Tag Archives: education

NPR goes down in flames

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“When Pierre goes down, he goes down in flames”

— Punch line to old aviation joke

The Republicans finally did something great that I thought they never would have the stones to do. They reduced the funding for the government-controlled media outfit called The Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Hallelujah!

CPB was established half a century ago with the good intention of providing television and radio services to rural America in a day long before cable TV and megawatt radio stations made television and radio ubiquitous, and long, long before the internet made them obsolete.

Fine.

Then they expanded into children’s programming like Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, to give children an alternative to Saturday morning cartoons.

Fine. But notice the inevitable expansion. Taxpayer-funded enterprises have a way of doing that.

Then they expanded into cultural offerings like Masterpiece Theater and British comedy.

Not so fine. Why do the wealthy elites who watch Masterpiece Theater and British comedy (or is it “comedy”?) need taxpayer subsidies? And why do we allow cultural offerings selected by semi-government bureaucrats and apparatchiks to use taxpayer money to undermine the competing cultural offerings on commercial TV and the internet?

Then they went woke.

Everyone knew CPR was woke, and then a long-time editor wrote a piece for The Free Press (you should check out TFP, by the way) that amounted to a full blown exposé. He revealed their conscious attempt to bury the Hunter laptop story, to trumpet the false Russian collusion story, to dismiss the lab-origins of COVID, and so on. NPR had become a Democratic government mouthpiece.

He reported that at the headquarters of their radio arm, NPR, there were 87 registered Democrats and 0 Republicans. Unsurprisingly, Democrats were staunch supporters of NPR, and vice versa. Republicans, not so much.

For that exposé, NPR suspended the editor temporarily and ostracized him permanently. Consider the Pravda-esk irony that a government organization charged with reporting news punishes an employee for doing exactly that, because the particular news he dares to report is that the organization is biased in reporting the news. He ultimately resigned.

This week, the Republican Senate voted to claw back about a billion dollars in taxpayer-money allocated to CPB over the next two years. All Democrats voted against the claw-back. Two purported Republicans joined them, but the measure passed the Senate and later passed the House. It’s now on President Trump’s desk for signature.

So, what will happen? CPB and its labyrinth of entities have always simultaneously maintained that (1) they receive hardly any taxpayer money, and (2) taking away their taxpayer money will cripple them.

Both are lies. They do receive a lot of taxpayer money – a billion dollars over two years isn’t chicken feed – and they will not be crippled by losing it. If nothing else, the Democratic National Committee will toss them a few hundred million, directly or laundered through George Soros and his minions.

The CEO of NPR had a few choice words:


“I’m so done with late-stage capitalism.”
“America is addicted to white supremacy.”
“White silence is complicity.”
“I’m grateful those who have pointed out my phrasing could be understood as trans-erasure.”
“Horses inspire awe and foster a sense of identity. More kids should have access to these incredible animals. But most horse spaces are white spaces.”
“I know that hysteric, white woman voice. I was taught to do it. I’ve done it. That’s whiteness”
“What is the deranged racist sociopath ranting about today? I truly don’t understand.”
“Donald Trump is a racist.”

Oops, those are her tweets over the years. Gee, how could anyone accuse them of bias?

Liberals imposed their racial discrimination by attaching strings to federal money. How’s that working out now?

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Executive orders and administrative agency rules going back to the 1960s required businesses contracting with the U.S. Government to engage in “affirmative action.”

That was the euphemism of the day for racial discrimination. They couldn’t just call it “racial discrimination” because that term had, naturally and appropriately, developed a negative connotation. It suggested a world where people were judged not by the content of their character, but the color of their skin. 

Over the ensuing decades, that euphemism “affirmative action” developed a similar negative connotation. By favoring people with certain skin colors, “affirmative action,” just like “racial discrimination” before it, suggested a world where people were judged not by the content of their character, but the color of their skin.

And so, the euphemism “affirmative action” was retired in favor of a new euphemism, “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” Capitalizing the words was evidently to make the term look grander.

Moreover, the capitalized words lent themselves to acronymizing into “DEI.” We thus doubly disguised “racial discrimination” with the use of an acronym for a euphemism.

But the double disguise was deliberately transparent. Everyone knew “DEI” meant “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” which meant “affirmative action,” which meant “racial discrimination,” which meant that people were judged not on the content of their character, but on the color of their skin. 

These farcical theatrics reached their comedic conclusion with “President” Joe Biden, who promulgated Executive Orders, probably signed by autopen while he was mindlessly eating ice cream cones, requiring that companies doing business with the government submit written statements certifying their commitment to judging their employees by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character.

The requisite commitment to racial discrimination was not limited to government contractors. Practically everyone receiving federal money – and that’s practically everyone – had to show they were committed to racial discrimination. Schools receiving DOE money, cities receiving HUD money, states receiving DOT money, anybody getting any money from any government alphabet – hell, the whole world – had to show its DEI commitment.

But alas, DEI, like its predecessor euphemisms, had already taken on a negative connotation of being what it was – an acronym for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which was a euphemism for affirmative action, which was a euphemism for racial discrimination.

