the same people

The thing you have to remember is that the members of the mainstream media are basically the same people as the members of the Democrat party establishment. In some cases, in fact, they're exactly the same people, e.g., George Stephanopoulos, who was Bill Clinton's press secretary and is now an anchor for ABC News. But in general, these people have gone to the same colleges; they live in the same neighborhoods of New York, Washington, LA, and San Francisco; they go to the same parties; they intermarry; and their kids go to the same private schools. Is it any wonder then that the mainstream media parrot the Democrat establishment party line? They're the same people!

silicon valley ubi

I note that a number of these Silicon Valley titans are in favor of UBI-- a  universal basic income. It strikes me that these people have a very high level of a certain type of intelligence-- mathematical/logical ability-- but that they're not particularly politically sophisticated. These people are the intellectual One Percent, or even the One Tenth of One Percent, and they simply don't understand 'ordinary people.' My guess is that they basically consider the vast mass of humanity as low-grade ore who will eventually be replaced by robots or algorithms of some sort. So their idea is just to buy these folks off in the hope that after a while they'll see the handwriting on the wall and simply stop reproducing.

literature

For some time now, I've had the sneaking suspicion that literature-- fiction, poetry, drama-- is what people who are no good at math do with their brains.

planetarianism vs. imperialism

In my beleaguered mind, there are two big-picture ways of looking at the world: the planetary point of view, as exemplified in my 'planetarian blog,' and one that looks back to the great European empires of the nineteenth century and even to great non-European empires of the past. This blog, 'Flyoverlandia,' favors this latter view. It's a more romantic, emotion-laden view of things than the Enlightenment-based planetarian view.

World War I was the great disaster for the European empires. True, they sputtered on and finally received their death blows in World War II. By the 1950s and '60s, Britain and France were divesting themselves of these overseas possessions wholesale, although not always peaceably.

I could see a return to these empires, and some others, in the coming decades. It would have to be done on a looser and more reciprocal basis, of course, but I could see major economic and even political links between the old imperial capitals and their former possessions emerging in the years ahead. This would include not only Britain and France, but Spain, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Portugal in Europe, plus the United States (North America, the Philippines), India, China, and Japan.

who cares?

I get very tired of news reports about what this or that celebrity 'thinks' about something. It reminds me of a statistic I came across years ago. People were polled as to  what celebrities they followed avidly. At the top of the list was Madonna, who was then at the apex of her stardom. Yet only 8% of those polled said they followed her career and pronouncements with great interest. Eight percent!

So when I hear some late-night talk show host quoted on this or that subject, I ask, 'Who cares.?' The fact is, even the most popular of these people only gets a couple million viewers a night-- this in a country of a third of a billion people! Why should anybody else care what these people 'think'-- and why is the media bothering to tell us?

npc

Twitter tried to ban these so-called 'NPC' memes, but they still seem to be all over the place:

why the disconnect?

I want to make sure the US remains a first-world country. Two aspects of this come to mind:

1. The primacy of science. We're the country that put a man on the Moon, after all. Any first-world country has to have a culture steeped in science and a population conversant with basic scientific method. Right?

2. We need an educated, skilled workforce. To get this, we need an immigration system based on merit, rather than family ties or just the ability to make it across the Rio Grande. Right?

So why is it that the two major parties don't support both of these things? The Democrats are all for science, acknowledging the reality of climate change, etc., but they seem to want to let anybody into the country who wants to come here and can make it across the border, legally or not. The Republicans, on the other hand-- or at least the Trump contingent among them-- want a meritocratic immigration system but remain willfully ignorant of climate change-- and probably evolution, for that matter.

I want both. Why isn't there a party for people like me?

they'll make a republican of me yet

Will wonders never cease? A Republican carbon tax? I know it's hard to believe, but here it is, put forward by the Climate Leadership Council headed by Reagan-era luminaries George Shultz and James Baker, backed by Larry Summers, Christine Todd Whitman, and Janet Yellen. They don't call it a tax, of course, but a 'fee' or something. That's what it is, though.

https://www.clcouncil.org/

Now if the Republicans could just come up with a semi-rational health care plan, I might be forced to convert.

old white guys

I get a little tired of the media constantly referring to 'old white men' as if they're part of a dying breed of dinosaurs. They're at it again with this Kavanaugh brouhaha, referring to these Republican senators as OWMs. It might behoove the media to remember that at one time these guys were YWMs, the kind of people who built this country. And with the experience of age, they might actually have learned a thing or two.

