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Never Fails to Disappoint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

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The Real Bigotry

Gov. Jay Inslee (D, Washington State)

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

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

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

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

RogerG

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The Fabrication of Narrow Perspectives

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

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Wow! Blue America Cheats.

Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin

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

(See here for more)

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

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

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

RogerG

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The Flavor of Bigotry in the Democratic Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best of buds: Ocasio-Cortez and Omar.

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

RogerG

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Government as Parent

Case in point: Parenting Montana.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RogerG

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What’s Happening to Our News and Information?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 Sureños and 2 Norteños.

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

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

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

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

RogerG

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A Pandemic of Urban Legends

Candidate Obama in 2008 came out with this zinger of condescension about folks in the hinterlands: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”.  It’s as if the blue-collar dwellers outside the east and west coast soirees of the well-off are wallowing in falsehoods.  Really, the urban fashionistas believe this drivel.  Though, the pot-and-kettle thing keeps passing through my head.  The self-proclaimed haute couture in look and thought have their own bigoted, ignorant fictions bouncing in their craniums.  Legends abound in Appalachia and among the coastal with-it.

Pres. Obama with Spielberg and Bruce Springsteen at a 2014 fundraiser.

Widespread oppression of the “marginalized” – a special designation awarded to any group organized and loud enough – is gospel among the beautiful people.  These people haven’t left the world of the “Mississippi Burning” script. To them, the “oppressed” are abused up and down the US interstate system.  Big journalism acts as the modern Hesiod of these urban legends.  Mythology isn’t an ancient phenomenon. It’s alive and well among attendees at Dem Party fundraisers.

But wiping egg off the faces of urban America’s “better” people is developing into a habit.  Jussie Smollet is one among many rotten egg producers.  Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Maxine Waters, the functionaries at MSNBC, the networks, Hollywood, WaPo (The Washington post), NYT, et al – the list is getting too long – can’t wait to jump at the bait.  They w-a-n-t to believe the myth is true.  The only problem is that the playing field is littered with lies.

Let me count the ways.  Be prepared, the list is long.

(1) In November 2016, a Muslim woman at U. of Michigan caterwauled that a 20-something white male threatened to burn her if she didn’t remove her hijab. The WaPo was hoaxed.  Hoax #1.
(2) Taylor Volk, a bisexual student at North Park U., said she was targeted with hateful notes and emails shortly after Trump’s election victory.  Hoax #2.
(3) In, once again, Nov. 2016, Ashley Boyer of Philadelphia blamed that staple of these fibs – white/male/Trump supporter – for harassing her with a gun and getting rid of the “n’s”.  The charge went viral only to be debunked by police.  Hoax #3.
(4) An 18-year-old Muslim woman in Louisiana in Nov. 2016 (Getting the idea?) charged white men for robbing her and yelling racial slurs.  The only problem: it wasn’t true because she said so.  Hoax #4.
(5) In May of 2017, racial slurs, anti-gay insults, and Nazi references were spray painted on a church by, as it turned out, the church’s own organist.  The WaPo ended up cleaning its face of egg.  Hoax #5.
(6) An 18-year-old Muslim woman, Yasmin Seweid, of NYC in Dec. 2016 declared that she was assaulted by drunken white Trump supporters in the subway.  She confessed.  Hoax #6.
(7) Dec. 2016: David Williams of Denton, Texas, torched his own car and spray painted “n’ lovers” on his garage.  A police investigation exposed the scheme as a hoax, but not before David and his wife garnered $5,000 from a GoFundMe page.  Hoax #9.
(8) A Muslim student at Beliot College in Feb. 2017 found anti-Muslim smears on his dorm room door.  He did it according to the Beliot police chief.  Hoax #8.
(9) Synagogues and Jewish schools were the subject of bomb threats in March 2017.  Surprise, the peril was linked to Trump.  Well, a US-Israeli man was arrested.  Wait, the story gets richer.  An ex-reporter with The Intercept, Juan Thompson, kept the pot boiling with new threats to Jewish community centers.  He would be indicted shortly thereafter.  Hoax #9.
(10) In May 2017, racist, anti-black notes appeared at St. Olaf College.  The WaPo had to walk back their story after a black student was identified as responsible for the slurs.  Hoax #10.
(11) Racist messages – “Go home n***er” – were discovered at the Air Force Academy’s prep school.  Sadly for the hate-crime posse, one of the targeted black students was the author.  Hoax #11.
(12) A Kansas State University student reported to police racist graffiti on his car in November 2017.  Later he admitted to doing it himself.  Hoax #12.
(13) Racist graffiti is all the rage with hoaxers.  In Nov. 2017, racist graffiti was discovered on the mirror in a Missouri high school.  He prank was conducted by a “non-white” enrollee.  Hoax #13.
(14) A Texas waiter at an Odessa steak house Facebooked in Dec. 2018 a racist slur on a napkin, and it went viral … of course.  The only problem: The waiter admitted to faking it.  Hoax #14.
(15) The Covington Catholic High School episode of Jan. 2019 was a disgrace.  The WaPo and the Detroit Free Press were all over the story with an account of an elderly Native American being abused by prep-school white boys in MAGA hats.  The story as it ran in the media – to put it mildly – was misleading.  The Black Hebrew Israelites taunted the kids with vile insults and Nathan Philips (the Native American activist) provoked them by incessantly chanting and pounding his drum in their faces.  Hoax #15.
(16) A spate of anti-Semitic vandalism hit NYC in Nov. 2018.  It turned out that the culprit was a Democratic party activist and former City Hall intern, not a follower of Alex Jones.  Hoax #16.
(17) Donald Trump was blamed for the arson of a black church in Greenville, Miss., back in Nov. 2016.  The WaPo must have been embarrassed when a fellow black congregant was fingered as responsible.  Hoax #17.

