The Ridiculous Mike McFeely

There he goes again. The Fargo Forum’s resident left wing flame-thrower couldn’t resist vilifying Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) after Cramer’s quickly deleted tweet stating “She’s retarded” in reference to actions by Cong. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

Mike likes to pile on when he thinks he’s got red meat. Mike can’t help but pull out all the anti-Christian, personally vindictive insults. He’s gotten very mean over the years when it comes to promoting his brand of coarse, unfair, left-wing rhetoric.

Sen. Cramer’s version of the events is clear. If you like Sen. Cramer, you believe him. If you don’t like, you now think you have confirmation he is a monster. Sen. Cramer states that two circumstances came in to play when he wrote his original tweet; fat-finger and auto-complete. We all know the helpful but sometimes very unhelpful auto-complete employed by software when writing on either a PC or a smartphone. We also know all too well what fat-finger means. I’ve probably corrected 20 words thus far because I fat-fingered my keyboard.

Sen. Cramer states he meant to tweet “She’s ridiculous.”

Reasonable people can disagree about this. It certainly is out of character for him to tweet, say or write anything like this. Perhaps, in a moment of frustration with Pelosi, he really did tweet, “She’s retarded.” Perhaps he quickly recognized his insensitivity and deleted the tweet. Or, perhaps it is as he said; he was a victim of fat-fingering and auto-complete.

The fact remains that probably no retarded, i.e. cognitively impaired, person would have known about this issue had it not been for McFeely and others like him. Do you think McFeely took that into account when he wrote his hateful article? Do you think the Forum editorial staff stand behinds and encourages this type of writing from its employees?

Father Giuseppe Berardelli

Father Giuseppe Berardelli was a retired Italian parish priest in Italy who contracted COVID-19. His parishioners contributed enough money to buy him his own ventilator; a device which was apparently keeping the good priest alive.

Faither Berardelli was 72 years old when he died on March 15, 2020. He was living in a retirement home in Casnigo. He had donated his respirator to a young stranger who had contracted COVID-19.

Perhaps some who had originally donated the respirator to Father Berardelli were upset to learn he gave away the respirator. After all, the donation was to keep a priest alive. He was probably beloved by his parishioners. The priest defied the wishes of the donors to do what he believed God would want one of His priests to do. After all, what drives a man to give up his life so that one of his brothers, stranger or not, could live.

Father Berardelli reminds me of Saint Maximilian Kolbe; a young priest who offered his life for the life of a married man condemned to death by Nazis in 1941.

Whether or not Father Berardelli is named a saint, it seems to me he loved his neighbor as himself. He gave the ultimate expression of that love, dying for a stranger.

Kathy Shark vs. Bette Grande

The Fargo Forum chose to publish a letter on March 23, 2020 from Kathy Shark under the heading “Grande is not a health expert“. The Forum had published a letter from Grand on March 22, 2020 entitled, “Fear not facts“. Conflict sells newspapers, or online subscriptions, and the Forum is nothing if it is not about setting up conflicts.

I read “Fear not facts” and found it very well conceived, a valid opinion from a former North Dakota lawmaker. She laid out the consequences of a policy of partial economic shutdown which could be more harmful than the coronavirus pandemic. At least, she reasoned, we should be able to ask questions and not feel intimidated by experts who may have a point of view which is narrow. Shut down everything, keep distances from people and flatten the curve is great but it must be weighed against other factors. I read nothing extreme or illogical in Grande’s article.

As a backdrop, consider that Grande was a conservative Republican lawmaker who was defeated by someone far more liberal.

Kathy Shark wasted no time in attacking Grande personally. “… who lacks the critical thinking skills to understand that we absolutely should heed the recommendations of experts.” So, Shark claims Grande doesn’t heed the recommendations of experts and lacks critical thinking skills. Shark wastes no words in another personal attack when she next states, “And please, Bette, don’t search for the rare individual within the scientific community whose single scientifically unsupported statement might align with your own opinion. You’ll usually find one, if you look hard enough.” Grande had not quoted any scientist in her original article. Align or not align, who is Grande supposed to be aligning with?!

The rest is just more nonsense accusing Grande of spreading rumors about panic. The entire scientific (or political) community is not monolithically aligned on how to respond to the current pandemic. In the U.K. the initial response was to undergo a philosophy of ‘herd immunity’ where the strategy is to allow a great number of healthy, younger people to be infected with the belief that they would easily survive and become immune. The older and more frail would also get sick but the healthcare system could treat them. That didn’t work and the U.K. has now come 180 degrees and taken a path similar to the USA philosophy.

The problem with Kathy Shark’s letter is she is attacking a political adversary just for the sake of attacking. She tells a few lies and hopes the anti-Grande population will cheer her on. This is small scale version of what we see in harmful national politics. While I think both Democrat and Republican Governors have been mostly apolitical in facing this pandemic, we are seeing the Democrats in the House and Senate hold up economic relief by attaching pet, liberal projects on to the relief bill and demanding the Senate Republicans crumble to their demands. So, while NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), and CA Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), have praised President Trump (R), and Trump praising Cuomo and Newsom, we have Congress stalled over providing economic relief to hard hit Americans and American businesses.

I know it is too much to ask Kathy Stark and others like her to email her Democrat lawmakers demanding economic relief. It is in her blood to email the Forum with hate mail to Bette Grande. The Forum should be ashamed of themselves for publishing Sharks’ letter.

He said what?!

Notre Dame Prof. Offers 21 Reasons Why Higher Ed Is ‘Bullsh*t’

Reprinted, without permission,

A professor at the University of Notre Dame has argued that higher education is drowning in “bullshit” in a year-old column for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Notre Dame Professor Christian Smithargued in a column last week that higher education has some serious issues. BS is universities hijacked by the relentless pursuit of money and prestige, including chasing rankings that they know are deeply flawed, at the expense of genuine educational excellence (to be distinguished from the vacuous “excellence” peddled by recruitment and “advancement” offices in every run-of-the-mill university),” one complaint read.

Smith bemoaned the lacked of intellectual diversity in many academic fields, specifically the humanities and social sciences. He argues that the academics in these fields are hypocrites because they fail to live up to the values of diversity and tolerance that they often preach.

“BS is the grossly lopsided political ideology of the faculty of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and social sciences, creating a homogeneity of worldview to which those faculties are themselves oblivious, despite claiming to champion difference, diversity, and tolerance,” Smith wrote.

One of Smith’s complaints has been discussed multiple times in Breitbart News’ higher education coverage. Professors, especially in the “social justice” fields,” have a habit of forcing unnecessary made-up terms to make outsiders feel confused and unwelcome.

“BS is the ideologically infused jargon deployed by various fields to stake out in-group self-importance and insulate them from accountability to those not fluent in such solipsistic language games,” Smith wrote.

Smith goes on to attack the tenure system, which he argues protects lazy teachers.

“BS is a tenure system that provides guaranteed lifetime employment to faculty who are lousy teachers and inactive scholars, not because they espouse unpopular viewpoints that need the protection of “academic freedom,” but only because years ago they somehow were granted tenure,” he explained.

This is not a new issue for Professor Smith.