Cowboy Confessional

This is becoming common – another video based on data taken directly from my Gun Facts book.  Keep up the good work troops!

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Nothing quite like a lung full of fresh air, unless you never get any.

More than just air.  A little elbow room, a change of scenery and the joyous abandon of summer are magical.  I know I had plenty of above when I was young and have the good fortune to chase more of it as my whims dictate.

Kids in cities don’t have it so good.

Nothing wrong with cities, but there isn’t a low of elbow room and few places where you can safely run, scream and shout.  Too few horses and some of the dogs you don’t want to pet.

Not much fresh air either.

If you live somewhere with a piece of land, a swimming hole, dogs, horses and other childhood essentials – like fresh air – then open your home to a city kid this summer.  The good folk at Fresh Air will show you how.  And if you yourself live in a city and know first hand how suffocating they can be, then toss a little change to the Fresh Air Fund.

Kids need the social oxygen.

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Normally I issue take-down orders when I see someone use my copyrighted “Gun Facts” book name, or when they fail to give me proper credit for the raw material.  But in this case I may let it slide.  They fellow did an interesting job.

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The only person more dangerous to freedom than a sitting president is whomever he appoints to the Supreme Court.  After all, president’s have term limits.  We can theoretically impeach a Supreme, but it is damn difficult.  Hence, a free people must keep certain individuals off the bench and out of robes (except for Ruth Bader Ginsburg – she needs to remain clothed).

Which brings us to the unacceptable submission of Elena Kagan.  We can dismiss her gravitas for a seat on the highest court given her lack of validatable decisions.  Smart as she is alleged to be (which is nonsense as we will see momentarily), having never served as a judge means she served-up no judicial opinions.  Thus The People have nothing solid on which to evaluate her ability as a lower-caste jurist and thus her ability to protect the Constitution, the freedoms of Americans or even if she looks good in a robe (I retain doubts about her visual desirability disrobed).

Keep in mind that she accepted a job in an administration that will last no longer than Jimmy Carter’s, so her judgment skills are already proven deficient.

But we do have her limited work as Solicitor General to review.  For those unacquainted with the mechanics of the monstrosity called constitutional law, the Solicitor General (not to be confused with generals who solicit) represents the alleged position of the United States government when arguments are hurled at the Supreme Court … which is the United States Government.  The SG is appointed by the President and rarely represents anything but the president’s opinion, though that occasionally agrees with the opinion of congress and even more rarely that of The People.

Yes, the game is rigged.

Kagan filed briefs in U.S. vs. Stevens, a nasty affair involving dog fighting and free speech.  Distasteful as they be, the most vile members of society often test and confirm constitutional rights.  Larry Flint argued that Hustler magazine was a form of protected speech and thus made sure every adolescent male could ogle photos of panty hamsters.  Thus in U.S. vs. Stevens the First Amendment was tested again over something more degenerate than Hustler, though the mind boggles at the very prospect.

In Kagan’s brief to the Supremes, she wrote in part:

“Whether a given category of speech enjoys First Amendment protection depends upon a categorical balancing of the value of the speech against its societal costs” [emphasis clearly not hers]. In her words court watchers hear echoes of Breyer the Senile from his dissent in the Heller gun control case where he waxed ineloquently about a non-existent judicial power to balance enumerated rights with perceived societal “costs.”

What Kagan argued is that judges have the domain to determine what (if any) balance should be struck between a right of The People and the power of the state.  The Constitution is silent on this subject (i.e., The People who ratified the Constitution never granted courts that power) which means that Kagan has already driven off the road of reason and into the rhetorical weeds. There is also the annoying aspect of regulating any right.  As the old law school song would go (if any J.D. candidate had lyrical skills) “How can a right be regulated and not be wrong?”

