Category: media and media people

Courage and Wisdom?

gun violence, gun control, law, mass shooting, 2nd Amendment, Donald Trump,

President Donald Trump responded to the weekend’s two shooting atrocities by decrying hatred and making five substantive proposals.

“They include tools to identify early warning signs in mass shooters, reducing the glorification of violence, reforming mental health laws, enacting ‘red flag’ laws to stop dangerous individuals from gaining access to firearms, and enacting the death penalty for mass murderers,” the Epoch Times summarizes.

But how useful are these?

The “early warning signs” of a criminal are often identical to grumpiness and even righteous indignation in others — “tools to identify” could easily serve as excuses for unwarranted meddling and worse.
Who would enforce lessening the “glorification of violence”? The federal government that is always at war?
Is it mental health laws that should be reformed, or the practice of putting whole generations of boys on Ritalin and worse . . . made especially ominous by the percentage of shooters on such drugs?
Denying “dangerous individuals . . . access to firearms” remains problematic under any semblance of due process and the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ principle.
Since “death by cop” is often one of the apparent goals of many would-be shooters, how much of a deterrent could death by sterile procedure actually be?

But if you are looking for even worse reactions, look beyond Trump. The Democrats took the occasion to raise funds.

And complain to the New York Times, which “changed a headline on its front page because it presented Trump in a neutral light,” reports independent journalist Tim Poole. “This was in response to far left activists and Democrats expressing shock and outrage and demanding everyone cancel their subscriptions to NYT over it.”

Ideological bias or old-fashioned market pressure?

If it is in tragedy that we find our greatest tests of courage and wisdom, the weekend’s shootings show a lot of political and media failure.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags 2nd Amendment, Donald Trump, gun control, gun violence, law, mass shooting

media and media people national politics & policies Popular

Birth of a Twitterstorm

Kamala Harris, race, debate, democratic, president, democracy,

“Kamala Harris is *not* an American Black. She is half Indian and half Jamaican,” tweeted Ali Alexander, a self-described black American activist, after the California Senator’s presidential debate performance. “I’m so sick of people robbing American Blacks (like myself) of our history.”*

On Friday, Donald Trump, Jr., retweeted Alexander’s tweet (before later deleting it). His traipsing into the details of Harris’s birth immediately sparked comparison to his father’s “birther attacks” suggesting that President Obama wasn’t born here.**

Seemingly, the entire Democratic presidential field was quick to condemn the tweet and Don Jr.’s retweet as “racist.” So did much of the media. Although months ago, CNN’s Don Lemon argued, “Jamaica is not America.”

The New York Times article identified Ali Alexander only as an “alt-right fringe figure” and “a member of a right-wing constellation of media personalities,” but nowhere informed readers he is African-American.

“This stuff about Harris, about her status, about her blackness,” Jason Johnson, politics editor of TheRoot.com, told Joy Reid on MSNBC, “that’s about black people.”

In fact, on Reid’s program back in February, Johnson was part of a discussion about the senator’s — gasp! — white husband. “She needs to find a strong black man advocate,” advised Tiffany Cross, co-founder and managing editor of The Beat DC. “Let’s just be candid,” Johnson remarked, “it’s not going to be her [white] husband.”

How important is the color of a person’s skin or their ancestry or the skin color of their spouse to that person’s fitness to be president?

It only matters to racists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* “Kamala Harris,” Alexander also pointed out, “comes from Jamaican Slave Owners.” True enough, but how is she responsible for what her ancestors did? Would it matter if she supported . . . reparations?

** For the record, Sen. Harris was born in Oakland, California, which was then and is still part of the United States of America.

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general freedom media and media people nannyism too much government

When Push Comes to Nudge

Ireland, global warming, authoritarian, totalitarian, control, climate,

Ireland’s prime minister — or “Taoiseach” — is enthusiastic. “Speaking at the launch of the Climate Action Plan in Grangegorman today,” the Independent reported last week, “Mr [Leo Eric] Varadkar said the government would establish a Climate Action Delivery Board in the Department of the Taoiseach to oversee its implementation.”

The plan will deeply affect “almost every aspect” of Irish life. “The Government plans to force petrol and diesel cars off our roads,” the Independent elaborates, “introduce new buildings regulations and change the school curriculum in a bid to counteract climate change.”

Though the scope of the effort is breathtaking, Mr. Varadkar pretends he is being oh-so-humble and cautious, “nudging” citizens rather than going for a “coercive” approach.

Typical politician’s whopper, of course. Higher taxes on fuel and plastics, banning oil and gas boilers in new buildings, forcing private cars off city roads — this is all force.

Pretending otherwise is something akin to a Big Lie.

And all in service to the cause of reducing “greenhouse gas emissions by two per cent a year each year for the next ten years.”

Varadkar says he is doing it for the young and at the behest of the young . . . who have been propagandized to believe “that the world will be destroyed in a climate apocalypse.”

Well, the Taoiseach didn’t use the word “propagandized,” and insists that disaster is “not inevitable, it can be stopped, action can be taken.”

But Ireland’s contribution to the planet’s “greenhouse gases” is negligible. If all the Irish held their breaths and keeled over for the cause, they wouldn’t make a carbon dioxide burp of a difference.

It is a power grab. Not anything like a “nudge.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture media and media people Popular

Gray Lady Commies

New York Times, communism, socialism, journalism, pandering, newspaper,

The New York Times has long leaned left. But is it really a stable Pisa-tower lean, at this point? It sure seems that, in recent years, the Gray Lady has gone extreme, abandoning its “respectable” center-left perch.

The change, economist Alex Tabarrok writes for FEE, appears to have happened “around 2010-2014,” when we can see “an inflection point” where phrases and buzzwords like “social justice” and “diversity and inclusion” increased in number in Times editorials and news stories.

Forget, for a moment, the why — is it demand side, with the paper trying to court Millennial readers; or supply side, a result of new hires out of journalism programs and other indoctrination factories; or a mixture of both? — and concern ourselves with how far will the Gray Lady go?

Communism, apparently.

Or, at least, “Automated Luxury Communism,” as identified in what may be the stupidest article to appear in any newspaper in years.

“The plummeting cost of information and advances in technology are providing the ground for a collective future of freedom and luxury for all,” the author asserts, upon the evidence of innovations he has identified as arising . . . in our capitalist mixed economy, chiefly in the market sector: lab-grown burgers and “molecular whiskey.”

It all smacks of a loafer’s Marxism, with robots and AI as the proles. I could explain this better had the author bothered to do any real work on his vision, but, unfortunately (?), he offers nothing but a “wouldn’t it be neat if” blog post.

That the Times’ placed on its front page.

I guess since Democratic pols are now calling themselves socialists, their lead thought organ must seize the advance guard position by going full commie.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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media and media people

It’s Aliens!

Why does corporate media report what it reports?

And neglect what it neglects?

From an article, yesterday, by Caitlin Johnstone, “Julian Assange is Reportedly Gravely Ill, and Hardly Anyone’s Talking About It,” we learn that Mr. Assange is too ill to speak. Since the U.S. Government has indicted him for espionage, you might think that this would be big news in America.

From major sources: crickets.

A few days earlier, friends noted that the Martin Luther King story, brewing in Great Britain, has received little notice on this side of the pond. New revelations about FBI spying on the much-honored civil rights leader, and also about the information gleaned from that spying, that is Reverend King’s alleged profligate sexual misconduct, sure seem like big stories.

But you know what is being seriously covered?

UFOs.

Yes, the subject that was pooh-poohed and pilloried by major media sources for decades has recently been getting major coverage from the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN and Fox News.

In the Post we are instructed that a “UFO is not necessarily an alien from another planet,” but by the end of that same Tuesday think piece, we read that we might have to consider that very bizarre possibility.

So, why is mainstream media mum about Assange and MLK but now so enthusiastic about UFOs?

Could it be because the Assange and King stories do not make our government look good, while the UFO story is part of a major plan* of “controlled disclosure”?

Of course, it might be just another round of disinformation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Dr. Hal Puthoff, in a lecture available on Vimeo, explains the plan in the course of discussing his work for the Department of Defense’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, as well as the more recent work of the To the Stars Academy, which has apparently organized the current media blitz.

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Tags alien, Assange, King, media, news

folly individual achievement media and media people

Bezos’s Big Breakaway

Something big may be about to happen.

Trump impeachment? Financial collapse? War with Iran? — each is all-too-likely, none desirable. But I am referring to space.

In The Economist, May 14th, we read of Jeff Bezos’s itch to live off-planet.

The article is “Amazon’s boss reckons that humanity needs an HQ2,” which tells us that on “May 9th the founder and boss of Amazon, who also runs Blue Origin, a private rocketry firm, unveiled plans for a lunar lander. ‘Blue Moon,’ as it is called, is just one phase of a bold plan to establish large off-world settlements.”

And then comes the obvious literary-cultural reference: “It is a vision ripped directly from 20th-century science fiction.”

Can we dismiss it as space opera, though? A number of major figures, not least of whom is Elon Musk (whose Space X has often been mentioned here), are talking seriously about near-term orbital, lunar, and Martian habitation.

It is hard to wrap my head around an imminent private space colony project. It has always been something for the indefinite future, not something I expected to see.

There remain scoffers, of course (and they may well be right), as well as more paranoid speculations — are the higher-ups, the most insidery of insiders, tipping their hand to a “breakaway civilization” event, perhaps to avoid worldwide catastrophe?

“People now have more information” than in the past, wrote Thomas M. Disch in The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World (1998), “and they are smarter, overall, as a consequence — even in those ways they choose to be dumb.”

I am keeping an open mind on whether Bezos’s proposed lunar colony is dumb or genius.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. The government is also jumping on board the Moon bandwagon, with the president floating a similar-to-Bezos schedule.

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