Category Archives: Media Criticism

The Low-Info Hipster Morons Who Voted For Obama

…learn that elections have consequences:

That mean old company won’t throw extra cash at them so that they can live the New York City lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed! Dear Dudes: Companies are in business to stay in business and employ people. Obamacare regulations are making that increasingly more difficult; the costs are staggering and burdensome. That whole “you can keep your plan” deal? Obama lied.

And anyone with half a brain would have known that. But they’re products of the public educational system, and universities.

Jeffrey Toobin

If you find yourself in bed with him, get out.

And along those lines, I could watch this all day.

So what do I think about all of this same-sex marriage business? Despite the fact that for as long as I’ve given the matter any thought, it has been quite clear to me that homosexuals are born, not made, it’s a bad idea to redefine a multi-millenia-old institution. As Frank J. noted the other day, the problem is that government and marriage need a divorce. Let them have civil unions so they can get the same legal benefits that heterosexual couples have, and leave marriage to the church. If they find a church that will marry them, more power to them.

And please, spare me the idiotic straw-man arguments about how it won’t really cause heterosexual couples to divorce and go find a new squeeze with the same genital configuration as themselves, and the ban on gay marriage was the only thing preventing this. No one believes that, no one argues that. The people who will be affected by this aren’t currently married couples, but confused kids on the fence. If you really do have a choice, at least in this society, choosing het generally makes for a better life, and we shouldn’t be encouraging the opposite. I don’t believe that not allowing same-sex marriages is discrimination against homosexuals. They continue to have the same rights as everyone else — to marry someone of the opposite sex, regardless of how unsatisfactory they might find such a union. It is, however, admittedly, gender discrimination. That is, Sue is allowed to marry Phil, but Bob isn’t. That to me is a much stronger argument. And that is one that can only be resolved by divorcing marriage from government.

On the legal issues, I’ve always thought that DOMA was unconstitutional under the 10th Amendment — I’m no fair-weather federalist. But the full faith and credit problem isn’t going to go away. It may very well be that “married” gay couples won’t be able to move to some states and have their marriage recognized. I’m surprised that it wasn’t more of an issue in argument.

On Prop 8, I think that it stinks that the government of California won’t defend its own duly-passed-by-the-people law before the Supreme Court, leaving the people of the state in dubious standing. Regardless of what one thinks of the issue, this is a terrible precedent, giving the government an effective veto over any law it doesn’t like and disenfranchising the voters. That in itself should be challenged in court, though obviously, even if they were forced to defend it, there would be nothing to prevent them from doing a crummy job of it. That, I think, is actually a bigger issue than whether or not gay marriage should be legal in California.

[Update a while later]

As always, a lot of interesting legal discussion over at Volokh’s place.

[Update late morning]

“My gay-marriage dilemma“:

In actuality, I support neither side in this debate. The radical identitarian Left is all of a sudden pretending to be Constitutionalists, citing the 14th Amendment as if they actually gave a sh*t about equal protection under the law — this canard after decades of shilling for affirmative action, PC campus speech codes, reparations, anti-male divorce courts, the subsidization of contraception by religious objectors, “abortion on demand,” etc. I have no time for this gang of phonies and tyrants; I don’t believe a word they say.

An analogous, if exaggerated, situation would be if I lived under a fascist military junta and were scheduled for execution the following week, the only way to stop this being to support the planned communist coup of the underground demagogue. I would know what was coming: I would trade one set of executioners for another. There’s no room for pure principle in a case like this.

Yes, that’s my problem, too. Many of the proponents of this do not do it in good faith.

[Early afternoon update]

“Same-sex marriage is not the same as opposite-sex marriage.”

[Update a while later]

Thoughts on being dissed by Rush Limbaugh.

[Bumped]

Obesity, Diet And Calories

Another blow to the mindless thermodynamic theory, and hope for a breakthrough:

Slimming bacteria work their magic in either of two ways, studies of gut microbiota show. They seem to raise metabolism, allowing people to burn off a 630-calorie chocolate chip muffin more easily.

