Posts Tagged → political
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
Even weather.com promotes fake news, fake science
The other day President Trump mocked the anti-science “climate change” political activism crowd when he tweeted about the need for some “global warming” to offset the record low temperatures descending upon America. He was joking, and mocking, but everything he does creates an opening for enemies of America to attack him.
So cue up the faux indignation and mocking responses in return.
Fake science and lame-ass blatant political activism miraging as news reporting came from everywhere: Business insider, Newsweek, The Independent (UK), CNN, New York Times, Yahoo, Vanity Fair, and many other political activism outlets that pose as news outlets, including, amazingly, weather.com.
Weather.com, you ask?
And the answer is sadly, Yes, even weather.com, which you would think is just about the weather. Turns out that even weather.com is fully in the tank for anti-scientific climate change political activism. The one article weather.com staff wrote actually seriously evaluated just what more “climate change” would mean for America and the planet, and how terrible it is that President Trump wants this.
Either leftist activists have no sense of humor, or they are such crazed activists that no matter what someone says, it must always be turned into a political debate and crisis and a nuclear bomb aimed at whomever it is they disagree with at that moment. I vote for leftists being crazed, because nothing else explains their behavior. And so, weather.com published a very serious-sounding article about Trump’s tweet worthy of something from that source of awesome satire, The Onion. The article actually purports to be about how Trump is both a bad person for wanting more global warming, and how global warming is nothing to laugh at.
So weather.com wants it both ways: Trump is bad, and stupid, and by the way, just in case he wasn’t serious, he shouldn’t joke, either.
Every other mainstream fake news outlet followed suit with variations on this same theme, Trump bad and stupid, and global warming must not be mocked.
What surprised me was just how politicized weather.com is (and Business Insider, for that matter, being that it is aimed at business people). So I submitted a comment on the weather.com feedback page:
“Your ridiculous article about President Trump calling for “global warming” was 100% political attack on the president and zero percent science. The president was obviously, plainly joking about having “more global warming” and your decision to treat his joke as something serious worthy of real analysis is either stupid or political activism by your website. I am guessing your article is political activism, because it criticizes the president as if his joke was meant to be serious. I object to weather.com politicizing the weather. I also object to weather.com relying on the opinion of politicized climate activists posing as academics, and then failing to obtain a balanced or opposing view from actual scientists who dispute human-caused climate. You are promoting a religious view, not a scientific view. At the very least human caused “climate change” is a nascent scientific subject to review and debate. Presenting it as settled is a subjective choice weather.com makes and thus, your credibility is damaged. Please leave politics out of your weather reporting. It certainly alienates me from wanting to use your web page or service.”
And then I went further into weather.com and discovered entire sections of the website devoted to climate change fraud, and slickly packaged.
Why is it fraud? Because their assertion of human-caused climate change rests almost entirely on the provably false notion that “all scientists agree” that climate science is “settled.”
A) There is no such thing as climate science, and what science there is about climate change is all over the place. Real science is hardly ever “settled,” and it becomes settled then only after a long, robust and transparent debate. This kind of debate has not happened with climate change, because a great deal of it being politicized (“everyone says this is settled, so shut up”).
B) Scientists who have studied weather, climate, forestry, ecology, meteorology etc have come down all over the place. There is no universal agreement among scientists. Asserting there is universal agreement is like politics or religion. Leap of faith, or leap of belief in political outcomes.
So, add weather.com to the long list of political actors masquerading as scientists and humble service providers.
Duly noted!
Politics over weather science:
Science Denier Chuck Todd Declares NBC a Heretic-Free-Zone
In the 1600s, the Catholic Church was on a roll with great momentum. The church’s Great Inquisition was well under way, as a money making venture and as a barbaric instrument of terror, coercing both potentially wayward believers and outright non-believers back into a dark corner, out of fear of physical torture, financial ruin, or burning alive at the stake. Due process and the rule of law were not yet concepts the church embraced outside of a small group of inner circle elitists.
