Mike

One: We Will Report No Story Until It’s Time

I had a post all ready to go regarding the media ignoring the devastation in the southern Appalachians caused by Hurricane Helene; about how the story had been dropping from the front page faster than the latest Trump assassination attempt, despite the mounting death toll, towns wiped out, etc…

Then the other night I see all the media outlets, as if a switch had been thrown, starting to give the story (some of) the attention it deserves.

I was curious as to why the change. Why did the bat signal go out for corporate media to acknowledge what’s happening out there (for them) in Gap-Toothed Cletus Land?

Then I realized what it was. With the carnage coming out of Appalachia too big to ignore, there was the danger that with the bad optics of Kamala, and Biden out-of-view, that this could be the Democrats’ version of Katrina. So if you read the stories since Sunday night, nearly every one contains an element of what Biden and Kamala are personally doing to help people who will never vote for them. Case in point, the five-minute photo-op of Kamala visiting FEMA.

You can’t buy the quality of public relations the corporate media provides the Democrats.

Two: Army Recruitment Weasels

A friend of mine contacted me about an op-ed in the Washington Post regarding military recruitment. It’s full of the usual gaslighting regarding how the Biden Administration was solving the military recruitment problem (that it had created) by meeting goals through better marketing and reorganizing the recruitment process.

In reality the military only achieved its goals because it lowered both the goals and the recruiting standards. Note, any time you hear about an organization that doesn’t meet KPI but crows about “momentum,” do a quick look at the numbers and you’ll find a bunch of one-time tricks used to juice the numbers. That’s what is happening here, with lowered standards dealing with physical and mental fitness, proficiency, and red flags such as tattoos and prior drug use. Good luck keeping that “momentum” going next year.

Then again next year isn’t an election year, right?

There are many causes of the military recruitment crisis, but a key one is a lack of leadership especially at the civilian level. I saw this exchange between Army Secretary Christine Wormuth and Senator Cotton when the latter questioned her playing with enlistment targets in order to prevent negative headlines. Her response?:

Wormuth said the Army looks at “what’s possible” and sets goals that are achievable.

I found that response horrifying. Management 101 states that failure to meet a KPI is a key information signal in the organization that something is wrong and needs to be changed. Goals are set to the needs of the service and then actions are geared toward the accomplishment of those goals. What Wormuth is saying is that either recruitment goals have no relation to the needs of the service, which is a failure of senior leadership, or that she is just going to ignore those needs in favor of avoiding bad optics. Either way she’s willingly corrupting the signal and this cannot be tolerated.

Three: Kerry, the Cr*p Weasel

I’m trying to think of a bigger scoundrel, a more ridiculous figure in American politics for the past 50 years besides Joe Biden and I keep coming back to John Kerry. Biden and Kerry both have so much in common: criminally ambitious, greedy, insecure, and dumb as a box of rocks.

Kerry has been in the limelight for 50 years: star witness to Congress on war crimes, US Senator, presidential nominee, Secretary of State, Special Envoy for Climate. He really is (unfortunately) an elder statesman.

This is a guy who got his political start in a way that makes Kamala Harris look like a saint, by throwing his fellow Vietnam War veterans under the war crimes bus. He was willing to be a figurehead as Secretary of State (foreign policy under Obama was run by the West Wing and staffers at State) in exchange for the title which he later leveraged into business connections. Then there was his time as special envoy on climate, where he lectured the world on consumption and fossil fuels while flying around the world in his private jet and living the high life on his wife’s (Republican) money.

So he’s been a corrupt, power-hungry hypocrite for half-a-century. So is a lot of DC. What makes him a a cr*p weasel? This:

”And people go and then people self-select where they go for their news and information. Then you get into a vicious cycle. So it’s really, really hard, much harder to build consensus today then at any time in the 45, 50 years I’ve been involved in this and there is a lot of discussion now about how to curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc… Our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to hammer it out of existence. What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully having winning enough votes that you are free to be able to implement change.”

So there you go, a man who has sworn numerous times to support and defend the Constitution just told his globalist buddies at WEF that he (meaning the Democrats) was going to throw that document under the bus. Given that he’s dumb as the aforementioned box of rocks, this thought is not his own, but there is a special place in the pit for an elder statesman willing to trash our Constitution in front of foreigners.

Who is going to hold him to account?

You know, Walz made a crack about the First Amendment not protecting misinformation. I wonder if Vance will force him tonight to defend that and what Kerry said at WEF.

Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala reminded me of the role that “Never Trumpers” play in our political system. They form a “normative boundary” on the right side of the political system which enables the Left to tar anybody outside of that boundary as “extremist” or “far-right.” Think of Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, and the rest as the Great Wall of the Establishment Right, beyond which rage the marauding hordes of Trumpist populism and MAGA who will never get invited inside for fellowships or Bethesda wine tastings.

