By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — Words matter. As if that needs saying — in words. That’s basic communication. They’re the most direct way for people to inform, or mislead, others. To request, to ask, to plead, to warn, to joke, to praise, to condemn, among the many daily interactions of life.
Other instruments to convey meaning include writing, facial expressions, hand signals, musical and other sounds.
Then there are moods and depths — seriousness, levity, the ephemeral, the important.
Anyone with something to sell, instruct, or persuade needs to master these tools.
Capturing the means of communication is among the priorities of the dictator. Or at least making the communicators into the allies of the dictator, like dominant media shielding Joe Biden and sinking fangs into enemy Donald Trump.
Sometimes twentieth-century leftists had been impressed if dictators made peasants literate. But, in itself, that only set the peasants up to absorb another avenue of propaganda: being able to read the official lies as well as hear them.
I remember early years of the Cuban Communist Party’s newspaper printed on rough newsprint, Granma. I checked the Granma website as I wrote this on May 29. It includes a reminder to get its headlines on your mobile phone. That surely wasn’t possible a half-century ago. Another avenue of propaganda now.
However, other things haven’t changed. The main Granma headline of the moment on May 29: “Provincial governors and vice governors were elected with more than 90 percent of valid votes cast.”
There’s nothing like the near-unanimity of the people’s will under their dictator’s heel. Or maybe el jefe is changing his ways a little? The dictator is comfortable enough after long decades of one-party rule that he’ll settle for manufacturing merely 90-percent-plus assent instead of 99 percent?
The title Granma doesn’t refer to the late iron-fisted Fidel Castro’s mother’s mother, but the yacht (a capitalist tool, of all things) that brought a few dozen early rebels including Castro to this long island from Mexico in 1956.
There’s still the photo of Fidel waving his rifle with two pals. How The New York Times had loved him. But by now this picture next to the paper’s logo is about as much a current event as young Frank Sinatra on the way to a singing career.
Of course, Granma isn’t the only newspaper in Cuba. There are other Communist ones, too. Including Juventud Rebelde, the propaganda pitch to the young folk.
So that’s a whiff of the one-party press with a Communist government. What about U.S. dominant media now that supposedly are unchained but have the fierce infatuations of a teenager?
We see every day how journos throw their punches, and pull their punches, to pummel those they oppose and withhold the blows from those they favor. But what about supposedly neutral topics that don’t involve winning elections and dethroning politicians?
What if they try to explain away topics that they simply don’t comprehend? And what might that tell us about their presuming to instruct us?
Beware when they try to get by “filling in the blanks” with what may sound correct to them.
Many people are interested in weather reports — even without adding a political dimension to them, such as is being done to about every aspect of life these days by “progressives.” People just wonder if their picnic or boating outing will have pleasant skies and waters.
We here in the desert portions of Arizona know that many other people don’t understand our climate except to think it’s hot. Maybe hot all year long (wrong.) They might not know that desert high and low temperatures may vary by 25 or more degrees within the 24-hour cycle, so a day’s high of 102 degrees doesn’t mean a low of 97 but more likely around 78 degrees. And 78 degrees is very pleasant when the humidity usually is low.
“But it’s a DRY heat” may be said mockingly by those who don’t live in it. However, it’s a real world of difference between their 90-degree days with 90 percent dripping humidity and our 90-degree days with 13-percent humidity where you can’t even see the perspiration (because it quickly evaporates into the dry air). So, you even get a cooling effect by the evaporation instead of water sinking into your clothes.
But even mild-feeling degrees at around the 90 point aren’t what you’d want to stay exposed to all day long. Air conditioning provides the necessary relief.
Of course, our summer desert weather doesn’t stay at highs no higher than 90, which would be a cool day here between June and August, at the very least. Or between May and September. By June, 115 degrees for a high around 4 p.m. isn’t remarkable, so if you want to enjoy the day’s 80-degree low, get up early.
Now, let’s look at a few weather statements apparently written by people who simply have no idea.
On May 23 Business Insider posted this lead sentence: “Half of the population of Phoenix, Ariz., would end up in the emergency room if the city had a blackout during a heat wave, according to a shocking new study.”
An accompanying video stipulated that there would be 48 hours without electricity, then the power being restored over the next three days, neighborhood by neighborhood. It defined “heat wave” as when “temperatures could climb above 115 degrees.”
