Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Lame-Duck President

Clarice Feldman knows why he squawks.

It’s all he knows how to do.

[Update a while later]

Thoughts on the brilliant political strategery of Maureen Dowd:

One interesting thing about Ms. Dowd’s description of “hardball” political tactics is just how dainty and genteel her brass knuckle suggestions actually are. A speech, an appeal to reason: there is nothing here about lucrative contracts for political supporters, promises of sinecure jobs for politicians who lose their seats, a “blank check” for administrative backing on some obscure tax loophole that a particular politician could award to a favored client; there’s not even a delicate hint about grand jury investigations that can be stopped in their tracks or compromising photographs or wiretaps that need never see the light of day. Far be it from Ms Dowd to speak of or even hint at the kind of strategy that actual politicians think about when words like ‘hardball’ come to mind. Ms Dowd speaks of brass knuckles and then shows us a doily; at some level it speaks well of Ms. Dowd as a human being that even when she tries she seems unable to come up with an offer someone can’t refuse.

This is more broadly a problem of gentry liberal politics. Gentry liberals desperately want politics to be clean, to be about the “issues.” And they yearn for their heroes to eschew all those nasty tricks of machine politicians. Thus liberal columnists like Dowd give liberal heroes like Obama two contradictory missions: fight the fight cleanly, but win big. Even when she’s buffeting President Obama over the head with her laptop, screaming at him to fight harder and dirtier, she can only think in terms of ineffective gestures, talking points more clearly recited, and speechmaking.

Maureen Dowd will clearly not be in much demand as a political strategist after this column, but the President needs to pay it some attention. Many liberals like Ms. Dowd have extremely unrealistic ideas about where the country stands and how politics work. They genuinely believe that a huge majority (90 percent!) is slavering at the bit to get more liberal legislation passed. They genuinely believe that the presidency is invested with awesome and numinous powers that can translate the will of the 90 percent into sagacious liberal laws without doing anything dirty or distressing.

When, inevitably, reality falls short of their hopes, they don’t re-examine their ideas about how politics work or where the country stands. Instead they blame the President for failing to deliver what he clearly could if only he were willing to try.

The delusions have no end. Not to imply, of course, that the president is competent. But as this failed presidency gets longer in the tooth, the long knives will be out among the Left against its author. Revolutions always eat their own.

Mathematics, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Being Normal

1 Comment

Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt:

You see, the human desire to mimic and fit in is one of our strongest instincts. We are social apes. And we take our cues from stories, whether those stories unroll before our eyes, are in a sacred book, are passed down in the culture, or are poured at us in books and TV.

Now, here’s the thing – the Marxists understand this all too well. A few of you, before, when I called them a religion (there is no such thing as a secular religion, btw. Believing in afterlife is not needed for a religion. If I’m informed correctly some older forms of Judaism are at least mum on the subject. Communism is a mystery religion, relying on “something happens” to make their paradise come about right here on Earth. To their credit they work towards the ‘something” that is to transform man. To their lack of credit, both their goal and their methods are repugnant.) But they are. They have created their fantastical past paradise – the supposedly communitarian past/female dominant option not included, though they let the feminists run with it – their fall from grace – the introduction of private property – their sin – “greed”, meaning wish for personal improvement in circumstances – and their hope of paradise – the emergence of the homo Sovieticus, though I suppose they don’t call it that now. After that, of course, it would be the return to the communitarian paradise.

(They fail to understand that their communitarian paradise is actually a h*ll of individuals being treated as things, and that, because the collective can’t ever decide things as a collective, an individual ends up taking control. Which takes us right back to feudalism. But let that pass. And having told a commenter not to trust enemies of a religion as information on it, I’m bound to say I’m not. I was taught by true believers. It just didn’t take.)

I’ve always found normality to be highly overrated, myself. It’s not normal, for instance, to be much smarter than average, by definition. I’m always amused when people complain about gays wanting to “normalize” their behavior (which is clearly abnormal), as though there is a moral component to statistics.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Evil

17 Comments

Why does it make “liberals” stupid?

Ms. Garber thinks the fear that the bombers might turn out to be Muslims represents a “sad assumption” that “Americans lack the intellectual equipment and moral imagination to tell the difference between an individual and a group.” This is arbitrary, unfounded and stupid. Let’s put it this way: Americans possess the intellectual equipment and moral imagination to discern correctly the relationships between individuals and groups. In particular, the relationships between individuals and any fanatical movements or criminal conspiracies of which they are a part.