Aside from the huge sticking point of the judiciary not being granted the power to make such decisions, the other insurmountable obstruction (and one that I devote an entire chapter to in my next book, Catalog of Canards) is that “cost” is a malleable concept.  Some interpret social costs to be direct financial costs to individuals.  Other folk think it is out-of-pocket government expenses including welfare, indigent medical care and congressional bourbon therapy.  Berkeley residents still riddled with psilocybin from their last Grateful Dead road trip perceive more spiritual expenses before subsequent hallucinogenic experiences overtake them.  The definition of social costs is as precise as that for “assault weapons”, both definitions being as narrow as nuclear weapon target diameters.

Quantifying social costs is impossible.

So put yourself in a judge’s robe and picture being so delirious that you believe you have the authority to identify a balance between rights and “costs.”  Where do you begin?  Costs, a concept as solid as Jell-O, has too many parties, angles and elements to measure.  Thus it becomes a judgment call, and judgment is always biased.  Since Kagan comes from the statist klan, we know which side of the scale she’ll lay her finger.

For those issues that the Constitution permits government intrusion into private affairs (which at the federal level is a short, clearly enumerated list) Congress was given the authority to find balance, not the courts.  Kagan professes that the power given to elected officials (who we can fire more easily, or in joyful moments decorate with tar and feathers) be usurped by unelected judges.  Further, given the broad role judges have assumed, they could attempt balancing acts on items over which the Federal government has zero jurisdiction.  In short, Kagan professes to become the conscious of the people and the arbitrator or everything.

The syntactic similarities between arbitrator and traitor may be pertinent here.

Reading further into Kagan’s brief, we see the disturbing instance where she defends indefensible law because it allegedly stops “the erosion of important public mores.”  I love reading this passage to my gay friends and noting that conservatives made the same claims about California’s Proposition 8 which banned gay marriage.  Thus Kagan is intellectually aligned with those who believe that individual rights are subject to majority morality (which is one semantic step away from her being a member of the Moral Majority).  She is confirming my oft spoken observation that there is not a dimes worth of difference between hard-left liberals, hard-right conservatives, and your garden variety jihadist:  they all seek to control their neighbor’s non-destructive behavior.  The liberals have Kagan, the conservatives had Falwell and the jihadists have bombs.

Come to think of it, liberals used to have bombs too.

Let us not waste time on a Senate confirmation process since Kagan has already confirmed her lack of understanding about the express written will of the American people as well as her proffered role therein.

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Noam got it wrong.

Before today I had no opinion about Chomsky.  My conservative friends tend to despise him and my liberal friends suddenly look nervous when his name is mentioned.  Swirling rumors about what he wrote and its relationship to propaganda theory and practice kept landing like drunken MIT co-eds in my mind (and there is nothing quite as amusingly amorous than a liquored-up geek girl).

I’m peddling a book to publishers on the very topic of agitprop.  Having invested a decade in exploding gun control myths I have encountered most every manifestation of misinformation.  Since gun control myths are a subset of propaganda proper, and since Noam wrote on the subject, all these rumors about Chomsky’s insights and how they might be currently leveraged by the left demanded I read into his work.

Can’t say I’m impressed.

I have to give Noam some windage here.  His Manufacturing Consent was penned before every teenager had their own blog and before newspapers began evaporating faster than the last wisp of rum from aforementioned co-ed’s breath (though I will confess that Myers taste better when slurped from her bellybutton).  Thus a fair amount of Noam’s noodling is non sequitur.

Some of it was plain wrong when written.

A primary premise in Manufacturing Consent was that the advertisers led the media by their financial noses.  Noam was metaphorically looking down the wrong end of the barrel (it would be a wonderful event if the barrel analogy were literal).  The media is a matchmaker, with the audience as client.  Any media outlet that creates content disagreeable with the consumer goes out of business.  The primary financial incentive is to give the public what they want, regardless of how bland, sleazy or repugnant it may be.  Without content consumers, the media ceases to exist and no amount of advertising money will enact resurrection.

