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Remembering Joe Ferguson


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When I was blogging regularly here, one of my main themes was discussing the post-9/11 world and the fight against Islamic extremism.

There’s a reason for that. Twenty years ago today, I lost a very good friend in the September 11 attacks. I’m sure I could spend time personally reflecting on what it means to be two decades away from that day.

But instead, I’ll devote this space — as I have for most of the last 20 years — to my friend, Joe Ferguson.

joe.jpg
Joe Ferguson

The last time we had dinner, Joe told my partner John and I about how much he was looking forward to being a part of the bicentennial of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. Typically, I found myself jealous of him. In his role as Director of Geographic Education at the National Geographic Society, Joe had one of the most unique and rewarding jobs I can ever imagine having.

He traveled around the world, bringing American school children face-to-face with the natural wonders of our Earth.  He was not only a teacher but also provided a critical turning point for these kids, many of whom had never before left their own neighborhoods.  Joe provided the path for these students to experience things that many of us never will in our entire lives.  In addition, he got to travel to the four corners of the globe. How rewarding that must have been. How do I sign up for that job?

I got an email from Joe on Thursday, September 6, 2001. “Hi cutie” it started — typical opening line for Joe to any of his friends.  He had just returned from Alaska and wanted to tell show me all the pictures, but the following week he said he was headed to California for another work trip.  I printed out and kept that email for many months in my briefcase as a way to keep Joe alive.

As dawn broke on September 11, 2001, Joe called his Mom in Mississippi to give her a wake up call as he always did when he traveled.  He said to her, “I’ll call you when I get to California. Have a good day.”  He was that kind of person.  The kind of person, who, no matter where he was and how busy he was, dropped a postcard to his friends so we could share a part of his experiences throughout the world.

At Dulles International Airport, Joe stood with his group traveling to California and took some last minute photos.  He and another colleague were scheduled passengers on American Airlines Flight 77, accompanying three D.C. public school teachers and three students on a National Geographic-sponsored field trip to the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara, Calif. After the photos were taken, they bid farewell to the children’s parents and proceeded to their gate.

At 9:37am, Joe lost his life at the young age of thirty-nine when terrorists slammed the plane into the side of the Pentagon at 500 mph.  A teacher and positive role model to young Americans was taken from the world in an act of sheer violence and viciousness.

As I was dealing with the many emotions of the events of September 11, a thought crossed my mind the next day. Gosh, I thought, Joe had said he was traveling and now he’s stuck somewhere until the airlines are allowed to fly again.  So I called his work number in DC and left a message.  After I heard his voice for the last time, I said “Give me a call if you are checking messages.” “I hope you make it home soon,” I concluded.  When I called that day, I had no idea.

It wasn’t until Friday, September 14 that I found out that one of my dearest friends had become a casualty of the attacks on America.  Suddenly, this war was personal – it had hit home.  I wasn’t expecting to have to go to two memorial services and walk around in a state of numbness for many weeks.

At Joe’s memorial service, there were lots of tears and lots of laughs as well.  One of Joe’s friends told the gathering that Joe had this way of making you feel as if you were his best friend in the world. I knew exactly what he meant.  I saw Joe every once in a while.  We would have lunch, or more likely trade emails or phone calls.  But every time we talked, I felt like Joe’s best friend.  Joe still has a lot of best friends all around the world.

Perhaps Joe’s death hit me so hard because it was the first death of someone close to me that I had experienced as an adult.  I am still surprised by the impact that his death has had, and in many ways continues to have, on my life.  In fact, I did a lot of personal reflecting in the months following 9/11. I questioned how important my job and even my life were in a time of war where terrorists could invade your workplace or your school and slaughter you with no remorse.  I questioned what value and worth my own career had in comparison with a man who had chosen to teach and change the lives of young people.  I felt trapped in a good job that was giving me no personal satisfaction.

All I could remember was how happy Joe always was and how that cheer was infectious to all of his friends and colleagues. I would miss that cheerful influence on me.  Joe had made the choice to live life to the fullest extent possible.  He was the model of an optimistic American who knows no frontiers and no bounds. He was doing more than his fair share of contributing to a better society.

