Curtis Dahlgren
Mainstream manipulation, 24/7: Whose information is "confusing" whom?
By Curtis Dahlgren
"The real enemy of clear thinking is the script. We think the world is supposed to go by a familiar plot. And when the facts conflict with the script, we edit the facts."
— Jonah Goldberg (5/19/10)
"Who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe." — John Milton (1608-74)
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind . . .
"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes — will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished . . .
"All good things which exist are the fruits of originality." — John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
WE HAVE COME FULL CIRCLE. Under Feudalism, the education of the serfs was not a high priority; the highest priority was serfdom docility. The 20th century saw an explosion of technological improvements, under the historically unique intersection of individual liberty and high academic expectations.
I had the blessing of attending a one-room country school in the 1940s and 50s — at a time in which both academic freedom and academic rigor were still peaking. We went from Happy Days to Hippie Days, and it's been all down hill since then. There was a political movement that began operating under the assumption that the more people receiving "aid" the merrier (a permanent under-educated underclass could be manipulated to its own advantage)
That kind of movement is more like a bowel movement than "progress," so here's an open letter to the self-described progressive Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
Dear Editor: YOU GUYS CRACK ME UP.
Where I live, I can choose between daily newspapers from Detroit, Chicago, Green Bay,
and Milwaukee, as well as a local weekly. I prefer the latter, but occasionally I weaken and
sacrifice $1.50 to be able to take your paper home to read just for laughs (such as the day
after Super Tuesday).
A tiny paragraph on page one ("Primary upheaval") mentions Senator Specter's defeat and Rand Paul's win, but the first headline to hit the reader's eye was "Doyle's partial veto toughens lending law." To your credit, the headline to the right with larger print said, "Fraud revealed in state Head Start program," but since we xenophobic Americans read left to right, the "Doyle" name was strategically placed.
Reports on Super Tuesday occupied less than one-half of page three. Evidently the results of the primaries weren't very "super" in the eyes of the editorial "board." A subscriber could look in vain for a picture of Rand Paul, or mention of his victory margin (I think it was 59% to 35 over the "endorsed" candidate). Neither man was an incumbent, but the MSM script says that it was an "anti-incumbent" day at the polls. You guys can't bring yourself to say "an-ti-lib-er-al," can you?
In other randomly scripted news this week, the Presidente of Me-hic-ko blasted the people of Arizona as bigots in the presence of our own presidente, who himself "mocked Republicans in Congress" — in heavily unemployed Youngstown, Ohio (he picks some strange places for his "readings," with great emphasis on poetic license). I suggest he go back to Elkhart, Indiana (the RV capital of the universe), to push John F. Kerry's new gas tax law — which tax he says is no tax (but simply a cost motorists will pay gratefully no matter what it ends up being called).
BY THE WAY, THOUGH, suppose millions of Canadians had walked across the border, trashing ranches, and demanding their "constitutional rights" in the U.S., would it still be called "xenophobia" if Montana and North Dakota ranchers raised objections to being shot to death? The Administration promised "transparency," and its "immigration" policies are clear enough, that's for sure:
We don't have QUITE enough voters in the underclass — or quite enough high school dropouts yet — to guarantee Progressive victories in 2010 and 2012!
Never mind that only SIX percent of Milwaukee blacks can read proficiently by the eighth grade — under the tutelage of the liberals' "Great Schools" program. The Wisconsin Education Association Council spends Big Bucks advertising its successes, while the union teachers continue to dumb down "education." We and WEAC would be better off if they took a fraction of its annual P.R. spending and bought Hooked On Phonics tapes for the Milwaukee Public Schools.
The MPS motto is, "At least we're not Detroit." However, MPS test results have sunk lower than those in the District of Columbia, no easy accomplishment. It's really not that hard to teach kids to read. In my country school, we learned to read in SIX WEEKS of kindergarten (even mildly retarded kids — if I may use that word, which is still in the dictionary, last time I checked). And the teacher paid no union dues! We were introduced to American history in our first grade readers, and got to overhear the other seven grades reading their lessons aloud (the equivalent of over 60 years of American history). Here's the way "history" goes today:
- Teacher: Why did George Washington cross the Delaware?