Of course, they have no problem whatsoever with the concept of evil if the people involved had been of the correct white European (not literally Caucasian) ancestry and into guns and militias and Tea Parties. Their disappointment when they were not was quite palpable. It’s only when they are politically correct non-people of that persuasion, and particularly when they are Muslim, that they become “complex.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

Erin Burnett is “surprised that the bombers weren’t stereotypical Americans.”

Of course she was. Because unlike Islamic extremists, “stereotypical Americans” would have no problem whatsoever with setting down an imminent bomb with nails in it next to an eight-year-old child.

These are the morons from whom we receive our “news.”

[Monday morning update]

The futile hunt for the elusive Tea Party murderer continues:

…decent Muslims are not responsible for the atrocity perpetrated by the Tsarnaev brothers. However, it is hopelessly naive at this point to speak of a “tiny minority of extremists” hijacking the religion of a billion people. The radical elements of Islam are larger and more powerful than that. They enjoy financial and cultural support from malevolent political factions who find Islam a comfortable fit with their ideology. The same media that never stops trying to weave an intellectual web between mainstream conservatism and bloodthirsty murderers is willing to discreetly avert its gaze from the radicalization of Islam overseas, and the tentacles these radicals are working patiently to extend into the United States. Islam has a problem, and only good, outspoken Muslims can solve it. We’re not doing them any favors by soft-pedaling the magnitude of the challenge they face, or setting a low bar of expectations for their achievements.

We might have gotten a good look at one of those outspoken good Muslims last week. (It seems patronizing to refer to them as “moderate Muslims.” Moderating between what – support for terrorism and good citizenship? We shouldn’t be looking for the “moderate” region between those “extremes.”) The Tsarnaev brothers’ Uncle Ruslan – a man who must have been going through a private hell few of us can imagine, as word of his nephews’ responsibility for the Boston Marathon bombings spread – thundered that these despicable acts of murder were an insult to the honor of his family, the Chechen people, and Islam. He denounced the terrorists in no uncertain terms, calling them “losers” who sought to ruin the lives of hard-working people making an honorable place for themselves in the great “mini-world” of America. Instead of hunting for the mythical snipe and wumpus of Tea Party murderers, the Left should take a lesson from Uncle Ruslan on calling out the real extremists in our midst.

But it won’t. Doesn’t fit the preferred narrative.

One more point — from comments:

What I can’t stand is the use of so-called experts and talking heads to fill the airtime when none of them know what they’re talking about. This is the time when their audiences are at the highest, the known facts are at their fewest, and people will remember things for a long time that very often turn out to be untrue. It’s almost to the point where we should apply the “48 hour rule” to any news coverage of a major news story such as a mass shooting or terrorist bombing. Treat everything you hear or read in the media in the first 48 hours with a high degree of skepticism.

I continue to recall with amusement the “aviation expert” that Fox News had after the first plane crashed into the twin towers, assuring us that this must be pilot error of some kind, and couldn’t be a deliberate attack. As he was sagely explaining this to us, the second plane hit, live, in the background.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Yes, we “right wingers” celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday every April, because, you know, Hitler was such an individualistic, freedom-loving, tax-hating, limited-government kind of guy.

I’d like to see pressure on NPR to fire this lying, slandering hack. OK, well maybe not lying — she’s probably nutty and stupid enough to believe it.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Law Professors And The ObamaCare Lawsuits

Why did they get it so wrong?

Almost without exception, law professors dismissed the possibility that the Patient Protection and Affordable Act Act (“PPACA”) might be unconstitutional — but something went wrong on the way to the courthouse. What explains the epic failure of law professors to accurately predict how Article III judges would handle the case? After considering three possible defenses/justifications, this essay identifies five factors that help explain the erroneous predictions of our nation’s elite law professors, who were badly wrong, but never in doubt.

It’s because they live in a leftist ivory-tower academic cocoon, where their idiosyncratic theories are rarely challenged or tested, until they collide with the real world, as they did with SCOTUS.

[Via Nick Rosenkranz]

Philosophy, Space, Technology and Society

The Frontier

21 Comments

Ross Douthat wonders what happened to it:

Go back and read the science fiction of the 1940s and ’50s, and you’ll be struck by the vaulting confidence that this expansion would continue upward and outward, and that a new age of exploration was just waiting to be born.

Today that confidence has vanished. Our Mars rovers are impressive and our billionaires keep pouring money into private spaceflight, but neither project captures the public’s imagination, and the very term “Space Age” seems antique. The Kepler 62 discovery might have earned more headlines at a less horrific moment, but it would have fallen out of the news soon enough.

