None so blind . . .
Even Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge can’t recognize any possible connection whatsoever between “Keynesian singularity” and immigration forced on all from above. There’s clearly no relationship at all between the Italian economy and the Italian government’s decision to spend money on a Ministry for Integration headed by a woman who has spent her life trying to make it easier for more Africans to become Italian citizens. No relationship whatsoever. Just plain old fashion racism.
Profiles of Cathedral Clerics 3
Lurking behind many progressive causes is the hand of a wealthy white person holding a sweaty wad of cash redolent of that malodorous mixture of sanctimony and guilt. Despite the rhetoric of many local progressive programs, the sweaty wad of cash does not go directly to the wretched of the earth for whom the money is ostensibly intended. In transit, the money falls into the hands of college students and upper-middle class Neopuritans who have discovered it’s easy to cash in, financially and socially, if they likewise roll themselves in the steaming pile of guilt and sanctimony like so many mongrel bitches. The rolling commences every time someone files a 501(c)3 or a 990pf, sallying forth into the world beneath the banner of phrases like “urban renewal” or “solidarity alliance” or “gender-queer empowerment.” Thus the sickness of entitlement democracy spreads, normalizes, and further entrenches itself in the West.
~~~
Today’s sweaty wad of cash comes from Adelaide Gomer, president of the Park Foundation and daughter of late media mogul, Roy H Park. To her credit, Adelaide lives in downtown Detroit and commutes . . . oh, wait. My apologies, I misread something. Let me start over. Adelaide lives in Ithaca, New York, home of Cornell University and a lot of SWPLs. According to this campaign contribution form, she resides at 422 Cayuga Heights Rd., Ithaca, NY 14850. Her neighbor’s house, at 502 Cayuga Heights Rd., recently sold for $506,000, which, in Central New York, is at the upper limit of housing prices. (I can smell the white guilt from here.)
But that’s all pittance compared to the Park Foundation itself, which boasts over $300 million in assets and dispenses around $20 million a year to Adelaide-approved causes.
You can look over the causes yourself. They’re not all bad, on the surface. I mean, at least ten percent of them aren’t. (Most speak for themselves, e.g. the $15k “Park Award for Photo Activism.”) But take this one: Project Look Sharp, housed at Ithaca College. (Oh, did I mention that Adelaide sits on the board of trustees at Ithaca College? No? Well, in fact, Adelaide sits on the board of trustees at Ithaca College. You’ll notice that Ithaca College gets a lot of money from the Park Foundation.) But that’s neither here nor there. Project Look Sharp received $163,000 from the Park Foundation last year. According to its webpage, “Project Look Sharp is a media literacy initiative of Ithaca College that develops and provides lesson plans, media materials, training, and support for the effective integration of media literacy with critical thinking into classroom curricula at all education levels.”
Well, I’m all for teaching media literacy in the schools. It’s a high-tech world, and things like building webpages with CSS are just basic for success. I’m glad to see the Park Foundation giving money to programs that bring technological know-how into classrooms and . . . oh, wait. My apologies, I misread something. Let’s look at the lesson plans that Project Look Sharp has actually put together:
By “media literacy,” Project Look Sharp means teaching kids how to deconstruct things in order to find patriarchy and racism at work. For example, in addition to lessons entitled “The Magic of Stereotypes” and “War Crimes at Abu Ghraib,” the Media Construction of the Middle East curriculum delivers the following:
This kit covers stereotyping of Arab people, the Arab/Israeli conflict, the war in Iraq and militant Muslim movements. Students will learn core information and vocabulary about the historical and contemporary Middle East issues that challenge stereotypical, simplistic and uninformed thinking, and political and ethical issues involving the role of media in constructing knowledge, evaluating historical truths, and objectivity and subjectivity in journalism.
And the Media Construction of Social Justice curriculum delivers even more goodies:
This kit explores how people in the United States have perceived social justice movements over the past 180 years and how the U.S. media have constructed that public perception. The subject areas covered include U.S. history, African-American studies, criminal justice studies, immigrant studies, labor studies, Latino studies, LGBT studies, media studies, peace studies, sociology, and women’s studies, among many others.
We can thank Adelaide Gomer for contributing enough money to keep the Project Look Sharp curricula free and online for at least another year or two.
~~~
The Park Foundation has given well over $10 million in scholarships for Ithaca College students majoring in film, journalism, or related disciplines—oh, wait. I meant, related “disciplines.” Some of the future progressives whose indoctrinations have been funded by Adelaide include the following:
Keith Bress, who is really into “changing the conversation about mental health issues and de-stigmatizing [drooling from one’s mouth].”
Kacey Deamer, who edits this leftist rag at Ithaca College.
Maya Cueva, a white girl who probably marks “Hispanic” on her applications and who enjoys “working with Created Equal, an LGBTQA activist organization on campus that emphasizes coalition building and collaboration with students from a diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and identities to try to critically and productively understand multiple perspectives.” Bet you can’t say that ten times fast.
So on and so forth.
~~~
Since 2000, Adelaide has gifted $500,000—that’s half a million dollars—to various left-wing politicians and organizations.
She gave $10k to Priorities USA, a non-profit whose goal is to “draw clear contrasts between progressive policies and those of the far right. We are committed to the reelection of President Obama and setting the record straight when there are misleading attacks against him and other progressive leaders.”
She gave $3k to the campaign of lefty representative Elizabeth Esty from Connecticut, which is, according to my map, not in New York, where Adelaide resides. Like someone else I know, Adelaide enjoys giving money to candidates all over America. Something about New Englanders and their inability to keep noses out of other people’s business . . .
In 2011, she gave ~$10k to ActBlue, a political action committee dedicated to making it easy for progressives to send money online to their favorite progressive candidates.
She gave $5k to the Working Families Party, which, as far as I can tell, is a pseudo-Commie political party with ties to ACORN.
So on and so forth.
~~~
Lately, Adelaide has been deconstructing that patriarchal, heteronormative, ethno-centric idea of “private property” by funding a lot of anti-fracking agitprop. (For my non-American readers, the fracking debate is similar to the oil drilling debate. Yeah, oil drilling may be environmentally risky, but the only way you can stop it is if the government tells private property owners what they can and cannot do on their property. Same thing with fracking.) Over the last several years, the Park Foundation has doled out $3 million to various anti-fracking filmmakers and researchers, all Adelaide-approved of course.
~~~
Adelaide Gomer: the face of Neopuritan guilt washed clean by the blood of giving millions of dollars to progressive causes.
The Limits of Reason
I’ve withheld comment on the George Zimmerman trial because it’s not an edifying subject—it’s intellectual junk food, a soap opera. I agree with James Goulding that our blogs should elevate the discussion, which, if we want Dark Enlightenment ideas to spread, is a better strategy than writing screeds about “the Jews control America!” or “fuckin niggers at it again!”
However, the latest round of Zimmerman punditry deserves comment.
Matthew Yglesias, who is, if possible, an even whiter Spaniard than I am, writes the following in a post entitled “Bayes’ Theorem for Dummies”:
I think what Cohen really means to be arguing isn’t so much that neither he nor Zimmerman are racists, but that racism is the correct social and political posture. That white people have good reason to fear black men, and that therefore all black men should be put in a subordinate position. But as a logical argument, Cohen here is falling afoul of very poor statistical inference . . .
. . . the fact that young black men are disproportionately likely to be involved in violent crime in no way licenses the inference that you should stop random black men on the street and begin treating them like criminals.
For example, since moving to a majority black city 10 years ago, it is the case that 100 percent of the people who randomly assaulted me on the street were African-American. And yet that was a single incident on one day out of thousands. The overwhelming preponderance of black men I walk past on the street on a day-to-day basis—even the young ones, even the ones wearing hoodies—aren’t committing any violent crimes. If I were to start questioning every single black male teenager I come across as a criminal suspect, I would very much be engaged in unreasonable behavior.
The critique is elementary. Formally, we may say that Zimmerman confused Pr(A|B) with Pr(B|A). Colloquially, we can summarize Yglesias’s critique thusly: “Even if most criminals are black, it doesn’t follow that most blacks are criminals. So it’s simply not logical to profile every black person you meet as being a criminal threat.”
