Posts Tagged → media
Leadership is about leading, right? Right?
Somehow Republican leaders managed to lose on every count in their checks-and-balances disagreement with the 0bama administration. It’s an incredible display of weakness and failure of leadership. Checks and balances is the way of American government. If you abandon that, then the government fails. Today, America is saddled with more bureaucracy, more big government, more invasive government than in our history. It’s a huge failure.
It’s incredible to me. Obviously the Republican Party must be re-built from the ground up. If we do not have leaders who can stand up for basic government functions like required annual budgets and stopping disastrous, unpopular programs like 0bamaCare, then what’s the party’s purpose? As a rubber stamp for the Marxists?
Yes, the mainstream (Democrat) media went to war with phony polls and nakedly partisan “reporters” against the Republican Party. But if all we do is fear criticism, then are we leading? No.
You vs. Machine
Since the days of the Luddites, Human versus Machine has been a persistent theme, with the human being the “good” side, and the machine wearing the black hat. It’s easy to see why.
This theme has been fully developed by Hollywood, with movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator series, and plenty of other sci-fi fiction, with future dystopias where humans battle cruel robots and machines that are either under their own control or under some robotic impulse, either way sparing the humans no quarter.
Truth is often the father of fiction, and this week we have seen three real-life Human vs. Machine stories that are much more compelling than the fake thrillers on screen. One is local, one is regional, and one is national.
First up is the local story, where Harrisburg mayoral candidate Nevin Mindlin argued his court appeal this Wednesday in front of a three-judge panel. A former Republican, the hyper-qualified Mindlin is now an Independent. He was removed from the ballot by a bizarre last-second technical objection by his opponent’s friends, after a hearing in a heavily politicized Dauphin County courtroom. See, Mindlin represents a threat to the combined and congruent interests of both the Democratic Party establishment machine and the Republican Party establishment machine, both of which fed in a bipartisan parasitic manner off of the body of Harrisburg City. Mindlin is completely independent of party bosses, and he will run the city (to the extent he can) in a way that is fairest for the Taxpayer. The establishments of both major parties have much to lose if Mindlin wins, because he will demand a criminal investigation into the debt shenanigans that destroyed the city, as opposed to Eric Papenfuse, who will simply look the other way and let the problems slip into the past, while the taxpayers are saddled with yet more unjustified losses. It is Man vs. machine, or really, vs. machines.
Regionally, the Mid-West has been a political toss-up, with one-time Republican Colorado becoming more liberal as Californians flee their home disaster and seek to bring the same bad ideas to an innocent, rural wonderland. This week we saw the recall of two defiantly arrogant state senators who had led the charge for insane gun laws. These laws do zero to effect crime and do everything to hamper lawful gun ownership, the kind Americans have enjoyed since the very beginning of the nation. The fact that both state senators were Democrats and the fact that their opponents did not include the Republican Party, but rather were an assembly of pissed-off citizens makes this a true-life Human vs. Machine contest. The local citizens who led the recall effort faced down and beat the Michael Bloomberg anti-gun machine, the Democratic Party machine, and several other political machines.
Naturally, the mainstream media has said very little if anything about this incredible feat. Naturally they haven’t, because to inform the voters out there that their future might really be in their hands, then their favored political party might lose power. So they hush it up. Recall that the failed effort to recall Wisconsin’s governor and several allied state senators was reported heavily every day for months and months, until it in fact failed. And then the mainstream media quickly slunk away and said “Never mind, folks.”
Finally, one Human vs. Machine story is still playing out in front of us on the national stage. That is the effort to define who is a journalist and what is journalism. No kidding.
With traditional and mainstream media sources dying left and right, this effort to exclude citizen journalists and artificially buoy up the legacy media is really just an effort to retain an old power that is quickly slipping through away, but which the Democrats need.
The advent of Internet media, blogs, and email have greatly leveled the playing field between citizen, voter, and political machine. At one time the only place where a voter could get news was from the news media, which is heavily invested in liberal and Leftist values (witness the 100th major media personality to leave the mainstream media and join the 0bama administration, this week, going from “satellite” duty to “in-house” role). Now, voters can get all kinds of reporting and information, without subjecting themselves to the heavy filtering and manipulation of the mainstream media, as best represented by CBS, NPR, ABC, NBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, etc. This threat to one of the most important sources of power and control has one political party scrambling. And so is no surprise that US Senator Dianne Feinstein of California is now leading the charge to make only the failing legacy media be defined as “real” journalism, and the new media, with citizen reporters like me, as somehow unfit and thus, not “real” journalists.
Never mind that any website is pretty much the same website as the New York Times, except that with many others (like here) you get no advertisements. Never mind that journalism school is really just an advocacy training system, teaching young liberals how to go out and spread their Gospel of Leftism and liberalism.
I mean, really, how much training does it really take to make calls, knock on doors, interview people, look up facts, and then write about them? Journalism school should be about one semester long.
So now we see the Human vs. Machine playing out with us citizens fighting to maintain our right to free speech, our right to be heard like anyone else, our right to have our desktop printing presses be just as valued as someone else’s larger printing press. And the machine we are battling is a national political party.
As usual, I sign off by asking you dear readers to do something practical about this problem. Do something to support the little guy, like help Nevin Mindlin by going door-to-door for him in Harrisburg City. Donate ten bucks to your favorite gun rights group. And write an op-ed or a comment on some website, as a symbol of your own independent thinking, free of the hatchet jobs of political parties or the mainstream media.
Race Relations in America, Justice for Chris Lane, etc.
Guest writer Patrick J. Buchanan says it best about the issue of race in America, in the piece below. Buchanan has plenty of his own baggage, but in this piece he hits the nail on the head. It’s an excellent read, originally published at http://www.wnd.com/2013/08/dead-souls-of-a-cultural-revolution/
Dead Souls of a Cultural Revolution
By Patrick J. Buchanan
August 22, 2013
Last Friday, Christopher Lane, a 22-year-old Australian here on a baseball scholarship, was shot and killed while jogging in Duncan, Okla., population 23,000. He died where he fell.
Police have three suspects, two black and one white. The former said they were bored and decided to shoot Lane for “the fun of it.”
As Lane was white and the shooter black, racism has surfaced as a motive. Thursday came reports that killing a white man may have been an initiation rite for the black teens in joining some offshoot of the Crips or Bloods.
What happened in Oklahoma and the reaction, or lack of reaction to it, tells us much about America in 2013, not much of it good.
Teenagers who can shoot and kill a man out of summertime boredom are moral barbarians, dead souls.
But who created these monsters? Where did they come from? Surely one explanation lies in the fact that the old conscience-forming and character-forming institutions – home, church, school and a moral and healthy culture fortifying basic truths – have collapsed. And the community hardest hit is Black America.
Black mobs routinely terrorize cities across the country, but the media and government are silent. Read the detailed account of rampant racial crime in “White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Race Riots to America.”
If we go back to the end of World War II, 90 percent of black families consisted of a mother and father and children raised and disciplined by their parents. The churches to which these families went on Sundays were stronger. Black schools may have been largely segregated, but they were also the transmission belts of patriotism and traditional values rooted in biblical truths and a Christian faith.
Though such schools graduated hardworking, law-abiding and productive citizens, today they would be closed as unconstitutional.
Indeed, all of those character- and conscience-forming institutions of yesterday are in an advanced state of decline today.
Seventy-three percent of black kids are born to single moms. Black kids who make it to 12th grade may often be found reading at seventh-, eighth- or ninth-grade levels. In some cities the black dropout rate can hit as high as 50 percent.
Drugs are readily available. And among black males ages 18 to 29, in urban areas, often a third are in prison or jail, or on probation or parole, or walking around with a criminal record.
Where do the kids get their ideas of right and wrong, good and evil? In homes where the father is absent and the TV is always on. From radios tuned in to rap and hip-hop. From films where Hollywood values prevail and the shooting never stops. From street gangs that sometimes form the only families these kids have ever known.
Still, crime has fallen since 1990, we are told.
And so it has. But that is only because the baby boomers, the largest population cohort in our history, passed out of the high-crime age group a quarter of a century ago, and because the jail and prison population in America has tripled.
What kind of leadership do we see today in Black America?
What can be said for an NAACP that was lately demanding a Justice Department investigation of a rodeo clown running around a bull ring in rural Missouri in an Obama mask, but cannot find its voice to address a black-on-white atrocity in Middle America?