- Student: I don't know. To get to the other side?
- History textbook: Washington was a war-monger who hoped to capture more slaves.
- High school senior trying to read textbook: Who's Jorge War-shing-ton?
- Senior history teacher: He's the guy this school used to be named for, before we changed the name to the Barack Obama Learning Center.
- National Park Service: "Delaware River Historic Site Now Closed Permanently."
AND YOU MEDIA EXECUTIVES CAN'T FIGURE OUT WHY PEOPLE ARE RESTLESS?
Our fearless presidente recently gave a commencement address in which he decried "too much confusing information out there" on the [previously called] Information Superhighway, the Internet, which is now in the cross-hairs of this Administration. He thinks all he has to do is deem the Worldwide Grapevine a "public utility" and 'regulate' it in a more appropriate fashion. Don't tell me he didn't learn anything from his trip to Red China.
Remember the old saying, "Don't confuse us with the FACTS"?
Even the Yoopers up here in da "el Norte" are no longer "confused" by this guy. A guy in the saloon the other day said, "Pretty soon we'll be like Russia, and standing in line for toilet paper." Regulating the paper industry would be one way for the federalis to cut down on the number of "squares" we use after going to the bathroom.
The presidente-in-chief accuses Jan Brewer of taking ice cream cones out of the hands of illegal children in Arizona. Ha! The federalis are the ones taking candy out the mouths of babies with their HELLCARE law — they plan to "track" sugar consumption of people living more than a mile from a supermarket? What's that all about, a war on the rural poor? And if we can't "track" illegal aliens, how do they figure on tracking exactly who lives one mile from a supermarket? Maybe that's why the Census bureau wanted to "mark" the location of the front door of your house (I'm only being partly facetious).
A major talking point of the HELLCARE "reform" was that we will know how many calories are in our Big Macs and Whoppers. Who the heck is counting anyway? We're a lot more concerned about what may or may not be in the HELLCARE bill than what's in our food (are we serfs no longer capable of making ANY decisions on our own?)!
I saw a map of the U.S. showing the states with the most obesity. Surprahse, surprahse — the "leanest" states are those in the north where we have to shovel snow! Here in the U.P. we burn calories just breathing the cold air — inside the house, due to the price of L.P. fuel. I remember moving to Wyoming during the 1980 recession, and after a few days I remarked, "I wonder where they lock up all the fat people" because none of them were on the street (my native Wisconsin being one of the few states that can combine snow shoveling and obesity).
But just to show you that America is not hopelessly apathetic, this week a moose in Vermont was saved from a death sentence by an online protest movement:
AP Writer John Curran, Fri May 21:
IRASBURG, Vt. — Pete the Moose munched on apples, bananas and a Snickers candy bar — he won't eat a Milky Way — blissfully unaware of his near-demise, a fate averted by lawmakers and helped along by thousands of fans online.
Vermont's favorite animal, ordered removed last year from a game preserve or destroyed, will now be allowed to stay on the land near the U.S.-Canada border under a compromise fashioned by state lawmakers in the waning hours of their session last week.
The turnabout came after the 700-pound moose's tale of woe went viral, prompting a "Save Pete the Moose" website, a Facebook page (more than 4,000 people "like this" as of Friday afternoon), about 10,000 YouTube views and a rally at Vermont's statehouse. [end of excerpt]
Good for Pete, but the horrifying part of that story, for the federalis, is that Pete is fed an occasional Snickers bar! In other stories, a cougar attacked a dairy heifer in Wisconsin the other day. The feds were on the side of the cougar, though, because the EPA is evidently intending to classify milk as "a hazard to the waters of the United States."
I'm not being facetious here one bit. To quote from "Michigan Farm News" (April 30):
"Looking for a way to optimize unintended consequences? Politicize them. Looking for a way to get farmers politicized? Read on.
