Letter to the Editor: Ridgewood manager deserve apology
JUNE 19, 2015 LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 2015, 9:28 AM
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
Village manager deserves apology
To the Editor:
I feel very strongly that Councilman Michael Sedon should apologize publicly to Village Manager Roberta Sonenfeld. By telling her she misled him regarding the budgeting of the HR person, he is basically telling her, and publicly so, that she lied to him. To mislead is to lie.
If he can prove that Ms. Sonenfeld lied, then she should be summarily dismissed for it is a horrible breach of her position to lie to the council. Knowing Ms. Sonenfeld’s integrity and business acumen, I will bet my last dollar she was totally transparent in the budget deliberations.
So either Mr. Sedon was in above his head when the budget was discussed, or he was being willfully disingenuous to accomplish some political point. If either of these two possibilities is true, then Mr. Sedon should resign.
The third alternative is to put all of this behind us with Mr. Sedon apologizing gracefully and publicly to Ms. Sonenfeld. He owes it to her, considering this gratuitous insult. Considering the abject polarization of Ridgewood politics and Mr. Sedon’s proclivity to pander to his base, I don’t think I will live long enough to see this happen.
JUNE 19, 2015 LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 2015, 12:31 AM
BY GREG TARTAGLIA
SPORTS EDITOR |
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
RIDGEWOOD — Winning its first state-sectional title in six years was a highlight for Ridgewood High School this softball season, but it was far from the only one.
Many others were recounted during the Maroons’ season-ending celebration dinner at the RHS Campus Center last Friday. The varsity squad finished 25-5, recording its highest win total in coach Patti Auger’s nine seasons, and knocked off reigning champ Morris Knolls in the North 1, Group 4 final.
“I hope all of you, especially our seniors, will look back upon this season and recognize what you’ve achieved,” Auger said in her address to the team. “And when you stop by Gym 1 next year and look up at the softball [banner], and you see ‘2015 sectional’ displayed on it, I hope it stirs up memories of just what an amazing season you had.”
After an eight-inning, 2-1 loss to eventual Bergen County champ Northern Highlands on April 8, Ridgewood won 10 in a row, including one against the two-time State Group 3 titlist.
“By far, the highlight was a 4-2 victory over Indian Hills [on April 14], which ended their 42-game winning streak,” Auger said, triggering a round of cheers and applause from players, coaches and families present. “That truly opened the eyes of many softball followers in Bergen County.”
The “walking dead” are aiming higher—and in New Jersey, it appears they have been driving.
But on Thursday, NJ.com reports, the state’s Transportation and Independent Authorities Committee released a bill to put an end to the behavior.
This legislative move follows a state audit in March that revealed the Motor Vehicle Commission had issued official documents, such as licenses, to more than 300 people who were already deceased. The proposed law would require that the Commission cross-check their records with the Social Security Administration databases to avoid issuing significant legal documents to anyone no longer alive. (Zorthian/TIME)
JUNE 19, 2015 LAST UPDATED: FRIDAY, JUNE 19, 2015, 12:31 AM
BY MARK KRULISH
STAFF WRITER |
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
Ordinances were introduced last week by the Village Council reflecting changes in the organizational structure of Village Hall, a cleanup of salary ranges for village employees and elimination of unused titles.
The new ordinance institutes a Human Resources department and creates a free-standing Department of Health, moving it out from under the umbrella of the Department of Community Services, which was eliminated. The Division of Assessments was moved to the Finance Department and a director title was created in the Building Department to accurately reflect recent hires.
“This is both a cleanup and reflects some strategic moves we’ve made with both the Building Department and with the Department of Human Resources,” said Village Manager Roberta Sonenfeld.
Discussion of the ordinances took place at a June 3 meeting, where Sonenfeld explained the Human Resources department would also assume supervisory roles in the Employee Benefits and Payroll Administration functions of the government.
Councilman Michael Sedon, who voted against the introduction of the ordinances, said the first time he heard there would be a full-time Human Resources department was at the first budget hearing in February. Sedon said he did not have an opportunity to give input on such a service, which he believed was already being provided.
President Barack Obama reacted to Wednesday’s horrific massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina by calling for gun control and criticizing the United States for the frequency of mass shooting events. “We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” Obama said, adding: “At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”
Obama is wrong on both counts. Innocent people were killed because a murderer–likely motivated by racial hatred–had a gun–but guns in the right hands have stopped, or interrupted similar attacks before. In South Africa, for example–whose racist past seems to have provided gruesome inspiration for the Charleston killer–a parishoner stopped a mass shooting by a black nationalist group against a multi-racial congregation by firing his .38 revolver at the assailants, who ran away.