When Trayvon Martin was shot to death in a murky incident in Sanford, Fla., Jesse Jackson rushed there to declare: “Blacks are under attack. … Killing us is big business.” Trayvon was “shot down in cold blood by a vigilante … murdered and martyred.”
After Chris Lane’s cold-blooded murder, Jesse tweeted: This sort of thing is to be “frowned upon.”
If I had a son, said President Obama, he would have looked like Trayvon; 35 years ago, I could have been Trayvon. Can the president not find his voice to speak to the parents of Chris Lane?
Since Lyndon Johnson took office, 50 years ago, we have spent trillions on his programs for health care, housing, education, food stamps, welfare and civil rights. Are we living in that Great Society we were promised?
In that same decade, we were told that the social, cultural and moral revolution bursting forth on the campuses would rid us of the repressive old-time morality and Old Time Religion, and lead to a more equal, just, humane and better America, a beacon to mankind.
Yet, are not the killers of Chris Lane who shot him for the fun of it the “do-your-own-thing!” children of that cultural revolution?
The death of Trayvon was said to be reflective of the real America, a country where black folks live in constant fear of white vigilantes and white racist cops. What nonsense.
In the real America, interracial violence is overwhelmingly black-on-white. Even if the media will not report it, everybody knows it.
And journalists will not dig into the numbers that prove it, for the truth would undermine their ideology and contradict the narrative that governs and gives meaning to their lives.
For liberals, America is always “Mississippi Burning.” It just has to be that way.
Top Fake-Out of 2011
Looking back, 2011 was a year full of fake-outs. Political, sporting, and cultural fake-outs.
All of these failures to deliver left disillusioned people in their wakes. Some, like the Jerry Sandusky\Penn State sex abuse scandal, left a lot of hurt and disillusioned people in its wake, not to mention the abused boys who welcomed the miserable company into their sad world.
The top political fake-out has to be the Occupy Wall Street “movement.”
OWS is not really a movement in the sense that lots and lots of citizens belong to it and it is representative of some larger but still-quiet change coursing its way through the body politic. Heck, there might be a thousand people per state who actually participated in OWS-themed activities across America. Maybe not even a thousand people per state. Busing in professional activists and workers from across the country to protest sites is well documented. So maybe it’s 500 people per state?
We are talking about at most twelve thousand people out of a nation of 350 million, and maybe only six thousand people.
But you’d never know it from the media reporting on it. OWS and its clones in California, Ohio, Harrisburg, PA, and elsewhere had maybe a handful of people at any site except the actual Wall Street site of Zuccotti Park and the ever-ready-to-protest San Francisco. But the media treated these few people as though they were the harbingers of great change. Their violence, filthy living conditions, rapes, drug use, vandalism, incoherent rants, circular discussions, and racism were routinely ignored in reports by mainstream media outlets (on the other hand, new news outlets are sprouting up right and left, like infowars.com, as POV videoed interviews of OWS kids are posted to YouTube and other sites).
But despite the actual sparse numbers of actual participants, the once-vaunted Columbia University is now actually teaching a course called…”Occupy Wall Street.”
That’s right. Both an undergraduate and graduate level course on OWS will be taught at what was at one time one of the nation’s premier centers of higher education. No one at Columbia is really sure what will be taught in these courses, but I am willing to bet that the filth, drugs, rapes, violence, vandalism, racism, incoherence, sedition, treason, and slovenly behavior at OWS sites will not be part of the syllabus. Columbia University, like all other “Ivy League” schools, has now just dropped another notch in the estimation of middle class families looking for a good return on their investment in Little Jane and Johnny’s education.
But OWS will also live on as a “movement” to be studied, emulated, promoted.
Never mind that two years ago a pro-Second Amendment rally on the steps of Pennsylvania’s state capital that attracted 1,500 supporters from across the nation received zero mention in the local newspaper, the Patriot News, while mini protests of two to five people waving placards against the Iraq War (where have they been the past three years, one wonders) were routinely covered as though they actually represented some sizeable part of the population.
OWS does not represent many people in America. Maybe five percent, or ten percent in a really bad economy like we have now. But their friends in the mainstream media make sure that their voices and position in the news are amplified far beyond their actual numbers and importance to American political discourse and electoral outcomes.
OWS should be studied, as the biggest fake-out of 2011. And maybe one of the biggest fake-outs in American history.