Bill Maher against the Young Adult Generation

If you didn’t see it and have not read it, you missed something. Bill Maher issued forth with an excellent monologue the other night. It’s worth quoting, via The Daily Wire and Maggie’s Farm.

In it Maher took out after the young adult generation, denouncing them for holding some incredibly stupid ideas. That is, they are true believing ideologues, to the point where they hold fast to their ideas, even when reality has shown them to be majorly awful.

You know the reason why advertisers in this country love the 18 to 34 demographic? Because it’s the most gullible. Yeah. A third of people under 35 say they’re in favor of abolishing the police — not defunding, but doing away with a police force altogether, which is less of a policy position and more of a leg tattoo. Thirty-six percent of millennials think it might be a good idea to try communism, but much of the world did try it. I know, millennials think that doesn’t count because they weren’t alive when it happened. But it did happen. And there are people around who remember it. Pining for communism? It’s like pining for Betamax or Myspace. So when you say you’re old, you don’t get it. Get what? Abolish the police and the Border Patrol and capitalism and cancel Lincoln? No, I get it. The problem isn’t that I don’t get what you’re saying or that I’m old. The problem is that your ideas are stupid.

Indeed, these products of America’s educational establishment cannot think. They have been brainwashed to the point where they will happily embrace any leftist ideological meme, because they want to belong to the cool kids gang-- and they are afraid of being canceled.

Maher continued:

Twenty percent of Gen Z agree with the statement, ‘society would be better off if all property was owned by the public and managed by the government,’ and another 29% saying they don’t know if that’s a good idea. Here’s who does know: anyone who wasn’t born yesterday.

Parents Against Critical Race Theory

The Daily Mail reports that the backlash against private school indoctrination in critical race theory is gaining momentum. Allowing woke teachers and administrators to indoctrinate your children in an ideology that will damage their future prospects is surely of vital importance.

Worse yet, parents have nothing to say about whether or not their children are being indoctrinated. They can either accept the new regime or they can pick up and leave. One understands that these programs, as is the entirety of critical race theory, are deeply unpopular. A recent Yale University study suggested that they will damage Democratic election prospects.

This means, to put a finer point on it, that Democrats do not believe in democracy. They do not respond to the will of the people or the people’s representatives. They want to impose their will on the nation and even the nation’s children. It is a frightening prospect, brought to you nationally by today’s ruling Democratic Party, and brought to you locally by the despotic leaders of the teachers’ unions, the people who bear the most responsibility for damaging the minds of poor minority children in major American cities.

When it comes to private school children, some parents are in full rebellion. When it comes to minority children, their parents have nothing to say. It is sad beyond imagining. 

So, to keep up to date on the parental rebellion, we begin with one Harvey Goldman, who pulled his daughter out of a New York private school, the Heschel School when he discovered that his daughter was being told to get in touch with her white privilege. He called it child abuse, and he was surely right.

The Daily Mail reports:

Parent Harvey Goldman said he pulled his daughter out of the $43,000-per-year Heschel School after learning that the fourth-grader was being tutored on her 'white privilege'.

Last September, he sent administrators a private letter, which he is now making public for the first time.

'First and foremost, neither I, nor my child, have 'white privilege,' nor do we need to apologize for it,' Goldman wrote.

'Suggesting I do is insulting. Suggesting to my nine-year-old child she does is child abuse, not education.' 

Goldman told the Post that administrators were 'arrogant and dismissive' in response, suggesting he pull his daughter out of the school if he was unsatisfied. 

He did, and moved the family to Florida, where his daughter now attends a free public school, which he vetted to ensure CRT was not part of the curriculum. 

Moving to Florida, attending a public school where critical race theory does not appear on the curriculum-- it's one solution.

And we have another parent, one Bion Bartning, whose children were attending another toney New York private school:

Riverdale Country School parent Bion Bartning was also so upset with the ideologies being taught there that he pulled his children out of the $54,000-a-year school.