It might also behoove the media to be reminded that at present there are no civilized, prosperous first-world black or Hispanic societies anywhere. There is no Wakanda, and frankly I don't see one on the horizon.

kavanaugh

I view these allegation about Brett Kavanaugh as basically ridiculous, even if there's some truth to them. I mean really, who cares what a couple drunk teenagers may or may not have done for a few minutes 35 years ago?

I find there's a much more serious charge against Kavanaugh that in my view should definitely keep him off the Supreme Court: the fact that he's a member of this tribe of overprivileged, spoiled-brat East Coast preppies. I don't want these people running  my country, thenkyo. They care much more about preserving the perks and privileges of their class than they do about sound governance of a population they view with barely disguised contempt.

And then there's the other question: Is the guy a drunk?

literature

I don't think literature-- fiction, poetry, drama-- is nearly as central to our culture as it was even when I was a child. The high point of the novel was probably the nineteenth century. Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy: These were tremendously influential figures in their cultures-- centrally influential. And in this country it sputtered on into the mid-twentieth century-- Fitzgerald, Mailer, Bellow (I never liked Roth). But today? I'd say Jonathan Franzen is arguably the best known serious novelist in the country-- and even that's due largely to Oprah-- but is he really a very influential figure in our culture? I don't think so. I think fiction is kind of going the way of what used to be called 'fine art'-- an incestuous little loop of producers and consumers. Have you noticed how much writing today is just . . . about writing?

And surely nobody cares about poetry. Why, for example, does this country have a poet laureate? The British had one so Alfred Lord Tennyson could write birthday ditties for Queen Victoria, but I doubt one American in a hundred could tell you who our current poet laureate is. I can't.

As for drama, I can only speak personally. I don't go to the theater. I don't go to movies. I don't even have a television set. What am I missing?

Our culture today is some combination of market forces, technology, and public policy. Literature doesn't have a whole lot to do with it.

the trouble with modern life

The trouble with modern life is that it's too fast. There's not enough time to think things through. This is even true in academe. Publish or perish! Everything is too rushed.

'Make America Great Again'

We are the country that put a man on the moon. Let’s get back to being that country.

GOTCHA!

Is it just me? Why do I get the feeling that this brouhaha over child separation at the border is just another ‘Gotcha!’ attempt by the Democrat-media complex to derail, first, the Trump candidacy and now the Trump presidency. The thing is, it’s just such a naked attempt to manipulate people’s emotions. ‘Trump Hates the Chilluns!’ Omigod. I think most people are smart enough to realize that this is a secondary issue. The important question is: Do you want this massive influx of illegal aliens across our southern border to continue? To that question, the overwhelming majority of Americans respond with a resounding ‘No.’

So if the Dem/media types think this issue is going to take them through the midterm elections, I think they’ve got their heads up their rear ends. In the first place, Trump has already taken most of the wind out of their sails with this executive order, although they’ll no doubt find some related aspects of this to keep bitching about. What they really want, of course, is for these families to be released into the general American population—in effect, an open-borders policy for these people. Make it across the Rio Grande, and you’re home free. They’d never have the guts to admit this, of course, because they realize most people totally disagree with them. But that’s what they really want.

And then there’s the sneaking suspicion that these people care more about illegal aliens than they do about Americans. After all, there are over a million American children separated from their parents who are in jail or prison. Have you heard a peep of concern about them? Of course not.

So my feeling is that this will fade as we move along toward November, that this will recede just like the Access Hollywood tape and Stormy Daniels and all the rest of them. ‘Gotcha!’ . . . not.

two simple questions

Q: If an American citizen is charged with a crime, is she separated from her children?
A: Yes. She is put in jail awaiting trial, and the children are brought under the wing of a child protective agency and usually put in some kind of institutional setting.

Q: Should illegal aliens be treated more leniently than American citizens?
A: No.

geopolitics

Immigration is the one issue I agree with Trump on. We need to control who's coming into this country; we need to be bringing in people with education and skills that will benefit us as well as them. Anybody who thinks it's a good idea for us to allow in millions of illiterate peasants from Mexico and Central America just because they can make it across the Rio Grande ought to have his head examined.

That said, it seems to me that we ought to be paying a lot more attention to these countries-- our neighbors, after all-- than we do. We should pay a lot less attention to the Middle East-- where, IMHO, we're basically on the side of the Bad Guys. What the hell are we doing in Afghanistan after 17 bleepin' years? And Iraq? A war we should never have instigated in the first place. Instead, we should be concentrating our efforts on trying to help our neighbors become prosperous, orderly societies-- first-world countries-- whose people would be perfectly content to stay where they are.

hollywood and hookups

This Harvey Weinstein business brings to mind a thought that's been growing in my mind about Hollywood and its influence on our popular culture. Weinstein was hardly unusual in the Hollywood culture; he was hardly the exception to the rule. No, he was emblematic of that culture. It's just that he was such a powerful figure that he was able to bend more women to his will. But this promiscuous 'hookup' attitude is the sexual subculture of Hollywood. This is the 'casting couch' culture. It's nothing new, people have known about it for decades.

