Category → Fruit of Contemplation
YouTube II: What I like
For those who might have misunderstand the last post, I do like YouTube, and below are just a few examples of what I like about that site to prove it.
Why do I visit YouTube? For one, I like to learn new things, gain technical information, find ways to do things that I regularly do and yet struggle with, like professional-level chainsaw maintenance. Then there’s the endless entertainment – humor, music, and especially the unintentionally funny videos where people representing themselves as experts instead prove the complete opposite.
First, we begin with down home redneck humor and part 2
Next up: seems like every week there’s a new political analyst from South Succotash USA who is light years better than all the tarted up partisan political activists in mainstream media. Here is Matt Christensen analyzing people casually calling for government-led civilian gun confiscation , and here is Laurel commenting along with liberal professors discussing a possible civil war , and finally the brave and actual for real news reporter Laura Loomer
Probably the best outdoor channel, Leatherwood Outdoors; here John is hunting edible mushrooms
Incredible instinctive bow hunter and spearer of grizzly bears Tim Wells
Funny black guy Terrence Williams talking about how he is not moving to Africa and how American blacks hurt American blacks
Serious black guy Malcolm X, speaking about how white liberals destroy American blacks
Somehow YouTube presented this guy to me as suggested viewing, and my first impression of his “intense face” was that he was a maniac. Which of course I had to see for myself. Turns out he is one of the people who makes a living off of his YouTube videos, and he is in fact interesting and knowledegable. We present “Wranglerstar”
RCBS reloading because every patriot should know how to reload ammunition
Assorted music: la femme d’argent by Air Safari, and Itshak Perlman playing Mendelssohn
For those who remember what it was like once (before people showed up literally everywhere all the time on planet Earth) to drive on a country road and actually find a quiet spot where you could…without being interrupted, a song about the joys of that by Jason Aldean
And of course Blake Shelton’s Kiss my Country Ass, just because if they are at all curious, big government control folks like those listed above ought to know how a lot of us really feel about their anti freedom policies
Rimsky Korsakov Schehezerade, which can only ever be the 1969 recording by the official USSR symphony orchestra, whose world-class members played out of both genuine love and understanding of great music and out of great fear of official punishment for perceived failure.
And finally, My Pretty Pony just to throw that monkey wrench into your digital profile, especially if you watch country music and reloading videos and you want to at least appear eccentric to the digital watchers.
And no, this is not a complete list by a long shot, so don’t think you are profiling me at all by looking at this. Heck, it could all be fake just to make people think I think a certain way, when I don’t actually…
Everything I know I learned from YouTube
YouTube is way beyond me, but what little I do know about it has shaped my life.
Every day people are vying for upvotes and clicks on YouTube, posting everything from my favorite “Idiots with Chainsaws and More Epic Tree Fails” to biting the heads off of chickens and the ubiquitous smart pet tricks. Guys (it is always guys) post all kinds of wildly incorrect videos about reloading and shooting old guns, and of course they are disinterested in helpful (knowledgeable) comments aimed at keeping all their fingers and eyeballs. They are, after all, posting on YouTube; therefore, goes their thinking, they are automatically experts at what they are posting about.
YouTube sensations might be a flash in the pan, a momentary glamor shot, or they might become an overnight millionaire. While I still do not understand how that works, my children assure me it actually happens. And then, my kids gleefully tell me, the overnight millionaires become dogfood as some perceived slight they are said to have committed is mob-magnified into the worst thing since Hitler, and then back down they go into the seething pit of unknowns…
Me, I am just a super unsophisticated user of YouTube. Listening to Mozart and Beethoven on endless play loops is probably my biggest utilization of the site, followed by leaving “My Pretty Pony” series on auto-play for hours while I am working or doing chores, just to throw monkey wrenches into the digital portfolio being built around my online habits and preferences.
But then there is the creeping recognition that just about every chore I do these days is prefaced with a visit to YouTube, just to find out the best way to screw in a light bulb, or to rake Fall leaves, paint our basement walls, or to do some other small thing that in the dinosaur days we just figured out ourselves through small trials and error, or we called Dad and asked how he did it.
Now, because I have come to rely on it so much, I walk around daily with a head full of YouTube, even if I am not necessarily spending much time on the site itself. Could I even live without it?
This reliance on YouTube has spawned all kinds of urban myth jokes, usually self-directed by surgeons, dentists, and car mechanics, who all begin their work on your open heart surgery by saying “Don’t worry, I learned to do this by watching a video on YouTube,” and then their big toothy smile is the last thing you see as your brain succumbs to the anesthetic.