It was time for a new euphemism. Conveniently, a new President had just been elected.

But the new President did something no President had done in generations. He effectively said, “No more racial discrimination, regardless of what acronym or euphemism you choose to call it by.”

He said he was reversing the Executive Orders and abolishing the federal regulations that required companies, schools, cities and states to certify their commitment to racial discrimination.

He even said he would require the opposite from them – he would require them to certify that they do not engage in racial discrimination. And he has threatened to withhold federal money from them if they continue their racial discrimination.

In all of this, he appears to have the Supreme Court on his side. Chief Justice John Roberts declared in a case some years ago that:

“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

For that tautology, liberals of course called him a racist. But he and a majority of the Supreme Court finally followed through in a case two years ago outlawing racial discrimination at the liberal establishment’s headquarters, Harvard University.

Of course, some schools and companies will simply provide false certifications. They will certify that they don’t engage in racial discrimination, even as they continue to. People who employ acronyms and euphemisms to disguise their actions can be expected to similarly employ lies to conceal those same actions.

But this is a start. And to put teeth into it, the President has at his disposal an entire Department of Justice which appears newly devoted to real justice – not the social kind.

Test scores suggest that 98% of us are becoming expendable

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Democrats in the Federal government the past few years sent a couple hundred billion dollars to the teachers’ unions the schools to help them fund teacher vacations recover from the needless and destructive COVID lockdowns.

I shouldn’t be so cynical about the COVID lockdowns. After all, they did apparently prevent the pandemic from spreading to children, along with preventing asteroid strikes and on-campus bear maulings, all three of which were notably absent in 2020-2021.

Oops, I’m being cynical again.

OK, I’ll admit that, as an educational tool, the lockdowns were not entirely wasted. For example, one education that many of us received through the lockdowns was that we should be wary of our establishment’s susceptibility to mass hysteria and their desire to control society.

Another education we received was that the teachers’ unions, a/k/a, the child indoctrination division of the DNC, will go to any depths for more money and less work, all at the expense of taxpayers and the education of the nation’s children. “It’s for the children” is the most destructive, self-serving lie since “to each according to his needs.”

But here’s the billion-dollar question: We may have learned a few things during the lockdowns, but did the kids learn anything?

This is a multiple-choice question, so you have a chance of getting it right just by guessing. I figure your odds are about 25% (give or take – I’m a product of public schools). Here are your choices:

(A) No, nobody learnt nothin’

(B) Yeah, everybody learnt everythin’

(C) Some learnt stuff, others didn’t no-how-no-way

(D) All of ‘em

The answer is (C). According to recent data, average test scores are way down from pre-lockdown scores, and don’t show signs of recovering. It turns out that most children accomplish about as much with schooling-from-home as their parents accomplish with work-from-home. That’s no surprise.

The interesting thing, however, is that while average test scores are way down, the high scores are not. Good students found a way to be good students during and after the lockdowns. Although most kids didn’t learn stuff, those good students did – and just as much as before.

Those good students who prevailed over the lockdowns while other students succumbed to them, tend to be from wealthier families. The reason could be that wealthier families hired tutors (doubtful) or that wealthier families have parents who got involved in their kids’ education when the lockdowns hit (likely), or that kids from wealthier families are imbued with their wealthy parents’ motivation (probably), or that wealthier families tend to be whiter and white kids do better on standardized tests which are racially discriminatory and became more so during and after the lockdowns (c’mon!).

This data present an interesting philosophical and social question: If our brightest minds continue to burn brightly, does it matter that the rest of the population is fading fast?

The humanistic answer to that question is, yes, it matters a lot. That’s my intuitive answer, as well, as a semi-humanistic full-human.

But does it really matter? It’s a fact that the top 2% of the population are responsible for practically all of human achievement in – you name it – science, math, chess, athletics, art, adventure, innovation, and business. The top 2% would include Edison, Aristotle, Einstein, Musk, Magellan, da Vinci, Fischer, Newton, and all the rest who matter.

“The rest” of the 2% is a big number. It’s estimated that about 100 billion people have lived altogether. So 2% of them amount to some two billion humans and hominids. Even among the living humans, 2% would amount to nearly 200 million people. There would not exactly be a danger of extinction.

The other 98% of us have always lived off these geniuses. Without the top 2%, we’d still be in caves trying to figure out how to make that hot, burny stuff that natural lightning makes with no trouble at all. We’d be unable to even imagine a wheel, much less manufacture or use one.

(That top 2% pay the lion’s share of Federal income tax, too, but that’s a different column.)

So long as we have that top 2%, the rest of us are fine. In fact, if the top 2% gives us just a little bit more innovation in the form of artificial intelligence machines (such as HAL, depicted above, a quarter century past his prime) we won’t need even them.

Right now, the 98% are stupid but not happy – because we’re always jealous of that smart 2%. If we replace the smart 2% with smart machines, we could be both stupid and happy.

On the other hand, consider the possibility that the 2% — being clever creatures – are already fixing to replace the 98% with machines. They wouldn’t even have to be smart machines; stupid ones would do. Hmm.