Many of our summer afternoons are near or at a “heat wave,” so there’s no shock at all to be told that 115 degrees without air conditioning would cause suffering, and people heading to emergency rooms. Or emergency cooling stations.
After our neighborhood summer electricity had been off for some hours years ago, I recall beginning to drive my Mom to go visit an ER’s cooling station when I saw porch lights suddenly start shining, so we knew the electricity was just restored.
On April 4 the HeraldWeekly site posted an article titled, “The Best and Worst States for Retirement in the U.S.” It carried this incredible statement:
“The dry heat of Arizona is almost impossible to bear during the summer, with temperatures in some places reaching between 104 and 107 degrees Fahrenheit.”
Well, “dry heat” actually is what makes high temperatures more bearable, not “almost impossible.” One-hundred-four at 15 percent humidity versus at 92 percent humidity is an important difference that the HeraldWeekly writer should undergo for an educational experience.
And: “Temperatures in some places reaching between 104 and 107 degrees Fahrenheit”? To me, that sounds as if the identity of these unbearable places is sort of hard to pin down, and that 107 is about as high as anyone reasonably could expect it to go.
Wrong. Right here in very identifiable big-city Phoenix, and all of hundreds of additional square miles of our suburbs, we know that every single summer we’ll have temperatures of 110 degrees and higher.
The weather pattern seasonally shifts in July and August, mainly, so we receive weather from the Gulf of Mexico instead of the usually prevailing air currents from the Pacific Ocean. The humidity goes up a bit and rain increases (relatively speaking, for us, because the entire year may receive only about eight inches of rain).
Still, we’re not talking about 80 or 90 percent humidity unless the rain soaks the air. And then the temperature comes down. After a “big” rain, probably expect a high in the 90s for the day, not 115 degrees.
As Thanksgiving approached in 2017, the international news company Agence France-Presse ran a weather story about the U.S. Southwest being expected to “sizzle” for the holiday, with Phoenix to “swelter” at 88 degrees.
However, a nice November afternoon 88 for a high in Phoenix, once the summer “monsoon” season has passed, is delightful. That means the low temperature likely is in the high 60s, with little humidity.
My overall point here being that these weather stories written at a distance don’t understand ours but try to make it “explainable” in ways that fit their way of thinking.
Imbalances In Newsrooms And University Faculties
If they do it to the weather, what else might they do it to? How about a newsroom where 90 percent of the writers and editors identify more closely with the Democratic Party’s platform? Or the same imbalance for, say, a university faculty.
On May 28, 2023, by the time everyone had time to know better, an Associated Press writer referred to the January 6, 2021, protest at the U.S. Capitol building as “the attack that shook the foundations of American democracy.”
Maybe just at Nancy Pelosi’s faked wax museum of horror.
Interesting to remember that a bare-chested man wearing a horned headdress and face paint, and a pushy man putting his feet up on then-House Speaker Pelosi’s desk, were examples of disorder supposedly as threatening as Donald Trump hypothetically firing 100 ballistic missiles into Capitol Hill.
And that the Trump-supporting, unarmed lady Ashli Babbitt was considered such a threat to maintaining democracy — or so we are instructed to believe — that a U.S. government agent had to shoot her to death from a doorway.
Now, how dangerous were the roaring left-wing riots around the United States in the summer of 2020, including fatalities? Remember, those were “mostly peaceful.” They don’t seem to be so worrisome at all in recent history.
Just think back to Republican personalities leaving Donald Trump’s White House on foot the evening of August 28, 2020, who quickly were surrounded by left-wing rioters who weren’t out on a lark.
The Associated Press managed to report on that date: “An angry mob attacked Sen. Rand Paul and his wife as they were leaving the White House following the end of the Republican National Convention early Friday, and demonstrators harassed and threatened other supporters of President Trump as they left the event.
“Video shows Mr. Paul, Kentucky Republican, and his wife Kelley being confronted by a mob of Black Lives Matter activists who shoved police escorting them out of the RNC conference,” the AP said. “Protesters knocked one of the officers, who had a bicycle, into Mr. Paul.”
The story went on to quote Paul that the mob was presidential candidate Joe Biden’s “new Democratic Party.” A man reportedly was punched in the back of the head and knocked down by the mob.
“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” as Bob Dylan sang in 1965. Dylan was chosen as one of their minstrels by 1960s left-wing radicals. The violent leftist group The Weathermen took their name from this sentence.
Trying to understand southern Arizona weather may be too challenging to some distant news desks. But political forecasts still blow as desired.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress