance, out goes Henry Bessemer and in comes Mary Wollstonecraft. Much space is reserved for our historical sins as these crowd out the richness of debate over the nature of our federal system. Labor history is reduced to a Marxist distillation; excluded is the role of violent anarcho-socialists in some of that history. Immigration and immigrants, of course, are always saintly. The 1960’s reads as if it was cleansed through the censors of the radical left. I could go on.
For pedagogy, teacher trainees are immersed in the mind of John Dewey. Who’s John Dewey? He’s a turn-of-the-century socialist who wanted to turn the schools into factories for making socialists.
Prof. John Dewey at Columbia University.
He’s famous for such arcane mumbo-jumbo as “constructivism” and seemingly commonsensical “child-centered learning”. The “construction” in “constructivism” is simply the matter of raising (or constructing) the child’s receptivity to socialism. “Child-centered” is an assault on the established canon of western civilization. The child’s wants are the guide to instruction, not Plato, the Apostle Paul, or the Founders. The teacher as the adult in the room is to be replaced by the chaos of adolescent urges.
Howard Gardner dispensing his gospel in India.
On this foundation is built the everyone-wins-a-trophy philosophy of “multiple intelligences” via Howard Gardner. Everybody is assumed to be smart, but in reality nobody is smart … if you think about it. The whole thing is a levelling of all students. From this we get the dilution of the curricular core to include excursions into all the “intelligences” to the detriment of a traditional core. It’s conducive to “heterogeneity” and grouping in almost everything.
About that “grouping”, “cooperative learning” are watchwords. Kids are thrust together into groups of varying abilities – the “heterogeneity” thing – and responsibility is socialistically distributed. What better way to “construct” the new child for the socialist future? Keep this in mind as your kid comes home with stories of his or her classroom group.
Don’t think for a moment that AP courses are immune to these influences. AP Literature guidelines now reflect Dewey’s “child-centered” nonsense. AP US History deemphasizes a mastery of historical facts and their connections. They demand mature judgments from immature minds. Across the curriculum, we’re creating opinionated ignoramuses.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that our professional goal wasn’t Jefferson’s ideal of an educated citizenry. It’s about making good little Democrats — by Democrats, I mean the Democratic Party as part of the consortium of the world’s Social Democratic Parties. Read “socialist” for Social Democrat … mostly of the mild sort.
The kids’ minds have long been pried open to being college snowflakes and Antifa recruits. Intolerant and propagandized since shortly after becoming bipedal, many of them are now subjecting us to their partisan and ideologically-laced rhetoric. The rhetoric supplants mature thinking.
Listen to this exchange between a taxi driver and his youthful customer over a hula doll on his dashboard. Count the number of times political boilerplate and the word “offensive” is used by the female rider.
We are reaping the whirlwind as tantrums and thuggishness displace reasoned debate.
We are witnessing the results of 4-5 decades of a blinkered and tendentious instruction. It has penetrated nearly everywhere. Buying a home in a better neighborhood will buy you a preppy student body; it won’t guarantee you a education free of the bacillus. Fleeing a blue state to a red one won’t change the dynamic. A private or parochial school might only provide a safer and more accomplished route to mediocrity. Home schooling might be an option if the curriculum can be kept free of the college ed schools and government’s embrace of identity politics, an unlikely occurrence.
Education reformers are everywhere, and have been arising zombie-like throughout my career. Yet, reform seems to always originate from the same worn out premises. We’ve reached the point that real education reform may require us to ignore the reformers. Unless it happens, we had all better keep an eye on Tommy (see below).
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
Interesting and brief account of treating inner city school students: “An Inner City School Social Worker Shares Two of His Cases”, Howard Honigsfeld, Psychotherapy Networker, 7/28/2015, https://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/blog/details/607/therapy-strategies-for-working-with-underprivileged.
An account of the challenges in an Oklahoma urban school: “A look inside an inner city school struggling with multiple challenges, including ‘needing improvement’ sanctions”, Danniel Parker, The City Sentinel, 5/15/2011, http://city-sentinel.com/2011/05/a-look-inside-an-inner-city-school-struggling-with-multiple-challenges-including-%E2%80%9Cneeding-improvement%E2%80%9D-sanctions/.
Interesting advice in teaching inner city students: “4 Tips to Being a Good Teacher in the Inner-City”, The Libertarian Republic, 11/11/2014, http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/4-tips-good-teacher-inner-city/
Excellent maps showing a changing Los Angeles ethnic demography from 1940 to 2000: “Los Angeles County Ethnic/Racial Breakdown 1940-2000”, http://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=169073.0.