National Journal’s Ron Fournier has come up with a frightening, ageist approach to defeating ISIS: enslave the millennials! He explains:
I know a better way to fight ISIS. It starts with an idea that should appeal the better angels of both hawks and doves: National service for all 18- to 28-years-olds.
Require virtually every young American—the civic-minded millennial generation—to complete a year of service through programs such as Teach for America, AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, or the U.S. military, and two things will happen:
1. Virtually every American family will become intimately invested in the nation’s biggest challenges, including poverty, education, income inequality, and America’s place in a world afire.
2. Military recruiting will rise to meet threats posed by ISIS and other terrorist networks, giving more people skin in a very dangerous game.
The tone of Fournier’s column suggests that he considers mandatory national service a compromise in light of political realism—he would clearly prefer to restore the draft outright. This “compromise” idea is less horrifying than the draft, but not by a whole lot.
Disclaimer: I’m a millennial. I’m 26-years-old. I’m married and have a surprisingly steady job writing about why the government sucks. I’m supposed to just set all that aside for a year to work for causes I either don’t support, or actively oppose?
There are so many things wrong with this idea. For starters, it violates the principles upon which this nation was founded—that all men and women have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. While the Supreme Court has never held that mandatory national service violates the Constitution, the language of the Thirteen Amendment seems pretty clear to me: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”
At the root of Fournier’s plan is a more insidiously evil notion: that millennials aren’t doing anything worthwhile with their lives right now, and their time would be better spent in Teach for America, or the Army. There’s some anti-market thinking at work here, since typically, the activities that free people choose for themselves are more productive and profitable than the ones totalitarian governments assign to them. This is why the comparatively less meddlesome U.S. government is generally in better shape than, say, Venezuela. Fournier is essentially saying that in order to defeat our enemies, we have to mimic their levels of disrespect for individual freedom.
What is communism? Is it a beautiful idea, a utopian dream of bright future? Is it a coherent ideology of “historic materialism,” one that will abolish exploitation, eradicate inequality and injustice, abuses, estrangement, alienation, or Entfremdung, as it was called in the mid-nineteenth century by a young German philosopher, Karl Marx?
Or is it something else?
Is it a mother who enters the room of a twelve-year-old kid, wakes him up in the morning at 3 AM, and tells his son: “My son, you have to get up, the Soviet Army is attacking Budapest again”? Or is it the same mother, who, a couple of months later, wakes up his son again at 4 AM: “My son, you have to get up, your father has been taken away by the political police?”
We have to give a clear answer to people who are still saying that communism or Marxism-Leninism was a great idea, a beautiful idea — only the implementation was wrong. This is utterly and fatally wrong. It is not true.
It is not true because this was an idea, which was aggressive and violent, right in its inception, right from the beginning. The language was violent, the substance was violent, and of course everything, which has happened since, has been enormously violent.
That is why somebody said, that “revolutions are like trees: you can tell them by their fruits.” Communism had a logical outcome. Because if you want to destroy the existing political, economic and social order, and you want to put a new one in its place, it is a logical consequence that while destroying the existing structures, you sooner or later start destroying the basic human rights, the basic liberties, human dignity and yes, you start destroying thousands, millions, tens of millions of human lives.
That is the true face of communism.
Winston Churchill said right at the beginning, don’t think it is a peaceful utopian idea, because sooner or later it will be converted into external aggression, external expansion, because that is the nature of the ideology.
It is not by chance that in most countries, the communist dictatorship was established by sheer military force, in most cases coming from the outside. Certainly, it was the case in my country and all countries of the region.
The support of the communists in these countries was significantly less than in many Western European countries that never turned communist. Why? Because there was no presence of the Red Army in those countries.
Inevitably, dictatorships have to erect walls, barbed wires, iron curtains. But these are not external walls or barbed wires. The free minds were captured from within – as it was said by Czesław Miłosz.
A famous Hungarian poet, Gyula Illyés, wrote a fantastic poem about tyranny in which he says, “where there is tyranny, there is tyranny everywhere”. It is not just in the concentration camps, it is not just in the prisons, it is in the smile of the children, it is in your laugh, it is in your daily life.
As Havel said, the basic problem here was a morally contaminated environment: moral relativism, and moral corruption. That is to my mind the most important toxic legacy of communism.