But, Bartning organized a new group to fight back:

Bartning then went a step further, founding the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) to fight back against what he calls a dangerous new 'orthodoxy'.

Bartning, who is Mexican and Yaqui on one side and Jewish on the other, said he was shocked to learn that schoolchildren are being forced to label themselves as privileged or oppressed by skin color.

'I don't fit into any of those race buckets,' Bartning told the Post. 'I think it is wrong to be teaching kids these socially constructed race categories.' 

'It's a destructive ideology, teaching children to be pessimistic and full of grievance rather than being optimistic and full of gratitude. It goes against all the values I was raised with, and there are many out there who feel as I do,' he said.

Setting one race against the other, it’s precisely what we should not be doing. Now, schools are doing it in the name of the vapid concept of equity:

Bartning said he had even encountered instances of children being given color palettes to match with their skin tone to assess their level of privilege.  

Happily, public school parents are beginning to join the movement-- and are running for public office.

Some public school parents have also joined the growing movement opposed to CRT. Maud Maron, a City Council candidate with four children in local public schools, slammed so-called anti-racist philosophy, as CRT is often branded.

'It's a really divisive, ugly orthodoxy and it's a multi-million dollar industry as well,' Maron told The Post. 'It's also very insidious because on the face of it, who wouldn't want to sign up to be less racist?' 

Now, Melissa Chen, a member of the advisory board of FAIR, has also spoken her mind:

In Wednesday's interview, Chen slammed CRT ideology as a 'new racist orthodoxy' that causes children to question if they are the oppressed or the oppressor because of their skin race. 

'They are being taught a very cynical, intolerant, kind of new racist orthodoxy that forces everyone to see each other - students really - by their immutable characteristics,' she said.

'So by their skin color, their gender, their sexual orientation. And it's very harmful, it pits them against each other. It assigns moral values. Are you an oppressor or are you the oppressed?

'Just purely based on skin color and that's what we're seeing with this language about demonizing white children because they are born oppressors.'

Chen said this is 'harrowing' that children are being taught this. 

She cited several schools mired in controversy recently as some parents and teachers have questioned their approaches to anti-racism.  

Because these schools are the 'elite of the elite', Chen said these teachings are being taught to children likely to go on to become the future leaders of the country and top institutions. 

'We've had several high profile cases already - you know Dalton school, Riverdale school this is happening at Grace Church school,' she said.

Truth be told, you can forget about any chance that children indoctrinated in this ideology are going to be future leaders in America, or anywhere. Hopefully, other children in other schools across America are not suffering the same brainwashing. Otherwise, when our legions of social justice warriors enter the fray against China’s armies of scientists and engineers, we are going to lose. It will not even be close.

Go Plant a Tree

It’s what real executive leadership looks like. Vice President Kamala Harris, anointed the border czar, has done precisely nothing that anyone knows about since she assumed the position. We are left to conclude that the title is more cosmetic than real.

Harris has not visited the border, even though she had time to visit the Northern border for a photo op. But, she has graciously donated copies of her book Superheroes Are Everywhere to all of those who enter the country illegally. If that isn't leaderly I don't know what is.

OK, let’s be fair. We do not know whether those books are being donated by Harris herself or whether they are purchased by the U. S. Gov. in order to enrich her. 

Anyway, in the realm of brilliant ideas, Harris is now going to have a talk with Mexican president Lopez Obrador about one of his great ideas. It's not about shutting down the border, or stopping people from getting to the border.

Harris wants to talk about a Mexican program that is guaranteed to ensure that Mexicans and Central Americans do not want to leave home. Harris believes that potential migrants will all be putting down roots by planting trees. Yes, indeed, these illegal migrants will be induced into staying home, in order to care for trees. 

The Mexican government has been promoting this project for some time now. As for its impact on the flood of illegal migrants, we all know the answer to that question.