And your last thought is “I’ll bet she did use YouTube!” for the simple reason that all of us have become YouTube junkies for even the mundane things we do. To the point where just about everything that is in the front of my brain, that is, the frontburner of my life, has YouTube images floating all about them. It seems that everything I know I learned from YouTube.
And it does not help balance things out, you know, leaven out the evolutionary YouTube gene, that when the tractor tire went flat, I reflexively turned to YouTube for help on how to re-inflate it. Yes, videos show you how you can use an overabundance of lighter fluid to inflate the tire back onto the rim. Lots of videos about this, with varying levels of success, that usually being inversely proportional to the level of entertainment. Because, while trying that lighter fluid thing, you might also accidentally and very explosively send the steel rim flying across the barn and out through the wall into the woods, too. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, because even if you fail to inflate the tire onto the rim and send it sailing into the next county, if you are smart and you filmed the resulting fiery disaster, you still have a cool YouTube video that will get you lots of clicks. That’s your fallback plan with the lighter fluid.
About the tractor tire: I opted for the sedate old guy’s video that showed how to use trailer ratchet straps to squish the tire onto the rim. After applying a lot of used motor oil to the tire bead, which helped slide the tire up, I did what the guy did on his video with ratchet straps. And I’ll be damned, when I turned on the compressor and injected air into the tire, it fully inflated then and has stayed inflated for months.
No, I did not film my own attempts to re-inflate the tire using the ratchet straps, and that is because the truth is I just don’t really know much about YouTube. I am there for the music, which come to think about it actually sounds like a never-ending cacophony symphony.
Greta the baby pied piper parrot
Climate change is just the highest profile policy issue where its proponents have failed to persuade people with scientific facts. Instead of trying harder to explain the actual facts, and thereby win over convinced converts, climate change proponents always resort to bullying, shaming, and mocking people who remain uncertain, unpersuaded, unsure of what has been told to them, and then especially skeptical of all the resulting hype and abuse. Think of a teacher who, having failed to effectively explain a subject to a classroom then resorts to emotional blackmail and criticism of the audience. The truth is that the failure to connect with and educate the audience lies with the teacher, or in the case of climate change, its proponents.
Enter the latest unpersuasive advocate of human-caused climate change, the Swedish child Greta Thunberg. Yes, an unremarkable 16-year-old high school drop-out is now the newest face in this highly politicized subject involving multidisciplinary sciences and an entire planet. Yes, Thunberg is a child without any education degrees or really any formal education at all, lecturing and hectoring adults about what they absolutely must do right now with their hard-earned money and freedoms, and just listen to her, dammit.
I have no idea where Thunberg came from, in the sense of how or why she became an activist media darling activist. Nothing about her is particularly outstanding; not charisma, not intelligence, not education or mastery of science. Suddenly she was The Voice Of Reason, or at least The Voice Of Pesky Mosquitoes That Won’t Go Away. This little kid is just a little kid, that’s all she is, so “Oh c’mon!” is what I am thinking.
How can she be taken seriously, how can the quality of our national policy debate have sunk this low? And then I remembered that the face of the big government civilian disarmament effort is an attention hog named Hogg, himself also an unimpressive annoying little foot-stomping brat. And like so many other 16-year-olds across the planet, Greta is a foot-stamping, pouting, demanding little brat who wants what she wants and she wants it right now. It doesn’t mean she knows anything, or that she is correct about climate change, or that my 16-year-old son actually should be handed the keys to my pickup truck and given five hundred bucks for the weekend, either. This is just the way that sixteen-year-olds behave, and real adults ignore them at least and often righteously put them in their place.
Sixteen-year-olds have this habit of wanting all the adult stuff without having actually worked hard and earned it. It is what makes sixteen year olds both exasperating and yet so adorable. They are so clearly in an in-between place, between child and young adult, between having their own thoughts and learning new things. In America, most sixteen-year-olds like Greta are high school sophomores.
Do you remember what the word “sophomore” means? Yes, that’s right, it means “wise fool.” That is, a sophomore is a person who exhibits the traits exactly in between wisdom and foolishness. True to being a sophomore in meaning if not in actual school, Thunberg has the language skills of a young adult, but the reasoning abilities of a child.
The more we think about this unphenomenal child phenomenon policy thing, the more evident it is what a game it is. Thunberg is just the young white equivalent of what Obama represented. If she can’t persuade us with actual facts, she will pout and cry and try to bully us with childish tantrums. And if our adult inclinations kick in, and we contest Thunberg’s bullcrap, why then we are just a bunch of big meanies who made little kids cry. It was the same argument used to buffer Obama from being held accountable for his endless lies — anyone opposing him was racist, mean etc. For shame that anyone would even dare to question these good people! (sarcasm)
And so today was Thunberg’s big day. She led a bunch of American government schools in a student “strike” over her inability to actually persuade thinking people that human caused climate change is real. While students at government (“public”) schools are too young to go on strike, the sound of the word ‘strike’ is so grown up sounding and exciting, and anyhow, it is kind of sexy Marxist chic. Thunberg thinks the strike is better than actually getting an education, and in her own words, climate change policy and socialism are inseparable.
Ah-hah!
And so a bunch of Democrat union controlled government school administrators and political activists posing as teachers actually encouraged their students to miss a day of taxpayer funded education and go do something else, maybe get more leftist indoctrination, maybe protest, against whom or for what none could really say. But a day away from school is what so many kids crave anyhow, and so away some of them went. Maybe some of them want to be just like Thunberg: A high school dropout and professionally aggrieved whiny brat on an endless mission to harangue her elders. Great; it sounds like another Chinese cultural revolution, except now in America by yet more foreigners who want more of our free taxpayer stuff given to them.
Thunberg does not know the science about climate change, but she does know how to parrot liberal talking points. And so maybe we can finally categorize her as a baby pied piper parrot, a malignant force leading small children astray, away from hearth and home and all that is good. I think this description is more scientifically accurate than anything Thunberg says about supposed human caused climate change.
Climate change turned this little human into a parrot
Scary and mean little kid!
“And Duetschland vill haff a glorious thousand year reich!” This angry child is frightening. Is she the next Adolf Hitler in training?
is Penn State for real?
I know, I know, PSU alum are not supposed to criticize our Mother Ship, Penn State University. But the cold hard facts are material, and it is important to at least raise one’s voice about important things.
For the record, I do not hate Penn State, though I have severed my commitment to PSU football because of the brutally unfair way the PSU board treated my hero and universally admired icon coach Joe Paterno. No, the opposite is true, I care very much about PSU. I am grateful for the stellar undergraduate education I received there. In fact, I received as good or better an education at PSU as or than available at supposedly elite Ivy League schools. That is because PSU is so large, has so many facilities and professors, that anyone who really wants to be educated, to talk with their professors, to spend time debating and studying with like-minded students, can spend all their time as a student being educated. If they but want to.
Which is pretty much what I did there. I served on the Student Senate, ran for student body president, engaged in all kinds of political activism, and studied, studied, studied. My professors, notably Art Goldschmidt, Jackson Spielvogel, Jim Eisenstein, and especially Ed Keynes, helped me grow as only a devoted educator can do. I served many of my best professors as a teaching or research assistant. They each studied me, saw my strengths and weaknesses, and challenged me in ways and in areas where I needed to grow the most, and where that growth would matter the most to my eventual debut as an educated adult.
On the other hand, my impression of Ivy League schools is that they are so one-dimensional and politically correct, that one must only gain entry and then spend four years parroting and agreeing with one’s professors to get out with a degree. No growth, no challenge, no self-development at the Ivy league schools, just indoctrination by the staff and parroting back by the students. Where is the value in that?
So what the hell is going on at Penn State with the sky-high tuition? At $38,000 a year IN STATE tuition, PSU ranks right up there with many private schools as well as public universities OUT of state.
Being run now strictly as a profit-loss bottom-line business, as opposed to an educational institution, PSU sets tuition fees that are affordable only to wealthy students, crazy parents, foreign students backed by foreign governments, and the children of PSU employees. Ye olde regular American or Pennsylvanian family simply cannot afford the Pennsylvania STATE university.
This situation is exacerbated by a so-called professional caste of elected officials, state representatives and state senators, who tell us all the time that they are professionals and they know what they are doing. What they are doing with PSU is constantly shoveling into its gaping maw more and more taxpayer money, with zero strings attached. No special scholarships for highly qualifying Pennsylvania students. No accountability to the taxpayers, no service to the Pennsylvania public.
And for those who justify this unfair situation because PSU is a big research station, OK, you name the program and let’s look into it. Some are pretty good, and some are worthless. For example, PSU has its own breeder reactor, so we know the PSU students of nuclear physics are probably getting cutting-edge education from nuclear physics researchers there. On the other hand, fake “climate researcher” Michael Mann was just hugely discredited in a court of law, and ordered to pay big legal fees as a result. Mann could not produce in court the data he used to make his name peddling phony science. As we all know, science is totally about reproducability, the ability to reproduce experiments and outcomes that other scientists have claimed. Mann cannot do that. Mann has been a political activist first and foremost, and has besmirched PSU’s good name as a research institution.
Maybe Mann can be now sued by Pennsylvania taxpayers for his fraud, and compelled to create a scholarship fund with his many ill-gotten gains.
We can call it the “Penn State Real Science Scholarship Fund.” And if it has only five bucks in it, it will still be a hell of a lot more than PSU has so far designated to supporting qualified in-state students who want to study real subjects.
Happy Economy: Consumers & Local Banks vs. The World
The US economy is strong, and it has been strong since a flood of consumer confidence swept in behind a new president who ushered in to a miserable bipartisan vacuum a refreshing cleansing confidence.
Added to that confidence was –and very much is– a renewed pride in America, in being American, and in American-made products. By mid-2017 a sense of 1950s community once lost and now found again birthed a strong antidote to Obama’s “new normal” of slow American decline.
And we can’t just blame Obama. Yes, Obama hates America and did everything he could to destroy our nation from inside and outside. But he was helped significantly by ye olde typical career Republicans who saw money to be made in America’s decline, just as there was money to be made in its growth. But growth is harder, and why work hard if you don’t really have to, they reasoned. Either way, growth or defeat, the big money Republicans bought their many pet congressmen to safeguard their investments and stood by watching as they hit big on a global economy shifting from their American home turf to China, India, the EU, and other undeserving recipients of America’s health.
In fact, America’s veins were opened up and flowing out. Our life force was draining away, and a host of hungry nations were perched around us, like vultures, picking away at the juicy scraps that fell from our Rust Belt homes and boarded up churches. Both Democrats and Republicans were pumping away, pushing our citizens’ energy force, our very national being, into the waiting mouths of so many other nations. And so our American economy had sputtered, dying
That is, until Trump inspired US consumers, and the local banks they work with and rely upon to take what are big steps in their quality of life.
And so like a thing alive, the American economy has powered forward like it has not moved in decades. And why would the economy not be alive? Our collective economy is us, of us, an organic part of us and an extension of us. America has a sense of good health again, and so it follows that our economy is healthy again, too. And it is getting stronger, despite transparent and treasonous attempts to destroy our economy by the Democrat Party and everyone else allied with them, including the governments and industries of China and Russia.
It is sickening that an entire American political party will do everything it can to badmouth, damage or destroy America’s economy simply in order to artificially malign a president they oppose. The cost to America is enormous! Then again, this is the same political party that advocates for illegal invaders over American citizens, for law-breakers and against law-followers, that claims Social Security will be tossed overboard by the other political party and then does everything in its power to give all of our Social Security money to their new chums, the illegal invaders.
So yes, I guess destroying America’s economy and hurting the American citizens standing in the way is to be expected from the Democrat Party and their communications arm, the Mainstream Media.
One discrete sector of the national economy that is changing is the timber industry. When four hundred million (400,000,000 !) middle-income Chinese aspire to own the nice kitchens and hardwood floors that define comfortable life in America, a huge sucking sound can be heard ’round the world as unquantifiable amounts of natural resources are pulled in to that huge nation. And when the Chinese economy began to falter in early 2018, even before the tariff battle, the Chinese domestic demand for American timber dried up. We then learned in late 2018 that the red oak, residual ash, and black walnut that had been bringing us huge export revenue but which were then beginning to stack up in East Coast log yards were not once destined for Chinese factories re-exporting their finished goods back to America. No, those logs and lumber were being used up domestically in China, as China grew its own middle-income population. A population that is now up against the ropes and cannot buy American hardwoods that make pretty kitchens and flooring.
Accordingly the American timber industry is going through a shake-up due to the way timber buyers invested and spent. The fact is that even as they close in China, new cabinet and flooring factories are opening up in several other Asian countries.
And so now on the battlefield it is the confident American consumer and her local bank officers standing strong against the evil political tide that seeks to reverse what has been accomplished, just begun really, since November 2016. It is happy healthy family and local community versus a global colossus hungry for endless cash, endless money, endless wealth, at any cost, and a domestic political party hungry for power at any cost, even the cost of individual liberties and American success.
In this fight I put my money on the American consumer, not just because I think she is a tough and hard working bunch, but because I am an American. I want her– you, me, us — to win this fight.