My partner John and I took a trip to the American West in the summer of 2003 and followed some of the Lewis & Clark Trail.  I know Joe would have loved the scenery and spirit of America that lives and breathes in the land of Montana and Wyoming.  The IMAX film about the “Corps of Discovery” produced by the National Geographic Society — Lewis & Clark: The Great Journey West — was dedicated to the memory of Joe Ferguson.  It is available on DVD and I strongly recommend watching it.

One day in early 2002, I heard a song on the radio that I don’t remember hearing before 9/11/2001. I didn’t even know it was LeeAnn Womack voice, because the words are the soul and essence of Joe Ferguson. The words are an expression of his personal passion and love of life. And the words are also an inspiration for all of us to get through the many trying days of our post-9/11 world.

I hope you never lose your sense of wonder.
Get your fill to eat, but always keep that hunger.
May you never take one single breath for granted.
God forbid love ever leave you empty-handed.
I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean.
Whenever one door closes I hope one more opens.
Promise me that you’ll give faith a fighting chance.
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance…
I hope you dance.

I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance.
Never settle for the path of least resistance.
Livin’ might mean takin’ chances, but they’re worth takin’.
Lovin’ might be a mistake, but its worth makin’.
Don’t let some hell bent heart leave you bitter.
When you come close to sellin’ out, reconsider.
Give the heavens above more than just a passing glance.
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance…
I hope you dance.

“Science” becomes self-negating


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It all started in 2013 when Popular Science disabled its comment section. We laughed. Or, at least, I did. What a stupid idea for a major publication to declare “Comments can be bad for science. That’s why, here at PopularScience.com, we’re shutting them off.” As if science was some sort of fragile bird that needs affirmation to flourish in the cold, cruel world of the internet. It turns out that it wasn’t science that needed protecting, it was the “scientific” consensus that was being walled off from criticism or questioning.

Science has gotten really…weird, man!

Eight years later the poisonous fruit of the walled garden continues to infect science publications. Scientific American, the nation’s oldest weekly magazine, has been a proudly leftist pseudo-political rag for quite some time. They endorsed Joe Biden for President in 2020, for example, and they currently have an article headlined “Politicians Don’t Get to Use ‘Science’ to Oppose the Equality Act.” prominently displayed on their home page. But their latest declaration “We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to Say So,” takes their bias to a new level.

After declaring that “13,000 scientists agree” that this is an emergency (because what’s more scientific than saying “everybody’s doing it, yo!”), Senior Editor Mark Fischetti sniffs “Journalism should reflect what science says: the climate emergency is here.” In a statement coordinated by Covering Climate Now, an activist project of the Columbia Journalism Review, Scientific American and several major newspapers declare that they will all use the same emergency language going forward. What prompted this call to action? Coverage of COVID-19.

The media’s response to COVID-19 provides a useful model. Guided by science, journalists have described the pandemic as an emergency, chronicled its devastating impacts, called out disinformation and told audiences how to protect themselves (with masks and social distancing, for example).

Got that? There isn’t a sentient being on Earth who thinks the media or the “science” got COVID coverage right. The response to COVID has been as devastating as the disease itself. We have been told to trust the experts, but the experts have lied to us from the very beginning about masks, about the efficacy of vaccines, and about herd immunity. The same “experts” who told us we couldn’t have funerals for our loved ones because of the virus praised last summer’s riots as being necessary and proper from a public health standpoint.

This is an open and direct call for conditioning and propaganda under the auspices of science. To push a radical, leftist agenda major newspapers are coordinating their messaging in order to scare the people into backing their preferred policies. And they’re not even trying to hide it! One look at some of the major players reinforces the one-sidedness of it all. The Guardian, The Nation, La Repubblica (Italy’s foremost leftist rag), and Al Jazeera are all pushing the mass coordination of the emergency narrative.

Science as we once knew it is dead. Cause of death: suicide.

WaPo’s Teeny Torquemada Has Thoughts


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The Washington Post’s Philip Bump is a zealot masquerading as a journalist. In today’s “news analysis” he continues to pump the narrative that Georgia’s new voting law is obviously bad because…well because republicans are just bad. That’s why.

“There’s always a reason that legislation is introduced, always some problem that lawmakers say needs to be addressed in the moment. In Georgia, there is no rational motivation for the passage of its new election law other than demonstrating fealty to the false claims elevated by Trump. Why did Raffensperger need to be replaced on the elections board now? Why did the rules governing absentee applications need to be tightened now, only a few months after an election in which repeated review and extensive scrutiny showed no improprieties had occurred?”

The answer is: COVID is (almost) over and the legislature is smart enough to know that the COVID-era loosey-goosey, let’s-mail-a-ballot-to-anyone-even-dead-people policies are generally unpopular and make elections less safe.

Keeping but reducing the number drop boxes, which didn’t exist before COVID is not a restriction, it’s the opposite. In a post-COVID world why would we need drop boxes anyway? Likewise, requiring ID for absentee ballots is exactly the same as states like Washington, Connecticut, and Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware. Since the legislature is making drop boxes permanent, they want to ensure the ballots are secure. That’s as rational a motivation as there can be for a healthy democracy.

But Teeny Torquemada doesn’t see it that way. Any and all relaxing of voting security (even the unlawful kind) must be upheld in the new world order that seeks to ensure republicans never win another election. After the President himself was awarded four Pinocchios for claiming the Georgia law is “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” the zealots need something to justify their their inquisition.

 

 

Humiliation: The Greatest Gift Our Adversaries Have For America


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The country of slut and body shaming is about to learn the positive influence of shame. The only question will be, will we learn shame’s lessons? America had its first sit-down with China this week on United States soil. 
The meeting was supposed to get both sides to the table to set the tone for relations between the two under President Joe Biden’s new Democrat administration. It was expected that the U.S. was going to bring up issues involving China, like human rights and its increasing aggression in numerous domains, but what was not expected was that China would mock the U.S. on U.S. soil. Many critics were stunned by the level of aggression that China showed to the U.S. and the weak response of the Biden administration.
A particularly stinging sentiment shared by the Chinese diplomat Yang expressed that America has lost its leverage on the world stage.
So let me say here that, in front of the Chinese side, the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.

The “patriotic” knee-jerk reaction to raise a middle finger to the commie bastards is one I no longer share. It’s about time we were challenged and our bluff was called. Maybe this will wake up a nation too busy burning down its own cities for Nikes and iPhones but I wont hold my breath.

China was not the only one openly mocking America Inc.. Russia’s Putin took to the stage to debate Biden after Biden had called him a killer in an ABC interview. Putin’s mockery comes at a time where Biden has yet to hold a press conference months into his presidency breaking a 100 year record in the process – big “debate me, bro” energy from Putin. Putin is putting his finger in a wound that none of us can deny – Biden is not cognitively fit for office. Keep poking, Putin.

The Emperors New Clothes

To these moments of American humiliation I say, good. We deserve it. We aren’t a serious nation anymore. During the meeting with China, Yang brought up Black Lives Matter to accuse the United States of violating human rights (has nobody told him we are merely LARPing civil rights?). Yang went on to mock the validity of our judgement of international public opinion or even the validity within the western world.

Yang: “So we hope that when talking about universal values or international public opinion on the part of the United States, we hope the U.S. side will think about whether it feels reassured in saying those things, because the U.S. does not represent the world. It only represents the Government of the United States.”

It’s hard to fight back against such claims when the US Military is now used primarily for endless, pointless wars and to promote feminist propaganda.
Biden: Some of its relatively straightforward work, where we’re making good progress, designing body armor that fits women properly, tailoring combat uniforms for women, creating maternity flight suits, updating, updating requirements for their hairstyles…

China and Russia are doing us a massive favor. They are humiliating us. It doesn’t matter what horrors they are doing at home to their own people. They know we don’t have the moral self confidence or sheer backbone to do anything about it. I have very little hope, but this would be around the time a country in our position starts taking themselves a little more seriously and stops the endless babble over the representation of .3% of the population and flight suits for pregnant women from the office of the President of the United States.