“White Flight Never Ended”, Alana Semuels, The Atlantic, 7/30/2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/white-flight-alive-and-well/399980/.
“Data shows how major U.S. cities are slowly re-segregating”, Kenya Downs, 3/7/2016, PBS NewsHour, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/major-u-s-cities-may-seem-integrated-but-not-for-long/.
A synopsis of John Dewey’s harmful impact on American education can be found in this critical review of Henry Edmondson’s book, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, Dennis Attick, PhD candidate in Social Foundations of Education at Georgia State University, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1061&context=eandc. The author is clearly supportive of the major tenets of Dewey’s education philosophy.
For an account of the most widely adopted textbooks in today’s America go here: “Widely Adopted History Textbooks”, American Textbook Council, http://historytextbooks.net/adopted.htm.
A summary of recent migration trends for California can be found here: “Leaving California? After slowing, the trend intensifies”, Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, The Orange County Register, 4/23/2017, http://www.ocregister.com/2017/04/23/leaving-california-after-slowing-the-trend-intensifies/.
Metrics of school quality don’t vary that much for schools within the same school district is asserted here: “Do Better Neighborhoods for
MTO Families Mean Better Schools?”, Brief No. 3; Kadija S. Ferryman, Xavier de Souza Briggs, Susan J. Popkin, and María Rendón; The Urban Institute, March 2008, https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/31596/411639-Do-Better-Neighborhoods-for-MTO-Families-Mean-Better-Schools-.PDF. ** The metrics for measuring school quality were performance on state exams, the school’s poverty rate, and exposure to white classmates and students with limited English proficiency.
** “Our kids are still in early elementary school too but I think you will find the answer varies widely. Obviously… not ”everyone” can go to private school! I know some parents who have had their kids just tough it out at a not-so-great middle school, then get a scholarship for private high school. Others with more resources opt to start private school earlier on. And, even some high earning families I know chose Oakland public high schools including Skyline, Oakland Tech, and charter schools. Ultimately it’s hard to say before your child starts school, what type of high school will work for your family. That said, we chose our home based on both elementary and middle schools we liked, at least ”on paper” as you say, figuring high school was too far off to gauge.”; from “Moving for the Schools”, Berkeley Parents Network, August 2012, https://www.berkeleyparentsnetwork.org/recommend/housing/schools.
Ibid. From the segment “Moving vs. private school – how to make the decision?”.
“II. Where Do They Live?”, Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Research Center, 4/14/2009, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/04/14/ii-where-do-they-live/.
“5 facts about illegal immigration in the U.S.”, FactTank: News in the Numbers, Pew Research Center, 4/27/2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/.
“California, Illinois, and New York Keep Losing People to Other States”, Ryan McMaken, Mises Wire, 5/10/2017, Mises Institute, https://mises.org/blog/california-illinois-and-new-york-keep-losing-people-other-states
The Progressives’ zeal to mold people to fit an ideologically-driven stereotype is abundantly evident today as it was in the latter 19th century. Back then, the recipient of their benignly intended efforts – but with malign results – was the American Indian. Today, the target is the entire American population, if not the world’s. The modern Progressives’ gaze became vastly more panoramic as they substitute their judgment for the wishes of anyone directly impacted.
Connecting Progressivism’s dots between the 19th and 21st centuries isn’t hard. Progressivism wasn’t a product of spontaneous combustion. It’s got a lineage – or, if you will, a trail of tears. Its 19th century roots became evident just as one expansive civilization began to swamp a nomadic one. The Progressives of the era – call them “reformers” with their Obama-esque “arc of history” rhetoric – planned a quick transformation of the American Indian into rural gentry. The tinkering with humanity ensued and misery erupted.
Nathan C. Meeker, previously mentioned in another post, was one example of an archetype littered about the civilian branches of the U.S. government. Many were utopian, and near utopian, in outlook with a powerful confidence in their ability to engineer better human beings. The American Indian seemed to be the preferred guinea pig in their social laboratory.
Vincent Colyer
Another scion in the Progressive line was Vincent Colyer, the Indian Board of Commissioners secretary. In a 1871 “peacemaking” tour of New Mexico and Arizona reservations, he upset a happy arrangement for the Chihenne band of Apaches and all others concerned. They were ordered from their much-loved Canada Alamosa reservation (sometimes called Ojo Caliente) in the New Mexico territory to the more inhospitable Tularosa valley, a hundred miles northwest. Colyer simply substituted his judgment for the Chihennes. He would set off an Apache/US conflagration that would sputter on and off for 15 years and only ended with the capture of Geronimo in 1886 and decimation of half the Chiricahua Apache population.
Chiricahua Apaches, 1880s.Apaches on the San Carlos Reservation waiting in line for government rations, 1870s.Chiricahua prisoners, including Geronimo (front row, 3rd from right) being transported to Ft. Marion, Fla., 1886.
“Substituting their judgment” is a common trait of those consumed with the self-perception of possessing superior wisdom. It is the blind spot of the Progressive. Their unquestioning faith in the “expert” is without limit. Jump forward to the middle of the 20th century and we have “urban renewal”.
What started out as “slum clearance” ended up as slum intensification. Social planners – an established squadron in the ranks of the nomenklatura – substituted the haphazard arrangements of neighborhood residents for Sovietized housing monoliths and called it “urban renewal”. In 1954, they gave us Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis.
Pruitt-Igoe (actually Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments) just before completion and its first occupancy in 1954.
It didn’t last 20 years. By the end of the 1960s, it was uninhabitable and a massive eyesore. Its chief architect, Minuro Yamasaki, exclaimed, “I never thought people were that destructive”. The thing was demolished in 1972.
Pruitt-Igoe, 1970.Pruitt-Igoe, 1969.The demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in 1972.
If there was a FBI most-wanted list for such things, the following grandiose public housing projects would join Pruitt-Igoe (see 7 below):
Queens Bridge Houses, Queens, NYC. It was raided in 2005 as the home of the “Dream Team” drug syndicate.
Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago, Il. In an already crime-plagued city, Robert Taylor displays some of the highest rates of violent crime and gang activity in the city.
Jordan Downs, Watts, Ca. Crime and gang violence are its watchwords for today.
Magnolia Projects, or “Da Wild Magnolia”, New Orleans, La. Let’s just say that the place’s reputation isn’t conducive to raising kids.
Marcy Projects, Brooklyn, NYC. Rapper Jay-Z, a former resident, wrote the rap “Murder Marcyville” as an anthem to its atmosphere. Need I say more?
Cabrini Green, Chicago, Il. No list of the infamous should go without this lovely specimen. Prior to its closing in 2010, USA Today called the place a “virtual war zone, the kind of place where little boys were gunned down on their way to school and little girls were sexually assaulted and left for dead in stairwells.”
The benighted gaze of the “expert” isn’t limited to housing. They’ve destroyed entire swaths of cities in the name of “redevelopment”. A similar roster of the infamous could be constructed for this imperial march of eminent domain’s elimination of private property (see 5 and 6). Lost in the imbroglio is the unique character of a place, evolved over many years of human interaction, only to see it replaced by a modern sterility. This is devolution, not evolution, thanks to the Progressives’ “experts”.
Not happy with fiddling with the cities, under the guise of “climate change”, the “experts” want to bring to all of society what they brought to the urban landscape. Climate change is so protean of a concept that it will abet almost any government meddling in our existence. Now here’s a mandate for the know-it-alls.
California is the epicenter for this latest craze among Progressives. “Climate change” enthusiasms have made the place almost unlivable for anyone aspiring to the middle class. Utility bills and fuel prices are exorbitant. Solar panels are everywhere but that is only possible with a ponzi scheme of subsidies and utility rate manipulation.
The place is so regulated that even getting a plastic bag to carry your groceries to the car demands another purchase … or, alternatively, bring your own filthy things from home. Owning and maintaining a car is now a grueling experience. Illegality might await if you buy a water heater outside your air district. Expressing the desire to start a business could be justifiable grounds for an insanity declaration and commitment to a state institution.
And, of course, the tax burden is back-breaking. No surprise here since the expert-driven paradise is an expensive proposition.
The invisible hand of Adam Smith becomes a deadening hand if it is attached to a Progressive “expert”. In their wake, we have the plight of the American Indian, the inner-city poor, and the California middle class. If success is measured by failure, a place like Sacramento – or any blue dot on the 2016 election map – should have a hall of fame, or shame, dedicated to the Progressive “expert”.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
For a history of Apache resistance, read The Earth Is
Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, Peter Cozzens, hardback edition, pp. 358-415.
