Camera Habits During the NCAA Tournament

During the month of March, I enjoy watching the NCAA Basketball tournament. This year I have the added incentive of rooting for Michigan State which is a scant 30 minute drive from where I live. So, for the past couple weeks I’ve watched a number of tournament games that have involved hundreds of NCAA college Basketball players. Now, during the tournament games the cameras will sometimes focus on those in attendance. Maybe the camera will pan a coach’s wife during a particularly dramatic point of the game. Maybe the camera will locate a celebrity in attendance.

I must admit though that one thing that is driving me mad with curiosity is why the cameras keep panning the parents of Oklahoma Stars Blake and Taylor Griffin. With the exception of once seeing the cameras pan the father of UNC star Tyler Hansbrough the only parents I’ve seen the cameras focus on are the parents of the Griffin brothers of Oklahoma. The cameras have been on these parents so often during Oklahoma games I’ve begun to think that the Griffins were starring in some kind of bizarre reality Television show.

Now, naturally, I’ve found myself asking why the cameras have focused so much on the Griffins. I mean, after all, if there are 10 guys on each team that is potentially twenty set of parents that cameras could pan. But lets reduce the pool by 16 sets of parents and suggest that the cameras are only interested in showing family members of star players and coaches. That would reduce it to a far more manageable handful of people that the cameras might pan. Still, even by those reduced numbers the Griffin parents are getting far far more face time on camera proportionally then any other family members. Indeed, one begins to wonder if all their camera time is designed.

So why do the Griffins get all this camera time? Are they the only family members in attendance supporting their star basketball player sons? Is it because they are more telegenic then other people? Or is it because CBS is subtly communicating that inter-racial marriages are something to be esteemed and aspired to?

Dissolving The People

“The people had forfeited the confidence of the government and could win it back only by redoubled efforts. Wouldn’t it be easier to dissolve the people and elect another in their place?”

Bertold Brecht
German Communist Poet / Playwright

The politicians and bureaucrats of the American state, at almost every level are criminal guilty of the crime of cultural-cide. The policies they are pursuing are tantamount to seeking to dissolve the people and their culture while electing another in their place. Americans are being dissolved by illegal immigration. Americans are being dissolved by multiculturalism. Americans are being dissolved by planned financial ruin. Americans are being dissolved by the death cult of abortion. Americans are being dissolved by a educational system that has spent decades preparing Americans for dissolution.

In Barack Obama we are being led by a man who is a stranger and an alien to all things Americans. Even if Obama is legally President he should be characterized as a “accidental American.” He is a man who had a mother who hated her own people. He had a Father who was a Tomcat who spread his seed over more than one continent. For a substantive period of his life he was raised by a Step-Father in Indonesia. Obama is the perfect character to dissolve America because he doesn’t belong to America.

America’s Bastard Percentage Increases Again

In 2007 in America almost 40% (39.7%) of children born are born to unwed mothers. This is an increase of 1.2% from the statistics of 2006. For those who attended government schools this means that almost 4 out of 10 (2 out of 5 if you never learned fractions) babies were born to unwed mothers. The statistic reveal that from 2005-2007 the number of children born in these United States to married women has declined 0.3% while the number born to unmarried women has mushroomed to 12.3%

Broken down by ethnicity the numbers reveal that between the years 2005-2007 that among blacks the percentage of children birthed to single moms grew from 69.9% to 71.6%. Among whites, who have considerably more ceiling room for increase, the numbers of bastard children, in terms of percentage expanded from 25.3% to 27.8% over the same two year period. The largest increase in out of wedlock births was found in the Hispanic community as their numbers jumped from 48%-51.3% of illegitimate children. If we take 1980 as a base for the Hispanic community that is a 32.3% increase from the base year 1980 when the rate was 19%.

Rutgers sociologist David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project, He writes,

“…Hispanics seem to have assimilated into the American culture of secular individualism more than the reverse. … These trends contradict earlier expectations that Hispanics might bring this nation a new wave of family traditionalism.” [The State of Our Unions |The Social Health of Marriage in America]

The growth in Hispanic illegitimacy is especially important because Hispanics keep increasing as a share of all new births, married or unmarried, up from 14.3 percent in 1990 to 23.8 percent in 2005 to 24.6 percent in 2007.

Thus, from 2005 to 2007, the number of babies born to unmarried white women dropped 2.0 percent, while the number of babies born to unmarried Hispanic women grew 15.2 percent.

If you’re under 35 I hope you’re taking Spanish classes because demography is destiny.

Scholarly Minds

“Great scholarly minds come in two types. There are system-builders whose minds encompass huge amounts of seemingly disparate information and then pull them into a coherent whole. Then there are those who we will call puzzlers. These men take great systems, break them into scattered sections, and start pointing out the problems with every single part, often from a perspective that few people have thought of and fewer yet can follow.”

F. A. Hayek
Two Types Of Mind
Encounter — September 1975

The Post-modern age is an age of “puzzlers.” I am a puzzler to the puzzlers.

Really though, Hakey’s puzzlers have a great deal in common with his system builders. It really is the case that there is no way the puzzler can take great systems and break them into scattered sections, and point out the problems with every single part unless they are standing on some great system that allows them to critique other great systems. The puzzler can’t be a puzzler from nowhere. Before he can break up the furniture in other worldviews he has to have a superior worldview that he can puzzle from.

This observation is true about post-modernism. Post-modernism fancies itself as puzzlers on steroids and further they insist that all they are doing is puzzling. They insist that there is no such thing as a great system. But this is a clever lie. They couldn’t be the puzzlers they are if they didn’t have a great system they were using as a wrecking ball to destroy other systems. The dirty little secret for the post-modern puzzlers is that their great system is in the affirmation of negation. By insisting that there is no such thing as meta narratives the post-modern puzzlers build a meta-narrative around and dependent upon the meta-narrative that there are no meta-narratives. Their negation of meta-narrative is the affirmation of their meta-narrative.

So by ripping up great systems the post-modern puzzlers clear the playing field for their own great system.