National Public Radio

I grew up on public radio and public television.  My mother, until it became impossible to stop us, only allowed us to watch "educational" tv when we were little.  Some of the most influential and memorable people in my life were public tv or radio personalities: Robert J. Lurtsema, (Morning Pro Musica, the best classical program ever), Maggie Letvin, (who, as a teenage boy, I found profoundly attractive), Julia Child, Fred Rogers, Don Herbert, (Mr. Wizard), the Brandeis historian Abram Sachar whose lectures and personal observations of history I will never forget, and more.  I don't remember that these people had any particular agenda to sell.  But not anymore.

Today's public radio constantly, and artfully pushes a liberal agenda.   There is no pretense of an unbiased approach.  I have not done it yet but I would guess that if you did a statistical sampling of npr topics they would roughly be divided into two groups: 1. people oppressed by the white male power structure: lgbtq people, people of 'color' and females and 2. the horror of the white male power structure, especially as embodied by Donald Trump.  And yet the majority of npr viewers are white and I would suspect that the majority of members of the board of directors are white, upper class males and females.  They are arrogant and self righteous about their values and beliefs.  Anthropogenic climate change and mutation and natural selection as a sufficient creative force, both controversial in much of America, are arrogantly taken as absolutes not to be questioned.

Also the quality of the programming has gone downhill.  NPR has adopted the mass market approach to radio programming filling it with chit-chat about the news and outrage over things they expect or want their audience to be outraged over.  They have become so predictable and banal that, even though they were once my go to for non chit chat, hot under the collar programming, I can no longer tolerate them.

Finally,  because they are and have been a highly respected and trusted news source for so long to a large and influential audience, they are the target vehicle for very sophisticated propaganda.   Non conventional political views are quickly shut down if expressed by callers.  NPR is a stalwart of the reigning paradigm of authority in our country much of which needs to be examined and questioned by journalists not promoted by them.

Our Institutions are Failing Us

The shooting in Florida this month reminds me again that our institutions are failing us.  The FBI was alerted, the police were alerted, multiple times, but nothing was done. Police on site failed to control the scene; with the shooter still unidentified and free students ran from the school in all directions while the police watched.

Recently Vladimir Putin announced the development of weapons systems that basically make half of our military obsolete.  Why did our intelligence agencies with their multi-billion dollar budgets fail to detect this?  If half of what he claimed is true, our aircraft carrier groups could not survive the first few weeks of a shooting war.  Our missile defenses also could not stop these weapons which can be fired from a multitude of locations, fly long range, fly at super high speeds and evade radar detection all the while homing in with nuclear or conventional warheads on a specific target.

Axis of Evil

I am thinking there should be a new axis of evil enshrined for America.  Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump conspiring to make America small again.  First Bush with his trillion dollar invasion of the Middle East.  That money was robbed from our economy and the economy of our future.  Add to that his expansion of Government with the so-called Department of Homeland Security.  Second we have Obama with his insidious increases in regulations over every area of our lives.  The idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant is absurd, but it provides an excuse for a raft of new regulations.  And his embrace of identity politics, a sure fire way to divide and diminish and something based on the ideas of victimhood, and blame assigned to artificially created identity groups.  Finally we have Trump who has blown the Federal deficit sky high and now is trying to trash the economy a la Smoot Hawley with tariffs on steel and aluminum.

It is time for the American people to demand major institutional change because our country is at risk.