Ms. Rapinoe, America built that soccer cup win, not you
Miss Megan Rapinoe is captain of the US Women’s soccer team, which had a win recently, and which as a result has been in the news.
That is… the United States women’s soccer team.
That is, These United States for those failing to catch a big part of the what makes up the girls’ soccer team and its win: The USA.
This ladies’ soccer team was born, built and sustained in and by the United States of America, as representative of and for the benefit of the United States of America. That is, of and by and for all of us citizens.
Right in front of the USA logo that Rapinoe makes her living from, Rapinoe then kneels in her contemptuous disrespect and unappreciation
So when that ladies soccer team goes on to win some cup (is this term “cup” a secretly sexist reference to a man’s protective cup? Which raises the related question: Is it sexist to mock the use of a protective cup by a trans-man? After all, the cup is ergonomically designed to fit over certain male-only genitalia that the trans-man does not actually have…but we digress here…and why not, this entire subject and the people in it is and are all foolishness and digression from reality from beginning to end) some place (sorry, the meaning and attractiveness of soccer elude me), Miss Rapinoe is suddenly thrust into the limelight. Because she now represents us, America.
From that limelight Miss Rapinoe then says a lot of typically boorish and hypocritical things, and so, she just needs to be reminded of a few things, to hold her to account, to speak truth to her power, to provide balance to her selfishness and arrogance.
First, you didn’t build that cup win, Megan. No, no you did not. As a matter of fact, all of us Americans built it for you. We created the opportunity for you, we gave you your pay and your freebies and room and board and your travel expenses and and and…I could go on, but you get the point. You, Megan, you just showed up at publicly funded stadiums to kick around a little ball, and then subsequently preen and pose for the cameras, as if you are a hero or something.
Megan, you did not build those stadiums. You didn’t even make the soccer balls! Or even stitch the uniforms together.
No, all you did was show up, better fed and better cared for than your foreign competitors, because you are an American and a beneficiary of all the great things that a capitalist America offers to people like you, like abundant, affordable, clean and nutritious food. And capitalist sporting goods endorsements.
Except that you then blatantly disrespected all of us good Americans who made this possible for you. You spoke down about America, you falsely criticized America for both imagined injustices and for some from many, many decades ago. You even managed to falsely criticize the current president for holding beliefs that he actually does not hold, but which his predecessor did hold, and about which you were silent. While wearing the USA logo on your clothing.
So, second, no, Megan, you are no hero. You did not suffer or sacrifice for your beliefs, or for your kick ball hobby. In fact, you have actually been very well paid for kicking around a little ball on publicly funded and maintained and secured fields. Speaking of pay, women soccer players get 13% of the gross of their $73 million annual product, whereas men soccer players only get 9% of theirs. Again, if there is an imbalance, it is that men are short changed yet again, and yet again, some nitwit complains the opposite is true. The nitwit of this particular moment is Megan Rapinoe.
You did not build what you have now, Megan. You simply showed up and did what you have been doing all your life, which you have been able to to do because America awards people with all kinds of opportunities that few other nations can provide, and volunteers give their time so kids can play on public fields. And instead of showing your appreciation, you attacked America and her citizens. You refused to show respect for our flag or our anthem, as if you are so much better than all of us, the us who made the you possible in the first place.
Megan, you owe back America its money. Everything you have is because America gave so much to you, and yet you act as if you went out and created it all on your own. You are a hypocritical fraud, Megan. Give us our public tax money back, or give us the soccer cup thingy, because people like me, we built that and made it possible, not you. And while we are on the subject of you asking to benefit from increased capitalism on your behalf, you should be aware that your request for Americans to buy more soccer jerseys and buy more soccer tickets and donate more money has fallen on deaf ears here. To hell with that, Megan.
You screwed me, Megan Rapinoe, and you screwed America; so screw you, too.
Megan Rapinoe saying “Screw you, America!”
Four easy things you and I can do to reclaim college education
College education needs to be reclaimed if America is going to succeed in coming generations.
Getting a “college education” these days has zero to do with getting educated, and everything to do with being indoctrinated and shamed, coerced, and guilted into agreeing with extremist teachers just to get a passing grade. Nothing today about college is truly educational. College is 100% radical anti-America indoctrination, even for kids pursuing a technical or scientific degree, because the electives alone are Man-Hating 101, Sexual Confusion 202, Inconsistent & Hypocritical Argumentation 303, and Moral & Intellectual Relativism 404. Four years of this junk and even the brightest kid is gone.
Having put one of my kids through “America’s most liberal college,” and with another one being similarly indoctrinated with huge malfeasance at a second university, sensitivities to the mis-education of American youth are honed razor sharp around here.