This is why the main stream media is moribund.  In the 80’s and 90’s a few university journalism schools, paired with statisticians, measured media bias and quantified that the American media was slightly to the left of Fidel.  Given that the polled public perceived itself slightly right of center, there existed a daily disconnect between the media and the public.  What Ma and Pa witnessed day-in-and-out disagreed with what the media marketed.  Fox News has high ratings simply because their content provided something that an otherwise homogeneous media did not.

Chomsky contends that the media was subservient to the advertiser.  Having worked in marketing I know this to be less than half the story.  Advertisers want to reach people, and the editorial leanings of the media are nearly irrelevant.  If a television channel reaches millions of males between 18 and 32, and if the advertiser sells Girl’s Gone Goofy videos, they would not care if the media was a nexus for necrophilia (which may be the next NBS reality show).  Based on ratings and demographics the vendor could predict their sales volume and would buy ad space.  Indeed, the only thing that would stop an advertiser would be if the anti-necra lobby threatened to boycott stations that aired drunken co-ed videos.

Hence, the left-leaning nature of the old media.  In the absence of competing outlets (pre talk radio, internet and Fox) they had insufficient backlash from the consumers. Thus, advertisers were content with the available advertising venues.  Without corrective action from either end of the financial relationship, we see two realities:  First, Noam didn’t know what he was talking about.  Second, the bulk of news was thus controlled by the media and the government, not advertisers.

Forget the military-industrial complex.  The media-politician complex was and is the real threat.

I know enough reporters to confirm that they live for two things:  telling a good story and exercising power.  The former is only of interest to other writers, and we get it.  The later is understandable only in the context that some small and sinister part of the populace always wants to control other people.  Reporters, producers and media moguls are no exception.  Controlling information was a great way to push the public toward some journalists’ political ends.  ‘Was’ is the operative word.  Today everybody is the media – there are millions of board and bathrobed fact checkers armed with an online sea of information that would make an Alexandrian librarian faint.

The media is no longer in control of the conversation, something they have yet to realize.

Noam got the financial aspects of the media backwards.  He also undersold the motivations of the media itself, which have been both malignant and manic.  Too many times we have witnessed major media outlets sell what remained of their souls in order to assassinate a person, company, industry or cause.  NBC faked exploding pick-up trucks.  CNN used machineguns to misinform the public about the power of sporting rifles.  ABC staged impossible self-defense scenarios.  CBS bought or co-produced fake documents during an election.  And MSNBC can’t emit an electron without it being accompanied by misinformation.

Yet Chomsky does not see this as a major source for the manufacture of “consent”.  Willful blindness or purposeful obfuscation?  Don’t know, but either way it says volumes about the quality of his analytical abilities.  He possesses all the functioning cognitive capacity of a drunk co-ed, but with none of the giggling charm.

Chomsky also felt that reporters, as a subspecies, trusted governmental information sources more than private.  Here Noam was nearly correct.  Like humans in general, reporters believe what they want and many seek information that bolsters their pre-existing biases.  If a corporation, advocacy group or man on the street helps assault whomever a reprobate reporter wishes to journalistically bludgeon, that is who will appear on the evening news.  Since reporters have been measured to be more liberal and Democrat than the public at large, they will more often accept government’s guile than General Motors’ (not that there is a difference between those two entities any more).  Yet when the government or a particular politician is the target of a reporters wrath, then non-government sources of deception work just as well.

Ask Dan Rather, providing his meds are allowing him to talk coherently this week.

Noam’s neglectfulness centers mainly on the assumption that “the media” (a rapidly evolving complex organism) is a mindless machine that is easily manipulated.  He ignores the media’s motivations and members therein who are merely activists with press passes.  Therein was the true source of propaganda – an unchecked media with no competition on the sources and distribution of information.  In the bad old days, your world view came from three very similar network news programs and one or two local newspapers.  Now with 500 television channels, several 24×7 news networks and the entirety of the Internet, the old threat of media manufactured consent is mitigated if not eliminated.

Noam Chomsky may have influenced a few, but his depth of analysis betrays a shallow intellectual pond.  Now that everybody is the media, Noam can be ignored … again.

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