This is the world that early scientists like Galileo and Copernicus stepped into, and where they met with the buzz saw of censorship. This is an old and well-known story from the church’s dark days, and it will not be repeated in detail here. It is mentioned, however, for the benefit of its irony: Today, openly partisan political propagandists like Chuck Todd of NBC “news” have set themselves up as the new church censors, deciding what is truth and what may not be said, for fear of upsetting a political arrangement of things he favors.
Chuck Todd has declared that no heretics will be permitted in his presence. His true goal is to shame and coerce non-believers into submission, out of fear of retribution and ruin.
Like the 1600s church censor before him, Giancito Stefani, the “Master of the Sacred Palace,” Chuck Todd has now declared that no person will be allowed on his NBC television show who defies or questions politically correct dogma, that being human-caused “climate change.”
Not even real scientists who have actually studied climate change are welcome! Really!
Chuck Todd and his coercive brethren today are like the 1630 church fathers; they have the same anti-science goal of control and censorship. In 1630, the church fathers were quite certain that scientists Galileo and Copernicus were way off base, that their ideas were heretical, and that those ideas must be declared haram, off-limits, unwelcome, wrong, banned, and unacceptable. Galileo was to be stopped at any cost. His ideas were dangerous.
To a certain political arrangement of things the church favored.
Similarly, Chuck Todd asserts that climate science is and has been settled, and that is that, he says. It shall not be questioned, he says. Not on his TV show, and, he hopes, not on anyone else’s TV show, either.
Chuck Todd name-calls people who disagree with the idea or claims of human-caused climate change “climate deniers.” This is a fancy name for ‘heretic’. The irony is that Chuck Todd and his co-believers are science deniers, because they deny the scientific refutations of human-caused climate change, and because there is absolutely no science behind the climate change belief Chuck Todd espouses; he and they will permit no actual science to contradict what is essentially a faith belief he and they have.
As if real science is ever settled. The whole point of real science is that it is an ongoing open, transparent enterprise of search and study, curiosity and analysis. Subjects that were once said to be dreamy fairy tales and heresy are today concrete fact.
The problem with human-caused climate science is that it is not transparent, it has been completely politicized, and it is almost 100% built on flawed computer modeling, which is something I know a lot about.
Much of the raw data fed into the computer models has been faked, and the models themselves contain a lot of sloppy methodology (e.g. certain variables are artificially heavily weighted while other variables’ importance are diminished, without any proof of why or how the decision was made).
The East Anglia University scandal is just one example of the complete corruption surrounding climate science.
Recently, Aaron Doering (see his official mugshot below), a purported “climate change expert” professor at the University of Minnesota, was charged with felonious beating the hell out of his girlfriend. Why did this saintly professor strangle his girlfriend? Why, only because she dared to challenge his views. And that right there is the summation of science-denying climate change advocates: Stand them up to scrutiny, and they will lay you down with coercion and violence, because they cannot stand to be challenged or questioned. Bullies, all of them, Doering, Chuck Todd et al.
Pseudo professor Aaron Doering likes beating up women who question “climate change”
An example of how established science changes is how the initial dominance of Einstein’s relativity physics resulted in a rejection of later quantum physics. Because for years the two were considered mutually exclusive, and scientists favored Einstein’s physics, which were already well established (the giant mushroom cloud thingy is pretty persuasive Einstein knew what he was talking about). But as quantum physics began to find its way forward with huge particle accelerators that defied what we thought we knew about atomics, Einstein’s relativity physics had to give way. It isn’t that one or the other is proven right or wrong; it is that both appear to be correct and we do not yet know enough about how that can be true, when both are operating on mutually exclusive rules.
So here is Chuck Todd, not a scientist, picking sides in an ongoing scientific debate without any scientific training himself, and without having held a scientific debate to educate his viewers, and using his position to squash dissent and ideas he does not like. This is because he is most loyal to the politics of human-caused climate change. No surprise there, but hey, let’s just say what needs to be said.
