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Separation
7 October 2014 | Ron Pickrell

Posted on 10/07/2014 8:46:03 AM PDT by pickrell

Though the Separation of Church and State is a relatively new concept, it has been declared settled law by the Media. That is much like the "settled science" of the extinct polar bears and the rapidly rising oceans flooding the coastal areas in the comfortably distant future of 2014. Or at least it seemed that way in 1994. Or at least it was reported that way in 1994, as fact, by the media. Disagreement was ridiculed.

It isn't popular among certain conservatives, but the clause about "no laws respecting an establishment of religion" was actually well designed by the founders. The idea- and the Constitutional mandate- that the government shall not pick winners and losers in the realm of faith, was necessary and good- yet only was applicable as long as watchdogs examined all who passed. Faithful, neutral and dispassionate arbiters who verified that it applied to all faiths, and to the lack of faith, equally.

Yet, oddly, it seems now that government is perfectly free to act against any manifestation, or infestation, of Christianity... but is strangely constrained from faulting Islam. Many find that disturbing, but apparently not the media. After all, isn't the government's job to prevent the impugning of the "religion of peace", by those contemptible Christians who would deny the cultural significance of public beheading?

No, the problem of this new century is far different. It is something that no one ever believed would be necessary to enshrine into the Constitution. And that problem strikes at the heart of the Republic, enabling the twisting, warping and even abject disregard of the Constitution. And until that problem is addressed and solved, all that flows from it will be a tide of unrelenting vandalism that cannot be held back, painted over, or even taxed into submission.

There was no clause in the U.S. Constitution dedicated to the Separation of Media and State.

None of the Founders could then envision a future cabal of media, beginning with journalism schools to indoctrinate, and White House Press Clubs to enforce, that was determined to decide by tight information embargo just who would be elected in America, and what laws would be allowed. They aren't the 4th rail of government- they are, far worse, a flanking movement rolling up all of the remaining defenses of freedom that stand in the way of The Agenda. They are zealotry crystallized into a century-long infiltration of tendrils into all aspects of power in the United States. They are planting the seeds for a green-shirted Obama Youth Organization designed to expose the evil jew and the evil capitalist. It is structuring for the next Krystallnacht, but expanded to include the self-employed and non-union undesirables.

What makes them truly dangerous is their increasing realization that they can actually can and pretty much have seize control in an inkless coup- thanks to technology. Nothing written, nothing provable.

Before the transistor was invented, no notion could have been envisioned by rational statesmen that a few selected, manicured, baritone, and blow-dried men, sitting in front of network cameras, could establish "reality" for tens of millions of voters. That their power to destroy by selective reporting could accrue to them nearly ultimate power in the power game itself.

That power was to monopolize the control of the relevant.

Excepting the mistakes of overly overt news anchors, their role wasn't to manufacture news. That sort of thing could be demonstrated to be false, and the costs to The Agenda would be high. The exposed and guilty would have to be publically punished for their lack of guile.

Control lay instead in solidifying in the minds of the average American, that in the early evening, they were watching The News. This reassured the public that they were keeping up with current events. And that by watching the entire news program, that they were then aware of all of the news. Period.

All of the news that was fit to print, and all of the news that was reasonable to broadcast. And if it wasn't on the news, or portrayed as the anchors and their affiliates presented it, then it was merely noise.

Examples would fill pages, books, entire libraries. Except that it wouldn't. Because the media discovered that the new technology bypassed print, except for the newsfeeds of the New York Times- the newspaper of wreckage. No printed record, just- as Rush Limbaugh cleanly describes it- a drive-by media immune to cost of distortions it imprinted on viewers last year, and last week.

There was no time, in prime-time, to examine how a childishly dangerous encouragement, by our State Department, of an "Arab Spring" uprising would spawn a global disaster and lay the seeds for planetary religious warfare.

There was only time for Al Sharpton and others to endlessly examine how white police officers are encouraged to shoot gentle giants.

This unholy merging of the Media with the State is not fully understood by many. The media may turn against unsuccessful public acolytes of the progressive agenda, but only when they fail to advance that holy cause. It does not demonstrate any separation of Media and Power. To the contrary, it reinforces the whip that any who don't measure up to the job, or at least allow themselves to be exposed to the public view as such, are punished by a media drunk with power.

It must be stopped. Or no elections will be anything other than circuses to amuse the multitudes, de-facto hunger games of diversion.

An understanding by the public must be insured. If they cede their rights to clear understanding of past and present political policy results, then they have thrown away the birthrights of coming generations of Americans.

Vandalism as a policy of State has catastrophic consequences. Unfortunately we are watching the realtime active vandalism before our eyes of international alliances, domestic structure, and the wealth- now increasingly debt- of the nation.

Enforce this separation of Media and State, or enter third-world status. That is what is on the ballot. And the longer America takes to choose, the worse the damage to repair. Who knows when the point of no return occurs?

Because after the balloting is done, the real work must begin. If not, then we have simply chosen the slightly less onerous faction. And the media's ability to continue to reach into even their opposition's primaries to try to prevent conservatives from nomination, will further homogenize the two parties.

No matter who runs for office, no matter who is elected, if they must genuflect to the Power of the Media to destroy, rather than kneeling to beg for divine help, then the decades long rebuilding of America will not commence until it becomes a centuries-long rebuilding, or worse.

And at that, only if we are lucky.


TOPICS: Government; Politics
KEYWORDS: media; separation

1 posted on 10/07/2014 8:46:03 AM PDT by pickrell
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To: pickrell

A for effort.


2 posted on 10/07/2014 8:53:25 AM PDT by ifinnegan
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To: pickrell

Why does everyone ignore the obvious?

The media makes money off ‘progressive’ policies. Media immediately gets 5 to 10 per cent of any savings or investment the government turns into ‘spending’. They get none of that money otherwise.
They serve Mammon.


3 posted on 10/07/2014 9:01:36 AM PDT by mrsmith (Dumb sluts: Lifeblood of the Media, Backbone of the Democrat Party!)
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To: pickrell

Good post.


4 posted on 10/07/2014 9:30:00 AM PDT by Jacquerie (CON-CON is for dumb-dumbs)
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To: pickrell; boxlunch; ransomnote; IChing; Bratch; laplata; chiller; ebiskit; ...
Haven’t read your article really critically, yet, but you are thinking along lines similar to my own thought.

I notice your registration date is about a week before mine, but maybe you’ll accept a pingout from a newbie.

5 posted on 10/07/2014 11:04:17 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion ("Liberalism” is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.)
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To: pickrell

We have the tools and technology to overcome this problem. It’s called Citizen Journalism.

All that’s lacking is will.


6 posted on 10/07/2014 11:13:24 AM PDT by abb ("News reporting is too important to be left to the journalists." Walter Abbott (1950 -))
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To: pickrell

For evil men to accomplish their purpose it is only necessary that good men should do nothing.


7 posted on 10/07/2014 11:34:13 AM PDT by Obadiah (None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.)
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion

BTTT


8 posted on 10/07/2014 11:52:41 AM PDT by E.G.C.
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To: pickrell
There was no clause in the U.S. Constitution dedicated to the Separation of Media and State.
I agree that that is not stated explicitly in the Constitution, but it is not necessary to underestimate the framers of the Constitution/Bill of Rights. The reality we see is that the correct grammar is that “journalism is” not “journalists are.” Journalism is politically monochromatic. The first question is, “Why?” It took a shocking length of time after I realized the “bias in the media” for it to dawn on me that the reason journalism is monochromatic is that journalists all face the same incentives, and journalists all talk to each other incessantly. They do that inherently, of course, in that journalists talk to everyone incessantly. They also belong to the National Press Club, and no doubt other associations. And we have the word of Adam Smith as to the results to be expected:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
You can say all you want about the National Press Club, or the White House Press Club, or any other voluntary association of that ilk. But there is a journalism institution which, hiding in plain sight, has every inch of the influence necessary to explain why journalism is and must be homogeneous. That institution is the wire service.

