Making the case once again. I’ve been saying that for years, before he was president.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Hooverville Blues
John Podhoretz isn’t impressed with Clint Eastwood’s latest movie:
If you make the mistake of going to see J. Edgar, you will emerge much older by the time the movie finishes, even though only two hours will have passed. Forget all that questionable talk about how those newly tested subatomic particles move so quickly that they violate the rules of time and can order a drink before they walk into the bar. It is Clint Eastwood, Hollywood’s only functioning octogenarian director, and not a subatomic particle, who has figured out a way to breach Einstein’s relativity theory. In the theaters in which his movies play, time literally slows down to the speed of an ant. I was so ancient by the time J. Edgar was done that I went home and watched five reruns of Law and Order.
There’s more, including a John Voight reference.
Has Second Life Failed?
Too soon to tell. Pooky Amsterdam mercilessly fisks a typical clueless story from the MSM.
Question For Space News Subscribers
Does anyone know if they ran my letter to the editor last week?
Don’t Believe The News
This is unintentionally hilarious:
Kerrick also spoke about the current status of the NASA Space Shuttle Program and its official retirement on Aug. 31. The media has caused a lot of worry and uncertainty about the future of NASA’s role in galactic travel, she said.
“Don’t believe the news,” she said. “Through this whole process, I learned not to trust the news.”
Although it is true that the program is gone, Kerrick said, NASA will be around until at least 2020. She also said Orbital, a private company based in Virginia, and SpaceX, a company based in California, are the primary sources of funding to continue the development of shuttles capable of going beyond low-Earth orbit.
It’s unclear whether she really said this stuff, or if the reporter just garbled whatever she actually did say, but there are at least four problems with that last paragraph.
[Via Jeff Foust]
Today’s Movie Stars
I think he’s being a little selective. I think that there are Cary Grants and Jimmy Stewarts today, but Leo DeCaprio isn’t one of them.
What Occupy Harvard
…should tell their elite liberal parents on Thanksgiving:
The man you think is a “sucker” because he votes for Republican candidates who don’t seem to give a hoot about him will vote for them every time. He looks at you, the crowd of The-Fix-Is-Always-In, and he casts his lot with the crowd of wealth and initiative.
You see, Mom and Dad, they don’t lie about his prospects. They tell him that he has to sink or swim. They don’t disrespect his willpower by promising that government will make life easier for him. They tell him that they respect his individuality. They tell him straight out what you, the liberal elite, know to be true but will never say. They tell him that life in America is winner-take-all, and that they are the people who will let him keep what he has. They tell him that his religion, his wife’s capacity to reproduce, his children—whether they are “successful” or not—are his treasure. They tell him that they don’t care if he is a person of modest ambition, little sophistication, and humble means. What they value is his capacity to change his own life.
What you tell him is that he should put his life in your hands. Yet you scorn his religion. You mock his faith in the sacredness of conception. You deride his belief in family. You tell him that his love for hunting makes him a murderer, and that his terror at being economically displaced makes him a xenophobe and a racist. Then you emasculate his hope for the future by telling him that if his ship comes in—that dream of a ship that makes the grinding disappointment of daily life worth living through—you’ll help yourself to a big slice of it. And you expect him to believe your rhetoric about fairness and equality when, all the while, you are accusing him of gullibility in his politics and bad faith toward the least fortunate of his fellow citizens. When, all the while, you are living untouched by your own policies. When you are cushioned against life’s hardness, not by government, but by simply knowing other people in your class. You expect him to buy your talk about equitable distribution of wealth when you are sailing through tax loopholes off into the sunset. For this man, his emotions make all the rational sense in the world.
Indeed.
Is The AP Panicking?
Now they’re trying to pretend that the Democrats weren’t totally on board with the Occupoopers.
[Update mid morning]
Obama’s coming Occupy nightmare.
What The Occupiers Believe And Why They Believe It
It’s indoctrination:
During the 2008 campaign, Obama’s critics often called him a “radical,” a “socialist” or even a “Marxist” and were either dismissed as hysterics or condemned for “McCarthyism.” It was not widely noted that, for those too young to remember America’s Cold War struggle against Soviet tyranny, the accusation of “Marxism” doesn’t carry much weight, while “McCarthyism” is at most something they’ve read about in books. (Stan Evans’s Blacklisted by History probably isn’t on the collegiate reading list.) Voters who were 25 in 2008 were in first grade when the Berlin Wall came down. If they have some idea that the Soviet empire was a bad thing, they have little idea of why it was bad. And this ignorance is no accident.
To explain why the Bolshevik experiment failed so spectacularly would require that students be taught the errors of socialism, which would necessarily require an explanation of the superiority of the market economy to the socialist planned economy. And the left-wing orientation of today’s academic establishment — “Down With Capitalist Education!” to quote a sign in a protest today by Cal State university faculty — pretty much prohibits any such explanation.
Seventeen-year-olds taught that they are “the 99 percent” and that advocates of economic freedom are “f–king up our future” have not been merely miseducated, but have been quite literally indoctrinated. But as Buckley said, they would be “outraged by the suggestion” that they have not arrived at their beliefs “by independent intellectual exertion.”
These young people have not been taught Marx and Lenin. Rather, they have had their heads stuffed with nebulous ideas about “equality,” “rights” and “social justice” by teachers (and journalists and movie producers) who cherish romantic mythology about the righteous glories of Sixties radical movements.
The other problem is that Marxism is an emotionally appealing argument, to those who have never been taught how to actually think.
[Update a while later]
“The putrid stench of a century of folk Marxism.”
Rick Perry Is An Idiot
At least based on his interview with O’Reilly.
No, the Occupy Wall Streeters are not looking for jobs, Rick. They’re looking for a big paycheck to cash in on their worthless college degrees, if they even have them.
But even worse, knowing that you were going into that interview that you would be asked about the president’s comments about “Americans being lazy” and knowing that your commercial had taken him out of context, in that he was talking about us bringing in foreign investment, did you point out that in fact that the president was wrong, and that there has been abundant foreign investment in the US because much of the money has nowhere else to go?
No, you just double down on the stupid.
Here’s some advice Rick Perry. Either listen to your political advisers, or fire them. Because this was a huge blown opportunity.