A tattered old bumper sticker my friend John Johnson has on his pickup truck says “Liberal ideas: So good they have to be required.”
The flip side of John’s bumper sticker is that totalitarians like Chuck Todd and Aaron Doering are so insecure about the truth of their views that they must censor all contrary arguments. Like almost all others in his establishment media, Chuck Todd bans his critics because he cannot withstand basic scrutiny.
But if the church is any indication, there is hope for Chuck Todd. Fast forward from the bad old days, and the church became an irreplaceable cornerstone of Western Civilization; without its Biblical values, there would be no universal truths or individual rights that make America so great today. The church just had to look inward and answer some basic questions about freedom, liberty, individual conscience, and then everything else fell into place.
And as unjustifiably confident as Chuck Todd is in public, he must have a spark of curiosity buried somewhere in his conscience. A normal person would.
Chuck Todd and Aaron Doering and all other liberals are envious of the Catholic Grand Inquisition’s ability to burn “heretics” alive
Our modern Salem Witch Trials in 2018
Back in the 1690s, Salem, Massachusetts, was the home of notorious intrigue involving witchcraft (following a similar hunt for “witches” throughout Europe). In the end, twenty innocent people from Maine to Massachusetts were executed, and as a result a great deal of changes were made in judicial procedure.
Much has been written about the Salem Witch Trials, so its history will not be repeated here. But the way it happened is instructive, because we like to think that today, in our modern age and nation, nothing like it could happen. And yet, the same thing is happening now, only under political guises.
The essence of the Salem witch trials is that a person would become suspect as a “witch” simply upon someone’s baseless accusation, with some finger pointing and rumor mongering. The accusation could have its genesis in not liking someone’s personality, a personal feud, not agreeing with them on some minor point or other, or on financial matters. Then a howling mob would be ginned up, assemble, and demand that the “witch” be killed.
At best a show trial would be arranged, in which the “witch” would have an opportunity to defend herself (occasionally himself) against baseless accusations, including the testimony of ghosts. There was no real evidence, just accusations and whipped up emotional fervor. Most accused witches died, with the survivors being those who admitted to their guilt and begged forgiveness.
Here at the end of the most modern age of 2018, which is some 330 years after all the witch hysteria business in Salem, one would like to think we are in an advanced mental, scientific, and legal state, not prone to supporting howling mobs seeking immediate retribution for some wild accusation without any evidence. And yet, you would be wrong about that. It seems that we are just about where Germany was in the late 1920s: A nation too big, too successful, too advanced to fail. And yet, Germany did fail, spectacularly, and with enormous costs.
Looking back over 2018, we have seen the same kind of behavior that caused and surrounded the Salem witch trials: In a sea of literal hysteria and insane cries, wails, and screeches of people clawing at the doors of the Supreme Court and the US Senate, Justice Kavanaugh was falsely accused of things he obviously never did (two of his accusers have since recanted); President Trump is blamed for every little thing that could possibly be construed to be wrong; people who disagree with political extremists are called “climate deniers” amid calls for their execution or incarceration by professors and professionals. Even the Koch brothers, with whom I share only some views, are demonized by the Left the way Germany’s Jews were demonized by the Nazis.
All of this political persecution relies on the presumption of guilt rather than of innocence, and the use of simple accusations and whipped up hysteria. Nothing good can come of it, and yet America has one political party dedicated to this approach of resolving political differences.
Apparently, at least half of America is made up of “witches.”
Fragile cry-bullies
While visiting friends the other day, one of their 20-something-year-old kids gave me and the other adults an earful on the Kavanaugh hearings.
“I am insulted that you will not believe a woman who claims she was drugged and raped by Kavanaugh,” she said.
Her mother said “Well, now wait, I do not recall hearing anything about drugs and rape.”
And I said “Ford has zero credibility, and in fact she has done more damage to women’s rights with her obviously false and politically motivated accusation than all the supposedly sexist anti-female men out there could ever do. Ford has set back real future women victims, who will now be greeted with skepticism as a result of all this crying wolf business with Kavanaugh.”
To which the kind-of-young person responded “Well, I, I, I, I don’t like this conversation,” and upstairs she went.
Backtrack a few weeks and I was listening to NPR on one of my regular road trips. On this particular NPR propaganda show, the subject being interviewed was a professor at NYU. He is writing a book about how emotionally and intellectually “fragile” the younger generation has become. How they are unable to confront dissent and disagreement with logic and reason, and how if they cannot bully an opponent into submission, and if they cannot cry an opponent into submission, then they give up and go off and suck their thumb.
This is a bit of a shortened summation, but what I write here is pretty close to what the professor said.
And he said it as a proud and politically active liberal. He is not criticizing young crybully leftists because he disagrees with them. Rather, he is afraid that they cannot persuade people in arguments, and that if they cannot shame or force people to agree with them, then they have nothing left and they then cede the field to the opponent.
My own recent experience with my dear friends’ kid reinforced the professor’s observations.
And even more to the point, when a young crybully takes a willful and wild leap from two 17-year-olds fooling around in high school or college to one being drugged and raped (no one has said that about Kavanaugh), and how dare anyone question it, then much more is at stake than the ability to argue reasonably.
What is at stake is the ability to be truthful, to be honest, and to concede when one’s own ideas are proven wrong.
What is driving a great deal of the current Democrat warmongering against poor Mister Kavanaugh is that the Democrats cannot persuade people with ideas. So they must destroy people, instead.
This ain’t the democratic way, folks.
College professors teaching kids to be crybullies who shame and punch their way into winning arguments is not going to succeed.
Chautauqua Institution’s Destruction
Chautauqua Institution was once a fine place to visit, many years ago.
It was safe, quiet, full of interesting people reading books or lecturing about the most recent book they had written. The on-site opera and orchestra provided just about everyone with any artistic taste with something.
Decades later, it has been completely taken over by the same people who have targeted every other American institution for capture and control, or destruction.
Chautauqua is now a summertime parade of communists, bigots, America haters, partisan political activists. Each speaker is treated to lavish welcome ceremonies as if they are the most gifted thinker on Planet Earth, when in fact they are the meanest, most close-minded political street brawlers in America.
The place reeks of radical, angry politics everywhere you turn. The air is poisonous with hate and tension, but always sold as love and open-mindedness.
I think the institution is still physically safe, for now, but my own kids have this sense that all is not well there. They have grown up going there every summer, and they report back feeling that same tension that anyone with different views feels there now. Unwelcome.
The last time I was there, or one of the last times, I sat at the Amp for a lecture by Donna Brazile. Of course she was presented as some kind of open-minded Deep Thinker, when in fact she is a narrowly partisan fighter and proven liar. Brazile helped fix Hillary’s illegal cheating “win” over Bernie Sanders in the Democrat primary.
When Brazile spoke that day, the entire Amp was a cheering section for the lady. There used to be rules against cheering or clapping for speakers, but the hyper partisan activists who now populate and run Chautauqua observe the same kind of rules on decorum as they do the laws they disdain for border security and illegal aliens living in “sanctuary” cities. That is, they make the rules as they go.
Having just received some emails from one of the Chautauqua administrators, I had to write this. The guy is either a huge liar, or a huge fool. To assert that Chautauqua Institution is anything but a far-left training camp and summertime re-education society is to deny the obvious reality as reflected in the speakers they invite, the speakers they DISINVITE, and all of the other far-Left programming there.
The CHQ administrators purposefully exclude alternative views they disagree with, even though CHQ is supposed to be all about alternative views. “Dissent” and “dialogue” is only acceptable from those who agree with the CHQ administrators and their partisan, liberal guest voices. This means that Chautauqua is an artificial, fabricated environment. Reality is concealed. Stealth is their way.
I understand the mindset of Liberals. I grew up with them. Liberals are very close-minded and very, very uncomfortable sharing any kind of space – physical, emotional, or intellectual – with anyone else. Let’s face it, Liberals are the very angry, hate-filled bigots they always said they were against. Chautauqua now perfectly represents that hateful culture, and the people now drawn to it and most happy there are like-minded tyrants and control freaks. Zero tolerance for opposing views.
And no, CHQ’s in-house “conservative” David Brooks is not a conservative. He is a RINO Republican, a moderate, which means he is pretty much a liberal. But he is there so the institution can falsely claim to cover all philosophical corners.
Please, spare us the visibly false claims and the pretensions to openness. Like the Boy Scouts of America, the education profession, academia, the media, Disney, and almost all other once-great institutions, Chautauqua Institution has been overthrown and captured by bigoted political partisans, who have now bent the place to their warped purposes.
Everyone have a nice summer. It won’t be at CHQ for me. The Chautauqua of my youth has been destroyed.
OK, call me a Whig
For those like me who are bothered by the simplistic, almost child-like identity politics of partisan political party identification, there is always the third way out: Independent.
True to its name, being an Independent means that one is much less driven by one-dimensional partisan interests, and much more broadly politically driven, by more philosophical interests.
Oh please, don’t kid yourself that the Democrats and the Republicans today represent philosophical strands of thought on government involvement in the lives of the citizenry. That is a joke.
Both main political parties, Ds and Rs, are each practically wholly-owned subsidiaries of their respective special interest groups. Because I believe in economic freedom, among other things, I am more drawn to the Rs than the Ds, who have now pretty much openly embraced socialism.
Socialism is the opposite of economic freedom, and socialism requires tremendous inroads into personal freedom to achieve its artificial “income equality” outcome. The Ds have completely thrown in with the communists, the socialists, the chaotic ANTIFA, and the 1%-ers like George Soros who fund all the anarchic, violent, anti-America street melees. If you like your doctor, you will not be able to keep your doctor, as the previous ANTIFA president demonstrated, despite his lies to the contrary. There is nothing here with this group or amalgamation of groups for the average American family trying to get by comfortably and live a simple, happy life.
However, there are plenty of Rs who are D-lite. Call them RINOs, GOPe, whatever, they are part of an established, elite political class who have elevated themselves above the broad interests of the citizen taxpayer. Their interests are narrowly economic and even more narrowly financial. Big corporations, the Koch Brothers, US senator Mitch McConnell’s big and financially rewarding ties to the Chinese government, the various guises of the Chamber of Commerce, etc.; all seeking to funnel as much financial gain into as few big pockets as possible. At the cost of Americans’ freedom now and future liberty.
Like the Ds, this GOPe group also tries to manipulate national policy for personal gain, with open borders and no checks on the el-cheapo labor force that comes with a huge cultural and school tax price tag. Obviously the GOPe has little in common with the interest of The People, either, though more economic freedom can be found here than with the Ds. Nevertheless, the GOPe RINOs are not really committed to defending citizen freedom and liberty.
Thus the demand for the Independent identity. The problem with the Independent Party is that it is frozen out of many states, where there is a bi-partisan death grip on electoral process. If there is one thing both Ds and Rs can agree on, it is that they and they two alone must control, if only occasionally share, political power and outcomes for everyone else.
This is why there is so much collusion and bi-partisan deal making in places like Pennsylvania, where our closed Primary artificially limits voter choice. Being an Independent in most places, like Pennsylvania, means one cannot really vote in a meaningful way in the primary election, arguably when votes matter most.
If the Republican Party of the 1860s was the vehicle for the great Abolitionist movement, much of that great spirit is now gone. Obviously. Oh yes, we have the congressional Freedom Caucus, a refreshing group of patriots and individualists. But they are largely outnumbered by the corporatists within their own party.
