The Daily Gouge Archive, Friday, November 13th, 2015

On November 15, 2015, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Friday, November 13th, 2015…a few, brief observations on Google’s understanding of the make-up of America’s Military:

Were one to base an understanding of the relative racial or gender composition of America’s veterans on Google’s November 11th doodle, one would come away believing women comprise 43% of America’s fighting forces, past and present, male minorities another 43%, while White men account for only a meager 14 % of those who’ve answered their country’s call.

Except that even today, White males continue to be overrepresented in the U.S. Military, comprising approximately two-thirds of our Armed Forces, as are Black males. Hispanics are markedly underrepresented, while women constitute less than 15% of our increasingly politically-correct forces. And the percentage of White male pre-9/11 veterans is even higher.

Big deal? No, not in grand scheme of things. It just fits the pattern of Liberalism’s larger strategy for changing everyday reality, in part by rewriting history.

And for a gazillion dollar company controlling much of the information superhighway, one would expect Google to get it right. But like every other Progressive-powered enterprise, they know so much that just isn’t so!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

Since we’re on the subject of those who know so much that just isn’t so, writing at NRO, Victor Davis Hanson details how an abiding…

Disregard for the Truth Advances the Left’s Agenda

“…Subsequent fact-finding does not seem to dispel these untruths. Instead, what could or should have happened must have happened, given that the noble ends of social justice are thought to justify the means deemed necessary to achieve them.

The 60 Minutes memos about Bush’s Air National Guard service were never authenticated. Everyone now rejects the myth that the Benghazi attack was a result of a video. Investigators proved that Michael Brown was not executed by Officer Wilson. Ahmed [Clock Boy] was neither a young prodigy nor a victim of bias.

But the legends are created and persist because they further progressive agendas — and the thousands of prestigious and lucrative careers invested in them.“

Speaking of legends created and persisting because they further Progressive agendas, courtesy of Renew America, Sylvia Thompson suggests…and we wholeheartedly agree…

Barack Obama is NOT Seeking “Legacy“

“To the many gullible souls out there who truly think that Barack Obama is “legacy building” in his all-out assault on America, I implore you to bow out of the conversation because you are not seeing clearly.

The term legacy carries positive connotations of something bequeath that is to the receiver’s benefit. Everything that Barack Obama does is calculated to destroy America, which he despises. This man no more cares about legacy than he fears being properly prosecuted by the white political leaders whose responsibility it is to remove him from office.

I focus on white leaders, because whites are still in the majority and they fill the majority of political offices. If the majority of political operatives were of some other ethnicity, I would lodge my complaint against that group. Ethnicity is an issue only because Obama is half-black and he uses that fact to intimidate guilt-conflicted white people. Otherwise, he would have been impeached and likely in prison for treason by now.

Barack Obama’s sole aim has been, since he first entered politics and continues as he winds down this presidency, the complete destruction of America as it was founded.

It is an insult to the intelligence of all Americans who must listen to elitist pundits on Fox news and elsewhere, and political drones in either party endeavor to make Obama’s behavior fit a pattern of normalcy. Attributing his destructive policies to “legacy building” is either self-delusion on the part of the people who make that claim or cowardliness…”

Or an absolute absence of discernment…and common sense.

As a Mr. Reis R. Kash of Springfield, IL so eloquently observed:

Though not without the help of some 4,000,000 Americans who couldn’t be bothered to vote in November 2012, however unexciting, uninspiring and un-Conservative Mitt Romney might have been.

Next up, our coverage of Progressivism’s purposeful dumbing-down of America continues as the WSJ notes there’s at least one institution of higher-learning remaining in America with…

An Adult on Campus

Mitch Daniels offers a lesson to college administrators.

We’ve been wondering all week what happened to the grown-ups on American university campuses, and it appears we have a sighting. Mitch Daniels, the president of Purdue University, spoke up Wednesday about the children’s revolt at Yale and Missouri in a letter “to the Purdue community.”

It deserves to be quoted at length: “Events this week at the University of Missouri and Yale University should remind us all of the importance of absolute fidelity to our shared values. First, that we strive constantly to be, without exception, a welcoming, inclusive and discrimination-free community, where each person is respected and treated with dignity. Second, to be steadfast in preserving academic freedom and individual liberty.