Gay Jokes 4 Progress!


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David Marcus in The Federalist writes a keen essay on the more subtle harms that cancel culture (yes, it’s a thing) can do to our shared cultural achievements. It’s worth a read. He hits on a few points that are missing almost entirely from the public debate on censorship in general, and makes one very important observation about comedy: “by laughing about…stereotypes [we can] diffus[e] them.” This is a concept as old as comedy itself, and it has a special place in the history of gay rights and gay acceptance generally, which we should not want to be erased.

In the Nexflix era people who were born in the late 90’s and early 00’s (how is that even possible?) got to discover TV shows and movies older millennials and Gen Xers grew up with. Friends is the most celebrated example, since it had a “moment” in 2017 and 2018. But its resurgence was also met with controversy over the *gasp* problematic jokes, especially insensitive gay jokes that peppered its decade-long run.

The 90’s were a weird time. Pants were too big, hair was out of control, and most of the country thought gay relationships (not marriage, relationships) should be illegal. in 1996 Congress sought “to express moral disapproval of homosexuality” by passing the Defense of Marriage Act by 342-67 in the House and 85-14 in the Senate. It’s shocking today to even consider this. And in the midst of a national controversy about gay people and civil rights shows like Friends and Will and Grace flourished.

Tensions about cultural norms were high back then as they are now. No one had satisfactory answers about how much the government should be involved in dictating gay rights. Republicans and democrats took the position that the world would end if their preferred policies weren’t enacted. And while the “very political” class was engaged in blood sport, the rest of us did what normal people do: we laughed about it. In an environment where your elected leaders overwhelmingly disapprove of you, just being a part of the culture was liberating and life-affirming. Sure, a fair critique is that we were treated as two-dimensional objects and not three-dimensional subjects, but we couldn’t even discuss this “problem” if we had been left as zero-dimensional non-entities.

“Doesn’t it make sense to place ourselves in the continuum of what came before us and what will come after?” Marcus asks. Of course it does. No society springs fully-formed into perfection. We are, after all, flawed human beings, not demigods. Erasing the culture of the past deprives subsequent generations of guideposts to measure the achievements of a more just society. Acceptance comes as a result of changing hearts not by diktats or censorship that force the changing of minds. If we were to declare a new starting point, a year before which all cultural content would be obliterated, how would we know if we were progressing at all? It would be left to the whims of those who think they are our betters to tell us.

Not every positive change in society needs to be the result of some dour theory cooked up in a faculty lounge or in a Queer Theory seminar. As Aristophanes said “comedy too can sometimes discern what is right.”

2020: The Election That Will Never Die


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On February 5, 2020, New York state-certified its election results in the state’s 22nd Congressional District, with Republican Claudia Tenney declared the winner, defeating incumbent Congressman Anthony Brindsi by 109 votes.

This process took 94 days.

If you thought that this was the final race of 2020, you would be wrong.

The last contested Congressional race of 2020 is Iowa’s second congressional district. On November 3, 2020, the race was too close to call between Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks, and her Democratic opponent, Rita Hart. After recounts, Iowa’s bipartisan elections board certified the Republican the winner by six votes out of nearly 400,000.

With this certification, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi provisionally seated the Republican Meeks.

Hart formally contested the election results — but not with the state of Iowa, but with the House of Representatives under the Federal Contested Elections Act, which allows the House jurisdiction to settle election disputes for elections to the U.S. House.

On Friday, February 19, the House Administration Committee met to develop its procedures to review Hart’s claim.