And never mind that the Ds demand their minorities aka modern-day slaves remain and vote on the Democrat Plantation, just like they did in the old days. And that everyone else fall in line with their autocratic control schemes. Or else.
I do not identify as a Democrat and probably never will again (to do so would be like gleefully standing by the road screaming “Heil Hitler” in 1930s Germany as the latest Democrat Socialist Messiah drove by), so trying to figure them out is a waste of time.
So, I am now reaching and looking farther back in time for a political identity, back to more philosophical times, to when big ideas had relevance to everyday lives. And in that past I find the old British Whig Party actually captures my current philosophical views.
The Whigs of the 1700s-1800s believed in spreading political power and decision-making to the citizenry as broadly as possible.
The Whigs believed in Abolitionism, the movement to abolish slavery. Plenty of economic and financial gain at stake there, so it was a truly principled stand in the meanest sense.
The Whigs believed in a parliamentary monarchy, which was radical at the time. Though the Magna Carta had been written and signed by the British king so many centuries before, its notions of freedom, representative government, and due process for the average citizen only took a few centuries to refine and percolate up and out to the point where the monarch’s absolute grip on power was actually, truly challenged by erstwhile representatives of The People.
That slow progress also involved a couple civil wars that were spiced nicely with religious feuding. Lots of heads rolling in the streets, families burning at the stake…what the Chinese call “exciting times.”
So given they had witnessed the great evil and cruelty carried out in the name of official religious control and power, the Whigs were naturally against the establishment of all religious tests for citizens, and against an official, established state religion. On this score they eventually lost, as Anglicanism is now the official state religion of Britain.
Similarly, Scotland has the Church of Scotland as its official place of worship. Not that either of these churches are very Christian nor pro-Western today. The Whigs correctly viewed official religions as being against the interests of the People, and nowhere is that more evident than in the Church of England’s official anti-West, anti-freedom do-gooder political meddling.
In short, Britain’s Whigs were non-conformists who believed in a third way: diffuse political power, as opposed to centralized power. They promoted economic freedom and individual liberty for all, including for the lowest slave.
British history and people may appear rather blase and boring to today’s casual reader, but rest assured it was nothing of the sort. An overabundance of violent civil wars resulted in the seemingly placid society one enjoyably visits today.
As a result, the Whig party was transcendent for almost two centuries. With its enlightened philosophical views came maximum freedom and opportunity for the greatest number of Britons, ever. Many Whig views found their way into the American Constitution.
Given the anti-citizen Uni-Party political establishment here in America, the weakness of the Independent Party, and my own Constitutionalist views, I am mighty tempted to join the 1700s Whigs. At least they stand for something real and valuable.
And what does it say that in 2018 we must now reach back to the early 1700s Britain to reconnect with our greatest individual rights and needs in 21-st century America?
The real NFL stats
The other day a political website overflowing with the typical hatred for the current president published a supposedly carefully analyzed essay that boasted the NFL is doing just fine, despite the NFL’s politicization and the current president’s subsequent criticisms of that politicization.
Though supposed to be a careful numbers analysis, the essay was full of personal invective against the president. It is a hint that the numbers argument is not strong enough to stand on its own.
This essay stated that current NFL advertising payments demonstrate the NFL is in full financial health; that there is no measurable financial result from the NFL’s politicization or the public disputes and discourteous behavior many of its employees have shown toward average Americans and the US president.
In short, the NFL is doing fine with the American people and President Trump has no traction.
It was the kind of article that I had to read three times over to ensure that the writer really meant what he wrote. And in fact, he did mean it, and yet it is just another example of how just about everything has been politicized, and how anything that can be politicized to score a point will be so used. Even if it is so obviously factually wrong.
Never mind that this week’s New Yorker magazine has a front cover showing a dead, bleeding Donald Trump at the bottom of an escalator. That is obvious bias and unhinged crazy (imagine if it had been the past president so portrayed). What is more intriguing is when someone reaches into a random numbers hat and tries to make a coherent argument, as the subject essay did, and pass it off as careful logic.