Yet, there is an innate desire and aspiration for freedom in every human being, in every community or nation. That is why so many uprisings, revolutions, freedom fights and wars of independence took place. And finally, yes, in the ‘Year of Miracles,’ Central and Eastern Europe was liberated.
At the same time, we should never forget and we have to remember that this was only possible because there was a great nation that sacrificed more human lives to roll back and defeat communism around the world than any other nation. And this nation was and is the United States of America.
This is the reason why the stakes of moral clarity about the crimes of communist regimes in the past as well as the present are particularly high for America. This is why we hope that the mission of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation will be part of a genuine national consensus, a non-negotiable minimum of bipartisan nature.
President Obama admits HealthCare.gov was a “well-documented disaster,” but says it helped the federal government better understand how to handle technology.
“With all the crises we were dealing with — the economy collapsing, the auto industry on the verge of collapse, winding down wars — this did not get the kind of laser-focused attention until HealthCare.gov, which was a well-documented disaster, but ended up anyways being the catalyst for us saying, ‘Okay, we have to completely revamp how we do things,’ ” Obama said in aninterview with Fast Company published Monday.
Obama’s comments come as he’s trying to promote his administration’s efforts to overhaul the government’s ancient technology infrastructure.
The president said outdated procurement rules and a lack of technological expertise hampered large-scale government projects, such as HealthCare.gov. But he said his administration has adopted new rules and recruited staffers from Google, Facebook and Twitter to beef up its tech efforts.
“If we are able through the U.S. digital team to recruit a baseline of talent and create a — pipeline — on a regular basis … what I do believe will happen is the government as a whole will start thinking about its relationship to citizens differently,” Obama said.
But near-insurmountable difficulties remain to be resolved — such as where the requisite $15 billion will come from
Two century-old tunnels that carry Amtrak and NJ Transit trains into New York City
The urgent need for new rail tunnels under the Hudson River is finally getting some serious attention after years of little activity.
At a closely watched summit of transportation leaders in New York last month, a top official from the Obama administration called Amtrak’s proposed Gateway tunnel between northern New Jersey and Manhattan “the most important rail project in the United States.” Peter Rogoff, the acting undersecretary of transportation, said the two states must act immediately to advance a plan, sparking attendees’ hopes that the highly complex, expensive, long-stalled project might finally get underway.
“It was like, ‘Whoa! We finally are hearing it from Washington,’” Martin Robins, the dean of New Jersey transportation experts and a conference participant, said after the meeting. “I wish it had come earlier.”
The sign of possible movement comes five years after Gov. Chris Christie canceledNJ Transit’s ARC (Access to the Region’s Core) tunnel project under the Hudson, citing the project’s potential high cost. It comes two and half years after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the existing, 105-year-old tunnels, raising the prospect of a long shutdown of at least one tunnel for repairs that could cripple rail travel in the near future.
“Closure of that tunnel, and the 50 percent to 75 percent reduction in capacity, would have a disastrous effect on the regional economy. That can’t be overestimated,” said Pat Foye, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey.
New tunnels are needed to prevent such a crisis and to allow continued economic growth, the conferees said. Rail travel across the Hudson has increased 140 percent in the past 25 years, even as auto travel has declined, and is projected to double again by 2040, according to the Regional Plan Association, which organized the conference with the Port Authority.
“This conference isn’t about transportation. It’s about jobs,” Foye said during a panel discussion. “It’s about protecting and retaining the jobs the region already has and creating the platform for future job growth. It is not an overstatement to say the region’s economic prosperity is at stake.”
But even with that looming risk and the kick in the pants from Rogoff, fundamental questions remain unanswered. Most importantly, which agency will own and direct the project? And where will the required funding, which could reach $15 billion or more, come from?
How will Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who are both under pressure to pay for other transportation needs, somehow agree to support such a massive undertaking? And what role will be played by the powerful but politically vulnerablePort Authority, which needs to spend billions on other projects and remains under a cloud of Bridgegate-related scandals?
If you go to the beach, it’s probably crossed your mind at least once: Shark attacks can happen.
It’s hard not to think about it since they’re in the news every summer. The latest terrifying story is of two teens who were attacked by sharks on Sunday in two separate incidents along the same stretch of beach in North Carolina.
According to the Associated Press, a 12-year-old girl lost part of her arm and suffered a leg injury, and a 16-year-old boy lost his left arm a little more than an hour later. Even scarier, both were in waist-deep water.
The most recent attacks weren’t the only ones the area has seen. A shark bit a 13-year-old girl’s foot a few days before, about 15 miles away.
There were 52 reported shark attacks in the U.S. last year, none of which were fatal, says Andrew Nosal, Ph.D., a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. California, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas are where they happen the most often, he says.
While that number seems low when you think about everyone who hops in the ocean each year, any shark attack is one too many. Should we be worried?
Probably not, says John Carlson, Ph.D., National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries shark expert. “While we can’t downplay the tragedies that occurred with these teenagers, we have to emphasize that shark attacks are an extremely rare event,” he says.
Carlson also points out that sharks don’t usually seek out humans and only attack when they confuse us for their natural prey.
Enhanced North Jersey Coast Line express weekend service to beach towns launches Sunday, June 21
June 15, 2015NEWARK, NJ — NJ TRANSIT is making it convenient and affordable to get to summer shore destinations with the return of express weekend rail service from Penn Station New York and northern New Jersey cities to shore communities along the North Jersey Coast Line this Sunday, June 21.
Enhanced Saturday, Sunday and holiday rail service on the North Jersey Coast Line will operate from June 21 through September 12 and utilize the agency’s dual-powered locomotives to provide a one-seat ride.
“This one-seat ride rail service from New York is a sound investment that not only gives visitors and residents easier access to some of our most popular beaches and boardwalks, it also helps take cars off the roadway and boosts tourism and the economy in our shore communities,” said Transportation Commissioner and NJ TRANSIT Chairman Jamie Fox.
“Our Shore service provides a safe and reliable way to get people where they need to be to enjoy time in the sun and expands transit options for travelers along the state’s costal region,” said NJ TRANSIT Executive Director Veronique “Ronnie” Hakim. “NJ TRANSIT is grateful for the continued support of the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority (NJTPA) without whom funding for this service would not be possible.”
Four round-trip express trains will operate between Penn Station New York and Bay Head. This service also features hourly train service between Bay Head and Long Branch from approximately 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Two of the round-trips will be geared to beach travelers, with an additional two round-trips providing service during the early morning and late night timeframes.
The express service will serve Penn Station New York, Secaucus Junction, Newark Penn Station, Elizabeth, Rahway, Aberdeen-Matawan, Red Bank, Long Branch, Asbury Park, and then all station stops to Bay Head, without the need of a transfer in Long Branch. A travel time savings of approximately 25 minutes is expected from the normal travel time between New York and trains such as Belmar, Manasquan and Point Pleasant.
Seating will be limited aboard the express service. Customers are strongly encouraged to purchase round-trip tickets or discounted beach packages to Long Branch, Asbury Park, Ocean Grove, Bradley Beach and Belmar (a savings of $6.50) prior to the start of their trip. NJ TRANSIT beach packages are available at some ticket windows and ticket vending machines. More information on beach packages is available on njtransit.com/summer.
Customers can also purchase NJ TRANSIT tickets using MyTix mobile ticketing.
Express trains will supplement NJ TRANSIT’s regular hourly rail shuttle service between Long Branch and Bay Head, and will operate using the statewide transportation agency’s new ALP-45 dual-powered locomotives. These specialized trains will operate in electric mode between New York and Long Branch and will switch to diesel operation for travel between Long Branch and Bay Head – allowing for the one-seat ride.
The announcement follows the May 11, 2015 endorsement of the service by the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority (NJTPA), which authorized a $273,000 allocation through the federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program (CMAQ) to fund the new service.
Detailed schedules are available on njtransit.com.
Hillary Clinton’s record as secretary of state became a hot-button issue this week after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Bloomberg Television that the Barack Obama administration’s failed “reset” policy with Moscow was her “invention.”
Here’s why it matters: Her campaign chairman, John Podesta, gave an interview to Bloomberg View’s Al Hunt in April in which he said holding up the “major accomplishments” from her State Department tenure would be a centerpiece of her campaign. Podesta may want to reconsider that plan. Running on Clinton’s signature diplomatic initiatives is fraught with risks because, on closer inspection, most that he mentioned don’t hold up to scrutiny.
“She put together that sanctions package that’s led to at least the possibility of having a deal on the Iran nuclear program,” Podesta told Hunt in the interview, which was aired on PBS’s “Charlie Rose” show. “That took very careful and longtime careful diplomacy.”