The Greenville, Miss., episode of a false hate crime.

(Thanks to the Daily Caller for the list.)

Why the mad rush to believe the unbelievable?  The answer might be found in the need to validate a pre-recorded fable of the world.  Traditional journalistic skepticism be damned.  It’s full-speed-ahead toward a much too deeply rooted folklore in our commercial and media centers, aka big cities.  Big media has been caught in too many falsehoods.  Their credibility is shot.  If they can’t deliver reliable news and information, what can they serve up?

A void exists to be filled by the rhetorical burps of Twitter and Facebook and the retinue of “fact checkers”, and they are linked in a miasma of interrelationships.  Facebook, for instance, uses Snopes.com to filter “fake news” and hate speech.  Snopes is a mess, if court documents in the divorce of the married co-founders is any indication.  Former candidates for political office (on a “dump Bush” platform), prostitutes, vixens with a “dome” complex on pot, and no functioning standards of objectivity are rampant (reported by Forbes and The Daily Mail).  A fact-checking degree is offered at some colleges but that’s no guarantee.  Naïve and left-leaning 21-year-olds aren’t about to produce the gospel.

What we are left with is each one of us running to our corners with our personal “truth”, emotional explosions when faced with pushback, no deliberation, and a mountain of urban legends that are held in a death grip like a Bible in a foxhole.

RogerG

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An Assassination Attempt on Citizenship

Americans, a noxious notion has seeped into your kid’s school curriculum.  It’s called “world citizen”.  It’s happening to your kids, prep school to inner-city.

As a retired teacher of 30 years, I was perplexed.  Is this an attempt to erase borders or proclaim allegiance to the UN or both?  Anyway, the original concept of citizenship may go the way of plastic straws.  The modus operandi is to fiddle with the minds of the youngins and tie the project’s prospects to the fortunes of the Democratic Party.

These Democrats aren’t kidding.  They are actively trying to erase the border as they erase the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, and even legal and illegal resident.  The cultural appropriator Beto (as in Robert O’Rourke) absconded with Reagan’s old line, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”, absent the reference to Gorbachev.  12 Dem-heavy states and DC already are issuing driver’s licenses to people whose presence in the country is in violation of our laws, thus creating havoc with motor-voter laws.

Robert O’Rourke at a rally at the El Paso border.

That bastion of insanity, California, has taken the chant of “healthcare for all” literally to mean “all”, as in any of the world’s denizens who can get here.  Oh, Bernie in his 2016 concoction of the concept tried to stop migrants from receiving the benefits if they enter for that reason.  The restriction is meaningless. How could it be enforced without a mind-reading machine?  Sander’s 2017 version, the one tucked to the bosom of Dem candidates seeking to oust Trump, ended the masquerade.  “Residents” are eligible for the freebie; the adjectives “legal” and “illegal” are absent.

Gillibrand goes further than the cultural appropriator with calls to dismantle ICE and the wall.  She’s in good company with many in the Dem congressional caucus.  And once these foreign citizens get here, it’s now wrong to count them as “non-citizens”, as per Manhattan Federal District Court Judge Jessie M. Furman (Obama appointee).  Not only are we not to stop the citizens of other countries from entering but we are to be kept in the dark about how many are here.

Federal District Court Judge Jessie Furmam.

“Foreign-born” is the approved moniker for everyone born on foreign soil and taking up stakes here. If they are non-citizens – which we can’t tell thanks to Judge Jessie – they are still citizens, citizens of another country.  That makes for an interesting situation when voting rights for foreign citizens in the US gets traction among the Dem rank-and-file.  Other countries’ citizens get to help choose what happens to US citizens.  Soon, with the erasure of the border, every US election will require shipping ballots to Moscow, Mexico City, Managua, Capetown, etc., etc.  With the Dems, what’s in a border anyway?

Voting rights is making the rounds among Dem strongholds in the US.  Stacey Abrams (failed Dem candidate for Georgia governor) announced her support for the craziness in local elections.  SF, of course, and some Maryland localities have already broken the ice (not ICE).  They excuse the folderol with cries that non-citizens – legal or illegal (which we can’t tell thanks to Judge Jessie) – pay taxes.  In tax-happy cities and states, yes, they pay some exactions.  The legal ones pay but don’t have to mess around with jury duty and draft registration.  Illegals ditto, but they don’t pay Social Security taxes and the like, unless they commit document fraud – which many have since that’s the only way for them to get paid. Advantages abound for those keeping their foreign citizenship.  They avoid the flip side of rights: responsibilities.

Today’s Dem Party is clearly out to blur the line between citizen and non-citizen.  And why not?  It’s a rich vein of votes.  It works to elect Democrats.  In 50 Dem congressional districts, the foreign-born comprise more than 20% of the population (only 11 Republican districts meet the standard).  Sandy Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was elected in a 25% foreign-born locale (almost 50% Hispanic).  In-migration and out-migration combine to bend the partisan balance beam of a neighborhood.

If we take the words of the donkey party’s candidates at face value – And how could we take them otherwise? – what’s the point of being a citizen?  Simply renting on American soil is enough to get all the bennies of the nanny state, condones massive document fraud, avoids certain inconvenient responsibilities of citizenship, and is a qualification for the franchise.  For all practical purposes, naturalization is irrelevant.  Now, that’s one way to repeal Art. 1, Sec. 8, Cl. 4 (naturalization power) of the Constitution.

Say bye, bye to the border. And isn’t that the point?

RogerG

* Thanks for the contributions of Howard Husock of “City Journal” and Matthew Continetti of “National Review”.

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More Numbers: Women Up, Women Down

Mike Allen’s Axios AM this morning came out with numbers from the Institute for Policy Research showing women as slightly better educated than men and slightly less likely to be in the workforce. Once again, numbers don’t lie, conclusions do.

What do the numbers mean? Can’t tell. Numbers naturally bounce within a range. The better educated factoid may mean – emphasis on “may” – a profusion of girls willing to sit a total of 16-18 years in a school desk to get degrees in the “soft sciences” and the law. Without a deep dive, who knows what the figure means. High concentrations in the “soft sciences” – a term meant to cover a subject without much math, physical science, and classical reading – says nothing about employability and practical knowledge given their huge corruption potential. “Better educated” may mean a greater acceptance of curricular hoop-jumping, not “better informed” or any other similar synonym.

Students in a women’s studies class at Pepperdine University.

For instance, identity studies (gender, race, ethnicity, etc.) doth not make an Einstein. They make partisan activists.

Watch the drop in female workforce participation be used to press the campaign for more government spending and employer mandates. But, as before, what does the number really mean? It may mean more women choosing child-bearing and raising than a paycheck. An uptick in fertility might go a long way in explaining the statistic.

Don’t think for a moment that such women don’t contribute to the national wealth. Raising the next generation is the most fundamental act in making social capital, the basic stuff of economic growth. A unionized government worker isn’t a substitute for mom.

When we allow superficial numbers to proliferate, and put them in the hands of partisans to be massaged for political impact, we get nonsense, and worse. We get a ballooning public debt that will fall upon the heads of those very same kids. Number crunching becomes kid crunching.

RogerG