Conservative Conversation and Community
Jesse Watters of Watters World just did a segment on people asking him what is going on with Drudge, and why his headlines have turned negative towards President Trump. I noticed the same thing for some time. I used to start my day on line for news updates as follows: Drudge Report, Watch.org and Ricochet […]
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When I first came to Ricochet, I was baffled at how people engaged so seriously in political discussion. I mean, it’s just politics—right?
As discussions got especially rabid and polarized over the entry of Donald Trump, I found myself feeling compelled to take sides. At the same time, I was trying to keep up with the destructive efforts of the Left and the media. What in the world was going on?
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This came up in my Twitter feed and I clicked on the video without actually reading the tweet. Half way through I was pretty sure it was an ad for The Daily Wire. Then I looked at the tweet more carefully and realized the video was compiled by Media Matters to show us that the […]
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With the latest attack on Donald Trump regarding his plans for Independence Day, I became even more sharply aware of the blatantly deceptive words and actions of the Left. Yes, I know it’s all about politics, but they are so willing to do just about anything—including physical and verbal attacks—that they border on demonstrating a type of psychosis.
It’s difficult to separate their lies and fears from their arrogance.
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I think it became clear to me in my formative years, that beyond good writing and bad writing, there was a style of writing that was meant to obscure. As a fine arts and graphic design student in college, I would sometimes try to decipher the convoluted gibberish about Abstract Expressionism in pretentious magazines like ArtForum and eventually give up, concluding that, either there were human beings (who, for the most part, lived in New York) so vastly superior in intellect than I or that this was all just a load of crap.
The late, great Tom Wolfe wrote a book, The Painted Word, about the pseudo-intellectual poseurs of the New York art scene who pushed great loads of self-indulgent and plainly awful art down the throats of Americans who couldn’t make heads or tails of it and those museum curators and collectors eager to be relevant. As he put it:
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Walking through downtown Mesa, AZ, the Monday after the Mueller report news broke, one of the public art statues leaped out at me. A newsboy stands astride his stack of newspapers, waving a copy over his head and shouting out the news. The front page has a one-word headline, all caps and bold: “TRUTH.” What a contrast to the sordid state of our current “journalism.”
The background is littered with paint cans and construction barriers. This is part of a facade renovation for downtown Main Street. How much more does our news business need renovation?
MoreI’m not being falsely modest. But I’m not a writer like Shakespeare, never expect to be, never want to be. The reason: I can only be who I am.
For a long time, I refused to call myself a writer. I wrote well as a student. As an independent consultant, I wrote articles for professional publications and used them as marketing pieces for my business. I even wrote a book. But I never felt comfortable calling myself a writer, never mind an “author.”
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[Updated upon considering some comments. Deletions noted by strike-through; italics annotate additions.]
The conservative media space, social and otherwise, is abuzz with another woman of the left speaking truth we wish to hear to the power of Big Media. Lara Logan is a woman of immense physical courage and moral courage. She has spoken hard truths to real power. She is a real, old-fashioned reporter. Kudos to Lara Logan are warranted. And. Lara Logan is human, like all of us, and we may choose to overlook parts of her humanity that complicate our preferred narrative.
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Lara Logan’s outspoken comments in recent days regarding the biased media and the death of journalism came and went quicker than a lightning bolt. Yet this flash of light lingered long enough to spark a fire. Her comments were read across conservative radio, highlighted in the Washington Examiner, and talked about on Fox News. When I heard that she spoke out, claiming to commit journalistic suicide, my ears perked up. She called the left-wing media propagandists.
“Former CBS News foreign correspondent Lara Logan said, “responsibility for fake news” begins with journalists as she berated the “liberal” media in a recent interview. “The media everywhere is mostly liberal,” Logan said during a podcast with retired Navy SEAL Mike Ritland on Friday. Logan, who said the interview was “professional suicide for me,” also blamed the media for not pursuing objectivity anymore, arguing journalists have evolved into “political activists.
MoreThe Democrats running for president are at it again: they are submitting a completely unrealistic proposal for single-payer health insurance and they aren’t sharing the facts. We must get the word out to everyone that we have to stop this proposal that will take us in a catastrophic direction.
The media, of course, will tell everyone that the public loves the idea of single-payer insurance aka, Medicare for All. Although those running for President have several different plans, none of them would be good for this country. But according to one poll, the public supports the idea :
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John L. Allen Jr., a respected Vaticanista, asks that question in an article entitled, How the USCCB could pitch a Vatican-backed McCarrick probe. Crux is not a site I frequent, but I stumbled across Allen’s report at one of my favorite sites, Catholic World Report, in an article by Christopher Altieri entitled, The Week in Review: China, […]
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The Map
Let’s start with a simple question. How long is the coastline of Lake Superior? Here, let me google that for you. “Shore length 1,729 mi (2,783 km) plus 997 mi (1,605 km) for islands”. Thanks, Wikipedia! Right away we can see a problem. Are you counting those islands or not? I’m saying count every last thing. All of it. Okay, include the islands. What other complications are we going to run into?
MoreMass media hysteria is unending; cries for impeachment go on unimpeded; laws on immigration sit in limbo. It’s no wonder that the U.S. political environment is a mess. More than that, I put my finger on two factors that are especially difficult to handle and accept on both sides of the political spectrum: paradox and […]
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Humanae Vitae (HV – the encyclical by Pope Paul VI on the regulation of birth) and Veritatis Splendor (VS – the encyclical by Pope John Paul II on the splendor of truth) may be the two most consequential and misunderstood papal documents of the second half of the 20th century. Both of these encyclicals caused uproar within […]
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What do you see? More
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One day I had a discussion with a man who (I thought) was a good friend. He was an ardent Leftist, and our discussion of politics and racism took a strange turn. When I pointed out that Jews had been discriminated against for centuries (and we’re both Jewish), he was outraged; he said that the Jewish experience couldn’t be compared to the tragedy of slavery. When I asked him, why not, he couldn’t answer me.
In another discussion, he was describing black people as victims and said we needed to acknowledge that fact. When I asked him how it benefited blacks if we acknowledged and treated them as victims, once again he couldn’t answer. We never discussed discrimination again.
MoreL’art pour l’art est un vain mot. L’art pour le vrai, l’art pour le beau et le bon, voilà la religion que je cherche…—Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin (Pen name: George Sand) in a letter to Alexandre Saint-Jean, (19 April 1872) Art for the sake of art itself is an idle sentence. Art for the sake of truth, […]
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Each day, I begin my morning by silencing my phone’s alarm and scrolling through BBC headlines — arguably an act of supreme masochism. Each day, then, I’m treated to a panoramic view of mankind’s ever-shrinking intuition. Each day, I witness yet more proof of the slow death of common sense. Such articles often remind me […]
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I’m not surprised that we’ve awakened to a gray, rainy day. Everything feels heavy and burdensome. It mirrors the dark mood that rests beneath the ordinariness of life. As I’ve tried to tune in to the beauty of another day, it is cloaked in sorrow and dread. Today we leave for Daytona Beach. Unfortunately it’s […]
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I don’t know art. I’m not even sure I know what I like. But the simple fact that I don’t understand it is reason enough to study the matter. This past month I had the opportunity to visit Barcelona. While I was there I went through the Picasso museum. If you’re looking for the elusive dividing line between art and supercilious nonsense Picasso is a good man to study.
This was painted by Picasso at age 14. This? This is clearly art, and good art too. A photograph tells you what a guy looks like. A portrait does that, but (if it’s executed well) it tells you something about the subject’s character. This guy has had a hard life. He’s not to impressed with anything anymore, or anyone, especially this punk kid painting his picture.
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