Your tax dollars at work

I learned something I did not know today. It was in an article by Matt Taibbi reaming a suborned soi-disant journalist named Lara Logan. You can read his rant here, but this is the part with the new info:

True, the Pentagon does have perhaps the single largest public relations apparatus on earth – spending $4.7 billion on P.R. in 2009 alone and employing 27,000 people, a staff nearly as large as the 30,000-person State Department – but is that really enough to ensure positive coverage in a society with armed with a constitutionally-guaranteed free press?

Hope you feel like you are getting your money's worth.

As for the content of the article, read it yourself and keep in mind the obviously forgotten advice of the old battle weary and drunken journalist who once told a rookie reporter:

When you interview someone you always have to ask yourself 'why is this lying bastard lying to me?'

But of course, I am only an historian. We never lie to anyone.

though we may not know what we are talking about.

Derbyshire on Immigrants.

I can understand why out of control illegal immigration might upset anyone. I can even, to a point, share the dislike for rewarding 'illegals' with a decent shot at residency and citizenship. But among some conservatives their dislike for 'illegal immigration' is morphing into a weird type of nativist anti-immigration spite pure and simple. Here , for example, is a reader writing in to agree with John Derbyshire, my favorite NRO commentator, about wanting to trash the 'Nation of Immigrants' image of America as untrue. Here's the key points:

Best I can tell most of my family came from Germany well over a century ago. But I'm not a German, never been there, don't really want to go. I'm an American. Let's start calling ourselves that instead of this ridiculous Nation of Immigrants nonsense.

And I don't buy Andy McCarthy's saying we have a '"nation of immigrants' self image.' I certainly don't. I don't know anyone who does. It's what we're told, we're expected to believe it, but I know nothing of having an immigrant past, and know only one person ... who does.

This is fun for several reasons. One, the Derby himself is an immigrant, from England, I believe (as are Andrew Sullivan, Arriana Huffington, Fareed Zakharia, Christopher Hitchens, etc, etc). Second, his ancestors came from Germany a century ago! Newcomer. My ancestor, a guy named Jesse, an Englishman or a Scots-Irishman, was active in the little North Carolina town near here in the 1760s. As a group, African Americans are the oldest 'American' population there is, if you discount the Native Americans (who really had an illegal immigrant problem).

Yet this relative newcomer now knows only ONE person who has an immigrant past. How odd. I live and work in rural America, the region where the good ol' WASP American culture first crystallized. People here either come from families that have been here for 200 years, or they've been here for less than 15 years. There is little in between.

As for me - I know lots of people with an immigrant past. My Cuban wife, for starters, and my second generation Cuban-American niece and nephew. They've done so well assimilating. My beloved sister-in-law is Vietnamese, which means my other niece and nephew are half-Vietnamese, though pure American and have no impulse to visit the old country tho' the older one says he can still understand Vietnamese.

Then there is my cousin's son: 1/4 African American, 1/4 Japanese, 1/4 Viking Minnesotan, and 1/4 Clemens. And my aunt married a Hungarian Jew who had escaped from Vienna one step ahead of the Nazis. He was actually the most sophisticated and intellectual of all my relatives.

And my friend Maeráed's dad is from Ireland; my niece Mulan is from China; one of my colleagues is from Kenya, one from Russia; one raised in Argentina though at least legally an American; one was socialized as an adult in Mexico and considers himself as Mexican as his Mexican wife who is, btw, legal as all get out; and one is Finnish. Of my two favorite colleagues over in the English Dept one is the daughter of Yiddish speaking survivors of the Holocaust and the other is, well, English.

What is this poor WASP boy to do, except buy into the 'Nation of Immigrants' image?


.

What were we thinking?

Remember the self esteem craze? That only telling a child positive praise would build up their self-esteem, which as we all knew, was the major predictor of success? Well, that was all wrong. It seems that kids are a whole lot smarter than the experts on kids, as any good teacher could tell you. The results:

According to Meyer’s findings, by the age of 12, children believe that earning praise from a teacher is not a sign you did well—it’s actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. And teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an extent that they believed it’s a teacher’s criticism—not praise at all—that really conveys a positive belief in a student’s aptitude.

I begin to question the self esteem craze myself when I read of a study that ranked high school kids for self esteem. Girls had lower self-esteem than boys, which supposedly showed that our schools were systematically failing girls and tilting the playing field against them. African American females had the lowest self-esteem of all, so they had a double tilt against them.

But African American boys had the highest self-esteem of all. By the logic of the study and its commentary they must have had the most advantaged education giving them the best shot at success.