That role of “right-wing” normative boundary setter is filled on the media side by sites such as The Dispatch and National Review which market themselves to the political ecosystem as the “respectable” Right. So it was with interest that I saw Kevin Williamson’s piece The Exotic Cat-Eaters of Springfield, Ohio at The Dispatch. Given the title, that it’s Williamson who is a founding member of the Never-Trumper brigade, and that it’s being published by The Dispatch you can reasonably guess where this is going.

Williamson is part of the larger National Review ecosystem that has lashed itself to the mast of “Never Trump,” and like Penelope of ancient myth is faithfully waiting for the spirit of Reagan and Buckley to return. There’s nothing wrong with that, I was a big fan of both in the day, but there’s nothing heroic or even virtuous about keeping a candle lit for ideological purity and trying to LARP Buckley’s purge of the John Birchers when the other side wants you dead.

Then again, better dead than rude.

Williamson sees his role in the political ecosystem as the heroic free-thinking man from the heartland of America, in this case Texas. There’s a lot to commend his earlier writings and he’s paid a professional price for his stances: he was ousted from The Atlantic for his public views on abortion. Now he is on what can only be described as a jihad, a maniacal obsession to rescue the soul of America from what he sees as the grifting sewer that is Trump and MAGA. In that, he’s found a home at The Dispatch.

If Teddy Roosevelt lionized the man in the arena, Williamson thinks he belongs there with him, charging up his literary San Juan Hill with a 6.7-liter diesel truck as his steed and armed with deadly metaphors and bon mots.

His Springfield piece reads as an American version of Heart of Darkness where instead of taking a boat up the Congo river our hero ventures up the country highway through Appalachia and onward toward Springfield in his “big 6.7L diesel.”

As he drives toward Springfield, he observes the contrasting scenes of the landscape. The wonderful natural beauty interspersed with “the inescapable herpetic rash of Dollar General stores and the strip-joint billboards sprinkled like pox.” You get the feeling that this would be a better place if not for the people in it. This is his sympathetic side and he’s just warming up, because when arrives in Springfield he finds the Haitian newcomers are just another demonized group of hard-working immigrants pursuing the American dream, a modern-day equivalent of the Irish and those groups that came before them.

The locals complaining about them? Bunch of “marginally employed white people on the dole” xenophobes. See? He’s the truth-teller who got it all figured out within a day or two of arrival. Everybody is playing the part assigned. Rather than using induction and seeing where the evidence takes him, he applies ideology as a reductionist lens to explain Springfield to the larger world. Well maybe “large” isn’t the right word, it is the readership of The Dispatch after all.

Then he writes:

“You can send little J.D. to Yale to make him polished, you can send him to Silicon Valley to make him rich, and you can send him to the Senate to make him powerful, but you cannot stop him from being what it is he apparently wants to be: Cleetus the Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll.”


So that’s really the whole purpose of his trip to Springfield. The locals, the Haitians, the American Dream… they were just bit players to support his predetermined narrative of bashing J.D. Vance. You wonder why he burned all that diesel to drive there when he could just have researched his hit piece with a Zoom call. You don’t need to do any research or investigation, just talk to the right people to get the quotes you’re looking for to write the piece you wanted in the first place. That’s Journalism 101.

Nothing about the effects on the local community of suddenly increasing the population by a third through dropping thousands of people from a 3rd World country that came here on a dodgy Biden TPS program. Nothing about how daily life has changed for the people who lived there or their complaints to the elected officials who betrayed them. Nothing about the effects of mass 3rd World immigration on America as seen through the eyes of one American town. America doesn’t belong to the people who live here as much as it does to Williamson’s vision of it.

That’s how you get more Trump.

For Williamson, Vance isn’t just wrong about Haitians and cats or the virtues of Springfield. He’s wrong because for him, Vance betrayed his upbringing — because for Williamson, Vance came from a place where “…. the biggest business was organized crime and where politics vacillated between demagoguery and banditry, beautiful in some parts, hideous in others, and
poisonously backward — you know: Haiti, but with white people.”

There it is and Williamson has quite willingly lent his years of credibility as a conservative writer and his down-home, truth-telling persona to same project Dick Cheney has; that is to define the right-wing side of the civilizational boundary and cast MAGA, Vance, Trump, and all of those “marginally employed white people on the dole” xenophobes in Springfield outside of it. There’s no place in Cheney’s and Williamson’s America for any of them, except to be the target of The Two Minute Hate.

