By Sofia Smallstorm
I asked the famous media studies ”””””””””’ from ””””””’ ”””””””’ ”””””””””’ for an interview we could call “The Real James Tracy,” promising that if the result was different I would change the title. You know him as the lone [working] academic who publicly began to question Sandy Hook, for which he received an avalanche of attacks from the national media, along with severe reproof by ””””’.*
Yet he held strong, drawing a growing troupe of followers who have created fascinating discussions on his popular website. Dr. Tracy, as he prefers not to be called, has appeared on radio shows before, but here, as the exchange gets underway, you will find the less formal personality in the amazing big mind that manages all that information we are treated to each week at MemoryHoleBlog.com.
//memoryholeblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/ssmallstorm_podcast_002_6-22-14.mp3
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*Redactions have been made to the above in accordance with a formal agreement between Tracy and his employer.
Heh. Redactions. Perfect.
Reblogged this on Today,s Thought.
Keep standing tall!
All due respect, the thing that kills most amateur journalists is they have absolutely no idea as to how to interview someone. More often than not, the “interview” turns again and again back to the “journalist” and their experiences, thus leaving the person being interviewed left to simply agree with what’s being said. Please, Sofia, try not to let the interview of your subjects become all about you. I turned this off about a fourth of the way through because I was hearing more about Sofia’s anecdotes than Dr. Tracy’s, who ostensibly was the focus of the “interview.”
I’ve encountered this repeatedly with others who do podcasts, not just Ms. Smallstorm. Please – have prepared questions and then continue to ask follow up questions of your subject’s responses. I’m not opposed to learning about the interviewer – that’s what solo broadcasts/podcasts are for – but when someone has been asked to be a guest for interview purposes, please hold back the ego and let them do the talking.
Shea: Go back and keep listening. It gets better about a half hour or so in. I thought the same thing: though I love to hear Sofia talk, I was hoping for more James.
Dear Shea,
Sofia encountered trouble at the gate, with the Twinkie, and had to work a little to get back on track. I thought her interview was very interesting and worthwhile – both from her perspectives, and those of Prof. Tracy.
Interesting that your short attention span is somewhat common to many of Tracy’s students, and he devoted considerable insight into the challenges of teaching ill-prepared Junior and Senior level students.
Keep listening patiently – and you will find that this ‘amateur’ interview is rich and worthwhile, and unlike anything you will find produced by the sound bite loving MSM.
I enjoyed the Twinkie. How many times in our stressed out high paced world can we meditate on something as transendental the one one mentioned?
Sigh. This was not a “journalistic” interview — read the title again. If you want the academic James responding to prepared questions, there is plenty of it to be found elsewhere. I do know the “guest” personally, having collaborated on certain things for a while now. The point here was to conduct an informal, personal exchange, which you didn’t happen to like, so you obviously made the right decision to switch it off.
Thanks for the conversation. James (not Dr. Tracy) knows how to turn a phrase – “peer surveillance” indeed, aka collective self-policing. I have been fascinated by the topic of “State Psychiatry” ever since I learned it was a going profession in the former Soviet Union, where not buying Marx-Lenin was proof-positive of insanity. Only there, I thought. But here I am in the Land of the Free suffering a touch of Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Gotta go look up the Schuman Resonance, even if ignorance surely is bliss.
Thanks for sharing James. Our youngest will complete her senior year in college next year and we will have fulfilled our promise to provide debt-free education for all our children.
As they grew up, we were awake enough to opt out of all vaccines, STAR tests, and other mandated hoops that were designed to deprive our kids of developing their own individuality, creativity, imagination, and health. We jumped from Montessori to Waldorf to public to private to home schools based on each child’s development and interests. We chose locally-grown food, carefully selected toys, tech, and apps, and limited MSM programming exposure. And of course, we made it a priority to do our share of car-pooling in hundreds of meetings, practices, competitions, and performances.
The good news is that we have met many of our children’s peers and they are not alone. They share a genuine passion for truth, equality, life, and our planet.
The bad news is that the world around them continues to assimilate their spirit. For example, I met one of my eldest’s friends who, after many years of struggling to find employment, is now working at a local charter school teaching third grade. I shared with her my concerns regarding mandatory Wi-Fi and Common Core. And she told me, point blank, that everything is fine and she loves her job.
You are in a unique position to influence your children’s future. As we reach a tipping point towards a profound defining moment, please keep in mind that there are many gems in the twenty and thirty somethings of our citizenry who can fulfill higher-dimensional opportunities. They need not conform to idiocracy if we help them.
In the future, it is our hope you will expand your reporting to also include potential long-term solutions to the problems you identify.
Lastly, props to Mrs. Tracy for her obvious courage, diligence, and support.
Thank you for sharing these experiences and observations. Most heartening. We are attempting to forge a similar path.
With your perspectives in mind, over the past century public school has become a colossal failure. Those in the know realize that schools of education in fact remain schools of experimental psychology, which explains Bill Gates’ general fascination with the area.
The process has only intensified over the past several decades, through initiatives such as Common Core. Coerced taxation to uphold the project of mass stupefaction makes the affair utterly deplorable. Schooling amounts to childcare for those who have no other options, enhanced by intense intellectual abuse.
Those who opt out of public schooling to home school or pursue other such scholastic initiatives should be exempt from paying for the miseducation of others. A similar argument can indeed be made for higher education, where genuine critical thinking is seldom the objective.
High school at one time provided what universities are looked to equip young people with today, which is ample proof of the train wreck K-12 has become. Without parents’ awareness and guidance children have little chance to thrive.
As a homeschooling parent, your remarks gave me my first smile of the day, so thank you. My progressive city is trying to implement tax-payer funded, voluntary (at least there’s that), universal pre-k: 5 days a week, 6 hours a day for 3 and 4 year olds. Get them as early as possible, I guess. I hate the thought of being forced to contribute to it. I have no doubt voters here will pass it, as City officials have said, “it’s the only moral thing to do”.
The comments of OldMan and James put their fingers on a basic determinant of the current political stupor of the American people. We are Educated to be politically stupid and passive. This is illustrated most clearly in James Loewin’s classic LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME, a critique of history school texts. We start out bright and alert as children and get dumber and dumber as we are Educated.
There is no solution within the Educational System within the current power system. However a revolutionary book by Salman Khan, THE ONE WORLD SCHOOLHOUSE, argues and illustrates plausibly that we can turn our efforts away from teaching to tutoring. When sufficient videos are created, the young can be tutored outside of the traditional Educational System, leaving it to rot in its own rigidity, irrelevance, deceit, and corruption.
I thought of this fantastic TED presentation while listening to the conversation:
http://youtu.be/nsKPvQCMATw
(I hope this embeds, but if it doesn’t, do click and watch; it’s about an Indian guy–India, that is–who proves that kids in remote slum villages can learn wonderfully with no teachers).
Of course, the Kahn Academy is one of the great points of evidence that individual freedom and the power it has to effect wonderful benefits is the way to go. What surprises me is that Mark, the most racially obsessed person I’ve ever encountered, and the enabler of the state par excellence, endorses it.
I say that because it is the intensely race-obsessed, the genuine racists among us, who dominate the educational system in our time. And that is Mark, in spades.
That is, the true racists, like Mark, almost always defend the school teachers’ unions because those who object to what they have made of the educational system in this country are supposedly trying to escape from it not because John Dewey’s nightmarish vision is now in full development, but because most of its victims are black and hispanic–so people who do not want their children ruined by it are by definition racists. Not because they want to make certain their children are not ruined by the state, but because this who can’t escape are largely black and hispanic, so we’re not removing ourselves from evil, but from its powerless victims. People like Mark tend to want the tax confiscations to keep flowing to the evil system, no matter how wretched it makes the communities it’s targeting.
If a racist wanted to destroy America’s blacks and hispanics, permanently, the best way to do it would be to support America’s diabolical teachers’ unions.
It is as if the left WANTS to destroy blacks and hispanics. Of course, since they cleverly have gained ownership the use of the term “racism,” anyone who does not agree with the Dewey/HG Wells/ Fabian Society plan for the “1984” New World Order are the “racists.” The ones who want to rescue them from the conspiracy are bizarrely characterized as the ones inflicting the destruction. Amazing.
So it’s hard to believe that Mark reveals himself as an enemy of Dewey’s vision. Will wonders never cease. I truly would have expected Mark to once again denounce James Tracy as a racist, this time, for his denunciation of the “public” schools. As I say, amazing.
Unfortunately, teachers’ unions such as the National Education Association are heavily bankrolled by the likes of Bill Gates. They are thus obviously compromised in terms of critiquing Gates-funded and inspired meddling in the educational process.
For purposes of disclosure, Florida’s faculty union. of which I am a member, is an affiliate of NEA. The union proved especially helpful, if not decisive, when administrators at ——- ——– ———- sought to discipline me for my analysis of the Sandy Hook and Boston events.