They also extract fewer calories from the muffin in the first place. In contrast, fattening bacteria wrest every last calorie from food.

Transferring slimming bacteria into obese people might be one way to give them the benefits of weight-loss surgery without an operation. It might also be possible to devise a menu that encourages the proliferation of slimming bacteria and reduces the population of fattening bacteria.

I’ve always been thin, regardless of what I ate (though as I got older, I did put on a few pounds, which came back off when I went paleo), and have never felt particularly virtuous about it. I don’t have much patience for thin people who lecture fat ones about their caloric intake. People do have different metabolisms, and what you eat can affect it, but the “diet and exercise” nazis don’t want to believe it.

The New Civility

Yeah, that national conversation about guns is coming along just fine:

Eddie Maxwell sent a mass email to state legislators at 10:54 p.m. on Jan. 27, warning them that even attempting to introduce a gun control bill was, in his opinion, a violation of state law.

Mitchell responded from his public, ALHouse.gov email account at 11:59 p.m., telling Maxwell: “Your folk never used all this sheit (sic) to protect my folk from your slave-holding, murdering, adulterous, baby-raping, incestuous, snaggle-toothed, backward-a**ed, inbreed (sic), imported criminal-minded kin folk.”

“That’s not the type of reply I expect to receive from a state legislator,” Maxwell replied on Feb. 11.

Obviously his expectations are too high.

Poor Poor Pitiful Mann

The involuntary public figure. And Monckton is piling on:

I, too, can name-drop sanctimoniously, just like Michael E. Mann.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been subject to a constant onslaught of character attacks and smears on websites, in op-eds, by a politicized and now-discredited clerk in the House of Lords acting without the authority of the House, in Michael E. Mann’s Climategate emails, and on left-leaning news outlets, usually by front groups or individuals tied to global-warming profiteers of the traffic-light tendency (the Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds): groups like Greenpeace, Deutsche Bank, the Environmental Defense Fund, Munich Re, and the World Wide Fund for Nature.

As the website WattsUpWithThat has frequently pointed out, climate researchers are in a street fight with those who seek to discredit the data that now comprehensively disprove the once-accepted scientific “evidence” simply because it is inconvenient for many who are profiting from attacking fossil fuel use.

Being the focus of such attacks has a lead lining: I’ve become an accidental public figure in the debate over human-caused climate change. Reluctant at first, I remain reluctant embrace this role, but nevertheless I choose to use my position in the public eye to inform the discourse surrounding the issue of climate change.

Despite continued albeit diminishing skepticism in official quarters, in reality the evidence against dangerous human-caused climate change is now very strong. By digging up and burning fossil fuels, humans are releasing carbon that had been buried in the Earth into the atmosphere, helping to stave off the mass extinctions that would follow from the next – and long overdue – Ice Age. And storms like extra-tropical system Sandy and hurricane Irene, and the oft-precedented heat, drought, and wild-fires of last summer cannot in logic, reason, or science be attributed to “global warming” that has become conspicuous chiefly by its near-total absence over the past two decades and perhaps more. In a deterministic climate object operating on a rational world, that which has not happened cannot have caused that which has.

If we continue down this path of lavishly-funded nonsense, we will be leaving our children and grandchildren a different planet—one with more extreme Socialism, more pronounced and widespread scientific illiteracy, worse episodes of cant even than those of Michael E. Mann (if that were possible), and greater competition for diminishing taxpayer subsidies. It will be worse than we ever thought.

My emphasis. As a commenter at JunkScience noted, that’s bumper sticker material, there.

The Economic Illiteracy

…of Fauxcahontas:

Whereas the regulatory points made in the Senate Banking hearings are esoteric and easily abused to create YouTube moments, the $22 minimum wage issue is readily understandable to the public and understood as absurd. What small business or retail outlet could survive if the minimum salary were $45,000 per year, regardless of what the employee did or what experience the employee had?

The country’s in the very best of hands.