In fact, the State Department under Clinton vigorously opposed almost all of the Iran sanctions passed by Congress while she was in office. Top officials, including Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman, openly advocated against many bills, including the sanctions on Iran’s central bank, which dealt the true crippling blow to the Tehran regime. The Senate passed that bill 100-0 and Obama reluctantly signed them into law. The State Department did implement them, but was criticized by lawmakers and advocacy groups for using waivers in the law to exempt several countries, including China and our allies Japan and South Korea.
Clinton can also expect to be pressed during the campaign over her involvement in the secret negotiations that led to the controversial Iran nuclear negotiations now nearing completion. Her deputy, William Burns, and her top foreign policy advisor, Jake Sullivan, heldmonths of clandestine meetings with Iranian officials to set up the talks. In the run-up to her campaign announcement, Clinton wascautiously supportive of the nuclear talks; leaving herself some wiggle room by saying she won’t render a final judgment until the deal is done.
Podesta then went on to say that Clinton “restored America’s place in the world, which had been very badly battered through the previous administration.”
While it’s true that global opinion of the U.S. soared when Barack Obama was first elected president, during Clinton’s State Department tenure of 2009 to 2013 there was no measurable upswing in foreigners’ views of America, according to the Pew Research Center’s polling on global attitudes. In most major countries, approval of the U.S. actually went down by the time Clinton left office, including by 11 percentage points in each of France, Germany and the U.K.
A poll conducted in 33 countries by the BBC World Service just after Clinton stepped down as secretary found that overall world opinion of the U.S. by 2013 was the lowest since the presidency of George W. Bush. If Clinton wants to run on having polished America’s image abroad, she’ll be hard pressed to come up with data to back it up.
“She engineered the so-called ‘pivot to Asia,’ ” Podesta continued. “Her first trip was to China.”
Clinton did lead parts of what the White House now calls the “rebalance” to Asia, but as Governor Scott Walker, a top Republican contender, pointed out last week, that policy has fallen well short of expectations. With China building fake islands around the South China Sea and threatening to enforce an air-exclusion zone in the area, the pivot policy now looks inadequate.
Along with Treasury Department officials, Clinton initiated a newstrategic dialogue with China, but after several high-level summits, the effort has produced few if any tangible results. The State Department did succeed in creating an opening with Myanmar, an effort led by her top Asia official, Kurt Campbell. Unfortunately, the military junta has not eased up its brutal persecution of Muslim minorities, leading to a vast refugee crisis in Southeast Asia, and political reform has now slowed to a crawl.
“She put some new issues on the table for American diplomacy,” Podesta went on, “including internet freedom, the importance of women’s rights as human rights, of LGBT rights as human rights, as part of our diplomatic package, which I think restored values to the way America projects its power around the world.”
This is hard to square with the fact that, in her first visit to China, Clinton insisted that human rights advocacy “can’t interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis.” Clinton’s State Department repeatedly waived lawsthat would have cut aid to countries guilty of gross human rights violations, such as Egypt. This record won’t be helped by Clinton’s family foundation having taken millions of dollars from foreign governments that systematically abuse their citizens and deny basic liberties to women.
Enters crowded Republican presidential field with the party faithful divided over the GOP’s direction
Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are the two most “bought and paid for ” political hacks to run for office in the history of the presidency
If the GOP cant win this time around it may be time to close up the party and go home
By BETH REINHARD
Updated June 15, 2015 7:33 p.m. ET
MIAMI— Jeb Bush, heir to one of American’s most successful political dynasties, sought to jump-start his presidential campaign Monday as a scrappy political outsider after failing in recent months to emerge as the undisputed front-runner for the 2016 Republican nomination.
“Not a one of us deserves the job by right of resume, party, seniority, family or family narrative,” said Mr. Bush, kin to two American presidents and a former two-term Florida governor. “It’s nobody’s turn. It’s everybody’s test, and it’s wide open.”
In the six months he has been building his campaign, Mr. Bush has dropped in the national polls and finds himself unable so far to break from a crowded pack of GOP candidates, even though he is expected to raise the most money and has nabbed name-brand political talent.Mr. Bush is reviving the logo he used for three gubernatorial campaigns—Jeb!—to emphasize that he is running not as a political scion but as his own man. Casting himself as a can-do chief executive, Mr. Bush drew his strongest contrasts to date with GOP rivals serving on Capitol Hill, including his former protégé, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
“Executive experience is another term for preparation, and there is no substitute for that,” Mr. Bush, who appeared without jacket or tie, told a cheering crowd his staff estimated at 3,000 people. “We are not going to clean up the mess in Washington by electing the people who either helped create it or have proven incapable of fixing it.”