Matthew Crawford, noted writer and gear head, is not happy about a recent trend in automobile modification:

The new thing is modern V8 muscle cars (Chargers, Challengers, Mustangs and Camaros) with exhaust cut-outs. They are deafening, and they are everywhere where I live in San Jose (which is not one of the genteel areas). They are also illegal, of course. . .  For those not satisfied with inflicting low-level hearing loss, a special Platinum A[**]hole feature is available on the aftermarket. It alters the engine’s spark and fuel map to deliberately induce explosive backfires that sound like a 12-gauge shotgun at close range.

We have these cars in our neighborhood though they tend to be heavily modified Camrys, Kias, and other small sedans. He’s right about the modifications to produce backfires, even from ½ mile away it sounds just like an old 12-gauge Mossberg I used to own.

I had always classified such car owners as narcissists, but he cites another possibility:

Julie Aitken Schermer is a professor of psychology, at Western University in Ontario, Canada. She conducted a study of people who modify their cars to make them louder (n=529), using a standard inventory of psychological traits. She was expecting to find narcissism, but what she found instead was “links between folks with a penchant for loud exhausts and folks with psychopathic and sadistic tendencies.”

“The personality profile I found with our loud mufflers are also the same personality profiles of people who illegally commit arson,” she told a reporter. These are people who have a hard time with “higher-order moral reasoning with a focus on basic rights for people.”

Crawford goes on to cite the impact of one particular miscreant in Seattle, the reaction (or lack thereof) of the police to said miscreant, and the impact the guy is having on the neighborhood. Crawford then gets to, for me, the interesting part:

… that the fabric of the world is torn by the small acts of cruelty and unconcern that make everyone else retreat from public space.

This can have an unfortunate resemblance to conquest, if those making a nuisance of themselves recognize one another as like beings, bound up in a common fate, and notice also that the space vacated by those sufficiently annoyed or intimidated is now theirs, collectively.

The interesting concept that Crawford introduces is public space and how it can be disrupted. We Americans typically speak of public space in fairly legalistic terms; what is public property and the things that are and are not permitted therein.

However there is another conception of public space which is defined as the geographic space within which people interact together; it doesn’t have to be a park, publicly owned property, or even a public accommodation such as a grocery store (as found in civil rights law). It can be something as amorphous as where your private property interfaces with public property such as your front yard or your porch (ask your HOA) or a public event such as an Independence Day celebration or a school play. The term “public space” could also be termed “community space.”

A key observation is one that Crawford implicitly makes which is the ability of a very small percentage of the population, if so motivated, to degrade if not destroy that public space. There is the previous example of the modified car owner in Seattle and the impact this man had on the local neighborhood, but it could just as easily be other factors which convey menace and disorder: a street encampment, widespread open-air drug use, or a flash mob. Or…. to use our expanded notion of public space, do you feel safe leaving your car in the driveway or wonder what you’ll see in your front yard in the morning?

Our notion of public space and how we interact with it has changed over the years. It was within our lifetimes that it was expected that men and women dress and in general comport themselves according to certain public social customs. Now that has changed and not only from the sense of crime and disorder on the streets, but also a general lack of courtesy and “social grease” used to smooth interactions among strangers. That problem will loom greater both with more “diversity” and the demarcation of the population into various identity groups that lack a common identity.

Crawford also points to another dimension of public space, transportation, specifically roads and how we interact with it. From his book, Why We Drive:

Before the arrival of automobiles in significant numbers in the 1920s, the urban street was a place dominated by pedestrians, horses, and streetcars that ran on tracks. It was the place where children played—and why not?

We share a public space through the use of our private property, cars. However, transportation, that is how we convey ourselves through public space, is also a matter of public policy and viewed as a strategic choke point by the Left for reconstruction. The street and other parts of the local/regional transportation system are being physically reconstructed, not only to discourage cars and in favor of public transportation but also to drive use of vehicles with limited range such as bicycles and personal mobility scooters. I should also note that the introduction of self-driving cars, their inability to share the streets with human-oriented automobiles, and the introduction of the public space into cars themselves through technological kill switches will have a similar effect.

In addition to the physical dimension, the transportation system is also being socially reconstructed because these alternate methods of transportation are limited in their range and flexibility. This social remodeling will entail, either directly or indirectly, changing the places where we live (“the 15-minute city”) due to our limited ability to travel and our ability to physically access the wider world beyond.

If socially reconstructed ideas of transport sounds suspiciously like the COVID lockdowns and the resultant vision of a “Great Reset” you are not alone.

More on driving and the exercise of citizenship another time. For now, exercise your sovereignty of human agency, gas up your truck, and just go some place far away for the day. Just because, in the wonder that is still 21st Century America, you can and don’t have to justify it to anyone.