Yglesias probably thinks his point is unanswerable. I’ll give him credit for at least attempting to return an element of logos to the seething pathos of this turgid affair. However, like the young college girl who first discovers that American settlers didn’t treat the natives too kindly, Yglesias is satisfied with setting his feet into the cement of his first rational step and not moving anywhere else.
From my perspective, his point is entirely answerable, and on purely rational grounds. It’s all a matter of returning logic to its context and filling in the priors.
~~~
First, Zimmerman was not following “all black men,” as Yglesias implies later in his post. Zimmerman was following a singular young black male, dressed in ill-fitting clothes, wandering a suburban neighborhood at night after a recent streak of burglaries committed by young black males in his neighborhood. 100% of recent burglaries had been committed by a marked population that constituted only a small percentage of the community’s whole population. Trayvon Martin, at various points of description, fit the marked “profile” of recent burglars.
As commenter Cail Corishev writes at Sailer’s:
I’m writing a Bayesian spam filter (based on Paul Graham’s Plan for Spam), and “profiling” is exactly what it does. There’s no one word that guarantees that a message is spam. But if a message contains 10 words that appear frequently in spam, and it doesn’t contain any words that appear exclusively in non-spam, the probability that the message is spam will be very close to 1.
That’s what profiling means. It doesn’t mean, “Stop all blacks because blacks are more dangerous than other groups”; that’s what liberals like Bloomberg do because they’re trying to avoid profiling. Profiling would have a cop say (pulling percentages out of my hat for the example), “Ok, there’s a young black man walking down the street in this neighborhood, so historical data says there’s a 5% chance that he’s up to no good. That’s not nearly enough to suspect anything. But he’s also wearing a hoodie, which adds another 5% (whether he’s black or white), and he’s hiding his face (another 3%), and keeping his hands shoved down deep in his pockets (another 10%), and his sneakers look brand new, which we’ve been told to look out for because a store was knocked over last night (another 20%). Let’s pull over and ask him where he’s headed …. Okay, he doesn’t seem to know this neighborhood (another 20%) so let’s chat with him a bit more…. Ok, he showed us what he was holding in his pockets, and it was liniment and denture cream that he said he’s taking to his grandma whom he’s staying with a few blocks from here (-30%), and he seemed friendly and relaxed while we talked to him (-10%), and offered to show us the receipt for his shoes (-30%). Seems okay, tell him to have a nice day.”
My limited knowledge of Bayesian statistics is, indeed, that it provides a framework for working with multiple priors for coming up with an averaged statistical probability. In other words, its entire point is to move away from the kind of decontextualized logic that Yglesias invokes, a logic that would make sense as a critique if Zimmerman (or anyone) had indeed been following every black male he met on a daily basis. But no one does that, so Yglesias’s invoked logic is really just a shot at a strawman.
~~~
Second, until the fight itself, Zimmerman’s actions were quite modest. The act of “profiling” or “being suspicious” is an act of personal caution, not a willful attack on someone else’s personal rights. (My crossing to the other side of the road while being approached by a group of young black males does not in any meaningful way affect the young black males. Zimmerman’s following Trayvon did not affect Trayvon.) Without his strawman (stop every black on the street!), Yglesias, I imagine, might modestly modify his claim: Zimmerman’s decision to follow Trayvon, or my decision to cross the street, remains illogical because, well, the same old same: “just because criminals are often young black males, most young black males aren’t criminals!”
The comments on Steve’s post provide many obvious rejoinders, which I paraphrase here:
The vast majority of grizzly bears don’t attack hikers, so it’s irrational for hikers to carry bear spray in the wilderness!
80% of lumps aren’t cancerous, so my mom was being irrational when she got hers checked out by a doctor!
The odds of my house burning down are at least as miniscule as the odds of any random young black male being a criminal, so I guess I’m stupid for having fire insurance. I’ll cancel it right away, Matt!
So on and so forth. One might also invoke the common airline policy of not allowing adult males to sit next to unaccompanied minors. Not all adult males are pedophiles, but most pedophiles are adult males. Betting that a given adult male is not a pedophile isn’t worth the risk, and is certainly worth the minor inconvenience of asking all adult males to switch seats in the event they are seated beside a young girl traveling alone. Liability issues, you know.
