Category Archives: Propaganda

Update IV: Falcon's Flight Of Fancy (Farce Continued)

Family, Intelligence, Journalism, Media, Pop-Culture, Propaganda, The Zeitgeist

Is the following item a metaphor for the American state of mind or what?

Grown-ups, who happen to be parents too, had been building a balloon-like experimental aircraft at their home on Fossil Ridge Road in Fort Collins. “The family has described the structure as a dome-shaped ‘homemade flying saucer.’ These kooks kinda believed they had secured the helium-filled contraption to the ground. Kinda, because their 6-year-old boy proved them wrong, when he climbed into the loosely tethered thing and is now afloat in the sky over eastern Colorado.

“We’re trying to determine the best course of action,” said Larimer County Sheriff’s Office Spokeswoman Kathy Davis. “This is a first and we’ll do what we need to do.”

I’d say!

A “silly people in serious times” is how Pat Buchanan characterized the contemporary America’s mindset.

Update I: The balloon has deflated and landed. No child was found therein. That’s not exactly surprising given the heights the thing scaled. The nation is searching, chicken-little style, for the poor boy, son to Richard Henne … a known storm chaser, who might have done some extracurricular chasing too: Henne made an appearance on the television program WifeSwap.

Mom’s name is “Mayumi.” It is not clear if Henne was on the tawdry reality show to “trade.” The media is characterizing the family’s “belief system” as a love of science. The Age of the Idiot…

Poor little “Falcon” (boy’s name).

Update II: On listening to the adjectival approval heaped on this family and its lifestyle—quirky, interesting, spontaneous, adventurous, science and mysticism lovers—it occurred to me that the parents of a Christian home schooler gone amiss in an air borne contraption would be met with an entirely different reaction. To wit: What were these atavistic homeschoolers doing to their child? Deluding him about the presence of G-d and the ability to reach Him with a man-made device? Why was he off school? Should social services be called? Improvise…

Update III: An entire news cycle was devoted to following the imaginary “Falcon,” as he flew through the air. Falcon was eventually located at home hiding in the extra-terrestrial transportation box engineered by his brilliant father, who was described by some members of the media as a mad genius. Publicity stunt? Journalistic ineptness? A pulse of the people’s tastes and proclivities?

Update IV: If you read the storyline, as I tracked it above, you’ll glean that from the get-go, the news media hawked the Falcon-In-The-Sky story as though it were fact. All failed the most basic journalistic test. A lede written by an old-school journalist would have specified the What, Where, Who, Why and How of the story, and then left it.

It is, moreover, amazing that the authorities and the media began from the premise that Falcon was levitating 10,000 feet above them, rather than hiding somewhere on terra firma. This is an example of the contagion that is mass stupidity.

Update IV (Oct. 16): FARCE CONTINUED. It transpires that the “Silly Sex” had a lot to do with how this story was accepted on the face of it. With the same confidence with which allegations of date rape are accepted from women, the police Spokes Skirt had reported that there was no doubt that “Falcon” was flying high. News media then ran with this factoid without checking it. Apparently, said a male police spokesman, the family (amateur actors and all-round grafters) behaved in a believable manner.

This hearkens back to that famous American naiveté—a chronic incuriosity and lack of inquisitiveness. The absence of a learning curve probably comports with this eternal wide-eyed wonderment.

Falcon, the child, is exhibiting what, I would wager, are the symptoms of severe stress: vomiting during the press and TV performances his grease ball of a father has put him through.

‘Yes, Columbus Discovered America’

America, Colonialism, Education, History, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Propaganda

Indigenous Indians protesting Columbus Day are not nearly as ridiculous as native Americans teaching and imbibing a great deal of tripe about Christopher Columbus. And no one puts it quite like David Yeagley, the great-great-grandson of Comanche leader Bad Eagle:

“…it is the greatness of Columbus that liberals cannot abide. Being the pathological protesters they are, no great achiever is allowed recognition. (Liberals laud only empty words of people like Barry Soetoro.) And that which the world has previously considered great and honorable must now be denigrated, demeaned, and condemned. Indeed, damned as evil and wrong.

That’s what Jeffrey Kolowith is teaching his kindergarten students in Tampa, Florida. They mustn’t like Columbus. He was bad. ‘He was very, very mean, very bossy,’ says Kolowith, poisoning the little children’s minds with disdain, aversion, and hatred for the very elements of character required to achieve anything grand. Self-discipline, group management, unrelenting dedication, these are not to be found in the weak and ‘loving’ liberal. The only thing they’re devoted to is undoing what achievers achieve.

An AP story, “A darker side of Columbus” emerges in US classrooms, indicates Kolowith is determined that children despise those who have accomplished the most significant feats in history.

Author of the article, Christine Amario, has assembled a sordid array of typical, boring anti-American brainwashers. The only one distinguished among them is in fact Mr. Kolowith—and only because he’s taken the anti-Western cause to the youngest children in the American public school system: the five-year olds.

The irony of an author with an Italian name, trying to discredit the greatest Italian since the time of Jesus! Self-purgation, is it? ‘Abbe pietá di me!’ (Have mercy on me!) This is the liberal’s idea of nobility: self-loathing.”

Read “Yes, Columbus Discovered America.” (As well as the the interview Dr. Yeagley conducted with me.)