The problem with arguing that the NFL is doing great! fantastic! so there! based on current advertising payments is that those payments are not directly connected to actual league performance. Those ad numbers are heavily indexed and fixed long ago to past data and calculations of expected market performance. Long before Colin Kaepernick started his anti-America kneeling thing. Long before the NFL was politicized.
The cited NFL numbers are heavily lagged, meaning they reflect past, not present or even close to present performance. Also, these ad numbers are relative to other markers/ variables that are either unrelated to NFL performance or are fixed. This means they either cannot or likely will not change due to NFL performance for a long time. This means the market-driven financial fallout from the politicized NFL’s self-inflicted damage is yet to be tallied or measured by the sectors being cited by the essay (unless you are looking at short-term sales of NFL merchandise, which has been yo-yo-ing for the past two years, or half-empty NFL stadiums and unbelievably low game ticket sales, as one would expect as a result of the NFL’s politicization and purposeful alienation of at least half of America).
Using the advertising measures in that political essay in a logical way, an actual analysis in five years would be appropriate. That would catch the standard market-based reevaluation of the NFL’s actual performance. And that probably won’t be a happy situation; certainly nothing for political writers to crow about. I am willing to bet that the NFL will be in real trouble in five years, as a result of openly disrespecting their audience and market.
I conclude this by looking at the most telling, most relevant statistics: Low ticket sales, half-filled stadiums, NFL merchandise sales way down, measurable TV-broadcast NFL game viewership down.
But by then the essay in question will be long forgotten, because almost all such essays are done for their immediate effect. That is, they are trying to create an appearance, a narrative, with the simple goal of damaging and reducing the president’s current polling numbers among his supporters. Accuracy, facts, numbers do not matter. And no one else in the legacy media will call them out on their inaccuracy, anyhow.
Essays based on numbers written by politicos who are ignorant about numbers and markets are not really, truly, meant to persuade people that the numbers are meaningful. Rather, high-churn essays like this are simply meant to score temporary political points. Just like the vast majority of the US establishment legacy media. It is just another angle, that’s all.
Stzroke Stzrike Three, You are OUT
Turns out criminal FBI agent Peter Stzrok III is actually not an FBI agent. Not really. Not in the sense that he worked at the FBI all his career.
Peter Stzrok III is a CIA agent who also served as the envoy to Iran for the Obama administration. He worked closely under former CIA director John Brennan. The FBI is just his latest DC insider gig. Peter Stzrok grew up in Iran.
Peter Stzrok III is a 100% political operative who has been given the very highest secret clearances to the most important American policy and defense secrets and policies.
And he is 100% pro-Iran… as in pro-Khameini, pro-Shia (Shiite), pro- radical Islam terrorism-exporting modern day Iran. This is why he was used as the Obama Administration’s envoy to Iran. It is one of the reasons the Obama Administration airlifted $1.4 BILLION in CASH to Tehran. It is one of the reasons the Obama Administration ENABLED Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Peter Stzrok’s father, Peter Stzrok II, also known as Peter Stzrok, Sr., was also an American double agent. He was deeply involved in all kinds of anti-American foreign actions, while being employed as an American agent.
When people complain about a “deep state” rooted in American government, Peter Stzrok III is the Exhibit A. What is now coming to light is a sickening realization that America’s government has been infiltrated by our worst enemies, and they use their taxpayer-funded positions to work against American interests.
Along comes Donald Trump putting America first, and all hell breaks loose.
Stzrok’s emails, texts and memos make it clear that he had plenty of co-conspirators in the FBI and DOJ helping him derail the incoming Trump Administration with a slew of false accusations and fake legal investigations.
This is Stzrike Three against Peter Stzrok, and it is high time this man be arrested, interrogated, and a long and serious investigation begin into how a crook like Robert Mueller got so close to up-ending and leading a coup against a newly elected president.