Michael Bates: April 2016 Archives
John Boehner Revealed His Character At Stanford - The Stanford Review
"Many conservatives would tell you that this is not the first time John Boehner has sold out the cause. I have always defended Boehner from these criticisms, but he has now made it impossible for me to do so. At Stanford, Boehner revealed his character. And it wasn't pretty....
"Besides, Boehner is a conservative. He likely agrees with Cruz on most key questions of policy and principle, from the size of government to federalism to defending life. However, these are evidently secondary concerns for the former Speaker of the House. Boehner puts his own petty personal and procedural differences with Cruz first, and unleashes with the type of vile criticism that he has never directed at Barack Obama, John Kerry, or anyone else....
"Now more than ever, the Republican Party and conservatives need to be united in an all-out effort to save the party and country from Trump. Conservatives from George Will to Charles Krauthammer to Bill Kristol to the whole National Review have stood firm against Trump on principle, but Republican elites are giving in. John Boehner divides us because he personally dislikes Ted Cruz. While the fire rages, Boehner misses the forest for the trees.
"At Stanford, Boehner made it clear that his critics have been right. Trump stands against everything for which Boehner has worked during his 25 years in Washington, but when it matters most, Boehner is unwilling to fight a shifting tide. At Stanford, we saw Boehner uncut, uncensored, and unprincipled."
Transgenderism: A Pathogenic Meme | Public Discourse
"Transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men. All... become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they 'identify.' In that lies their problematic future.
"When 'the tumult and shouting dies,' it proves not easy nor wise to live in a counterfeit sexual garb. The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people--extending over thirty years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered--documents their lifelong mental unrest. Ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to twenty times that of comparable peers....
"Most young boys and girls who come seeking sex-reassignment... come with psychosocial issues--conflicts over the prospects, expectations, and roles that they sense are attached to their given sex--and presume that sex-reassignment will ease or resolve them.
"The grim fact is that most of these youngsters do not find therapists willing to assess and guide them in ways that permit them to work out their conflicts and correct their assumptions. Rather, they and their families find only 'gender counselors' who encourage them in their sexual misassumptions....
"What is needed now is public clamor for coherent science--biological and therapeutic science--examining the real effects of these efforts to 'support' transgendering. Although much is made of a rare "intersex" individual, no evidence supports the claim that people such as Bruce Jenner have a biological source for their transgender assumptions. Plenty of evidence demonstrates that with him and most others, transgendering is a psychological rather than a biological matter.
"In fact, gender dysphoria--the official psychiatric term for feeling oneself to be of the opposite sex--belongs in the family of similarly disordered assumptions about the body, such as anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder. Its treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones any more than one treats obesity-fearing anorexic patients with liposuction. The treatment should strive to correct the false, problematic nature of the assumption and to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it. With youngsters, this is best done in family therapy.
"The larger issue is the meme itself. The idea that one's sex is fluid and a matter open to choice runs unquestioned through our culture and is reflected everywhere in the media, the theater, the classroom, and in many medical clinics. It has taken on cult-like features: its own special lingo, internet chat rooms providing slick answers to new recruits, and clubs for easy access to dresses and styles supporting the sex change. It is doing much damage to families, adolescents, and children and should be confronted as an opinion without biological foundation wherever it emerges."
Conventional Wisdom | The Weekly Standard
"Party conventions are open processes. Delegates to these gatherings are not handpicked by party bosses. They are regular Republicans who participate because they have the time and interest to do so. The Cruz team put in the effort to organize regulars loyal to its candidate; the Trump campaign failed to do so. Consider, for instance, the Colorado convention held earlier this month. Delegates to that convention were chosen at precinct caucuses held on Super Tuesday--and any registered Republican was invited to attend. That the Trump campaign failed to get its supporters to those caucuses is not the fault of the Cruz campaign, the Colorado Republican party, or anybody else except the Trump campaign.
"The Republican party does not belong to its presidential candidates in the way that Trump presumes. In important respects, it still belongs to the party regulars who attend these conventions. Starting in the 1970s, the party organization began sharing authority with voters to select the presidential nominee, but sovereignty was never handed over to the electorate lock, stock, and barrel. The delegates to the national convention, chosen mostly by these state and district conventions, have always retained a role--not only to act when the voters fail to reach a consensus, but to conduct regular party business.
"This is hardly antidemocratic, by the way. Party organizations such as these are a vital, albeit overlooked part of our nation's democratic machinery. The party regulars at the district, state, and national conventions do the quotidian work of holding the party together between elections: They establish its rules, arbitrate disputes, formulate platforms to present to the voters, and so on. It would be impossible to have a party without these sorts of people doing work the average voter doesn't care about.
"And these people are hardly the "establishment" in any meaningful sense of the word. Consider the process in Colorado.... But the process was open to any registered Republican, and more than a thousand people served as delegates at the state convention. There were some big political players involved, naturally, but by and large they were just average people. The same goes for the state conventions in places like Wyoming and North Dakota. These meetings in Cheyenne and Bismarck are in no way beholden to, or the equivalent of, the power players working on K Street."
A Conversation with Camille Paglia -- Conversations with Tyler -- Medium
She's not a conservative, but....
"[Brazilians] also understand nature, the grandeur of nature, the power of nature. It's much larger.... Yes, instead of these silly little arguments that, 'Oh, climate change is causing the end of the world.' Oh my God. Anyone who talks like that does not understand the grandeur and the power of nature. To imagine that we can make a change in it is so absolutely absurd."
"I really have not been following the Stones. Ever since Bill Wyman left the Stones, I have not felt that this was the Stones I knew. I'm delighted that they go on, and that they perform, and so on, but I have absolutely no interest in exposing myself to those horrible arena conditions for music. Oh my goodness, just the light shows and the this and the that. They're not musical experiences. They're social experiences now."
"Right now, our primary school education is absolutely appalling in its lack of world history and world geography. I know because I get everyone in my classroom. I'm lucky I teach at a kind of school where I'm getting students from a wide range of preparation.... It is unbelievable how little they know. It is absolutely shocking how little they know. This is a recipe for a disaster."
"This other thing of the online thing, I don't believe this online thing at all. I think that you need a live person, and you need a live person who can talk extemporaneously and respond to the moment. Not just people who are reading the same old damn lecture over and over again."
"Obviously, we're in a time now where parenting is in crisis, I would think. The reason we have all these whiny, super sensitive girls on campus that'll run shrieking at the slightest thing that offends their ears or drag mattresses onto the stage at commencement exercises, the reason we have that is because the parents have not prepared them for real life. In other words, they've been raised in this bourgeois, pampered cocoon, so I think there's been a tremendous failure of parenting, certainly, in terms of young people being ready to take on the real world in their late teens."
"The problem right now is that the masculine has no honor whatever in our culture. We're in a period now where young people are being processed for the universities, and the gender norms are said to be that gender is a construct. It is simply the product of environmental pressures on people. There's no nothing in the body -- .... Working class culture retains an idea of the masculine. There's absolutely no doubt about that. But, with that, comes static. So you have to have strong women in order to deal with masculine men. That is why masculinity is constantly being eroded, diminished, and dissolved on university campuses because it allows women to be weak. If you have weak men, then you can have weak women. That's what we have. Our university system, anything that is remotely masculine is identified as toxic, as intrinsic to rape culture. A utopian future is imagined where there are no men. We're all genderless mannequins."
"By the time second-wave feminism revived, which was with Betty Friedan's cofounding of NOW in 1967, I was out of sync with them. When suddenly they revived, began complaining about men, and all that stuff, so on and so forth, I hated it. It was early clashes that I had with those feminists from the start. I tried to join second-wave feminism. They wouldn't have me because I would not bad mouth men. These women, like Amelia Earhart, they did not bad mouth men. They admired men. They admired what men had done. What they said was, 'We demand equal opportunity for women,' which gave us the opportunity to show that we can achieve at the same level as men who did all these great things."
"[Women's Studies profs at SUNY Albany] deny that hormones have the slightest impact on human life. They said hormones don't even exist. They told me I had been brainwashed by male scientists to believe -- these are women who are in the English department. Wonderful education they had in biology."
"I'm just trying to inspire graduate students to rebel against this horrible fascism that forces theory onto them before they expose themselves to everything that's wonderful and imaginative in the history of literature and art. I believe that paying minute attention to the actual work itself is the mission of criticism. I am hopelessly old-fashioned. Because that's not what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to mention Foucault 59 times in one paragraph, et cetera."
"I'm always in touch with the janitors, infrastructure, condition of the buildings. I deal with everyday life. I'm not treated like a queen. I'm just like an ordinary schoolmarm working like a horse, pulling the plow. I think that's a really good idea for writers is to have a job where you're dealing with constant frustrations, and problems, and so on. I think that's really good for you."
"Get a job. Have a job. Again, that's the real job. Every time you have frustrations with the real job, you say, 'This is good.' This is good, because this is reality. This is reality as everybody lives it. This thing of withdrawing from the world to be a writer, I think, is a terrible mistake. Number one thing is constantly observing. My whole life, I'm constantly jotting things down. Constantly. Just jot, jot, jot, jot. I'll have an idea. I'm cooking, and I have an idea, 'Whoa, whoa.' I have a lot of pieces of paper with tomato sauce on them or whatever. I transfer these to cards or I transfer them to notes."
"There's all this propaganda being pumped out about this issue, when in fact, women are not -- if women are earning 72 cents or 75 cents on the dollar, it's not for the same job.... This is the lie that's being told.... What it is, is overall, the averages of women, of their own volition, for whatever reasons, are taking jobs that have more flexibility as opposed to the around-the-clock, seven days a week, night thing. For example, women tend to shy away from commission sales jobs where they're on the road a lot, and that is where a lot of men have very high earnings. Women are making choices, and they would prefer to be closer to their children, so yes. These disparities are ultimately based in biological differences."
Reclaiming "Redneck" Urbanism: What Urban Planners Can Learn From Trailer Parks
"Trailer parks remain one of the last forms of housing in US cities provided by the market explicitly for low-income residents. Better still, they offer a working example of traditional urban design elements and private governance. Any discussion of trailer parks should start with the fact that most forms of low-income housing have been criminalized in nearly every major US city. "
The Storefront Index | City Observatory
"In an effort to begin to quantify this key aspect of neighborhood vitality, we've developed a new statistical indicator--the Storefront Index (click to see the full report)--that measures the number and concentration of customer-facing businesses in the nation's large metropolitan areas. We've computed the Storefront Index by mapping the locations of hundreds of thousands of everyday businesses: grocery and hardware stores, beauty salons, bookstores, bars and restaurants, movie theatres and entertainment venues, and then identifying significant clusters of these businesses--places where each storefront business is no more than 100 meters from the next storefront.
"The result is a series of maps, available for the nation's 51 largest metropolitan areas, that show the location, size, and intensity of neighborhood business clusters down to the street level."
Tulsa's not included, but metro Oklahoma City (including Edmond, Norman, etc.) is. The storefronts captured are not necessarily pedestrian-oriented. In fact, most in metro OKC are in post-war, auto-oriented shopping centers.
Broadcast History: Behind the Clear-Channel Matter
Early chaos in frequency assignment, the first 40 clear-channel stations, proposals for "super-power AM radio," and the watering down of clear-channel exclusivity.
Evolution of the American AM Band: A Brief History by Ed Ripley: Includes a discussion of WLW's brief period running as a 500,000 super-power AM station and the use of directional transmitters.
Wikipedia: Clear-channel station: History of the concept and a list of current clear-channel stations.
1941 North American Radio Broadcasting Agreement: Resulted in a massive shift in frequencies to make way for clear-channel stations in neighboring countries; moved KVOO from 1140 to 1170.
April 26th, 1991 Plains Tornado Outbreak
A map-focused recounting of the high-intensity tornadoes that hit north central Oklahoma and south central Kansas a quarter-century ago. One of the tornadoes did $12 million damage to Oologah schools, ending the school year a month early.