A good survey of early urban renewal efforts can be found in “The History of Hamlin Park Part VII: Early Housing Acts and Start of Urban Renewal”, Mike Puma, Buffalo Rising, 9/23/2013, https://www.buffalorising.com/2013/09/the-history-of-hamlin-park-part-vii-early-housing-acts-and-the-start-of-urban-renewal/
More on Pruitt-Igoe in wikipedia, “Pruitt-Igoe”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe
An early criticism of “urban renewal” from 1965 can be found here: “The Failure of Urban Renewal”, Herbert J. Ganns, Commentary, 4/1/1965, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-failure-of-urban-renewal/
More on “urban renewal” failures: “5 Disastrous Urban Renewal Failures”, Modern Cities, 3/10/2016, http://www.moderncities.com/article/2016-mar-5-disastrous-urban-renewal-failures-/page/1
More on “urban renewal” failures: “Redevelopment Wrecks: 20 failed Projects Involving Eminent Domain Abuse”, Castle Coalition, http://castlecoalition.org/pdf/publications/Redevelopment%20Wrecks.pdf
“The 7 Most Infamous U.S. Public Housing Projects”, Newsone staff, Newsone, https://newsone.com/1555245/most-infamous-public-housing-projects/
The book is a corrective for anyone wanting to go beyond politically correct fairy tales and the myths of manifest destiny. Naiveté is rampant alongside cruelty and bigotry.
Interesting to me is the now-familiar use of the momentary state of science to draw grand conclusions about people, such as the Native Americans (or American Indians, if you will). Couple that with “progressive” reformist zeal and disaster awaits.
Nathan C. Meeker
No better example can be found than the brief career of rookie Indian agent Nathan C. Meeker (above). A utopian down to his bones, it took him only a year to rile up the Utes as he impetuously and zealously embarked on the all-too-familiar crusade of socially engineering the Utes of Colorado in 1878-9 (pictured belwo). It would end in death all around, including Meeker’s own, the rape of his wife and daughter, and the near destruction of the Utes (illustrated below).
Utes in 1870s photo.Meeker’s destroyed agency in 1879.
Is there a lesson for us in this whole sordid affair?
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, Peter Cozzens, read pp 341-357.
Sonam Sheth, politics and national security reporter at Business Insider, from her Twitter page.
While scanning Yahoo news, I ran into an article by Sonam Sheth (pictured above) of Business Insider about Trump’s pardoning of Joe Arpaio, the sheriff accused of challenging one judge’s definition of the amorphous abstraction of “racial profiling”. What was presented as a straight-up news piece was essentially a stitched together product of lefty wish-fulfillment. The article went along a boozy path from the pardon to Trump-as-mafioso. Journalism isn’t journalism any longer. It’s fevered imaginations run wild.
To grasp the pitiful state of journalism, let’s go on a journey through Sheth’s personal profile. It will illuminate a lot about her unconscious – or conscious – mingling of bits of hard news with barnstorming lefty politicization. This will be brief.
Her’s is a compressed odyssey from a Rutgers University classroom to a couple of extensions of the classroom in internships and a “columnist” for the college newspaper. While in the college cocoon, she had a 3-month layover with Citizen Action of New York. Currently, Citizen Action is one of the lefty activist groups in the vanguard of The Resistance. Check out these gems of left wing boilerplate from the website:
“Build the Movement. Add Your Name to the Restistance Rapid Response: We’re building the statewide movement we need to take on Trump and make health care for all a reality. Build it with us.”
“Gov. Cuomo: Stop Trump’s Climate Attack! While we fight the Trump administration every step of the way in D.C., New York must lead on climate change by transitioning to 100% renewable energy. It’s up to Governor Cuomo.”
There’s more, but you get the idea.
What would attract a future Business Insider staffer to an organization of politically strident lefty activism? Hmmmm.
Oh well, from there she dropped into a short internship with CNBC and was picked up by Business Insider. I’m sure that the Rutgers econ degree drew attention with the HR departments, but with the degree comes a load of ideological fixations. They make it easy to leap from assumption/premise to disjointed fact to conclusion, all in a surreal and dreamy narrative landscape. It would make Salvador Dali cringe in envy.
Salvador Dali
Now to the article. The title says it all: “Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio could be a crucial piece of evidence in the Russia investigation”. A person could stop with the title and be just as informed.
The article was riddled with so much bounding from point to point that my wife could only hear, as I was reading, my repeated refrain of “This is bull@#$&*!”. The bravo sierra begins with the grasping for a link between the pardon and hoped-for proof of obstruction of justice.
First, right out of the gate, she constricts Arpaio’s sin as “criminal contempt in July for violating a court order to stop racially profiling Latinos”. “Racial profiling” is one of those politically loaded terms that are bandied about like a frisbee. It’s become so expansive that a victim might shy away from using the word “black” to describe a black assailant.
Besides, Arpaio’s tough illegal immigration stance, and his use of “racial profiling”, might have something to do with the overwhelming type of illegal that a sheriff might confront in a state that shares a border with the Latino world south to the Strait of Magellan. In effect, the judge is either ordering the sheriff to ignore the rule of law – immigration law that is – or pretend the obvious doesn’t exist as he does so. Either way, it’s a court-ordered charade. Trump’s pardon put an end to the judicial lunacy.
Illegal immigrants sit in a group after being detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents in McAllen, Texas. (Associated Press).
For our budding journalist, it may never have occurred to her that an immigration hawk of a presidential candidate has a natural affinity for a sheriff thinking, and doing, the same. It’s not proof of criminal intent and conspiracy to clear a sheriff from the clutches of an activist judge for carrying out policies in line with the policies and constitutional authority of the president of the United States. But no, Sheth’s surreal potboiler must take precedence.
From the pardon, she builds the edifice. In quoting a single source, Renato Marriotti, she tries to weave a story of criminal intent from, once again citing Marriotti, Trump hypothetically “ending investigations as to his friends”. The presence of “friends” is not evidence of “intent” of criminal conspiracy to “obstruct justice”. Arpaio isn’t an example of the kind of cronyism typical of the Clintons. If viewpoint sympathy can be strung into the kind of relationship most typically found in criminal conspiracies, then most assuredly Bill Clinton should be dressed in striped livery for the pardoning of Marc Rich. There was much more evidence of illicit behavior in that whole unseemly affair.
President Bill Clinton and Denise Rich attend a funraiser for ‘The G & P Charitable Foundation for Cancer Research’ in October 1998, in New York City. (DIANA WALKER/LIAISON)
As for Sheth’s insinuation of “obstruction of justice”, where’s the underlying crime? You know, the criminal conduct that a person seeks to hide. For Bill Clinton, it was perjury in Federal District Court in Arkansas and his subsequent dissembling testimony before a federal grand jury in Washington, DC. For Trump, as the constitutionally ordained chief executive officer of the United States government, he simply asked about the possibility of ending the investigation of Michael Flynn. Even here, Sheth can’t present proof of an order by Trump do so. She’s only got Comey’s “feelings” of pressure.
I’m reminded of my discussions with my teenage sons after they came home late. Certainly they felt “pressure”. Am I guilty of “obstruction of justice” simply because they felt “pressure” … but I’m hiding no crime for which the “pressure” is applied? Sheth’s pseudo-logic enters the realm of the ludicrous.
Of course, lurking behind the curtain is the fantasy of all denizens of the left: the Trump/Russian criminal conspiracy, the philosopher’s stone of explanations for the 2016 election results. There’s been no evidence of “criminal conspiracy” … up to now. But, then again, there’s no evidence of an underlying crime in my sitdowns with my clock-challenged sons … up to now. I can only hope and pray that they never discover Sheth-logic.
Possibly Sheth could benefit from 2 doses of reality. First, the president is the federal government’s alpha law enforcement officer. In essence, he’s the chief DA of the federal government. He can inquire into any investigation under his purview. It may prove to be embarrassing to his supporters and much fun to his detractors, but voters can deal with that at the next election. Alan Dershowitz, no card-carrying member of the “vast right-wing conspiracy”, said as much in June of this year (see 6 below).
Furthermore, the president’s pardon power is near absolute. If Trump so wished, he could pardon the entire roster of inmates in the federal penal system. He doesn’t even have to wait for convictions to fling the power around. It may not enhance his electoral viability, but he could do it.
Sheth’s story is a mess. It is more lefty wish-fulfillment than it is journalism. It doesn’t even make for good commentary, and more resembles a bad term paper. As per the old cliché, there’s no there there. For the Sheths of the world, it’s as if they want to overturn an election with smear-mongering and an endless manipulation of the criminal justice system. The more appropriate venue for their angst is the ballot box … which, by the way, they have difficulty in winning.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
“Trump’s decision to pardon Joe Arpaio could be a crucial piece of evidence in the Russia investigation”, Sonam Sheth, Business Insider, 8/27/17, https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/trumps-decision-pardon-joe-arpaio-160000939.html
Citizen Action of New York website, http://citizenactionny.org/
Sonam Sheth’s brief profile at Business Insider website, http://www.businessinsider.com/author/sonam-sheth
“Alan Dershowitz: History, precedent and James Comey’s opening statement show that Trump did not obstruct justice”, Alan Dershowitz and contributor, Washington Examiner, 6/8/2017, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/alan-dershowitz-history-precedent-and-james-comeys-opening-statement-show-that-trump-did-not-obstruct-justice/article/2625318
Politically-inspired murder has spasmodically erupted throughout history, especially from the late 19th century to the present. Lately, it appears to be a more frequent guest to our political struggles. Intemperate discourse is all-too-common. Ramped up rhetoric, fueled by claims of vague and impersonal harms, has found expression in thuggishness, and even murder. Welcome to Charlottesville on August 12.
