The Road Not Taken

All things are possible.  Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26)

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” (a quote made famous by Robert Oppenheimer originally from the 1944 Prabhavanada and Isherwood Translation of the Bhagavad Gita[1])

As we look toward the future there are always two options.  We can look forward to a better future with optimism, or we can see the deep, depressing gloom of a world lost.  The question each of us must answer individually is which path shall I take?

It is so easy in today’s world to choose the darker path because those who feed the information stream scream out all the ills of the world.  There are a variety of motivations for this, profit, fame, pettiness, or just selfish pleasure, but in the end, it all contributes to pushing us towards the negative.

For me, Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” serves as a guide to follow my own heart and not be persuaded by the shouts of those who find pleasure in their own voices.

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[1] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/now-i-am-become-death-the-destroyer-of-worlds

Doubling Down

Here we are a month after the inauguration of President Trump and CNN has this headline.  New executive order may be a pivotal moment for Trump's vision of presidency. I guess I should be used to the hyperbole and exaggerations that are now touted as “real news” by the mainstream news agencies of ABCNNBCBS, but it still intrigues me that they can be so self-absorbed to not realize the damage they are doing to their brand when they are patently one-sided in their reporting.

And of course they bring in Christine Amanpour interviewing the Iranian Foreign Minister to get Iran’s view of the President.  My favorite line?  “Iran responds very well to mutual respect.”  But of course, that would be as they define mutual respect.  When you’re the “Great Satan” I am not sure how that mutual respect thing really works.

Scott Adams has a good video on the dialogues now playing out in the MSM.  

It’s All About the Narrative

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On Monday, November 28, 2016, there was a terror event on the campus of Ohio State University.  It involved an OSU student, a young Somali immigrant, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, attacking others with his car, and then a knife.  This attack was similar to what we’ve seen in Palestinian attacks in Israel. He was engaged and killed by an OSU police officer, Alan Horujko, who reported “shots fired” as he called for assistance.  This led the OSU emergency response team to declare an active shooter event and broadcast it via social media to all the students.  Its Twitter message read, “Buckeye Alert: Active Shooter on campus. Run Hide Fight. Watts Hall. 19th and College.”

It took about an hour from the first notification for the OSU administration to determine the only shooter was the police officer, and the student body should be notified of the all clear, but the twitter responses make a rather telling commentary on the thinking of the average student, others who followed the feed, as well as those who will use any such event to push their political narrative.

On the one hand, there were a significant number of individuals who could not fathom why the OSU team would advocate “fight” as one of the responses.  If someone has a gun how could you possibly fight them?  The concept of actively participating in their own defense appeared to be completely alien to them.

For the record, the advice advocating fight comes only if there are no other options.  You are trapped and about to be shot.  In this instance the advice is to be as violent as possible to disrupt the shooter and either disarm them or escape.

Then there were those who used the events of the day to talk about the need for everyone to have a gun and how OSU should not be a gun free zone.  @Tradecraft Ltd offered this great opinion, “Apparently colleges would prefer their innocent students to just be good little victims.”

Finally, there were politicians and others from California, Virginia, and elsewhere around the world, who weighed in about how too many people have guns and that this never would have happened if we had better gun control laws.

Senator Tim Kaine, D-VA (Clinton VP candidate), found it necessary to weigh in before he had the facts (I assume) with “Deeply saddened by the senseless act of gun violence at Ohio State this morning. Praying for the injured and the entire Buckeye community”

I am not a twitter user, and looking at the dialogues on this medium I am convinced my choice was a good one, for civility and respect don’t seem to be its forte. 

What is the Role of the Press?

I read much about how bias the press is against Mr. Trump, or in favor of Ms. Clinton.  The principle critics are, of course, the conservative media, who have their own bias.  It doesn’t take too critical an eye to see that what we view as the mainstream broadcast media, ABCNNBCBS, their subordinate networks, and affiliated stations all seem to have the same agenda in their selection of what news to feed us, and how to shape public opinion in support of their group's goals. 

It has recently become obvious that on-line search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing as well as social media giants Facebook and Twitter all do the same thing.  The anonymous editors, sitting behind their screens have been shown to fashion the trending stories to ensure their agendas rise to the forefront of any story line, or derogatory articles are buried deep in the search results.

Perhaps it has always been this way, but it is just more obvious now than at any time in my past because of the way we absorb the information that inundates us.  For example, look at how the press covered Franklin Roosevelt for the entirety of his Presidency.  From what I’ve read Americans knew he had polio, but never were shown the extent of his infirmity.  The White House and the press colluded to only release information that showed the President in normal views, sitting in a car, sitting on the porch, or standing to give the state of the union address to Congress.  They were led to believe he was a bit slow to walk because of the braces, but did not appreciate he was wheelchair bound or the full extent of his paralysis.  Was this wrong?  Did the public have a right to know?  Should his opponents have made a big deal over this as they would now in this age of ad hominem political attack?

In the later part of the 19th century, writing in the Fortnightly Review, Oscar Wilde said of the press.

“In old days men had the rack.  Now they have the press.  That is an improvement certainly.  But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralising.  Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the fourth estate.  That was true at the time, no doubt.  But at the present moment it really is the only estate.  It has eaten up the other three.  The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it.  We are dominated by Journalism.”[i] 

 How true that appears today, where opinion far outweighs fact.  A time when journalists and other opinion holders (who fancy themselves journalists) abound, and platforms like Facebook and Twitter are based almost exclusively on shouting out opinions either for or against some social issue.