I’m glad the union served a useful, and valid, function in your service James, and I appreciate your mentioning it.
Perhaps in the interests of brevity I was too glib. Unionism is not by definition problematic. I am not one of those who think they have all outlived their purpose. That’s a large question I shall not develop here.
The nuance I kind of assumed the reader is aware of (I am sadly prone to that) is what John Dewey represents in 20th century history. That is, what the Columbia Teachers College did to Normal Schools across the country as the century unfolded. It was a vast, diabolical, social experiment. You, James, mentioned in your comment “mass stupefaction” (what a felicitous phrase!) and “intense intellectual abuse.” Well, that’s what it is, and Albert Shanker and Randi Weingarten and such like don’t seem to care about it.
If the unions are there to protect their members, though, let’s not let them get away with pretending to have quality education as their goal as well. Generally, they are about securing greater taxpayer extractions and denying the possibility of firing incompetents. It’s all fine and well to have an organization that defends the interests of its members against potentially despotic employers, holding said employers to their obligations. It’s quite another thing, though, when that defense involves an intentional, systematic, corruption of the institution its members function in, with the goal of transforming society.
What teachers’ unions have become in American society is this: John Dewey’s posthumous water-carriers.
Certainly, in these pages, I have pointed out that tenure was dreamed up with you, James Tracy, in mind, and I’m glad your trade union did not throw you under the bus when it came time to demonstrate what they are there for. They defended the membership, as should be expected. But the kids are not their membership, and they don’t give a damn about them. What they care about, when you listen to them rail against any genuine reforms, is statism and power, Common Core, and the deliberate dumbing down of the human race– as Charlotte Iserbyt has documented perfectly (incidentally, she’d be a great Checking It Out interviewee).
Khan Academy has been lauded for years among homeschoolers (and others) here in CA. However, in recent months it has come to light that Kahn does its share of data collecting on visitors to the website. We all need to remember that very little (if anything) in this life comes for free, and that goes for information as well.
As far as public employee unions go, I’ve always wondered why, at least theoretically, public employees would need to unionize. Who, exactly, do they need protection from? The taxpayers? Realistically, I understand the issue: my husband is a college professor, too. (As an aside, I wonder how many other college professors homeschool? We do, too!) In fact, he is currently fighting his administration and the accreditation committee against “Student Learning Outcomes”, so he may very well benefit from union membership at some point down the line; however, we’ve managed to avoid union membership and all union dues (not an easy feat here in CA). I am very happy that James received support from his union when he needed it, but I bet he could have managed the situation on his own or with the help of a decent attorney. For anyone interested, a wonderful book outlining the history of the N.E.A. and the various unions involved in education is “N.E.A.: Trojan Horse in American Education” by Sam Blumenfeld. He, along with Charlotte Iserbyt and John Taylor Gatto, were instrumental in altering my views on public education.
I’m not familiar with teachers unions and wasn’t referring to them, although I don’t expect mere reality to stop Patrick’s critique. I’m generally in favor of unions if for no other reason than they can defend people like James. I didn’t know they were financed by Bill Gates, et al. Gates also financed (slightly) Sal Khan a little; the rich have very big stomachs but very tight sphincters.
http://www.ted.com/playlists/35/bill_gates_my_13_favorite_tal
If I catch your drift, Baxter, you are pointing out how we are all corrupted, and can’t escape it, by the nature of the Matrix. All too true.
Still, even though the odious Bill Gates is the money man behind TED, the thing produces really fantastic presentations. Things we probably would not find out any other way.
Should we not recommend TED presentations, because Gates bankrolls the operation? He does lots of horrible stuff with his money, and his plans for us all are certainly evil. That’s a very large question to contemplate. Too big for here, now.
I, for one, will continue to benefit from TED and continue to denounce Gates. I wish the world were pure and undiluted goodness. I wish evil men were not the ones producing the things I think are good. I can wish, though, till the cows come home, and it won’t change a thing.
Patrick, how is Gates any worse than the other oligarchs: the Kich brothers, Soros, Rockafeller, Adelson. Just askin’, I really don’t know. Although why I am asking a ding-a-ling like you God only knows.
Sue, have I mentioned lately that you are a racist loony? Non-Whites are indoctrinated and deluded precisely so they won’t unite with indoctrinated and deluded Whites. Sal Khan was of south Asian origin; he was tired of being a hedge fund manager and wanted to do something useful. It could happen to anyone, even people with Celtic fair hair.
Gates has developed a singular interest in sterilizing the people of Africa, for one thing. Considering where he pours his billions, one imagines he’s got the Georgia Guidestones on his mind.
The Koch brothers tend to finance cultural institutions, but the money they give to political ends always tends to seek the reduction in the size to the state, which, if successful, would redound to all humanity’s good. The state, after all, is our greatest enemy; always has been.
Soros is the inverse of the Koch brothers: every dollar he donates has as its purpose the development of 1984 in our time. Whereas the Koch brothers and Gates earned their money honestly, selling products to happy customers, Soros, the Nazi collaborator, essentially stole it all by manipulating derivatives markets. A truly nasty piece of work, that one.
Rocky The First had as his object the undermining of Christianity and the educational system. When that proved successful, his despicable descendants continued the tradition by focusing primarily on creating a world government, a project that is is well advanced by now. Whereas Soros is openly contemptuous of Western civilization, the Rockys are quietly dignified; Soros is like a rabid rat, attacking wildly, whereas the Rockefellers are more like termites you aren’t even aware of.
So each focuses on different things. With the exception of the Kochs, though, all are using their financial power for evil purposes, so they have that in common.
Very telling how Soros, Gates, and Ford Foundation funding of so many projects–such as phony environmentalism–is close to non-existent to the Left, versus the tremendous attention given to Koch money to which followers are exhorted to give the periodic, “Two Minutes Hate.” See, for example,
http://www.thenation.com/blog/178743/koch-brothers-spent-twice-much-2012-election-top-ten-unions-combined
It’s as if the Kochs are the only interest concerned with influencing ideas and political designs.
It should be noted that Bill Gates has a close relationship with Norway’s former prime minister, soon to be installed as head of NATO. Reward for compliance and family roots. Jens Stoltenberg, or Jenseman as he is fondly referred to by his admirers, generously gave huge sums to Gates’ vaccination projects – money from national coffers. We can only imagine what’s coming now that the whole world stage is theirs for the taking.
http://www.henrymakow.com/left_norways_satanist_pm_jens.html
Anne,
A few weeks ago I told you how happy I was that you decided to stick around this place. Well, this is a new reason to say so.
So, you, too, thought of the Georgia Guidestones when examining the work of the odious Mr. Gates. All I expected was a Ray Charles chuckle from a random reader who knew about them, and with the added hopes that some would search for the reference and learn about them.
You already understand the dastardly business, but at a deeper level than even I, perhaps. You are indeed a treasure, and as long as you remain among us I hope everyone recognizes your value.
Someday, maybe, you can tell us what you think of Knut Hamsun, as long as Norway has come up, and even the Max Von Sydow biopic (or, if you prefer, click on my name and write about it at my own, sadly neglected, place). It is a subject I am very interested in.
Gates earned his money ‘honestly?’ I also doubt that’s very true of the Koch brothers..
Mark says: “Sue, have I mentioned lately that you are a racist loony? Non-Whites are indoctrinated and deluded precisely so they won’t unite with indoctrinated and deluded Whites.”
What the heck does the second sentence mean? As for the second, coming right back at ya…
The soon to be leader of NATO. Scroll down in the link for second photo. The lady pictured is his sister. She runs Norway’s “Statens Institutt for Folkehelsen” – National Institute for People’s Health – and is sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Both siblings are heavily invested in the vaccine industry.
http://8858.vgb.no/2009/02/15/vaksiner-stoltenberg/
Oops! noshprekenme Norwegian.
The Rockefellers came up in the discussion above and Patrick described them well. A little bit of history about a Cinderella in the Rockefeller kitchen; from fairy tale wedding to breakdown. For those who are interested in some lesser known history, the two links below tell part of the tale.
This was the biggest wedding at the time in Norway since the previous royal one, years earlier.
http://www.britishpathe.com/video/rockefeller-and-his-bride/query/LITTLE+OLD+NEW+YORK
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20071899,00.html
I believe that when Cinderella had produced enough offspring for the family, they were done with her. And done in a way they know all too well. Of course that is only speculation on my part. After the now divorced Mrs. Rockefeller moved to Connecticut, and still suffering from her “illness”, she met a Norwegian homebuilder in Newtown – of all places. She became obsessed with this man and began stalking him at all hours. She was driven to his house in the middle of the night by her chauffeur, the family making sure that she still lived their kind of life. This man had to change his phone number and ended up getting a restraining order against her. Not a happy ending to this Rockefeller fairy tale, but not unexpected considering the family she married into.
Recently I saw a photo of this lady. She had moved back to her old home in Norway and looked aged way beyond her years.
Patrick, I only posted it for the photo of Jens in the black T-shirt with 666 in white. It was later explained that it was supposed to be some sort of address. To hell?
Patrick, interesting that you should mention Knut Hamsun. It’s been a long time since his name was brought up around me. I will attempt to answer you privately about Hamsun and Max von Sydow (a great actor). In the meantime suffice it to say that Hamsun would approve of the conversation on this blog.
During Hamsun’s time, and he was well travelled, he had the psychopaths, sociopaths and hypocrites well pegged. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920, back in the day when it meant something.
Recently a museum was built in his honor on the island of Hamarøy in northern Norway where he lived for many years. Sadly, this museum is in line with the “trend” of removing beautiful art and architecture, replacing it with modern eyesores. Now, where did I read that was part of a certain manifesto? Oh, yes. Anyways, here is the museum and the word beauty does not come to mind, nor does it blend into the nature around.
Historical museum for writer Knut Hamsun including exhibition areas, library, reading room, cafe and 230 seat auditorium:
http://ad009cdnb.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/hamsun_1-528×351.jpg
Re. Cinderella and the Rockefellers. I expected the link to the People Magazine article to be broken, although it works fine here, so I copied the article:
• October 09, 1978
• Vol. 10
• No. 15
Post-Divorce and Breakdowns, the Cinderella Once Wed to a Rockefeller Finds a New Career
By Lynne Baranski
Once upon a time—well, about three decades ago—a blond, beautiful and headstrong girl named Anne-Marie Rasmussen lived on a tiny North Sea island off Norway and dreamed of a place called America. At 18 and by herself, she arrived in New York and found a job as a kitchen maid for one of the world’s richest families. Among the “Rockenfelleres,” as Anne-Marie first spelled the name, was a son called Steven. Yes, the scion and the servant fell in love. They were married in 1959 with the rapturous attention of the world focused on them. And then…
“Ever after” turned out to be 10 years. The breakup of her marriage to Steven Rockefeller, Nelson’s second son, left her, Anne-Marie says, “quite bitter and angry. But,” she adds, “sadness disappears with time.”
The stresses that shattered her fairy tale were manifold, she says, and she does not absolve herself. “For years I had this problem of depression,” Anne-Marie, now 40, admits. “It became worse as I grew older. It got so bad two years ago that I couldn’t be with my three children, and they went to live with Steven.”
In all she has suffered three nervous breakdowns. Though she consulted “the best doctors and psychiatrists,” she says incredulously, “nobody diagnosed me right”—at least not until the past year when a doctor linked her emotional problems to a chemical imbalance and prescribed lithium. Now, Anne-Marie says, “my whole life has been totally changed.”
With new confidence, she is emerging as an artist whose work ranges from pen-and-ink drawings to collages and some photography, all of which she signs “Mia,” her nickname. From her strikingly modern home on another tiny island (this one in New Canaan, Conn.), she toils 10 to 13 hours daily preparing for a series of gallery showings beginning this week. “I’m doing what I always wanted to do but was afraid I couldn’t do,” she says.
Her art often reveals a biting humor. One collage is made entirely from bras, another of discarded Rockefeller and Rasmussen wallets. Ironically, she recalls, it was her “honest face and happy smile” that won her the job in the kitchen of Nelson Rockefeller’s 27-room New York apartment. She and Steven soon began “dating and hiding—I was so afraid I’d lose my job.” How did the Rockefeller family feel about the courtship? “I don’t think they had much of a choice about accepting me,” she says.
In her 1975 autobiography, There Was Once a Time, Anne-Marie (who resumed using the name “Rasmussen” after the divorce) comes off as a woman craving affection who married into a family that was proper and purposeful to the point of joylessness. “Maybe,” she wrote, “they had so much time left over to feel responsible for humanity in general because so many of us took care of their daily comforts.”
Anne-Marie was married briefly to a Norwegian-American businessman after her divorce. She continues to share parental responsibilities with Steven. One daughter, Ingrid, 15, attends school in Washington, D.C., while another, Jennifer, 14, lives with her father, who is now remarried and a professor of philosophy and the history of religion at Vermont’s Middlebury College.
Anne-Marie is especially pleased these days that her 18-year-old son, Steven Jr., has decided to postpone college for a year to assist her career. (Her life also includes a man, but she will describe him only as “someone in my heart.”) Steven takes his mother’s work, whose prices range from $200 to $700, to private showings and has already made a sale to one of America’s foremost collectors. The buyer in this case, it could be said, took a very grandfatherly interest in the young art salesman.
Oh I meant to tell Mark I think he’s a racist loony right back. I’m in a beyond loud apartment that has robbed me of precious sleep so I’m not in top form lately, although I’m moving soon…
‘Children Full of Life’…here is a stunning documentary, how children are encouraged and guided to learn fully…engaging their very human
emotional as well as intellectual and physical beings to experience a particular accountability, enjoyment, and response-ability that is sadly left out of American/western education systems.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tLB1lU-H0M
great interview you two, fresh and different!
James, I seek out and thoroughly enjoy all of your radio interviews, so please continue with this medium as a tool for my education and enlightenment. I really appreciate all your time and effort in putting together, maintaining and posting on your blog and obvious preparation that you put into your interviews.
The give and take between you and Sofia makes for easy listening on a wide range of topics.
I realize from your interview that I am so fortunate my child is grown and never was involved in Common Core. Common Core’s primary focus seems to be crazy making and I would be in so much trouble because I would be camped out in my child’s math class.
Sofia, thank you for the info about wireless emf radiation and how it affects mold reproduction. I need to do some research on that and human resonance.
Thanks James and Sofia, I enjoyed this. I agree with macweezy, you are “fresh and different” and I always enjoy your work. You are both also great listeners too and that is a rare quality that makes it a pleasure to listen to you. While I am extremely dubious about Common Core, I am not ready to give up on public education. My kids are creative kids, who love to read, and are learning a lot about the world of other people. Everyone should be able to make their own decision about their child’s education, and I while don’t think home-schooling will work for us, I applaud people who are able to home-school. (My kids are 7 and 11 BTW.) I believe my kids are developing into critical thinkers, despite any Common Core shenanigans. I will keep a very close eye on it. Their teacher’s have been pretty great so far in my opinion, although on paper they go to an under-performing school They recently struck down tenure in California and I’m wondering what effect this will have on education here if this decision is not reversed on appeal. Thanks for all the information about WiFi as well. It is possible to spend all my time worrying about the future for all the kids, but instead I will do what I can to try to make it a better future.
That is why we care, Calimom, to do what we can to make a better future.
You are doing it right. You are watching everyone and everything that affect your children.
I have one humble observation for you, a loving parent, with children in their age group (the best of times!): Do not get distracted. Assimilation pressure increases exponentially as they move up. The programming moves very fast and, if you rest, you may miss some major defining moments.
I like OldMan’s advice about blocking the “programming” the world around young kids imposes, by osmosis.
One thing that worked for me with my daughter was from an early age we’d watch old movies together, two or three times a week, after dinner. She’s seen all the Fred Astaire, Marx Brothers, Doris Day, Cary Grant (she was at Mt Rushmore when she was 12–she’s 18 now–and told the guide that there’s a house up there; she’d seen North by Northwest many times by then (there’s no house, except in Hitchcock’s world)), etc. We watched countless foreign films, and she can’t comprehend when her friends refuse to explore them just because they are not in English.
I also made certain she appreciates Sinatra, Dino, Johnny Cash and the Beach Boys–and Opera. She might love what is to me the impossibly boring stuff that passes for pop music today, but she understands why it is not interesting musically, and why I can’t bring myself to waste my time listening to it.
The effect all of this had was to give her a sense of cultural independence in a sea of conformity. Only now do some of her friends comprehend some of the value of what she loves in culture, as a hipster fad discovers that Sinatra is cool. She laughs, because she knew that all along.
So, I found this, my own “programming,” taught her to think for herself about what’s good, even as her peers were intent on learning how to conform to a tiny, arbitrary slice of manufactured “culture” and groupthink. Sure, she loved Hannah Montana, but she also was horrified at what happened to Miley Cyrus (the Vigilant Citizen always says that growing up with this endless sequence of Disney good-girls-gone-bad is intentional programming of our children to mold their minds as to what to expect of life as adults; he makes a very good case). We don’t have too many Doris Days these days.
I would like to suggest making your podcasts available in iTunes. The iphone podcast app is a wonderful tool for disseminating information. I really enjoyed this discussion with Sofia. You both have so many insights to share. I always enjoy hearing both of you.