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane of the modern era. “The propaganda of the deed” (meaning: violent action as the catalyst for revolution) was all the fashion in anarcho-socialist circles at the turn of the 19th into 20th centuries. Assassinations, bombings, and robberies were the preferred means of activism of a violent element in Europe and the U.S. The mayhem was one of the prime motives for the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920’s.
The assassination of Pres. McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz in New York, 1901. He would be executed in the electric chair later in the year.Luigi Galleani, anarcho-socialist shortly before his deportation in 1919. He was a loud and frequent exponent of the “propaganda of the deed”. Carlo Budda, brother of terrorist bombmaker Mario Budda, once said of Galleani, “You heard Galleani speak, and you were ready to shoot the first policeman you saw”.The Wall Street bombing of 1920, killing 30 people, was carried out by Galleani’s followers.
Individual and group violence has continued apace. Some of it spontaneous; some of it premeditated; and some of it less fatal, as in mere bullying and assault-and-battery. College campuses from Berkeley to Cambridge have become noted for the Antifa goons patrolling the corridors of higher learning.
More recently, taking it to new heights, was James Hodgkinson in his hunt for Republicans on June 14. On Saturday, August 12, James Alex Fields, Jr., plowed his car into crowd of counter-protesters killing one and injuring 19.
James Alex Fields, Jr., and his damaged car.
Are we approaching the Vietnam War era’s daily mortality counts? On the one side we have the wickedness of the tiki-torch carrying white thugs. Aggrieved by the alleged oppression of whites, they are on hair trigger for violence. On the other, we have the ready-made insta-mob of the consortium of Black Lives Matter, Antifa, et al. The scene is starting to resemble post-WWI Weimar Germany with its street battles of left and right gangs.
Berlin street fight scene between Nazis and communists in the early 1930’s.
It’s sad that both sides seem to be taking their cue from ISIS in Raqqa. The left had their Raqqa moment in June. The right’s imitation waited till August. The similarities are striking. Like ISIS defending their caliphate in northern Syria and Iraq, Hodgkinson preferred gunfire. Fields adopted the Nice and London method of political expression by simply smashing people with a vehicle.
It’s also sad that we have a president that can’t rise above any personal slight, no matter how slight, during these moments of sorrow. His combative nature muddies any attempt to have us rise to the “better angels of our nature”.
Mr. President, drop the twitter feed!
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
“Recounting a day of rage, hate, violence and death: How a rally of white nationalists and supremacists at the University of Virginia turned into a ‘tragic, tragic weekend.'”, Joe Heim, Washington Post, 8/14/2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/local/charlottesville-timeline/?utm_term=.6ee9f78a1d31
Bernie Sanders, American socialist politico extraordinaire.Nicolas Maduro celebrates election results that give him carte blanche to remake the country’s constitution in his own image.
Remember Obama’s jab at Romney in 2012 for Romney’s suggestion that Russia is a serious threat to our interests? Back then, our too-cool-for-school president said in debate to Romney, “The 1980s called; they want their foreign policy back”. Now, in a tantrum over losing an election, the Dems sound more like Romney than Mr. Too-Cool. Well, the rhetorical gambit can be used in many ways.
Watch the above video. Maduro, the president-for-life – or maybe El Comandante fits the bill – has been implementing Bernie’s economic playbook. The free-stuff economic approach is playing out in the streets, shops, and stomachs of the average Venezuelan.
Caracas grocery store, 2015.
In Cuba, first came the dictatorship, then came the economic ruination. In Venezuela, economic ruination arrived, then the dictatorship. I suppose that Bernie will expound criticism before cameras about Maduro’s means to achieve Bernie’s ends.
Havana neighborhood, 2016.
I often wonder about the academy’s (schools and colleges) delinquency in implanting economic sense in the young. People don’t seem to know the meaning of socialism or its consequences. How else to explain the popularity of Bernie, a softer (and elderly) version of Maduro?
The closest parallel to the current debacle over the Republican efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare might be the failure of the far more numerous opposition to the Bolsheviks from 1917 to 1920. The divided nature of the opposition spelled their doom and anchored the Bolsheviks in power for over 70 years.
There are 3 effectual political parties in America: (1) the Republican Party, (2) the Semi-Republicans, and (3) the Democratic Party. Like the Whites in the Russian Civil War, the Republicans couldn’t sublimate their pet interests and form a united front to attain the ultimate goal of saving the country from Obamacare.
