…and radical politics. As he notes, let’s hope that SCOTUS slaps down this evil once and for all.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Princess Of Mars
If that had been the title of the movie mistitled John Carter, I am confident that it would be doing much better at the box office. It was the title of the book on which it was based and, unlike Disney, Edgar Rice Burroughs knew how to sell books. It would help as well, of course, if the trailers had offered ample views of Lynn Collins rather than Mars monsters. It would have brought in the adolescent males by the hordes, just as DiCaprio brought the female tweens into Titanic.
We took the afternoon off (from normal weekend chores) to go see it at the matinee in 3-D IMAX, and we had a great time. Yes, it’s harder to suspend disbelief about the features of the planet than it was in E. R. Burroughs’ day, but it’s still a great story. Sadly, the theater was almost empty, both because of Disney’s awful marketing, and because it was competing with the opening weekend of a movie about teens hunting each other down.
I was amused to hear at the end someone talking about how it was a rip off of Star Wars. Obviously, whoever said it had no concept of what George Lucas was reading as a boy. I imagine that it was pitched as “Star Wars meets Gladiator,” but it’s a lot more than that. I highly recommend, and I particularly recommend it for families, who want a great role model for their daughters.
The New Neo-Nazis
I have some thoughts on Toulouse and political miscategorization, over at PJMedia.
“Clunky, Anachronistic”
Judy Miller on the death of The Death of a Salesman. I had to read it in a literature course in college (Arthur Miller was a Michigan grad). I agree, it hasn’t held up well.
Diminished Climate Alarmism
Lessons from l’affaire Heartland:
The Heartland affair has shown not merely that some climate alarmists (namely Gleick) will stoop to outright deception, and most of his peers will close ranks to defend him in a sort of Green Wall of Silence. Perhaps more disturbing, it reveals that these people really have no idea how their opponents on the climate issue actually view the world. So when they dismiss skeptics as having no legitimate arguments, it should make outsiders take pause.
Without being a trained climate scientist, I can read the various blogs and try to parse the academic papers, but ultimately I have to rely a lot on the good faith and judgment of the scientists themselves. The Heartland affair has reassured my earlier conviction that the case for climate alarmism is far weaker than the alarmists have been telling us.
His emphasis. I think it applies to how the Left views its skeptics in general.
ObamaCare
…approaches its day of reckoning. As do its authors, in November.
Rarely has one law so exemplified the worst of the Leviathan state — grotesque cost, questionable constitutionality and arbitrary bureaucratic coerciveness. Little wonder the president barely mentioned it in his latest State of the Union address. He wants to be reelected. He’d rather talk about other things.
And no celebration of its two-year anniversary. I guess it wasn’t as much of a BFD as Joe Biden said it was. Or perhaps it is, but not in the way he thought.
[Update a few minutes later]
Happy second birthday, ObamaCare! “Now let’s destroy it, root and branch.”
[Update a while later]
Five things the Democrats (politically) got wrong on ObamaCare. Did they get anything right?
[Mid-morning update]
Heh: “Democrats so misjudged everything about Obamacare, you would think they never read the bill or something.”
[Late morning update]
WSJ: Liberty and ObamaCare.
America’s Real Fiscal Gap
Over $200 trillion dollars? Sadly, give our current policies, I can believe it.
The Colliers Series
Started sixty years ago, introducing the American public to the coming age of space. It later led to a series of Disney short animations, shown on Sunday nights.
Test-Tube Hamburger
This could be a useful breakthough in terms of a cheaper protein source. Via Natural News, who is naturally whining about it.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems sort of related: Red meat makes you happier. The science is settled!
Is Climatology Pseudoscience?
Some thoughts from Judith Curry (and indirectly, Gary Taubes).
I think that it’s become pretty clear that regardless of the status of climatology per se, many of its leading practitioners, or at least, most-public proponents, have shown themselves to be pseudoscientists. And specifically, I mean Michael Mann, Phil Jones, and James Hansen among others (not to mention the disgraceful and disgraced Peter Gleick).