"Rules put forth by the EPA under the presumably infallible Clean Water Act have the potential to harm every farmer . . but dairy farmers should pay particular attention, since the EPA apparently intends to classify milk as a hazard to the waters of the U.S. and add tremendous costs and regulatory burdens."
Literally speaking, the feds consider milk to be an OIL. I KID YOU NOT:
"A key element of this program calls for farmers to have an oil spill prevention plan . . . Sounds reasonable on the surface [but, say the feds] . . 'Milk typically contains a percentage of animal fat"[Typically? Who writes this stuff anyway?] and, sit down for this:
Animal fat is a "'on-petroleum oil,' the EPA rule says."
Thus, G-d forbid, should a farmer forget to close the valve on his bulk milk tank when he starts milking (believe me, it happens sometimes), he could be in deep doo-doo — so to speak — with the federalis for polluting "the waters of the United States"! And here you thought the EPA was busy regulating light-crude oil spills in the Gulf? How naive can you get?
A farm "industry" lawyer says, "That's a pretty significant overreach by the government, since the [clean water] act . . is very obviously intended to deal with petroleum-based oil spills." The article continues:
"If the Obama EPA was willing to give farmers a break on the oil spill rule, it has shown no effort to do it. In fact, farmers are expected to be in compliance under the law this November, although . . [farmers have] no assistance available and no department personnel to help them comply, said Allen Krizek, MSU Extension liaison . . . "
NOT MY PROBLEM, YOU SAY?
But this is only one tiny example of the regulatory nightmare being created in Washington. One defining characteristic of totalitarianism is — not to simply ignore the pleas of the people, but — to mock them and ridicule them for being "confused" and complaining. Another trait of dictators is redefining words (milk is an oil), and overreaching in the overall agendas (adding "administrative rules" to a basic law passed by Congress).
Can't for the life of you figure out why the natives are "restless"? Calling the Tuesday primary results "anti-incumbency" sentiment totally misses the point. Who's kidding whom? The "tea-baggers" (which I define as the nearly 2/3 of the citizenry who are in essential agreement with the Tea party) are anti-totalitarians, not JUST "anti-incumbent."
Here's another front-page story from Mich. Farm News: "Representative seeks to intimidate Farm Bureau."
"Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif), Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has demanded that the American Farm Bureau Federation justify its opinion about the economic impacts of the recent EPA rule that would require large livestock facilities to report greenhouse gas emissions."
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) questioned Waxman's motives: "Mr. Speaker, I am very concerned when one of the premier committee chairmen of our great House of Representatives appears to be using his power to intimidate Americans from expressing their First Amendment rights to petition the Congress for redress of grievances."
As you all know, this week the Administration expended a great amount of energy (and CO2 through its deep breathing) on behalf of illegal non-citizens — EVEN WHILE mocking the Constitutional rights of cattlemen over whose property those illegals have trespassed. And you STILL don't get the "point" of the Tea party movement, or the election results.
UFF-DUH. KEEP IT UP AND YOU AND WAXMAN WILL EVENTUALLY GET THE "POINT"!
[more to come] PS:
What was it that doomed the good ol' USSR? Was it President Reagan, Lady Thatcher, or the "Pope"? In actuality, Reagan knew that the Evil Empire was already doomed by the amount of underground humor that circulated in the USSR via the grapevine among the serfs. Somewhere I have a book that compiled some of those jokes. I'll post them if I ever finish unpacking and find the book. One that I remember went like this:
"Why does the KGB always travel in threes?" Answer:
"One has to know how to read and one has to know to write. And one has to keep an eye on those dangerous intellectuals."
Of course, the real intellectuals were already dead or in prison. Paranoia is one of the tell-tale signs of totalitarianism. So — beware the current attacks on free speech, aimed mostly at conservatives. And beware the attempt to co-opt the liberal churches for purposes of "civil discourse" favorable to the regime. These are serious times! "Perilous" times!
But if I had any advice for Las Vegas, it would be "Don't bet the farm on Harry Reid. Not YET anyway!"