In contrast, the Democrats acted with the iron discipline of the Lenin-led Bolsheviks. The Bolshevik’s reward was a 70-year lease on power over millions. Could this be ditto for the Democrats?
Bolshevik leadership, 9th Party Congress, 1920.Congressional Democratic leadership, 2017.
Let there be no mistake: parties #2 and #3 have made it possible for American healthcare to continue to be on a death watch. Escalating premiums, deductibles, and declining participation by medical providers will proceed.
Americans will become acquainted with the truism that health insurance isn’t healthcare. Insurance is a piece of paper that no one need accept, unless the Dems push to enslave the medical industry as the Bolsheviks chained Russians. Are we now to look forward to Medicaid-for-all?
What? “Man”? Have I committed a faux pas? Have I exposed my hidden longing for male hegemony?
“Man” in the title was meant to refer to “humankind”, not the archaic meaning fraught with all kinds of triggers for today’s amped-up sensitivities of some college millennials. No need to run for the couches and crayons. Please disband the tantrum mob. No harm was intended. The title merely rolls off the tongue easier without too many words and syllables. I preemptively apologize to the easily offended.
Obsessing over God’s gender has hit the divinity schools. To balance out the deity’s “correct” nature, should we have more images of God as a god-ette? Should the Sistine Chapel ceiling be repainted?
What I really mean to ask is, have we made ourselves God?
Now, with the pronoun battle put to rest (or maybe not), the campaign to invent new sexes – the waste product of divorcing sex, gender, whatever, from genitalia and chromosomes – has made a hash of our language. Confusion reigns and the hyper-sensitive are on patrol.
No such confusion, however, exists among the mostly urban sophisticates about the reasons for the boy/girl behavioral differences that would be apparent to anyone who happened upon a playground. While grudgingly having to accept some role for biology – genetic discoveries are too profound to completely ignore – in the nature/nurture battle, it’s really nurture now, nurture all the time, and nurture everywhere. Social circumstances occupy the pride of place for academic and big media drivel on the subject, the first step in the deification of the person.
The upshot of it all is the psycho-motor reflex among Progressive types to embark on the project to socially engineer away the differences, or to make our boys more like our girls and our girls more like our boys. To wit, make “man” – or “person-kind” if you will – the protagonist and prime mover in the Genesis story.
After all, it is asserted, we contrived the social surroundings and, therefore, must be willing to recontrive them more to the zeitgeist of today’s cultural nomenklatura. The endgame has no end, but is a perpetual crusade to blur distinctions, crown the person as the determiner of all reality, and disembowel institutions and anything old that confer responsibility and restraint.
The passion for the nurture thing lends itself to social fabrication. It is engineering with human beings as the raw material. God is no longer the clock-maker of all things. We are.
National Geographic magazine might be a bellwether of some cosmopolitan thinking on the subject. In the cover story “Genius” for its May issue, the author, Claudia Kalb, much expounds on the importance of social influences in the production of geniuses.
Really, really smart people, she proclaims, have abetting “social networks”. Those without, as in all our popularly-identified oppressed classes, suffer the lot of the forgotten. Women and the poor are two favorites. As Kalb writes,
“Throughout history women have been denied formal education, deterred from advancing professionally, and under-recognized for their achievements …. People born into poverty or oppression don’t get a shot at working toward anything other than staying alive.” (1)
The point has just enough of a kernel of truth to be dangerous. The call for coddling social networks is a blank check for all sorts of interventions to even the score. If women are handcuffed by the world, then spousal roles must be made to change, divorce made easier, the public treasury thrown open, paychecks additionally garnished, and volumes added to the tax and regulatory codes. The entertainment industry, the courts, and public schools are enlisted for the cause. Little goes unaffected.
Wonder Woman standing firm and erect, but with a physique that couldn’t crush a marshmallow.
Add a splash of science to the social ingredients and you can also relegate the baggage of moral restraint to the trash heap. Restraint was implanted by dad’s deadly glare, mom’s firm hand, and a pulpit’s fiery sermons. From there, it is embedded in the frontal lobes of the brain. Genius is correlated to creativity and creativity is generated by ignoring those frontal lobes, in Kalb’s rendering (2). I’m not so sure about Kalb’s causal train of thought but it does relegate the conscience to simply being an impediment to personal self-fulfillment, or “genius”. Once again, we have more fuel for more social fabrication to blast furnace away objective limits.
Nihilism becomes a factor of social production, or, more accurately, it’s about the annihilation of predetermined forms in favor of a freewheeling rejiggering of reality to match momentary fads of thought. Old time religion, the nagging voice of the old morality, marriage, and the dictionary must either face social expulsion or be contorted out of all recognition. As one scholar put it, the scorched earth is in the service of modern Progressivism’s ultimate goal: “the emancipation of the uninhibited self” (3).
