Well, they’re certainly not encouraged by the current educational system.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
Logical Fallacy
In a review of a movie trailer (and a forties movie reviewer) by Lileks:
Let me just go on record as believing that it is not a good or necessary thing to make comedic action movies about 12-year-old girls who shoot people in the head. Because this is what I think of when I read a quote about the loss of dignity and importance – the way a culture, not individuals, loses its sense of dignity and importance by finding opportunities to leach the innocence from anything previously regarded as sacrosanct.
The comments on the HotAir thread are full of the usual scoff-talk – why, comics were once considered corrupting to children! Elvis was forbidden to be seen from the waist down! Piano legs were covered by Victorians! Christians chopped peeners off Roman statues! and so on. If there was once a standard now seen as silly and puritanical, it must mean our current standards are the same.
This is the same fallacy as that engaged by someone who, in response to a critique of his loony ideas cries, “They laughed at Einstein, too!” To which the rational rejoinder is, “They also laughed at Soupy Sales.” It’s an unjustified extrapolation, and a more robust defense is required.
Taking The Modern Age
The engineers, the people who actually make this stuff work (not to denigrate the financiers, marketers, etc. whose efforts are also necessary to fund the engineers) are underappreciated in society. As is technology in general. As he points out, people are complaining about having twenty-minute delays on a trip that would have taken their ancestors (and not distant ancestors — great-great-grandparents) months.
Dogs And Cats
Tim Robbins gave money to Michele Bachmann?
I wonder it there’s a relationship between this and his breakup with Susan Sarandon? Perhaps he had his own road to Damascus experience?
As Instapundit notes, we’ll know this is for real if he gives money to Scott Brown.
Complexity And Danger
Bob Clarebrough has some useful thoughts on the risk of space flight, for NASA and private enterprise, over at The Space Review. This is a very important topic, and one that I want to write a long post on, when I get unburied from current activities.
Some New Year’s Resolutions
…from Frank J.:
While continuing to trust science, let’s make sure the scientists we’re getting it from aren’t douche nozzles.
I like science — we all like science — but if we’re going to throw a huge wrench into our economy, let’s make sure it’s not on the advice of scientists who treat data like a used-car salesman treats an old Chevy.
Next time we pick a leader, let’s make sure he has more qualifications than a bunch of empty slogans of the sort you’d use to sell carbonated beverages.
Yeah, we won’t get a chance in the next year, but let’s try and do that at least once this next decade. It’s hard, but we can do it. Yes we can.
If we have another economic crisis, let’s not hand a blank checkbook to a bunch of Democrats.
Politicians love spending money — Democrats especially. If we had a problem of having way too much money and needed to get rid of it quickly, you’d be a fool to elect anyone other than Democrats. But if the problem is that we’re running out of money, it may be a bad idea to put Democrats in charge, because their solution to having too little money will inevitably be to spend more money.
He has more.
New Year’s Predictions
From Alan K. Henderson (I’ve always wondered what the “K” is for…):
A band of Somali pirates will relocate from the Indian Ocean to the Caribbean, in a plot to hijack the cruise ship Oasis of the Seas. In a case of bad timing, Chuck Norris and Steven Segal will be among the passengers when the strike occurs. Tiger Woods and his wife Elin Nordegren will also be on board; she will incapacitate one of the pirates with a sand wedge.
During the Daytona 500 trials, Michaele and Tareq Salahi will mysteriously emerge from Mark Martin’s car.
Dan Brown of will release yet another Da Vinci Code sequel, in which symbologist Robert Langdon discovers clues in the CRU climate data that ultimately lead to the Bavarian Illuminati.
There are more.
Laugh
…so you don’t cry. Dave Barry reviews the year:
It was a year of Hope — at first in the sense of “I feel hopeful!” and later in the sense of “I hope this year ends soon!”
It was also a year of Change, especially in Washington, where the tired old hacks of yesteryear finally yielded the reins of power to a group of fresh, young, idealistic, new-idea outsiders such as Nancy Pelosi. As a result Washington, rejecting “business as usual,” finally stopped trying to solve every problem by throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at it and instead started trying to solve every problem by throwing trillions of taxpayer dollars at it.
He goes through it month by month.
The Foolishness Of Reliance On Authority
Roger Simon runs into a Hollywood nitwit who believes in global warming because NASA says so.
Point 1: “NASA” doesn’t say so. One duplicitous ideologue masquerading as a climate scientist at one particular NASA center says so. That center had to confess error on his behalf (no doubt through clenched teeth).
Point 2: “NASA” has no opinion on anything. NASA is a government agency, with thousands of employees, of varying opinions. The previous NASA administrator, in fact, famously outraged the warm mongers with his own skepticism, but if any one person could have spoken for NASA at the time, it would have been Mike Griffin, not James Hansen.
Point 3: NASA has had many spectacular achievements in the past. It has also had many spectacular failures. To rely on it, as an agency, as a source of authority for something (particularly when there is no official agency position on it) is foolish. In fact, this false sense that people have in NASA as an authority has contributed greatly to the difficulty over the past decades to raise money for private ventures. This is because investors, when doing due diligence on an investment decisions, have often gone to someone at NASA who knows nothing about the venture, and relied on their foolish advice, for no other reason than they worked for NASA.
Anyway, this gets back to the foolishness of relying on people who claim to be scientists, instead of on science itself.
Avatar And Pantheism
Some thoughts from Ross Douthat.