There is more than one wire service, but even if there were a hundred of them, they would IMHO all promote the same politics, simply because they all face the same incentives. And, of course, in fact a single wire service - the Associated Press - overwhelmingly predominates, precisely because of its history of monopolistic behavior. What is the incentive which faces journalism in general, which drives journalists to be “liberals?” It is the fact that they do nothing but talk, and therefore their incentive is to promote talk above action.

A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt famously asserted that

"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena . . . who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds . . . 
That sentiment was liberalism 100 years ago. But it obviously is not congenial to someone who talks all the time, and does nothing. So in the 1920s, journalism took the popular and honorable label “liberal,” and inverted its meaning to apply it to people with the exact opposite predilection to that of “It is not the critic who counts.”

And what is the exact opposite of “It is not the critic who counts?” It is the cynical rejection of the primacy of action over talk. Ownership is credit for valuable action, and the opposite of granting the "doer of deeds” credit for the value he added to society is familiar - “If you own a business, you didn’t build that.

OK, that is my definition of the problem - what constitutional recourse could theoretically be had? IMHO there is a case. First, let us analyze the rationale of current regulation. There is IMHO no case that opinion transmission technology should be regulated. You can easily say that “the Framers didn’t envision television,” but in fact they did envision - and they did support - "the progress of science and useful arts” by authorizing Congress to institute the Patent Office. They also allowed for progress in the Constitution itself - Article V, “Amendments.” The existence of those two provisions implies that if technological changes to the propagation of opinion by technical means come to require regulation, they can be regulated in a constitutional manner - by amending the Constitution. Absent a constitutional amendment, the First Amendment forbids the government from regulating “the press” in any technological incarnation.

That is obviously an argument against the FCC, at least in any form which is remotely susceptible to promoting or subverting particular politicians or parties. But it is also, and especially, an argument against “campaign finance reform” in all its forms. Here, I resort to the aspect of the First Amendment which forbids an establishment of religion - that is, it forbids the government from recognizing priestly secular authority - as well as the prohibition in the Constitution of “titles of nobility,” to argue for equality of all, including journalists, before the law. “Campaign Finance Reform” presumes to establish a so-called “Fourth Estate” - journalists - as de facto a priestly class who are officially recognized as being "objective.” The reality of efforts at objectivity is precisely the opposite of the Star Wars dictum of “Do or not do, there is no ‘try.’” WRT objectivity, you can try to be objective - you can even assert that you are trying to be objective - but you cannot claim actually to be objective without proving that you are not objective about yourself. Or anything else.

And the reality is that if a case were brought to SCOTUS which gave it the opportunity overturn McConnell v. FEC - and thus of McCain-Feingold - a favorable decision would only depend on Robert and Alito agreeing with the dissent in McConnell. The majority opinions were only a majority because Sandra Day O’Connell concurred. And she is off the court.

I mentioned that historically the Associated Press behaved monopolistically. In 1945 the AP was found to be in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. But back then, the AP was “too big to fail,” in the sense that its official mission - the economical distribution of news nationwide - was considered essential, and impossible without a wire service. But in technology terms, 1945 was in the Dark Ages - the advent of the Internet as we know it is based on lasers, fiber optics, microwaves, and satellites which were scarcely more clearly clearly envisioned in 1945 than the telegraph and the Morse Code was in 1791 when the First Amendment was ratified. The upshot of that technology is that the cost of worldwide transmission bandwidth is now so low that, I dare say, the typical internet user can afford as much bandwidth in his Internet access as the mighty Associated Press could command as recently as a century ago.

The bottom line is that wire services are not essential because their cost-efficiency rationale is now utterly obsolete. And the wire services - any and all of them, and especially the AP - give the nation a single journalism which is free but not independent. They deprive the nation of free and independent presses.


9 posted on 10/07/2014 2:39:39 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion ("Liberalism” is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.)
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To: pickrell

Freedom OF religion does not mean freedom FROM religion. Indeed, attempting to accomplish the latter undermines the former.