The “uninhibited self” knows no restraint. Even chromosomes are no barrier to any thought, wish, or belief about ourselves. Don’t worry about science saying otherwise. The tent of science, faux or otherwise, is big enough to include people willing to wrap an aura of scientific truth around any self-conception. The gender revolution is born.
National Geographic magazine, January 2017 issue.
It’s a coup d’etat of the mind over the body. It’s a matter of a person convincing “ze-self” of being something in spite of their body saying otherwise. What’s next? Will transgender lead to trans-species?
Welcome to reptile man. Cosmetic surgery and tats can make your body conform to your self-image.
Progressivism is an ally in the “emancipation of the uninhibited self”. After all, what is Progressivism? In a nutshell, it is the rosy belief in the power of the state to actualize every person’s highest potential. The “highest potential” need have no reference to a deity. The “uninhibited self” is the new deity, and the referee of first and last resort of all things.
Even the limits of the economic principle of scarcity has no relevance in this universe. The state’s efforts at a takeover of healthcare, for instance, are about leashing the nation’s medical providers to the crusade. If you have a son living under your roof at age 26, the state will command your medical insurance provider to keep covering him. And for all those without insurance, the state will deconstruct the whole industry and throw open the public purse to further the fantasy that people have healthcare if they possess a piece of paper with “insurance” printed at the top. Actually, they have something with as much value as 1923 German marks ($1 =4,210,500,000,000 German marks) . What good is it if nobody will take it?
Children playing with stacks of marks and a man with a wheel barrow of marks to buy a loaf of bread, 1922 Weimar Republic, Germany.Post-Obamacare healthcare as government provides it for free to ever larger segments of the U.S. population?
What government is waiting to do for medical care it has done to schooling, motor vehicle management, and the ghetto. The cost of the “emancipation of the uninhibited self” comes in the form of destroyed lives, wrecked neighborhoods, and classrooms as incubators of good little Democrats and knowers of not much else.
4-6 hours wait time at California DMV offices after the state awards drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants.Inside the DMV office is worse.
Government can’t be the agent for liberating the self. The task is too gargantuan and the goal too pernicious. And there ain’t enough money. Maybe Dirty Harry of Clint Eastwood fame said it best:
“A Man’s Got to Know his Limitations” – regarding “man”, that includes the 2 God-created genders as well as the other 24 recently-discovered permutations.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
1. “Genius”, Claudia Kalb, National Geographic, May 2017, p. 48-49.
2. Ibid, p. 44.
3. The point was raised in an interview of Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, by Hugh Hewitt on July 4, 2016. The full conversation can be obtained at http://www.hughhewitt.com/dr-larry-arnn-4th-july-reflection-declaration-lincoln-dr-harry-jaffa/ .
In the article, she outlines the conflicting demands facing the Democratic Party. On the one hand, the party needs to recapture the middle-America working class. On the other, they are the party of coastal, urban, media, and academic populations for an obvious reason: it is the social orientation of the activist base and party elites. The people that man the phone banks, attend the rallies, donate money, and run the party are socially so far removed from the lives of ordinary working-class Americans. The core of the party has views to match the obsessions from these quarters. Which way to go – reach out to the neglected and despised, or stay glued to the base?
Some want the party to become more appealing to the working-class-without-college-degrees. Others, like Frank Rich, the party’s chief apologist and favorite economist, say, “Forget about ’em”. Read his piece “No Sympathy for the Hillbilly” in New York Magazine, http://nymag.com/…/frank-rich-no-sympathy-for-the-hillbilly… .
I don’t know how the Democrats can square this circle. There’s no way to make transgender bathrooms, the drumbeat of rampant misogyny and racism, climate-change hysteria, unrestrained immigration, a bullying multiculturalism, and socialism here/there/everywhere the key to an outreach program to anyone outside the Dems’ isolated demographic echo chambers.
They’ve got the wrong message and reputation for the wrong crowd. Good luck in reversing that.
Unsurprisingly and generally speaking, parents strive to grease the skids for their kids’ future success. Particularly, middle class parents will drive themselves to near bankruptcy in order to guarantee their offspring’s advancement. Yet, when they buy into a nicer neighborhood to enroll junior in a “better” school, are they really getting a “better” school? There’s good reason to doubt that proposition. Much of the corruption in our schools has deep tentacles, and is no respecter of “red” vs. “blue” states, public or private schools, inner city or suburban schools, parochial or secular, and even reaches down into home-schooling. It’s equal-opportunity corruption.