If you are one of those easy going liberals who is just fine with your kid being barked at and browbeaten into submission by people you yourself would never hire into your own business, then shame on you for allowing your own child to be ruined. Your kid will not be prepared to think straight after undergoing the kind of nonsense now passing as college education. All your hard-earned money is being poured down a drain. I do not desire any of this for my kids.
College indoctrination is a soup of subjective notions and unprovable ideas that cannot stand the light of day, and it is for this reason that universities have circled their wagons with anti-free speech codes and all kinds of other unconstitutional foolishness meant to insulate the indoctrination from being challenged. And the few challengers are brow beaten and given poor grades.
No diverse or free thinking allowed for you!
So if you are interested in seeing universities once again become centers of learning and ideas, of critical thinking skills and robust debate, then here are some easy things you can do:
a) Do not donate a dime to your alma mater or graduate school. Don’t give them a penny, and if you feel like telling them why, do it, and tell your alumni association, too. Explain that you will not give one red cent toward political indoctrination and the crushing of free thought and individual liberty.
b) Write to your elected state representatives and demand that they eliminate faculty tenure from whatever your state university system is. Tenure is what shields the biggest losers, the most incompetent frauds from being outed as the academic nincompoops they are. Tenure was supposed to protect free thought; now tenure is used to eliminate free thought. Make every college professor at a state university work hard and compete for a five year contract. Make professors actually earn the money they are paid and the class room time they have. That will eliminate about 80% of the ideological foolishness now presented as “education,” and it will incentivize private colleges to follow the same course.
c) File a lawsuit against your kid’s university on behalf of your kid for all of the racial profiling, racial harassment, and racial discrimination now masquerading as being against “white privilege.” That phrase, “white privilege,” is a disgusting racist epithet meant to prepare people of a certain skin color for genocide. No two ways about it. If you said this about anyone else’s skin color, you would be rightly booted from polite company. So take it to the courts and get real justice, because under most state law public institutions and private institutions taking public money cannot engage in this kind of official racial discrimination. Lawsuits at NYU, Oberlin, and Google are paving the way. Join in, you just might win back your kid’s college tuition.
d) Write to your state representatives and demand that no further taxpayer funding be provided to schools where “white privilege” racism and anti-male discrimination is being taught or promoted, or any other fake racial/sexual nonsense is being bandied about as truth.
And again, if you are one of those liberal parents who is just so happy that your kids got degrees in gender studies, critical race theory, underwater basket weaving, and drawing rainbows for fifty thousand bucks a year, then you are dumb, foolish, even stupid, because those kids who did not undergo that trash will be out-thinking and out-competing your dumbed-down kids for the next fifty years. And it is all your fault; you were not just complicit in the ruination of your own children, you caused their failure.
Yeah, way to go Mom and Dad; great job.
Another bite at the Steven Thrasher apple
Steven Thrasher received a PhD in journalism, and then spoke at the New York University graduation ceremony. He called President Trump a “fascist,” praised terrorism and terrorists, and called for censorship of viewpoints he does not share.
Whatever Thrasher received his PhD in, it is not journalism.
Steven Thrasher is the shining example of everything that is wrong with journalism and the mainstream media, because he is a raging extremist political activist, advocating for specific policies, including the net effect of book burning, but posing as a fair-minded journalist.
Journalists used to say they were fair-minded arbiters of facts, accuracy, full reporting, so that readers and viewers could be fully informed and make up their minds. Steven Thrasher represents the culmination of the perversion of journalism into partisan political activism.
If journalists are wondering why so many Americans see the mainstream media as fake news and political activism, it is because people like Steven Thrasher are training young people to enter journalism under false pretenses. Young journalists no longer are interested in actual facts, they are committed to writing fake narratives that support a certain political outcome that favors one political party and one ideological position over another.
This is not reporting, it is not real journalism. It is simply using one’s position in the information chain to promote a set of facts, often provably fake facts, that favor one political party and perspective. These are not reporters, they are political advocates.
If you think this is the way journalism should be, then you cannot complain when people point out all of the resulting falseness and call it fake news.
That Northwestern University is retaining Thrasher in its journalism department says even more about that once-fine university than it does about Thrasher. His employment there says that Northwestern University knows full well that Thrasher is a bad teacher, a fake teacher, and yet they are going to keep him on staff anyhow.
Why would any parent send their child and their hard-won money to Northwestern University? A degree from that school must be worth less than spit.
Steven Thrasher has a real PhD in Fake Journalism
Bad journalism is like bad cooking. You can put up with it for a while, until it starts to do you in.
Lately there has been a lot of really bad, highly politicized journalism, the kind where you realize that you just can’t believe a single thing that fake journalists are saying any more. People ingesting this fake news know it is bad, and yet if it is served up with flair and fancy flourishes, it can be tolerated for a while simply because so many people around are similarly pretending to enjoy the crap. They are following the advice of actor Billy Crystal: It is better to look good than to feel good. But now we really feel awful.
Doctoral candidate in “journalism” Steven Thrasher gave a commencement speech to an overly respectful audience at New York University last week that gives perfect and clear insight into all that is wrong in academia, in “higher learning,” and in the supposed craft or profession of “journalism.” And the audience sat there and took it, despite widespread rejection for Thrasher’s white hot hate speech (and surprising amounts of applause at times, too). One wonders how Thrasher would have taken open disruption of his bad performance, like he advocates for others with whom he disagrees.
Steve Thrasher is no “journalist.“ Forget that having a PhD in something as simple as reporting facts makes no sense except as a crotch stuffer. This is a PhD in totally fake news. It is actually pretty sophisticated, because it involves deceptive behavior.
Thrasher’s establishment media is loaded with people just like him: Not seeking real facts or accuracy, not trying to report just the facts so that people have a firm grasp on reality, but instead preloaded with a partisan, highly subjective political mission, and using “journalism” to achieve it. With people like Thrasher, the mainstream media absolutely IS the enemy of The People.
[One of my kids has a science degree from NYU, and she was subjected to political harassment and intimidation by many of her science professors for four long years; I have emails from some of her professors demanding that she attend anti-Trump and anti-America rallies.]
Steven Thrasher:
- Advocated for genocide of “white” people and Jews
- Advocated for violence, vandalism, blacklisting, and oppression against people with whom one does not agree politically
- Advocated for politically correct speech, not free speech, and shutting down speech one disagrees with
Along with his litany of politically correct America-destroying policy points, Thrasher also called President Trump a “fascist,” which seems to be kind of an oh-yeah-take-this moment for political extremists on today’s campuses. Note to Thrasher: You just showed us that you are the intolerant, power-crazed fascist, not Trump. And Thrasher is supposedly an ‘open minded academic’!
From Thrasher’s ugly speech anyone with an open mind can see the disastrous present of academia and the scary future of America. And if you have been willingly ingesting fake news until now, because it is everywhere and easy and it calms your nerves because it makes you feel like everyone agrees with you, and yet having seen Thrasher’s performance you have decided that you finally feel ill, you cannot be alone. Stop eating the crap that is being served up to you by academia and the mainstream media. You will feel better.
Mainstream media, the establishment media, that is the same media which gets its next crop of so-called reporters from institutions like Northwestern University where Thrasher is next set to “teach journalism,” has been poisoned by the likes of Thrasher for decades. Students at these schools cannot get passing grades unless they submit to the political indoctrination of extremists like Thrasher. So education and open minds are out, and politically correct brainwashing is in throughout the establishment media. Thrasher is why the mainstream media has indeed become the avowed enemy of The American People.
Some takeaways we get from Thrasher’s ‘Munich Speech’:
- Communicate clearly with any college or graduate school from which you or your kids hold a degree, that you will not financially support them or speak their praise until all of this politically correct evil is scrubbed from their institution, top to bottom.
- Communicate with information outlets that orchestrate fake news, and tell them that you will not watch them or listen to them or hold them in even middlin’ regard, until they clean up their house and begin acting like non-partisan professional reporters of facts and not like political activists. CNN may be the worst of the bunch, but taxpayer-funded NPR is blatantly partisan and politically correct. National Geographic magazine wants to sell subscriptions, but why would any normal person willingly allow NG’s cutting-edge PC trash into their home? Same with the New York Times, the Washington Post, and about three hundred other mainstream partisan information outlets masquerading as “news.”
- If you find yourself in an audience with a speaker like Fuhrer Steven Thrasher, stand up and object, or show that you object by leaving. The speaker has no right to demand that you just sit there meekly and take their abuse. They certainly do not extend to other speakers the same expectation of respect and tolerance that they are now demanding from you. You are not a captive audience, you can get up and leave. Do it.