© Curtis Dahlgren
May 22, 2010
"The real enemy of clear thinking is the script. We think the world is supposed to go by a familiar plot. And when the facts conflict with the script, we edit the facts."
— Jonah Goldberg (5/19/10)
"Who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe." — John Milton (1608-74)
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind . . .
"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes — will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished . . .
"All good things which exist are the fruits of originality." — John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
WE HAVE COME FULL CIRCLE. Under Feudalism, the education of the serfs was not a high priority; the highest priority was serfdom docility. The 20th century saw an explosion of technological improvements, under the historically unique intersection of individual liberty and high academic expectations.
I had the blessing of attending a one-room country school in the 1940s and 50s — at a time in which both academic freedom and academic rigor were still peaking. We went from Happy Days to Hippie Days, and it's been all down hill since then. There was a political movement that began operating under the assumption that the more people receiving "aid" the merrier (a permanent under-educated underclass could be manipulated to its own advantage)
That kind of movement is more like a bowel movement than "progress," so here's an open letter to the self-described progressive Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:
Dear Editor: YOU GUYS CRACK ME UP.
Where I live, I can choose between daily newspapers from Detroit, Chicago, Green Bay,
and Milwaukee, as well as a local weekly. I prefer the latter, but occasionally I weaken and
sacrifice $1.50 to be able to take your paper home to read just for laughs (such as the day
after Super Tuesday).
A tiny paragraph on page one ("Primary upheaval") mentions Senator Specter's defeat and Rand Paul's win, but the first headline to hit the reader's eye was "Doyle's partial veto toughens lending law." To your credit, the headline to the right with larger print said, "Fraud revealed in state Head Start program," but since we xenophobic Americans read left to right, the "Doyle" name was strategically placed.
Reports on Super Tuesday occupied less than one-half of page three. Evidently the results of the primaries weren't very "super" in the eyes of the editorial "board." A subscriber could look in vain for a picture of Rand Paul, or mention of his victory margin (I think it was 59% to 35 over the "endorsed" candidate). Neither man was an incumbent, but the MSM script says that it was an "anti-incumbent" day at the polls. You guys can't bring yourself to say "an-ti-lib-er-al," can you?
In other randomly scripted news this week, the Presidente of Me-hic-ko blasted the people of Arizona as bigots in the presence of our own presidente, who himself "mocked Republicans in Congress" — in heavily unemployed Youngstown, Ohio (he picks some strange places for his "readings," with great emphasis on poetic license). I suggest he go back to Elkhart, Indiana (the RV capital of the universe), to push John F. Kerry's new gas tax law — which tax he says is no tax (but simply a cost motorists will pay gratefully no matter what it ends up being called).
BY THE WAY, THOUGH, suppose millions of Canadians had walked across the border, trashing ranches, and demanding their "constitutional rights" in the U.S., would it still be called "xenophobia" if Montana and North Dakota ranchers raised objections to being shot to death? The Administration promised "transparency," and its "immigration" policies are clear enough, that's for sure:
We don't have QUITE enough voters in the underclass — or quite enough high school dropouts yet — to guarantee Progressive victories in 2010 and 2012!
Never mind that only SIX percent of Milwaukee blacks can read proficiently by the eighth grade — under the tutelage of the liberals' "Great Schools" program. The Wisconsin Education Association Council spends Big Bucks advertising its successes, while the union teachers continue to dumb down "education." We and WEAC would be better off if they took a fraction of its annual P.R. spending and bought Hooked On Phonics tapes for the Milwaukee Public Schools.
The MPS motto is, "At least we're not Detroit." However, MPS test results have sunk lower than those in the District of Columbia, no easy accomplishment. It's really not that hard to teach kids to read. In my country school, we learned to read in SIX WEEKS of kindergarten (even mildly retarded kids — if I may use that word, which is still in the dictionary, last time I checked). And the teacher paid no union dues! We were introduced to American history in our first grade readers, and got to overhear the other seven grades reading their lessons aloud (the equivalent of over 60 years of American history). Here's the way "history" goes today:
- Teacher: Why did George Washington cross the Delaware?