There have been many labels thrust upon the Millennial generation, especially when it comes to their work ethic. The group has been called lazy, entitled, and spoiled—but at the same time the generation has also been heralded for its collective innovation and desire to work for something other than money.
While America may still not know quite how to pin down the drive and desires of this generation, it does seem that their views on jobs and careers differ from their Boomer parents and the Gen Xers who came just before them. The most recent Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll separated respondents into a younger group of those “just starting out” and an older group of participants who were more established in order to determine whether or not these groups saw things differently on a variety of issues. In many instances there are, in fact, generational differences in perspective, but on some questions, Americans aren’t quite as far apart as they might seem.
When asked what their primary concern was during their first job, about 64 percent of older Americans talked about making as much money as possible or learning new skills. When asked the same question, younger Americans were much more likely to say that their top priority was doing something that they found enjoyable or making a difference in society, with 57 percent choosing one of these options.
Mass delusion is an important tool of oppressors because they can’t survive free expression. That’s why the First Amendment’s a target.
Nearly 100 years ago, Walter Lippmann wrote about “the manufacture of consent” in his classic work, “Public Opinion.” On the heels of that book, Edward Bernays penned a little volume called “Propaganda,” in which he stated that an elite would always be responsible for making the public aware of “new ideas” which the public would then act upon as the elite nudged them into it. Related, but more in-depth is Jacques Ellul’s 1962 book, “Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes.”
Political propaganda aims to mobilize the masses to move an agenda forward. That’s most effectively done when the masses are unaware of the process. It’s what “community organizers” work towards, whether they know it or not. Once the masses are mobilized to push for a cause, the propagandists’ goals can be put into law.
In fact, many newly propagandized ideas seem to have taken America by storm just in the past decade or so. Same-sex marriage is only one of those ideas. Transgenderism is now eclipsing that notion, and its propaganda techniques—wrapped in the language of civil rights—are getting Americans on board with the idea of erasing all sex distinctions in law, including theirown. It’s as though Americans are buying into a fast-talking sales pitch without being allowed to read the print, whether it’s large print or small.
There’s more on the horizon: a singles’ rights movement that promises to end legal recognition of all marriage. Then there is transhumanism, which includes a push to end “fleshism” by enacting laws that protect non-biological entities from discrimination.
Propaganda Is Directing Us Leftward
American conservatives are by and large clueless about propaganda methods and tactics. And it shows. There are virtually no conservative social psychologists around. You’d think once a liberal social psychologist hits the public over the head with this factsome on the Right would take notice and at least try to get clued in.
American conservatives are by and large clueless about propaganda methods and tactics. And it shows.
Meanwhile, the Left has been employing social psychology and depth psychology on the masses for decades. President Obama’s campaign staff was filled with social psychologists. In this context, those who believe conservatives can subsist on reason and logic alone are kidding themselves. It’s no wonder GOP leaders are caving on so many principles, and being absorbed so easily into the Left’s machine.
A lot of people are scratching their heads today, wondering how life got to be so surreal, so fast in the United States of America. Based on the silencing tactics revealedby the LGBT lobby, many observers are likely now thinking: “Gee, I thought marriage equality was merely a gay rights movement. I didn’t realize that fascism was part of that package.” The Great Unraveling continues at a rapid clip when slipping on a pronoun in these days of transgender rule could cost you your career or earn you massive social media rallies chanting “hater” at you.
Even benign reminders of the First Amendment—embodied in Religious Freedom Restoration Acts—are quickly dispatched by mob hysteria. One day a supposedly principled leader like Indiana Gov. Mike Pence promotes the RFRA, and the next day he folds and essentially signs on with the mob.
Even benign reminders of the First Amendment are quickly dispatched by mob hysteria.
There seem to be few independent thinkers left. But even they don’t seem to know what hit them. A woman getsbanned by her gym and labelled a bigot because she told management that a man—who she only later learned “identified as female”—entered the locker room while she was getting undressed. Comedians who dare tread into trans territory are shut down. Never before have the media and pop culture dictated in such a draconian manner how each and every one of us is supposed to think about identity. Our own identity.
The list goes on. The unrest and rioting from Ferguson to Baltimore seem to be happening on cue also, with media propaganda that urges it on. There is no real debate on the merits of policies that depend on a blind faith in man-made global warming: those who disagree are labelled “deniers.”