Anyway, the Daily Mail reports on this important story:

López Obrador pitched his 'Planting Life' program, which aims to pay farmers to plant 1 billion fruit and timber trees in Mexico, to U.S. President Joe Biden at Thursday's climate change summit. 

The program has been extended to El Salvador, and Mexico wants U.S. funding to further extend it to Honduras and Guatemala.

López Obrador claims the program can help prevent farmers from leaving their land and migrating to the United States. He has also proposed that the U.S. grant six-month work visas, and eventually citizenship, to some of those who participate in the program.

So, what is it really about? It’s about opening a pathway to citizenship for Mexicans. Why did they not tell us this at first? The report continues, and explains that the farmers receive around $225 per months to tend to the trees. With money like that floating around, why would anyone leave?

Better yet, planting trees will save the planet. And for the climate conscious idiots in the Biden administration, it’s catnip. 

Opinions are mixed in Mexico on whether the program is really working and whether it can offset Mexico's other policy of encouraging the use of fossil fuels.

The program has already planted 700,000 trees in Mexico, where it pays 450,000 Mexican farmers a stipend of about $225 per month to tend the saplings.

Some critics have suggested that farmers with marginal or unprofitable natural woodlands have simply cut them down in order to plant new trees and qualify for the monthly stipend.

López Obrador says the carbon-capture from trees in the reforestation program will make a major contribution to fighting climate change. 

But at the same time, López Obrador's administration has focused on building oil refineries and burning more coal and fuel oil at power plants, while placing limits on private renewable and gas-fired electricity generation. 

The last paragraph is rich indeed. While enticing the Biden administration and Czar Harris with mumblings about climate change, the Mexican president has been building oil refineries and has been burning more coal. Yes, indeed. These people know who they are dealing with. 

Shakespeare's Empathy

The stupidification of America proceeds apace. Now, a literature professor from Drexel University schools us by pretending that Shakespeare’s plays are dripping the milk of human kindness. The plays are, Paula Marantz Cohen postulates, all about empathy.

As noted in previous posts, the rage for empathy does not merely misunderstand empathy. It represents a new way to sell men on the need to get in touch with their feminine sides. Obviously, the culture had a problem selling men their feminine sides, so it has glommed on to empathy, and is now telling men that even Shakespeare became more empathetic with age. Dumb ideas die hard.

I trust you will forgive me for not having read Cohen’s book. But, it is published by Yale University Press, and we ought at least to notice that Yale Professor Paul Bloom, a man occasionally quoted on this blog, has already shown that empathizing does not necessarily make anyone kinder and gentler. It might just as easily, as Adam Smith had pointed out centuries ago, make people into sadists. Links here and here.

When Donald Trump’s supporters saw him getting abused and harassed on a daily basis, they felt empathy for him and they wanted to avenge the abuse. You might agree or disagree with their tactics, but at the least, the experience, as well as Prof. Bloom’s book, Against Empathy, shows us that empathy is not quite the panacea that its proponents pretend that it is. One suspects that Cohen has not addressed the arguments against empathy, and this is a very good reason not to read her book. 

Thus, I quote from the Wall Street Journal review, written by another empathy monger, by name of Melissa Holbrook Pierson.

Pierson describes Cohen’s thesis, namely that Shakespeare’s plays represent a type of therapy, whereby, in writing them, he gained insight into his toxic masculinity and allowed his inner empath to express itself. Seriously, there's more to life than therapy.

In Pierson’s words:

Her [Cohen's] thesis is that in conceiving progressively more nuanced characters who express their humanity in stereo—with a dual focus on their own troubled lives and their relationships with others—the playwright schooled himself in empathy.

Note the expression, “humanity in stereo.” It is perfectly mindless and meaningless. Anyway, Cohen apparently is happy to quote Harold Bloom-- no relation to Paul-- to the effect that Shakespeare invented the human. One has to admit that Bloom’s notion was absurd on its face. 