What is the procedure? The Committee will set up a task force to oversee an investigation or recount. After the Committee completes its examination of the election, they will issue a report to the full House in a resolution with recommendations. The House then adopts or rejects this resolution by a majority vote. The precedents of the House state that the resolution can:

• dismiss the challenge
• declare which candidate is entitled to the seat
• assert that no one should be seated pending the completion of an investigation
• call for a new election to be held
• refute the challenger as not qualified to contest the election
• provide reimbursement for the contestants from the House’s contingency fund for costs incurred in the contested election process.

Every election cycle has its closest race and has its upset wins, but this process of involving the Federal Contested Elections Act is rare. In the few instances, it has been, the results have been contentious.

In 1996, California Republican Bob Dornan was challenged by Democratic candidate Loretta Sanchez. On election night, Sanchez won by 984 votes and was certified by the California Board of Elections. Dornan then contested the election, alleging that many votes were cast fraudulently by illegal immigrants. Sanchez was seated provisionally, and a 16-month congressional investigation ensued, finding some evidence that 624 votes were cast illegally. California officials also threw out an additional 124 flawed absentee votes. Ultimately, Sanchez was declared the winner (by an albeit) smaller margin.

In 1984, Indiana Democratic Incumbent Frank McCloskey faced Republican Richard McIntyre. McIntyre led on election night and, after a recount, was certified the winner by the Indiana Secretary of State, winning by 34 votes. McCloskey contested the results and brought his case to the House of Representatives. The House Majority (Democratic) refused to seat the Republican. After conducting a recount, the House determined that McCloskey won by four votes. When the House Democrats voted to seat McCloskey, Republicans walked out of the chamber in protest.

Earlier this month, the Democrats took the unusual step of voting to strip a member of the minority party of their committee assignments, removing Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene of her posts. Do the Democrats want to escalate things and now vote to remove a sitting member of the House of Representatives in such partisan and contentious times?

I hope that the committee votes to dismiss Ms. Hart’s suit. We need to put the 2020 election cycle behind us. Like many politicians who have lost a previous race, she can run again in the next election. But if she (and the House Democrats) move forward and ultimately seat her, she will not be deemed a legitimate Congressperson. If Congress overturns these election results, people will lose even more faith in our government, which many already believe is rigged.

American Rocket Fuel


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America has stood out from the world as a special place of wealth and opportunity. With only two neighbors and two giant oceans on either side, we’ve known America to be a special place in the world and have boasted about it for a century. Then why do we tear ourselves apart?

America has a great flaw. Great athletes, artists, musicians all know what it is (even if they claim not to). It is success that can tempt a person or a people into complacency, risk aversion, and an over-abundance of resources. A lack of resources is the breeding ground for resourcefulness and innovation. The concept of unearned success is one of the main driving force of left-wing criticism (or at least it was until fat shaming and slut shaming became the next moral crusade for upper class white liberals). Our obsession with “privilege” is a symptom of this way of thinking.

Growing up in the 90s, the message delivered to young people a world struggling outside our borders, especially in places like Asia and Africa (but not exclusively). This may have been true in a lot of ways, but if the intended result was to instill humility and gratitude for what we had, it was a complete and total failure. We take almost everything we have today for granted. At some point, the social benefit of denouncing your own country, and not valuing what you have, became the standard for righteous living in the greatest land on earth.

Our culture is completely self-loathing and self-destructive. As a people, we no longer grapple with the kinds of problems humanity dealt with hundreds of thousands of years.  Over one generation (the hippie generation) the Western World managed to escape the terrors of the natural world through great success. Only a fool would think we were ready to handle such a change in so short a time. It’s seemingly driven us mad as we burn cities for 6 months over one bad cop and a man high on fentanyl, as we celebrate all things ugly like morbidly obese women in Calvin Klein ads, and as we play god with racial and sexual power games. Where is this all headed? Is there hope?

Minneapolis. Protests over the death of George Floyd

America, like the individual, is in need of competition. Without it, we will continue to self destruct. We have been peerless in our endeavors for too long. If we can not teach ourselves to adopt gratitude and drop the shame, it seems like the only cure left is for the rest of the world to catch up. If America can get over itself and realize the world is a competitive place, that is the day America can start injecting rocket fuel into its veins again.