Category Archives: Media Criticism

The Apollo 11 Landing Site

Jeez, another fake photo. I see they’re just trying to maintain the fiction that humans walked on the moon. I mean, c’mon! You can’t even see stars in that picture. You’d think they’d at least try to photoshop them in.

[Update in the afternoon]

Wow, are my commenters gullible. They really believe this. Come on, people, just look at the lighting and the shadows! Obviously fake, just like the landing itself. And that story about the astronaut punching out that truth teller.

Anybody But Obama

Despite the hopes of the foolish, the Tea Party hasn’t gone away:

“When it comes to the presidential contest, I think the tea partiers will turn up in droves,” she told The Daily Caller.

“They aren’t rallying in the street anymore — I think they’ve been there, done that, so they appear to be quieter. But tea party chapters are still alive and vigorous, and they are just chomping at the bit to pull a lever in November.”

What’s more, says Foley, is that tea partiers will ultimately rally behind whomever the GOP nominee turns out to be.

“And frankly, I think many tea partiers are eager to pull the lever in favor of the Republican presidential nominee — whoever that turns out to be — simply because, from their perspective, that person’s policies will be clearly preferable to those of President Obama,” she said.

And then there’s this:

Foley is the rarest of species: a tea party supporter in liberal academia. A law professor at Florida International University and chair in constitutional litigation for the Institute of Justice, Foley says many of her liberal colleagues didn’t receive her pro-tea party book too well. (RELATED: Full coverage of the tea party movement)

“It’s more than a little ironic that some of the most close-minded folks I have ever met make their living as professors whose entire job is to engage in scholarly inquiry and convey that spirit of open-minded inquiry to their students,” she said. “It never ceases to amaze and disappoint me.”

I’m long past either amazement or disappointment. They can do neither any more.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a review of Foley’s book, which explains the Tea Party to the idiots in the media.

Nitrates And Nitrites

The junk nutritional science:

…a 2005 study by scientists with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute with investigators supported by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, found that sodium nitrite infusions led to the production of nitric oxide which increased blood flow and protected the hearts and livers in mice undergoing experimental heart attacks and liver injuries, reducing heart muscle and liver tissue damage.

All of this experimental research is preliminary but does illustrate that in the past 15 years, “we’ve gone from considering all of these things to be toxic and carcinogenic to realizing that [nitrites are] playing a fundamental homeostatic role,” said Dr. Ferric Fang, M.D., professor of laboratory medicine and microbiology at the University of Washington in Seattle. They’re a normal, natural part of a healthy body and not chemicals to fear.

So, hotdogs and processed meats are condemned as junk food because they contain nitrates, which they don’t, while vegetables are declared health food because they’re free from the same chemicals, which they’re not. It may be awhile before people will get to the point of calling bacon and hotdogs health food.

Woody Allen’s notion in Sleeper is looking more and more prophetic.

[Update mid morning]

Some disgusting anti-bacon propaganda.

“A Refuge Under Siege”

A leftist Irish film maker discovers the truth about Israel:

He talked slowly about his time in Gaza. He spoke about 20 Arab teenagers filled with ecstasy tablets and sent running towards the base he’d patrolled. Each strapped with a bomb and carrying a hand-held detonator.

The pills in their bloodstream meant they felt no pain. Only a headshot would take them down.

Conversations like this are normal in Tel Aviv. I began to experience the sense of isolation Israelis feel. An isolation that began in the ghettos of Europe and ended in Auschwitz.

Israel is a refuge — but a refuge under siege, a refuge where rockets rain death from the skies. And as I made the effort to empathise, to look at the world through their eyes. I began a new intellectual journey. One that would not be welcome back home.

The problem began when I resolved to come back with a film that showed both sides of the coin. Actually there are many more than two. Which is why my film is called Forty Shades of Grey. But only one side was wanted back in Dublin. My peers expected me to come back with an attack on Israel. No grey areas were acceptable.

An Irish artist is supposed to sign boycotts, wear a PLO scarf, and remonstrate loudly about The Occupation. But it’s not just artists who are supposed to hate Israel. Being anti-Israel is supposed to be part of our Irish identity, the same way we are supposed to resent the English.

But hating Israel is not part of my personal national identity. Neither is hating the English. I hold an Irish passport, but nowhere upon this document does it say I am a republican, or a Palestinian.

Oh, that’s just crazy talk. Crazy fascist.

The True Meaning Of The Killing Fields

Some questions about Cambodia:

…what happened in Cambodia is what happened in the French Revolution, and in Stalin’s purges and mass collectivization campaigns, and in Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, only on a proportionately larger scale. It was mass murder in the name of equality. It wasn’t “genocide”; it was Communist utopianism carried to its logical extreme. The Khmer Rouge, who called themselves Maoists, believed that the most important social and political value was equality and that in order to create their new, classless society in which everyone was equal, it was necessary to exterminate anyone who might be smarter, or better educated, or wealthier, or more talented than anyone else. Thus, they killed the educated, the bourgeoisie, the middle classes, and the rich; movie stars, pop singers, authors, urban residents, and workers for the former government; and anyone who protested — as well as the families of all the above. Towards the end, they also killed cadres who were thought to be a political threat. Whatever their crimes were, the Khmer Rouge do not seem to have been motivated by racial, ethnic, or religious hatred.