And that’s what this second point is really about: the logic of damages. In a purely decontextualized way, I know that Pr(A|B) is not the same as Pr(B|A). Given certain context and content, however, betting on Pr(B|not A) may carry serious consequences if, however unlikely, I turned out to be wrong. In other words, taking minor measures to avoid the risk of certain events or probabilities, however unlikely, is not at all illogical. In fact, in many contexts, we commend people who take these measures. We call it “planning ahead” or “preparing for all possible outcomes” or “erring on the side of caution.”
~~~
This all seems to me a perfectly rational rejoinder to Yglesias’s over-simplified evocation of Bayes and its implications for how Zimmerman acted. Zimmerman’s neighborhood had recently been burgled by young black males, a small percentage of the community’s population. Trayvon Martin was a young black male, which, of course, did not mean he was a burglar. However, the possibility that he was a burglar, however unlikely, was nevertheless, given demographic reality, modest enough to warrant a few minutes of Zimmerman’s time to check him out, because not checking him out (i.e., assuming that Martin was not a burglar) might incur greater damages to the neighborhood.
Are you not rationally persuaded?!??!!?!
Nope. Not Aaron Gross, one of Sailer’s progressive trolls:
the fact that young black men are disproportionately likely to be involved in violent crime in no way licenses the inference that you should stop random black men on the street….
That’s absolutely correct. There may be other facts that imply it, but the facts that Cohen cites do not support it in any way. And it’s obvious that Cohen did get his conditional probabilities backwards, just as Yglesias pointed out. Cohen was talking about P(black|criminal), where a more relevant probability is P(criminal|black).
I haven’t read all the comments here, but from the ones I’ve read it seems that as usual, iSteve readers endorse the stupid, unsound argument over the intelligent, sound argument because the former supposedly leads to the desired conclusion.
Now, there may be a purely rational case against the one I’ve presented against Yglesias, another round in a logical tête-à-tête. However, Aaron Gross’s ostrich response is the most common one I’ve seen from the Left.
What am I to do with that? The “stupid” comments to which Gross refers lay out the same argument against Yglesias that I’ve provided here. To me, it seems like a perfectly reasonable counter-statement to Yglesias. To Gross, however, it’s the usual, unsound stupidity of biased proles grasping for rationalizations.
We’ve now reached the reason I brought this whole thing up: the incommensurable gap between me and Aaron Gross demonstrates that logic and reasoning are, in the end, absolutely worthless when it comes to arguing about social and political issues. It seems we cannot even decide on what constitutes “sound” versus “unsound” argument—on what constitutes rationality versus stupidity. More and more often, I find myself persuaded by Heartiste’s preferred tactics for cultural engagement: mockery and agitprop.
Which brings us back to the second sentence I wrote in this post: I agree with James Goulding that our blogs should elevate the discussion. But how can we elevate the discussion if the other side will never see as rational what we see as rational? What’s the point of trying to convert the Brahmins if they deride even a rational counter-statement as “stupid” and “unsound”?
At this point, I’m failing to see a point.
RELATED: Perhaps I’m being too pessimistic. William Saletan changed his mind about the Zimmerman case. (But then, Saletan is probably just a closeted reactionary.)
Chinese Logographs vs. the Latin Alphabet
In my series of posts on Islamic science (the point of which was to begin a discussion about political and intellectual climates that have been, in history, most conducive to scientific and technological progress), I made the following statement about the importance of the printing press to Europe’s scientific and industrial revolutions:
Europe industrialized first because Europeans figured out how to bring theoretical knowledge together and put it to work for material, practical ends . . . The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution were made possible by neither applied technology nor pure science but by a generative relationship between both, a relationship enabled in great part by the printing press and an increased circulation of ideas.
. . . Islamic science failed to systematize its knowledge across disciplines and never bridged what today we call the pure/applied science gap. It’s probably fair to suggest that this systematization never occurred because the Muslims lacked an adequate means of circulation. Seen in this light, the printing press was perhaps the most important pre-Enlightenment invention—whichever culture developed that first was bound to systematize its fragmented knowledge first.
It was pointed out to me that the Chinese had invented movable type printing much earlier than Gutenberg. Indeed, Bi Sheng invented the world’s first true printing press in 1040 AD (“true” in the sense that it used movable types instead of wood or ceramic blocks, both of which were fragile and/or re-produced whole pages instead of characters). In the 1200s, a similar press was invented in Korea. So why didn’t East Asia industrialize? Why didn’t the printing press lead to an increased circulation of ideas in the Orient? Surely, by the time Europe began to awaken from its slumber, the Chinese had likewise accumulated enough practical and theoretical knowledge to make modern science and technology possible. They had the knowledge; they had the press. What went wrong?
The printing press was never widely adopted in China or elsewhere in the Orient. One major reason it was never widely adopted is that printing with Chinese characters is exceedingly more difficult, cumbersome, and expensive than printing with the Latin alphabet. The former would have contained around 20,000 characters; the latter contains 26 letters. In other words, alphabetic writing systems lend themselves to movable-type printing; logographic systems do not.
In practice, a single font scheme for early European printing presses required about 100 characters. And according to this fellow from Utrecht University, by the middle of the sixteenth century, highly profitable printers were already ordering font schemes that had 100,000+ types (for various special characters, including a’s and b’s, et cet.). However, huge numbers of types could be produced in Europe because smaller sets (100 or so, as I said) had already been produced and found to be extremely profitable for the printer. Chinese printers never had a chance to experiment and test the market with small type sets; for them, movable type printing was a massive and expensive undertaking from the very beginning. Also, Gutenberg had invented, along with the printing press, a hand mould which made the production of type matrices extremely easy. No such method for creating Chinese types was ever invented, in part, I assume, because Chinese characters are just so much more intricate than Latinate letters.
Another problem for Chinese writing was (is) that their logographic system is open-ended. As Steven Fischer succinctly explains in A History of Writing:
Each new word in the language automatically requires a new grapheme in the system. In contrast, a ‘closed’ alphabetic system, like the one underlying the Latin script, can phonetically reproduce every new word with a very small inventory of letters.
Even if China had experienced something similar to the scientific revolution, it might have been difficult for printers to ‘keep up’ with the constant flow of new symbols coming from the scientists and their new words, each of which would require a new type. And without a method for creating new types quickly and inexpensively, it wasn’t exactly a safe economic bet for any Chinese entrepreneurs to go into printing.
According to the same scholar I linked earlier, printing was never widely adopted in the Islamic world for two very different reasons. First, printing in Arabic script was outright banned in the Ottoman Empire until the mid-1700s (minority groups, such as the Greeks or Armenians, could apparently print in their own scripts, but that practice never became widespread, either). Second, even after the ban, Islamic scholars were purists about their calligraphy. The Arabic writing system, like the Latin one, is an alphabet, containing only 28 letters and thus suited for movable type printing. However, Arabic letters ideally run together, in cursive fashion; for most of Islamic history, not writing the alphabet in cursive is considered a bastardization of the writing system. During the printing press’s first century, there was simply no way for printers to print without separating the letters. Well, fuck that! said the Islamists. We just won’t use printing presses, then.
Brilliant.
~~~
The invention of the printing press made possible the increased circulation of ideas necessary for the scientific and technological revolution. However, had Europe’s writing systems not been alphabetic—had they been comprised of hundreds or thousands of characters instead of just 26—then printing would have been a much riskier economic undertaking, and we probably wouldn’t have seen an explosion of printing presses opening up all over Europe. Goodbye, circulation of ideas.
It goes without saying that, throughout history, no one in Europe or China met in synod to decide once and for all what their writing systems would be like. No one took votes on whether or not to adopt an alphabet, a syllabary, or a logographic system. From the neoreactionary perspective, however, the story of the European and Chinese writing systems—and their contributions, or lack thereof, to the adoption of print culture—provides an obvious lesson: cultural systems do matter when it comes to cultural advancement and enrichment. Not all cultures are equally equipped to advance. The East Asians had higher average IQs, but they didn’t have an alphabet. The difference between adopting an alphabet and adopting tens of thousands of individual symbols was, in part, the difference between who industrialized first.
Civilization is difficult, fragile. A million things have to go right for it to emerge and a million more have to go right for it to advance. It’s never just the one thing. Even writing systems matter.
Profiles of Cathedral Clerics 2
Last week, we did a fun biographical sketch of Glenn A. Britt, Timer Warner Cable CEO, Dartmouth graduate, Obama lackey, and diversity hound. This week, we take another journey into the lifestyles of the Cathedral’s rich and famous.
Meet Charles K. Gifford.
Charles K. Gifford, son of a wealthy bank executive, graduated with a degree in history from Princeton University in 1964. He is a member of the boards of Bank of America (former chairman) and CBS (former chairman). He also serves on the board of WGBH, Boston’s public broadcasting corporation, and the trustee’s board at Northeastern University.
Over the last 20 years, Charles K. Gifford has given over $200,000 to Democratic politicians. Among his largest donations were gifts of $28,500 to the Obama Victory Fund and $15,200 to the Democratic National Committee. But he’s not all about mega-bucks donations. Our man Gifford spreads his wealth around to the little folk, too. He especially seems to enjoy funding Democrats who live nowhere near his home state of Massachusetts. (Someone’s mommy never taught him to mind his own business.)
For example, Charles K. Gifford has given $5,000 to Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator from Colorado known for wanting to bring more illegal immigrants into America so he can sign them up for Obamacare. Charles K. Gifford has given $2,300 to Kay Hagan, a Senator from North Carolina known for wanting to bring more illegal immigrants into America so she can sign them up for Obamacare. Charles K. Gifford has also given $2,100 to Sherrod Brown, a far-left Ohio Senator known, interestingly enough, for wanting to bring more illegal immigrants into America so he can sign them up for Obamacare. (Brown is also a big fan of forcing every state in the nation to legalize gay marriage.) Charles K. Gifford has also given $10,000 each to the Democratic Parties of Ohio and Wisconsin. In his home state of Massachusetts, Gifford gave lots of money to the late Ted Kennedy.
When he isn’t giving money to left-wing Democrats, Charles K. Gifford enjoys heading the Boston Plan for Excellence, an organization dedicated to training teachers to deal with Boston’s urban NAMs so the manjawed Bryn Mawr grads don’t high-tail it for the suburbs after a semester. As BPE puts it: “[We] recruit highly talented, diverse people who are committed to becoming urban teachers and provide them with a year of intense preparation based in the classroom.” (Loving diversity and being a rich board member go together like wine and cheese!) At a more general level, BPE spends lots of money trying to figure out why Boston’s urban schools suck. To its credit, BPE receives most of its funds from private sources, but in 2010, under Charles K. Gifford, BPE received a $5 million federal grant—I guess the corporate sponsors aren’t seeing results! Under Gifford, BPE has also partnered with the Fund for Teachers, “an organization that normally receives a substantial part of its support from a governmental unit.” What does the Fund for Teachers do? Read some examples here. Clearly, Gifford knows how to take care of funds and spend money wisely. He is a Bank of America executive, after all.
Charles K. Gifford. Who ever said a degree in history won’t take you places?!
Networks of Influence, or, Profiles of Cathedral Clerics 1
I’m an ambivalent fan of the website Theyrule.net. On one hand, they’ve done a great service by using network theory and network visualizations to chart the many, many connections between powerful corporate players. You’ll be shocked (or not) to discover that very few board members sit on only one board. However, the Marxist bent of the site’s owners keeps it from being as useful as it could be. Techno-capitalist that I am, I only fear corporate power when it builds an evil alliance with other spheres of influence. Theyrule.net does not provide the connections between the corporate world and the worlds of USG, academia, and Hollywood, although such connections are legion.
~~~
If you learn one thing from exploring Theyrule.net, it’s that once someone gets power, he’ll probably figure out how to get more of it. “A million dollars isn’t cool. Know what’s cool? A billion dollars.”
Take Glenn A. Britt, CEO of Time Warner Cable, a major media provider in the United States. Theyrule.net can show us that his corporate interests (and therefore powers) extend beyond Time Warner Cable.