Human beings belong to groups. They belong to families, communities and nations. They do not identify themselves as human beings. No character in Shakespeare becomes more or less human, more or less empathic. As for humanity’s foundation, it lay, according to the book of Genesis in the acquisition of free will. Humans are moral beings because acting ethically is the basis for functioning effectively in groups. 

Harold Bloom, she notes, asserted that Shakespeare “invented the human,” but what exactly did he mean? His formulation suggests what Ms. Cohen’s contention makes explicit: The ability to empathize—per the dictionary, “the power of entering into the experience of or understanding objects or emotions outside ourselves”—can be considered humanity’s foundation. She finds empathy central to the manifold power of Shakespeare’s work, the element which has allowed it to outlast the time that gave rise to it.

Of course, group cohesion is more important than feeling anyone’s feelings. And group cohesion is produced by following a single set of rules, rules that belong to one group and not to another. Different groups speak different languages. Different groups have different customs and manners. But all human societies have language and all have customs and manners. If you do not understand the structure of social interaction, as well as the structure of storytelling and language usage, you will never understand Shakespeare.

So, the notion of expanding kindness is simply silly:

She proceeds to demonstrate the progress of Shakespeare’s expanding “kindness,” as simplified in the book’s title, over the course of eight plays.

Being as Cohen is presumably totally woke, she shares the brilliant insights of her students, students who are so woke that they cannot read Shakespeare except as a commentary on systemic racism. This is pathetic and does not elicit any empathy for the author:

As the university’s student body grows increasingly diverse, she finds classroom perspectives deepening on a wealth of issues in the works. Students coming of age in the time of #MeToo and a heightened awareness of systemic racism have different takes on such plays as “As You Like It” and “Othello” than students a generation before. In this way, “Of Human Kindness” performs its own central idea.

As for Cohen’s readings of plays, they range between empty and vapid:

Thus Othello is a more developed Shylock, as both Iago and Othello are “driven to villainy by a wound to their humanity.” Lear is Hamlet confronting the estrangements of old age. And “Antony and Cleopatra” is a more chiaroscuro, “late-life rewrite of Romeo and Juliet.” In essence, Shakespeare used his own plays as a developmental workshop.

A developmental workshop-- spare us the drivel. In the first place, it is a fundamental error to read plays as commentaries on the playwright’s psyche. If the plays appeal to everyone else, the reason must be that they are not merely a function of the man Will Shakespeare. 

Iago is not trying to destroy Othello because the latter wounded his humanity. Whatever does it mean to wound your humanity. Othello is not susceptible to the notion that his wife is cheating because it is a wound to his humanity. The minimal Darwinian analysis would suggest that the play would better be understood in terms of a struggle for status and power. And the analysis would also suggest that Othello’s jealousy had something to do with a man’s doubts that his wife might give birth to someone else’s children. Or else, his doubts that his wife could really love him.

The notion that King Lear is an aging Hamlet strikes this reader as especially stupid. Hamlet’s problem is not merely a need to avenge his father’s murder. It is-- that he is not sure that his father was really his father. The play dramatizes the question of the cost of adultery-- it has nothing to do with the insipid issue of humanity, whatever that may mean.

As for King Lear, the doddering old fool makes a calamitous mistake in handing his kingdom over to his daughters, in believing their protestations of love, and in imagining that they will still respect him after he has relinquished his power. As the play demonstrates, the language of love is not Lear's language, and he should have avoided the temptation to get in touch with his feminine, loveable side.

As for Romeo and Juliet being rewritten into Antony and Cleopatra, the thought is too silly to entertain. 

As Aristotle suggested, tragedies befall those who have become arrogant, who suffer from hubris. They fall from a high situation because they believe that they are above the law, that the rules do not apply to them.

As for the high comedies, God only knows why Cohen’s students think that As You Like It has anything to do with systemic racism. If her students think such a thing, that can only mean that they are too stupid to understand the play. As everyone ought to know, the high comedies are about courtship. They are about changing courtly love, which was largely limited to adulterous relationships between married women and younger boys, into a ritual leading to marriage. The plays show the development of new mating customs that arrived in Europe with the Protestant Reformation. 

Sad to say, but this purportedly new form of Shakespearean criticism is merely a symptom of a culture that is losing its collective mind. The correct term is not empathetic, which most of the empaths do not understand anyway, but pathetic. 

Courtney Ann Taylor: "Shame on Us"

Speaking truth to power Georgia mother Courtney Ann Taylor attacked the Gwinnett County Board of Education for continuing to force children to wear masks. As she and everyone else knows, children are very, very rarely susceptible to catching the virus. 

Zero Hedge has the story:

Taylor slammed the board who for months have proclaimed the importance of "social, emotional health" telling them, "if you truly mean that, you would end the mask requirement tonight. Tonight.”

“This is not March 2020 anymore,” the mom of a 6-year-old rage…

“We have three vaccines, every adult in the state of Georgia that wants that vaccine is eligible to get it, right now, and every one of us knows that young children are not affected by this virus.”

“They’re not,” Taylor said, as she began to get emotional, “and that’s a blessing.”

“But as the adults what have we done with that blessing? We’ve shoved it to the side and we’ve said we don’t care, ‘You’re still gonna wear a mask on your face every day, 5 and 6-year-olds, you still can’t play together on the playground like normal children, 7 and 8-year-olds,'” she said.

“We don’t care. We are still going to force you to carry a burden that was never yours to carry. Shame on us,” she said.

“It is April 15, 2021, and it’s time,” Taylor said angrily.

“Take these masks off of my child.”

Climate Change Prophecies

The Biden administration is going all-in on its war against the weather. Led by pompous buffoon John Kerry the administration has decided to reconfigure the national economy in order to prevent some lame prophecy from coming true. And they are doing it in the name of science. Fancy that.

To commemorate the first Earth Day, Mark Perry has put together a list of predictions, that is, prophecies, that serious climate scientists proposed over five decades ago. By now it's time for a reality test. We can evaluate the evidence and judge whether these scientists were right or wrong.

It is sobering, to say the least. Consider a few of them, herewith:

1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years [by 1985 or 2000] unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

2. “We are in an environmental crisis that threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China, and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”

9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”

17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so [by 2005], it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an Ice Age.”

One notes, in #9, that scientists have enough evidence to make predictions. In truth, they have enough evidence to formulate hypotheses. But, do they allow the evidence to falsify their outlandish predictions.

So, hysterical apocalyptic prophecies all turned out to be worthless. Naturally, those who do not believe in science have decided that this does not mean that said scientists are crackpots. It means that the end is approaching, faster than ever.

What We Lost in Minneapolis

In the matter of the Derek Chauvin murder trial, we turn to a notable criminal law attorney, one who does not belong to the vast right wing conspiracy.

That is, we turn to Alan Dershowitz, a man of integrity who has consistently defended the criminal justice system. This time, Dershowitz points out the level of jury intimidation involved in the Chauvin guilty verdicts. 

He begins with a simple observation, namely that Rep. Maxine Waters specifically chose to intimidate the trial jurors, in a manner that recalled past efforts by the KKK. Considering that Waters had previously adopted Storm Trooper tactics in an effort to incite public harassment of Trump administration officials, at least she remains consistent in her bigotry.

Lawyer and liberal pundit Alan Dershowitz accused Rep. Maxine Waters of using KKK tactics to intimidate jurors in the Derek Chauvin murder trial.

“The Klan would march outside of courthouses and threaten all kinds of reprisals if the jury ever dared convict a white person or acquit a black person,” Dershowitz said in an interview on Newsmax.

Her remarks should have produced a mistrial:

Dershowitz believes that her comments should have resulted in a mistrial.

“Her message was clearly intended to get to the jury: ‘If you will acquit or if you find the charge less than murder, we will burn down your buildings. We will burn down your businesses. We will attack you. We will do what happened to the witness — blood on their door,'” Dershowitz explained. 

“The judge, of course, wouldn’t grant a mistrial because then he’d be responsible for the riots that would ensue, even though it was Waters who was responsible,” he added.

In a Newsweek article Dershowitz expanded on his concept. It is not just that a not guilty verdict would have provoked mass violence. Surely, in our doxing age, the jurors understood that if they had voted the wrong way they would have been attacked personally. 

Dershowitz argued that the judge should have sequestered the jury. At the least, the actions of Waters and other officials will provide grounds for appeal. Surely, the jurors understood the potential consequences of their actions:

 President Joe Biden, in his comments following the guilty verdicts in the Chauvin case, correctly pointed out that the jury was "under extraordinary pressure." This pressure came from the realization that if the jury failed to convict on the highest charges of murder, there would be violence in the streets. Every big-city police chief and mayor understood this reality and prepared for it. Yet, we are supposed to assume that the 12 jurors who convicted Chauvin of all the charges were not influenced by this obvious reality. The judge, who made an unconstitutional decision not to sequester the jurors, himself acknowledged that Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) had given the defense an appellate issue due to the statements she made before the judge finally sequestered the jury.

The American people can have no confidence that this jury verdict was not tainted by the threats of violence made outside the courthouse. Those threats almost certainly seeped into the jury room. American justice, and in particular our system of trial by jury, cannot survive if jurors are under "extraordinary pressure" to render verdicts that reduce the threat of outside violence. Trial by jury is a fragile institution that requires jurors to be insulated from external pressures. The judge in the Chauvin case recognized that jurors could well be influenced by the danger they might face if they rendered an unpopular verdict: He took the unusual step of keeping the jurors' names secret. This sent a message to jurors that publicizing their names might endanger their safety. Yet the media provided demographic profiles of these jurors nonetheless, clearly allowing them to be identified by friends and neighbors.

Not only did the judge refuse to sequester the jurors—he also gave them inadequate instructions about listening to outside sources. He repeatedly told them not to watch "the news." But television news is not the only source of information in the modern age. The vast majority of people get their information from other sources, such as the internet, podcasts, radio and television shows that are not necessarily "the news." There are also myriad personal contacts with friends and family members.

Everyone in Minneapolis was on edge about what the jury would do in this case and what the reaction would be if the jury failed to convict on the murder charges. It is inconceivable that at least some jurors were not aware that if the verdict was anything short of murder, there would be riots, violence and threats made to the jurors themselves. This reality may not have consciously influenced the jurors. They may all honestly believe that the evidence proves Chauvin's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But it is highly likely that this reality may still have influenced, in subtle ways, the decision whether to convict for murder instead of merely manslaughter. The case for manslaughter was strong. The cases for second- and third-degree murder were highly questionable, both as a matter of law and fact. Yet, the jury quickly returned verdicts of guilty on all three charges.

Sequestration of jurors for an entire trial is difficult, cumbersome and expensive. But I believe that the Supreme Court of the United States should rule that in cases like this one, where there are pressures to convict for fear of mass violence, the jury must be sequestered throughout the entire trial. If this is not mandated, the constitutional rights of defendants in such cases may well be compromised.

Citizens have the constitutional right to protest outside a courthouse. Even a congresswoman has that right. No one should try to curtail the First Amendment. The correct constitutional approach is to permit protests while insulating the jury from them. Sequestration strikes the appropriate constructional balance between the right of protesters to demand convictions and the right of a defendant to a fair trial that is uninfluenced by those same demands.

Among the casualties in Minneapolis was the right to a fair trial. Unhinged rhetoric has consequences. Legitimizing political violence has consequences. Obviously, those who believe in summary justice do not care about minor matters like criminal procedure. And yet, criminal procedure and the due process of law is what protects us from justice by lynching.