'Yes, Columbus Discovered America'

America, Colonialism, Education, History, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Propaganda

Indigenous Indians protesting Columbus Day are not nearly as ridiculous as native Americans teaching and imbibing a great deal of tripe about Christopher Columbus. And no one puts it quite like David Yeagley, the great-great-grandson of Comanche leader Bad Eagle:

“…it is the greatness of Columbus that liberals cannot abide. Being the pathological protesters they are, no great achiever is allowed recognition. (Liberals laud only empty words of people like Barry Soetoro.) And that which the world has previously considered great and honorable must now be denigrated, demeaned, and condemned. Indeed, damned as evil and wrong.

That’s what Jeffrey Kolowith is teaching his kindergarten students in Tampa, Florida. They mustn’t like Columbus. He was bad. ‘He was very, very mean, very bossy,’ says Kolowith, poisoning the little children’s minds with disdain, aversion, and hatred for the very elements of character required to achieve anything grand. Self-discipline, group management, unrelenting dedication, these are not to be found in the weak and ‘loving’ liberal. The only thing they’re devoted to is undoing what achievers achieve.

An AP story, “A darker side of Columbus” emerges in US classrooms, indicates Kolowith is determined that children despise those who have accomplished the most significant feats in history.

Author of the article, Christine Amario, has assembled a sordid array of typical, boring anti-American brainwashers. The only one distinguished among them is in fact Mr. Kolowith—and only because he’s taken the anti-Western cause to the youngest children in the American public school system: the five-year olds.

The irony of an author with an Italian name, trying to discredit the greatest Italian since the time of Jesus! Self-purgation, is it? ‘Abbe pietá di me!’ (Have mercy on me!) This is the liberal’s idea of nobility: self-loathing.”

Read “Yes, Columbus Discovered America.” (As well as the the interview Dr. Yeagley conducted with me.)

Update III: Tossed and Gored By Gore Vidal

Constitution, Crime, Criminal Injustice, Democrats, Homosexuality, Intellectualism, Liberty, Literature, Military, Propaganda, Reason, Terrorism, The State, The Zeitgeist, War

Despite his surprisingly mundane and misguided ideas on politics and economics, brilliant belletrist Gore Vidal, at 83, still manages to dazzle with his original insights. In a country in which homegrown retardation is more pressing a problem than homegrown terrorism, that’s quite something.

Vidal recently gave an interview to the British Times from which it was clear that he no longer sees signs of the divine in Obama. Nevertheless, absent from the dismal score card he gave the president was a realistic appraisal of the putative gifts of Obama, a charmer who was elected based on his ability to sweetly say nothing much at all.

To his credit, Vidal is scathing about Obama’s talismanic, “solve that [war] and you solve terrorism” treatment of the Afghanistan war. At the same time he wants to see Obama, Lincoln-like, lord it over the people (especially with respect to health care). But those kinds of images go with the homoerotic territory.

In any event, his weak protestations over Obama are the least interesting of Vidal’s comments, the ones about Timothy McVeigh and the love that dare not speak its name the most interesting.

Read the interview.

Update I (Oct. 1): Some respect for Gore Vidal, please. He belongs to a generation of intellectuals who SERVED. Bravely. As a matter of interest, “Some 450 out of 750 Princeton graduates in the class of 1956 served in the military.” Samuel Huntington, one of America’s greatest scholars, served in the army. “All four of the Kennedy brothers served in the military; not one of the thirty Kennedy cousins has.” [Excerpted from Are We Rome?The Fall of An Empire And The State of America by Cullen Murphy, 2007, p. 82.]

Most of the neocon-minded war mongers have not served.

Of course, “our freedoms,” such as they are, do not come courtesy of our armed forces leveling this or the other far-flung protectorate abroad. That’s yet more neocon nonsense on stilts. Cheap sloganeering.

Update II: The proverbial Orwellian Ministry of Truth decrees how the peons think about the issues of the day. When it comes to Timothy McVeigh they’ve had the same degree of success as in ensconcing Rosa Parks as the new Founding Mother of America.

Vidal is rare and courageous in recognizing the legitimate effrontery against life and liberty that motivated McVeigh to commit his crime. He is also unique in acknowledging that McVeigh was not a rube, but a thoughtful man who had fought for his country and was familiar with its foundational principles and documents. Here is McVeigh on the American experiment gone wrong (haven’t you read the interview?):

I think it all has to do with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the misconception that the government is obliged to provide those things or has the jurisdiction to deny them. We’ve gotten away from the principle that they were only created to secure those rights. And that’s where, I believe, much of the trouble has surfaced.

The characters involved in the Waco massacre—our “brave” law and order officers and their puppet masters—deserved to be put to death too, but were not. Vidal has my respect for recognizing what the decidedly mediocre mind of a Rich Lowry has been incapable of. If Vidal were of a younger generation (like myself), his iconoclasm would have consigned him in mindless America to obscurity.

Update III: MORAL/INTELLECTUAL EQUIVALENCE. Conflating the causes for which McVeigh committed his cruel crime against agents and family of an oppressive government is akin to conflating MY causes with those of, in Myron’s taxonomy of the evil, the “Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin,” and I would add Al Gore (to round off the profile, and to poke at the humorless).

What sort of moral relativism is this? What kind of messy thinking is this? The causes and theories of the Unabomber, Hitler, Stalin (and Al Gore) were wrong on their logic and facts; McVeigh’s causes and motivation, if not his deeds, were right. What’s so hard about that? Kudos to Vidal, however confused he is about all else, for recognizing this.