In fact, it’s even more extensive than that; Theyrule.net’s database is incomplete. According to this biography of Glenn A. Britt, Glenn A. Britt “serves on the board of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and is a member of its Executive Committee. He is also a board member of CableLabs, Pearl Harbor Memorial Fund, Xerox Corporation, The Paley Center, Cardinal Health, FIRST Robotics and the Manhattan Theatre Club.”
I’m a capitalist, which means I like competition, and this man seems to represent the worst kind of monopolistic capitalism so common in the early 21st century. Well, I’m still a capitalist. I hold no ill will toward a successful businessman.
Thing is, Glenn A. Britt is not just a successful businessman. His biography once more, please:
In December 2009, Mr. Britt was one of five corporate executives appointed by President Obama to a task force charged with strengthening America’s economic competitiveness through leadership in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education. The “Educate to Innovate” initiative strives to increase the scale, scope and impact of private-sector and philanthropic support in improving American students’ STEM proficiency.
What does the White House tell us about this “Educate to Innovate” initiative? Surely, it’s a program designed to channel massive amounts of money to ensure that high-IQ, high-achieving students go into science instead of to Wall Street, yes?
Err . . .
In reality, this initiative, of which Glenn A. Britt is a part, is all about spending money on more STEM teachers and on attracting more NAMs into the STEM fields. But on spending money for future scientific advancement? Perish the thought.
President Obama believes that great teaching is a key part of any child’s success, and in the STEM fields, it is critical to creating educational experiences that are project-based, hands-on and build a love of lifelong learning.
That’s why President Obama challenged the nation to recruit and prepare 100,000 new effective teachers over the next decade.
Already, more than 150 foundations, companies, and others have come together to lead 100Kin10, a coalition that will work to help reach part of the President’s goal through private funds and challenge Congress to fund the rest.
. . . President Obama knows that we simply cannot, as a Nation, expect to maintain our run of ingenuity and innovation—we cannot maintain that stream of new and different ideas—if we do not broaden participation in STEM to all Americans, including women and girls and minorities. To that end the Administration has taken steps to bolster the participation of these groups through in the following ways:
I’ll let you read the steps on your own time.
Clearly, our Glenn A. Britt is not merely a corporate master. He is also an Obama lackey, sitting on the “board” of a major White House initiative. Well, what more should we expect from the man who won the Kaitz Foundation Diversity Champion Award? Here’s our man Glenn A. Britt—member of many boards, CEO of Time Warner Cable, Obama shill—on the importance of diversity:
I was at a Time Warner diversity session [recently]. As is typical with these sessions, everyone got very energized and wanted to go back to their different parts of the company and start working on diversity.
Then a woman stood up — a female person of color — and she said, ‘This is great that we’re all energized about diversity, but if you’re really committed to diversity, let’s stop and think for a moment about what that is, because if you’re really committed to it you’re embarking on a very difficult and long journey.’
She went on to say that typically when people talk about diversity, they go back to their departments and say if we hire a few more females or people of color, then we have done what we have to do. But diversity is really a lot more than that.
Diversity is about truly embracing, seeking and welcoming all different kinds of people with all kinds of different opinions and different ways of thinking. It’s about respecting those viewpoints, listening and using them to come up with the best business decisions for the company.
Hmm. No wonder my cable and internet go out all the time. I’ve got Time Warner Cable . . .
~~~
As a node in the Cathedral’s network of power, Glenn A. Britt is just a single node. However, he is a somewhat important node who possesses a relatively higher degree of betweenness centrality than other nodes might. This means, essentially, that he is a point of entry or a point of movement between the Media Cluster and the USG Cluster.
And, to a lesser extent, the Academia Cluster. Summon the bio:
He received a B.A. in economics from Dartmouth College, where he graduated magna cum laude. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Mr. Britt received an M.B.A. from the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth, where he sponsors the Britt Technology Impact Series.
Theyrule.net provides a limited peek into the network of which Glenn A. Britt is a part. From a neoreactionary perspective, however, we know we must fill in a few more connections to see the full Cathedral Network in operation:
habitableworlds.wordpress.com 
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