You can observe these bias agendas in action as the latest Clinton or Trump controversy plays out.  Today, more than ever before, we are left to our own intelligence to determine what is real and what isn't.

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[i] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1017/1017-h/1017-h.htm

Why Polling Shouldn’t Be Reported as News

When I was taking my graduate statistics course it was a point of debate in the class on how you can, through manipulation, make statistics infer anything you want.  The point of the discussion was to undersatand how personal bias and agenda can potentially cloud the results of even the most rigid surveys or samples.

Today our news channels inundate us with poll after poll purporting to show how Americans feel about almost any topic you can think of.  Each poll is presented as indisputable evidence of whatever agenda the news organization wants to push.

For example, lets take the latest AP Poll - Racial Attitudes Topline (Oct 28), being pushed around the news world.  It is supposed to show how average American’s have become more, not less, racist since the election of President Obama.  The Washington Post felt compelled to defend the legitimacy of the poll in this article,  Washington Post -- How the Associated Press polls on racial attitudes were conducted, but in that defense I see no explanation on how academic bias was accounted for, or how they legitimatized the assumptions on human performance in measuring implied feelings from association.

So what kinds of Headlines come from this online survey? 

Washington Post – “AP Poll: A slight majority of American’s are now expressing negative views of blacks”

 The Guardian (UK) – “Racial prejudice in US worsened during Obama’s first term, study shows”

 NY Times – “The Price of a Black President”

The Hill (blog) – “Poll:  Racial attitudes towards blacks could cost Obama at the polls”  (I would recommend the Hill get a new Headline writer if this is the best they can do).

You know, I read the poll numbers, and there is a minor shift between 2010 and 2012 in approval ratings for the President, but then the economy still stinks and we’ve listened to two negative campaigns slamming each other for the past year, so shouldn’t we expect a shift in approval ratings?  As far as the race questions all three categories, White, Black and Hispanic shifted but I am not sure how in the limited sample size they had you could say with certainty it was beyond the margin of error found in any polling sample.

I wonder if the fact that any time someone is critical of the President some media type feels compelled to label that critic as a racist would have anything to do with these findings?

There is one thing I would take as a certainty.  Chris Matthews of MSNBC will have a field day with this poll.  I doubt he’ll read it, but I would expect he will cite it often, without any realization of his potential role in the shift, if in fact there is one.  

The Great Dilemma for News Bureaus

So let’s say you are in Libya and just kind of stumble across a personal journal of some victim of an assassination.   What do you do?

1. Return it to the family, respecting the owners and family’s right to privacy?
2. Make copies and report on its contents as an unnamed source?
3. Make copies, report on it, and return it to the family?

Obviously choice 1 can’t be right, it’s not your fault the victim was careless with the journal and you do have a job to do.

Choice 2 might be okay, but what about the family?  Don’t they have a right to see what their son, father, and brother was thinking? Of course they do!  By golly that leaves you only one choice.

Actually, in this case I agree with the CNN approach.  The question of how much right the family has to suppress the contents of the journal is a tough one, but since we are dealing with a significant news story on a personal representative of the President, I think the value of the insight outweighs the concerns for privacy.   This is one of those tough call issues that has to be made on a case by case basis.

Now that the administration is condemning their approach you have to ask why?  Is it really out of respect for the families wishes or some other self interest?

So In the News...

(Reuters) NASA has cleared Space Exploration Technologies, AKA Space X, to carry cargo to the $100B space station.  The confidence of the private company is reassuring. "This is a test flight and we may not succeed on getting all the way to the space station," Elon Musk said. "I think we've got a pretty good shot, but it's important to acknowledge that a lot can go wrong. This is pretty tricky."  We’ve come a long way from Apollo.

(Reuters) In 2011 a sleepy Air Canada pilot took rapid evasive action to avoid a collision with Venus.  Fourteen passengers and crew were injured by the pushover maneuver.  Oh, I know Venus is bright, and a tired pilot can make mistakes, but that is why they have strobes on the airplanes.  Stars twinkle, planets are bright, and airplanes flash!  People, wear your seat belts, you never know when a planet may leave its orbit.

(Reuters)  Last year almost 1,800 people renounced their US citizenship or handed in their green cards to avoid taxes.  That is more than the combined total of 2007, 2008, and 2009.  The US is one of the only countries to tax its citizens for income earned while working abroad, and apparently the IRS doesn’t make it easy to file.  As Peter Dunn said, in giving up his citizenship, he felt American Citizenship had become more of a liability than a privilege.  So let the exodus begin.

(Associated Press) SECDEF (that’s the acronym for Secretary of Defense) Leon Penetta said he regrets the cost to the taxpayers to finance is weekend trips home.  ($32,000/flight).  So far the SECDEF has found it necessary to get away 27 times for a taxpayer bill of around $860,000.  He has reimbursed the government about $17,000, so he probably only feels about $843,000 bad.

(The Weekly Standard)  Under the category of what goes around comes around, DNC Chief, Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been challenged to release her tax returns by her opponent Karen Harrington.  This is in response to Ms. Schultz call for Presidential candidate Romney to release his.  Seems fair to me, if you are going to make demands of others be sure you’re willing to meet those same demands yourself, but that really isn’t a progressive politician's approach is it?