Why then do Cambodians and the world call the mass murders by the Khmer Rouge “genocide”? I can think of several possible reasons. One is the superficial similarity to other mass slaughters — as noted earlier, the pictures of the Cambodian killing fields look very much like the pictures from the German concentration camps. Surely many people who are largely ignorant of history know only that similarity. Another reason is the fact that the victims of genocide are sympathetic. The U.N. creates commissions, and wealthy countries send money. Cambodia today is filled with NGOs bringing aid of various kinds. The desire for international sympathy might explain why Cambodians use the genocide label.

However, I suspect that the most important reason for the usage worldwide is that many people in the international media, international agencies, and international NGOs (not to mention academia) are reluctant to face up to the crimes committed by Communism in the name of equality. To do so might call into question the weight attached by them to equality as the most important social value and undermine the multicultural faith that evil is predominantly the product of inequality, racism, ethnic hatred, or religious fanaticism. That cannot be permitted, so such crimes must be either ignored or mislabeled. And, of course, the remaining Communist regimes in the world are only too happy to cooperate in characterizing the killing fields as the products of irrational paranoia on the part of Pol Pot and his gang rather than the perfectly rational result of the quest for perfect equality.

It’s useful to remember (or to be aware, if one wasn’t) that Pol Pot was educated (so to speak) in Paris. That was where he was radicalized, another child of the malignant Rousseau.

And when you hear some of the hate and misanthropy coming from the American Left (and too many of the Watermelon Greens), it could easily happen here as well, if they ever are given the power they crave. Particularly if they ever achieve their ongoing goal of disarming the people.

If You Can’t Learn From Detroit

You’re probably incapable of learning:

When American cities embraced the high cost, high regulation statist model two generations or so ago, they were often the richest and most dynamic places in the country. Increasingly “progressive” policies, with higher wages for unionized teachers, bigger bureaucracies enforcing tighter regulations, more “planning” by qualified technocrats and more government services and benefits to improve the quality of residents’ lives were supposed to take the American city into a new golden age.

It’s hard to think of many social experiments that have more disastrously failed. Now many of these once flourishing cities are hollowed out shells, while around them suburbs and increasingly exurbs flourish away from the deadening influence of urbanist politics. None of this affects the hold of progressive and urbanist ideology on true believers; if anything, they believe even more passionately in the cause. Obviously the problem is that we haven’t spent enough on enough tenured teachers, haven’t written enough new regulations and established enough new bureaus to enforce them, haven’t published enough white papers by enough credentialed planners, haven’t extracted enough taxes and provided enough services. If we could just tax the suburbs and exurbs more heavily and spend more of the money in the cities, all would be well.

It’s a classic case of the definition of insanity.

[Noon update]

No, it’s not just Detroit.

“Ishtar Lands On Mars”

This is a cruel headline at the Gray Lady.

I haven’t seen the movie (we were actually thinking about seeing it this weekend, but a combination of Patricia being under the weather and sticker shock at the prices for the 3D/Imax kept us away for now. But nowhere in the article does it really say, or at least support the notion, that it’s a bad movie (a Ishtar undeniably was, in addition to being a box-office flop) — it’s a business failure in that they spent too much in making it. The criticism that it “…was a bewildering mash-up, starting during the Civil War and moving to the Old West before leaping to a planet called Barsoom (Mars), home to tusked, four-armed creatures called Tharks,” sounds just like the book to me, which is an SF classic and the inspiration for much of the great SF in the twentieth century (including Star Wars, to the degree that it’s more than space opera). It seems as though perhaps the critics aren’t capable of handling complex story lines. Certainly, John Miller thinks differently.

Anyway, I hope that it does make its money back — I’d like to see it have sequels.

Oh, and speaking of SF, Sarah Hoyt has a review of (occasional commenter) Rick Locke’s new book, which looks like a good read.

[Late Sunday evening update]

Bruce Webster has a more extensive, mixed review.

Bambi Versus Godzilla

Watching Mark Steyn go after Sandra Fluke is almost, but not quite enough for me to take pity on her:

…the most basic issue here is not religious morality, individual liberty, or fiscal responsibility. It’s that a society in which middle-aged children of privilege testify before the most powerful figures in the land to demand state-enforced funding for their sex lives at a time when their government owes more money than anyone has ever owed in the history of the planet is quite simply nuts.

…Insane as this scenario is, the Democrat-media complex insists that everyone take it seriously. When it emerged the other day that Amanda Clayton, a 24-year-old Michigan million-dollar-lottery winner, still receives $200 of food stamps every month, even the press and the bureaucrats were obliged to acknowledge the ridiculousness. Yet the same people are determined that Sandra Fluke be treated with respect as a pioneering spokesperson for the rights of the horizontally challenged.

Like him, I pass.