10 posted on 10/07/2014 2:44:58 PM PDT by walford (https://www.facebook.com/wralford [feel free to friend me] @wralford on Twitter)
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To: pickrell
As I noted, "the wire services - any and all of them, and especially the AP - give the nation a single journalism which is free but not independent.” The AP itself is free - but the Democratic Party does not choose to be independent of the AP.

The political principle of journalism as such - as implied in its role as critic of doers - is socialism. The political principle of the Democratic Party is power. Journalism provides the propaganda wind, and the Democratic Party sails with that wind. Journalists and Democrats go along and get along.

At its best the Republican Party is a little more principled - but lately, not so much. :-(

11 posted on 10/07/2014 3:13:36 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion ("Liberalism” is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.)
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion

Well thought out, well written.


12 posted on 10/07/2014 3:37:36 PM PDT by pickrell (Old dog, new trick...sort of)
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To: pickrell
Well thought out, well written.
Thanks. It is the product of a lot of consideration over a long period of time, and I am pretty satisfied that it is a good characterization of the status quo, a.k.a., the mess we’re in.

But that leaves me with a problem - what do I do from here? I was disappointed that Dinesh D’Souza pead guilty to the charge of violating campaign finance law; the only way my analysis might be presented to SCOTUS would be for somebody to violate that law, and appeal his conviction all the way to SCOTUS. But who is able to stand up to the pressure of doing that? Will SCOTUS fall back into liberal hands before anyone ever brings such a case to SCOTUS?

It is discouraging, I tell you . . .


13 posted on 10/08/2014 1:48:05 PM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion ("Liberalism” is a conspiracy against the public by wire-service journalism.)
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion
"But that leaves me with a problem - what do I do from here?"

A vast number of people in this country have the same problem. The rage is that what is so apparent, what yields so surely after a little honest thought, seems to be something not communicable to the other side.

In my years, I have often wondered how the German people allowed the Nazis to rise? How did the North Koreans allow themselves to be sold into hopelessness? Why would any of the subject populations of brutalized countries accept their fate with seeming timidity?

Nearer to home, figuratively, why does Hollywood always assume that numerous minions are always available to do the bidding of whatever bad guy the plot constructs? Wouldn't you think that they all understand what happens in the last act?

I've come to understand that some tragedies cannot be prevented, and that is the saddest blow to befall me as I near retirement. There will be no magic moment where the dark side suddenly realizes and confesses the error of their ways. No happy ending will occur after the forces of good wipe them out afterward.

And that is because ignorance feels better than understanding. That having someone tell you that someone else caused "all of that", whatever "that" may be, will always appeal more than facing consequences for your choices. For that is what life is- a collection of your choices, and those choices which were made for you by people who just knew what was good for you- often before you were even born. It is those choices which will strictly shape your opportunities.

Yes, there will be blood on the concrete before this long vandalism spree slows. And that is because the cycle of creative destruction among free individuals will always occur. Sometimes the building outpaces the burning down. Sometimes not.

It is only after they sell themselves into chains, that populations realize what the actual cost of "free" is. And by that time it will be a repeat of the soviets, dancing at their victory in 1917, and then never being allowed to dance again for 80 long years, long after the dancers were dead. But long enough for them all first to see 10 million or more of their fellow dancers killed by not just the champion of the people, Stalin, but mainly by those minions he gathered around himself to do his bidding.

Do you want power and wealth- then learn to gather minions around you. But you have to want it really bad.

Do what you can, but don't think that the bill will not be paid. The advantage will lie with those snakey enough to maneuver others into paying the bill. This is what they train for, and always will- this is what our system has been corrupted into.

Just realize that you aren't the only one.

We all have failed. We had no real chance to do otherwise, if we were to provide for our families, rather than enter the zealot ring.

14 posted on 10/09/2014 3:13:50 PM PDT by pickrell (Old dog, new trick...sort of)
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