- Don’t pay for your kids to attend expensive colleges unless you know they are going to get a real education that will help them advance themselves throughout life. Think about it: Steven Thrasher has a PhD in journalism, and what the hell did it do for him? It made him stupid and close-minded. College education today is a scam, as we see with Thrasher, and as will be seen with his students. Most college experiences today are Marxism 101 to Cultural Revolution 404. This is not an education, at least not one that an employer will value. Pay for four years of science, or pay for a one- or two-year degree at a community college or technical school like Penn Tech in Williamsport, PA. Bankrupting your family while losing your good kid to four years of mind-numbing indoctrination is not a smart move.
Thrasher either virtue signaling or beginning his sieg heil salute, and either way demonstrating how political activism has corrupted and ended professional journalism.
“Vee vill crush zem like stzraw” or some other personification of Nazi German speak
Thrasher’s “Ha! I just said that!” moment
Steven Thrasher, the personification of everything that is wrong in academia and in the establishment media
How I feel about my many liberal friends
If you have suffered abruptly ruptured friendships and precarious family relationships because of politics since Obama, you are not alone. You are among most people, especially if you have any independent, conservative, patriotic, or traditional pro-America beliefs. Obama brought with him the most divisive political atmosphere since the early Cold War, and his believers implemented that divisiveness with astounding aggression.
Here’s a small example.
A couple years ago I sold a really neat “vintage” National Park Service ranger hat to a lady in Texas via an online auction site. She was thrilled with the hat when it arrived, as it was described accurately, packed carefully, and she paid a fair price for it. She was happy about the exchange until she looked me up and saw what I believe. Suddenly she became unpleasant and full of nasty comments; about me, not that hat. Just to be sure, I used one of the many online services to look into her background, and sure enough, she was a rabidly partisan person who brooked zero disagreement. She judged me not by the happy transaction that had caused our paths to cross, but by whether or not I toed her political line.
Here’s another small example.
In early 2016 I was in detailed discussions with a woman in Vermont to buy her small business. It was perfect for what I can do and like to do, and for one of my kids. We got down to brass tacks, and she encouraged me to get my own website ready. I sent her the purchase contract and we set a mid-2016 date to meet and consummate the transaction. And then all hell broke loose. She had looked me up online and went from being an interesting and likable person to a hate-filled, snarling, angry jerk. The deal was off, because I had the “wrong” ideas, none of which had anything to do with the business we were going to transact.
And I am not even mentioning the many actual friends I have had, some for over thirty years, who have disavowed me, walked away from me, harangued me and then abandoned me, because I calmly disagreed with their assertions about politics and culture. It pains me even now to think how these paragons of virtue and open-mindedness behave so poorly, so intolerant of other views. Apparently traditional views that were A-OK in America for 220 years suddenly became so toxic and so, so bad, that anyone espousing them automatically had to be excommunicated, shunned, thrown overboard, humiliated, attacked, and so on.
It’s a crock o’ crap.
Since the 2016 election, liberals seem to have gone collectively lemming-like over a cliff and down into a pool of fiery, angry hate. Whether it is on a street where someone is simply wearing a MAGA hat (I don’t own one yet, but I do plan to get one; Nick Sandmann inspires me), or at a Trump rally, or on a social media site, liberals engage in physical violence, vandalism, and constant bullying of people they simply disagree with. They have worked themselves into a fantastically intolerant lather over election results they dislike, and gosh, they spare no one a full flaming if that person disagrees with them!
Even old friends who love them!
FakeBook’s censorious purge of conservative and independent voices (while retaining true haters), as well as Twitter and Instagram’s ongoing war on independent thinkers and conservatives (while allowing the Hamas terror group’s account to remain), is the natural result of all that intolerant hate for ideas and people who are not in lockstep with liberalism.
And of course I could do the same to them. I think liberalism is a cancer on America. I think the national Democrat Party has become the party of sedition and treason, that it has declared open war on America and its citizens, and that you can easily make the case for outlawing the party and legally punishing its members. I think Obama is an arch criminal who should swing. But all that does not mean I hate my liberal Democrat friends who liked or even adored Obama. That’s their business. I am not going to judge them because they made a mistaken choice about politics.
Here is a simple meme I made up tonight, from one of my favorite movies, “Some Like it Hot,” a truly subversive and pro-tolerance movie that still makes me involuntarily laugh out loud like a bleating camel or a braying donkey. This meme sums up my approach to remaining friends with liberals who, despite their best efforts to ruin our decades-long relationship, I still love and can still enjoy.
I’d say this is a model for how America should work. How it used to work. Tolerance, people, tolerance. We should still all be in the same boat, headed in the same direction, and at least respectful of one another. After all, nobody’s perfect.