It’s possible that we’re less interested in space travel because we feel that it’s a luxury good at a time when we have bigger problems here on Earth. But it’s also possible that we’ve gradually turned inward, to our smartphone screens and Facebook profiles, because we know that spaceflight isn’t going to get us to another world anytime soon.

Actually, if the latter is the case, “we” are too pessimistic, because we’re paying too much attention to NASA’s dysfunction, and not enough to what’s happening in the real world of spaceflight. I do think that the billionaires are capturing peoples’ attention, and as real things start to happen, they’ll do so much more.

Business, Space

Antares

8 Comments

Well, they had a nominal liftoff through first-stage separation. And they just separated the fairing (which has been a problem for OSC recently). Stage two has ignited.

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, it’s in orbit. Looks like everything went by the book. Congratulations to the OSC team.

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

When Professors Attack

4 Comments

I found this to be telling, and typical:

Should an organization that is largely composed of UNC professors be involved with participants in such a vicious political smear campaign as the one suggested by Blueprint N.C.? Perhaps it is within their legal rights, but the title “scholar” implies a higher standard than the down-and-dirty program planned by Blueprint.

To be a “scholar” means to adhere to a high level of objectivity. It also suggests that one uses terms with precise meaning. But there was little objectivity or precision at the Duke event, and given the lack of professionalism exhibited by some of its leaders, Scholars for a Progressive North Carolina and Blueprint NC are a natural pairing.

In one instance, UNC-Greensboro history professor Lisa Levenstein described Republicans as “ideology-driven” whereas liberals are “not driven by ideology” but are instead motivated by “the common good.” This is intentionally misleading and false; the liberal concept of “common good” in itself implies an ideology of sorts. (Unless of course, she does not comprehend the meaning of “ideology,” which would be cause for great concern about her ability to teach history at the university level.)

My emphasis. This is the century-old Leftist trope/tripe that they are “pragmatic” while those who disagree with them are “ideological,” and of course, ideology is bad (except, apparently, when it masquerades as a religion that justifies suicide bombings). I’ve been meaning to write a piece about the irony that the people actually had a choice last fall between an ideologue who claimed to be a pragmatic empiricist, and someone who had no actual political principles, but just wanted to be president and try to make the country actually work better. They went for the ideologue.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Low Fat, High Carb

31 Comments

I’m sure that this is just a coincidence:

It’s an interesting coincidence that this increase in obesity started roughly at the same time that the U.S. government started to advocate low-fat, high-carb diets. I remember that period pretty clearly, because I thought it was wonderful. Entenmann’s came out with no-fat pastries — the no-fat cherry coffeecake was one of my favorites — I could eat as much rice as I wanted, pasta was good and more pasta was better, as long as you didn’t use butter because of the evil saturated fat and cholesterol. But margarine, rich in transfats made by hydrogenating corn oil, was much better.

I remember that period clearly, too. It was during that time, after my father’s first heart attack at age 44, that the health gurus told him to go low-fat and eat more grains. Ten years later, he had another one, from which he died a month later. I blame the FDA/nutrition-industrial complex for his death (though it didn’t help that he smoked and had grown up on bagels, knishes and potatoes). And I find it particularly galling when idiots think that it’s anti-science to not buy the health-destroying junk science of the conventional wisdom, when the actual science indicates that it’s killing us.

[Update a couple minutes later]

In reading the Yglesias piece, it’s worth pointing out the flaw in the logic. No one is claiming that humans aren’t capable of rapidly evolving to accommodate dietary changes. That’s a straw man.

The issue is whether or not there is any evolutionary pressure for us to evolve to be healthy with a modern big-agro diet. In short, there is not. If you’re lactose intolerant in a dairy-based society, you’re unlikely to thrive or reproduce. But when it comes to grains, people do just fine on such diets when young, in terms of reaching reproductive age and rearing kids. The bad effects hit us generally later in life, when our genes no longer care (yes, I’m anthropomorphizing, but you know what I mean) whether we live or die, or are healthy or ill. So we go on, generation after generation, continuing to eat crap that’s bad for us, and our bodies not bothering to adapt.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

“If It Saves Just One Life”

11 Comments

I agree with this take on how the terrorists won in Boston. This sort of irrational risk aversion is the theme of my book. “Safe” is never an option, in any absolute sense. In order to prevent a potential death of a citizen, the authorities shut the whole town down, costing hundreds of millions of dollars to the local (and probably national) economy. The whole town, that is, except for the Duncan Donuts shops. Which, as he says, really tells you everything you need to know. It was security theater, just like TSA.

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