What's relatively new is Hollywood's attempt to foist this culture on the rest of us, to tell us that this should be the 'new normal' in matters sexual. I think they're wrong about this. I don't think this is really what people want, and young people in particular, and young women especially.

I think there should be clubs in colleges, high schools, maybe even middle schools called, simply, 'Monogamy.' I think monogamy is really what most kids want, especially if their parents seem to have successful marriages. These clubs would be totally voluntary, not affiliated with any religion, but the kids who join them would basically be saying, 'I want to find a life partner with whom to have children and a family. I'm not interested in promiscuous sex.' The hookup culture tries to pressure girls, in particular, into having casual sex when they may not want that at all. 'Monogamy' would be a cultural alternative that would allow these young people to avoid that pressure.

our neighbor to da nort

This Samantha Bee brouhaha brings to mind a thought I've been nurturing for some time now about Canada. I think the seed of this thought was planted in my mind in the wake of Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's 'Handmaid's Tale.' The idea is that Canadian claims to moral and intellectual superiority over us are really based on something entirely different, to wit: the fact that we've got, you know, California and Florida whereas they're left with the likes of, ah, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In other words, it's basically sour grapes.

nyc haywire

New York Mayor Bill De Blasio has come up with a truly awful plan to impose virtual racial quotas on the city's top examination schools. It seems there aren't enough blacks and latinos at these schools, because not enough of them do well on the rigorous entrance exams. (Unspoken, of course, is that there are too many Asians at these schools, where they typically make up well over half of the student population.)

We need to be making sure that the brightest kids get the education they need. Affirmative action quotas for these schools create only the illusion of ability, and the result will be that the good students at these schools will inevitably be slowed down while the quota students try to keep up. A terrible, self-destructive idea that will produce predictably horrible results.

https://nypost.com/2018/06/05/de-blasios-latest-bad-idea-will-hurt-citys-elite-schools/

he, her, hers

This is a rather personal post, but I think it solves a problem that has been bedeviling writers and editors for some time now.

It has to do with the third person singular of the personal pronoun. This pronoun is gender-specific in all three cases: nominative: he, she; objective: him, her; and possessive: his, hers. This has led to a lot of handwringing in the gender-neutral world we now live in-- and some very tortuous locutions. When this first started becoming an issue, writers would say 'his or her' or 'his/her,' which is pretty clunky: 'Each student should put his or her notebook in the drawer.'  Later they tried putting things in the plural so they could use they, them, and theirs. 'Students should put their notebooks in the drawers.' This involved rewriting whole paragraphs and passages, though. Another ploy was to put everything in the passive voice, which was even worse: 'All notebooks should be put in the drawers.' And now we have a whole new issue with transgender people who don't fit into either of these 'binary' categories.

Solution: Just dispense with she, him, and his altogether. Simply dispatch them to the dustbin of syntactical history, along with thou, thee, and thine. Thus fragile male egos would preserve pride of place in the nominative case with he, but the female forms her and hers would obtain in the objective and the all-important possessive cases. The he- form is preserved in all three cases, for simplicity; and each term is totally inclusive and so would include all varieties of 'nonbinary' preferences.

Problem solved, and rather elegantly if I do say so myself.

arithmetic

Even something as simple as arithmetic is related to our remaining a first-world country. Don't you think so? Wouldn't it be a good idea if all the schoolkids had to memorize their multiplication tables from 1 to 10 before they graduated from elementary school? Don't you think they could do it? After all, it's basically rote memorization, right? Only later might it sink in what these relationships actually are. And it would give kids a certain basic confidence around numbers that might lead on to further mathematical understanding. It's that kind of understanding-- that logical-mathematical intelligence-- that will keep us in the ranks of the first-world nations.

schizophrenic google

It seems there are actually two separate Google companies. One is the successful high-tech company whose great service we all use. The other is a politically correct second company that has been piggy-backed onto the first and advocates for a 'multicultural, diverse' tech universe that doesn't quite seem to exist in reality. Here's an example of their output, bemoaning the attributes of a 'white/male dominant culture.' I doubt you can have it both ways.