- Student: I don't know. To get to the other side?
- History textbook: Washington was a war-monger who hoped to capture more slaves.
- High school senior trying to read textbook: Who's Jorge War-shing-ton?
- Senior history teacher: He's the guy this school used to be named for, before we changed the name to the Barack Obama Learning Center.
- National Park Service: "Delaware River Historic Site Now Closed Permanently."
AND YOU MEDIA EXECUTIVES CAN'T FIGURE OUT WHY PEOPLE ARE RESTLESS?
Our fearless presidente recently gave a commencement address in which he decried "too much confusing information out there" on the [previously called] Information Superhighway, the Internet, which is now in the cross-hairs of this Administration. He thinks all he has to do is deem the Worldwide Grapevine a "public utility" and 'regulate' it in a more appropriate fashion. Don't tell me he didn't learn anything from his trip to Red China.
Remember the old saying, "Don't confuse us with the FACTS"?
Even the Yoopers up here in da "el Norte" are no longer "confused" by this guy. A guy in the saloon the other day said, "Pretty soon we'll be like Russia, and standing in line for toilet paper." Regulating the paper industry would be one way for the federalis to cut down on the number of "squares" we use after going to the bathroom.
The presidente-in-chief accuses Jan Brewer of taking ice cream cones out of the hands of illegal children in Arizona. Ha! The federalis are the ones taking candy out the mouths of babies with their HELLCARE law — they plan to "track" sugar consumption of people living more than a mile from a supermarket? What's that all about, a war on the rural poor? And if we can't "track" illegal aliens, how do they figure on tracking exactly who lives one mile from a supermarket? Maybe that's why the Census bureau wanted to "mark" the location of the front door of your house (I'm only being partly facetious).
A major talking point of the HELLCARE "reform" was that we will know how many calories are in our Big Macs and Whoppers. Who the heck is counting anyway? We're a lot more concerned about what may or may not be in the HELLCARE bill than what's in our food (are we serfs no longer capable of making ANY decisions on our own?)!
I saw a map of the U.S. showing the states with the most obesity. Surprahse, surprahse — the "leanest" states are those in the north where we have to shovel snow! Here in the U.P. we burn calories just breathing the cold air — inside the house, due to the price of L.P. fuel. I remember moving to Wyoming during the 1980 recession, and after a few days I remarked, "I wonder where they lock up all the fat people" because none of them were on the street (my native Wisconsin being one of the few states that can combine snow shoveling and obesity).
But just to show you that America is not hopelessly apathetic, this week a moose in Vermont was saved from a death sentence by an online protest movement:
AP Writer John Curran, Fri May 21:
IRASBURG, Vt. — Pete the Moose munched on apples, bananas and a Snickers candy bar — he won't eat a Milky Way — blissfully unaware of his near-demise, a fate averted by lawmakers and helped along by thousands of fans online.
Vermont's favorite animal, ordered removed last year from a game preserve or destroyed, will now be allowed to stay on the land near the U.S.-Canada border under a compromise fashioned by state lawmakers in the waning hours of their session last week.
The turnabout came after the 700-pound moose's tale of woe went viral, prompting a "Save Pete the Moose" website, a Facebook page (more than 4,000 people "like this" as of Friday afternoon), about 10,000 YouTube views and a rally at Vermont's statehouse. [end of excerpt]
Good for Pete, but the horrifying part of that story, for the federalis, is that Pete is fed an occasional Snickers bar! In other stories, a cougar attacked a dairy heifer in Wisconsin the other day. The feds were on the side of the cougar, though, because the EPA is evidently intending to classify milk as "a hazard to the waters of the United States."
I'm not being facetious here one bit. To quote from "Michigan Farm News" (April 30):
"Looking for a way to optimize unintended consequences? Politicize them. Looking for a way to get farmers politicized? Read on.
"Rules put forth by the EPA under the presumably infallible Clean Water Act have the potential to harm every farmer . . but dairy farmers should pay particular attention, since the EPA apparently intends to classify milk as a hazard to the waters of the U.S. and add tremendous costs and regulatory burdens."
Literally speaking, the feds consider milk to be an OIL. I KID YOU NOT:
"A key element of this program calls for farmers to have an oil spill prevention plan . . . Sounds reasonable on the surface [but, say the feds] . . 'Milk typically contains a percentage of animal fat"[Typically? Who writes this stuff anyway?] and, sit down for this:
Animal fat is a "'on-petroleum oil,' the EPA rule says."
Thus, G-d forbid, should a farmer forget to close the valve on his bulk milk tank when he starts milking (believe me, it happens sometimes), he could be in deep doo-doo — so to speak — with the federalis for polluting "the waters of the United States"! And here you thought the EPA was busy regulating light-crude oil spills in the Gulf? How naive can you get?
A farm "industry" lawyer says, "That's a pretty significant overreach by the government, since the [clean water] act . . is very obviously intended to deal with petroleum-based oil spills." The article continues:
"If the Obama EPA was willing to give farmers a break on the oil spill rule, it has shown no effort to do it. In fact, farmers are expected to be in compliance under the law this November, although . . [farmers have] no assistance available and no department personnel to help them comply, said Allen Krizek, MSU Extension liaison . . . "
NOT MY PROBLEM, YOU SAY?
But this is only one tiny example of the regulatory nightmare being created in Washington. One defining characteristic of totalitarianism is — not to simply ignore the pleas of the people, but — to mock them and ridicule them for being "confused" and complaining. Another trait of dictators is redefining words (milk is an oil), and overreaching in the overall agendas (adding "administrative rules" to a basic law passed by Congress).
Can't for the life of you figure out why the natives are "restless"? Calling the Tuesday primary results "anti-incumbency" sentiment totally misses the point. Who's kidding whom? The "tea-baggers" (which I define as the nearly 2/3 of the citizenry who are in essential agreement with the Tea party) are anti-totalitarians, not JUST "anti-incumbent."
Here's another front-page story from Mich. Farm News: "Representative seeks to intimidate Farm Bureau."
"Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif), Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has demanded that the American Farm Bureau Federation justify its opinion about the economic impacts of the recent EPA rule that would require large livestock facilities to report greenhouse gas emissions."
Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) questioned Waxman's motives: "Mr. Speaker, I am very concerned when one of the premier committee chairmen of our great House of Representatives appears to be using his power to intimidate Americans from expressing their First Amendment rights to petition the Congress for redress of grievances."
As you all know, this week the Administration expended a great amount of energy (and CO2 through its deep breathing) on behalf of illegal non-citizens — EVEN WHILE mocking the Constitutional rights of cattlemen over whose property those illegals have trespassed. And you STILL don't get the "point" of the Tea party movement, or the election results.
UFF-DUH. KEEP IT UP AND YOU AND WAXMAN WILL EVENTUALLY GET THE "POINT"!
[more to come] PS:
What was it that doomed the good ol' USSR? Was it President Reagan, Lady Thatcher, or the "Pope"? In actuality, Reagan knew that the Evil Empire was already doomed by the amount of underground humor that circulated in the USSR via the grapevine among the serfs. Somewhere I have a book that compiled some of those jokes. I'll post them if I ever finish unpacking and find the book. One that I remember went like this:
"Why does the KGB always travel in threes?" Answer:
"One has to know how to read and one has to know to write. And one has to keep an eye on those dangerous intellectuals."
Of course, the real intellectuals were already dead or in prison. Paranoia is one of the tell-tale signs of totalitarianism. So — beware the current attacks on free speech, aimed mostly at conservatives. And beware the attempt to co-opt the liberal churches for purposes of "civil discourse" favorable to the regime. These are serious times! "Perilous" times!
But if I had any advice for Las Vegas, it would be "Don't bet the farm on Harry Reid. Not YET anyway!"
© Curtis Dahlgren
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