“Two years ago, a student-led initiative created the ‘We Are Purdue Statement of Values,’ which was subsequently endorsed by the University Senate. Last year, both our undergraduate and graduate student governments led an effort that produced a strengthened statement of policies protecting free speech. What a proud contrast to the environments that appear to prevail at places like Missouri and Yale. Today and every day, we should remember the tenets of those statements and do our best to live up to them fully.”

So a commitment to tolerance can coexist on campus with a commitment to free speech and open debate. What a concept.

Though, as Katie Pavlich reports at Townhall.com, unlike Indiana, adults in the Show-Me State…at least those still possessed of even a modicum of common sense…remain in shockingly short supply:

Who Needs Jim Crow? Black Mizzou Students Self Segregate, Kick Out White “Allies”

“The social justice warrior insanity at Mizzou keeps getting more bizarre and counter productive by the day. The latest development? Black protesters are self-segregating and even their closest white allies aren’t invited to the circle…”

“Share, decompress, be vulnerable & real”; seriously?!?

In a relate item, Jonah Goldberg correctly identifies the source of the problem:

Campus Commotions Show We’re Raising Fragile Kids

“It seems like every week there’s a new horror story of political correctness run amok at some college campus.

…So what is going on?

Well, a lot. Many conservatives want to put all the blame on political correctness or cultural Marxism. And though I think such ideologies certainly belong in the dock, political correctness is now quite old. Lamentations about it were commonplace when I was in college 25 years ago. Does anyone, other than a few campus hotheads, actually believe universities are more intolerant, bigoted and racist than they were a generation ago?

What has changed are the students. Yes, there has been a lot of ideological indoctrination in which kids are taught that taking offense gives them power. But, again, that idea is old. What’s new is the way kids are being raised.

Consider play. Children are hardwired to play. That’s how we learn. But what happens when play is micromanaged? St. Lawrence University professor Steven Horwitz argues that it undermines democracy.

Free play — tag in the schoolyard, pickup basketball at the park, etc. — is a very complicated thing. It requires young people to negotiate rules among themselves, without the benefit of some third-party authority figure. These skills are hugely important in life. When parents or teachers short-circuit that process by constantly intervening to stop bullying or just to make sure that everyone plays nice, Horwitz argues, “we are taking away a key piece of what makes it possible for free people to be peaceful, cooperative people by devising bottom-up solutions to a variety of conflicts.”

The rise in “helicopter parenting” and the epidemic of “everyone gets a trophy” education are another facet of the same problem. We’re raising millions of kids to be smart and kind, but also fragile.

And what happens when large numbers of these delicate little flowers are set free to navigate their way through life? They feel unsafe and demand “safe spaces.” They feel threatened by uncomfortable ideas and demand “trigger warnings.” They might even want written rules or contracts to help them negotiate sexual relations.

In other words, this is the generation the mandarins of political correctness have been waiting for.”

The end result being, as Noah Rothman notes at Commentary Magazine, America has birthed…

A Generation that Hates Free Speech

“It’s beginning to become hard to ignore how woefully ignorant a burgeoning generation of Americans seems to be in even the bedrock philosophical tenets upon which the United States was founded. You might think that a principle notion so central to the American identity as the freedoms of speech, expression, and assembly – rights so essential the Founders made it the first – would enjoy at least modest respect if not veneration from all citizens, young and old. Increasingly, the next generation seems to view First Amendment protections not as a bulwark against the dangers of tyranny, but as a threat to their comfort and preferred intellectual isolation.

The looming catastrophe that could befall a nation that no longer respects its most basic freedoms was exposed once again as an acute crisis this week amid the disruptions on the University of Missouri campus. There, amid vague and poorly substantiated claims of endemic racist antipathy toward African-Americans, students and faculty alike engaged in a protest that regarded the presence of citizen and student journalists as a sinister development. One of the now deservedly unemployed faculty members [not quite] abetting this abuse of public property was even shown calling for “muscle” to remove from the premises one of the student photographers.

When asked if she thought this response was justified, the vice president of the Missouri Students Association crystalized the crisis afflicting Western education. “I personally am tired of hearing that first amendment rights protect students when they are creating a hostile and unsafe learning environment for myself and for other students here,” she said. If only this poor soul were an outlier, but anecdotal evidence that Americans are becoming less comfortable with the Constitutional right to free speech is increasingly matched by more scientific support…”

Or as the WSJ so accurately asserts…

“The failure is that elite colleges are turning out ostensible leaders who seem to have no idea why America’s Founders risked extreme discomfort—that is, death—for the right to speak freely.”

Exhibit “A”: