Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Change” and Marxism

3 Comments

Some thoughts:

In my other life, when I was national security adviser to Communist Romania’s President Nicolae Ceausescu, I wrote the lyrics of his ode to “change.” Ceausescu pretended that his predecessor had devastated the country, and he pledged to change that change. In those days I heard that ode to change a thousand times, and today I am stunned by its similarity with the Democratic Party’s “change.”

I’m not.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

“Federal Versus Commercial”

4 Comments

Clark Lindsey responds to a clueless editorialop-ed over at Aero-News. I should note that this is why we have blogs.

[Update a while later]

Wow. I went back and read that piece, and it was so chock full of stupid I couldn’t even get through the whole thing. Plus, the guy needed an editor. Kudos to Clark.

[Update a few minutes later]

I love this typo: “Along the way other companies that have a spaceflight heritage, such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and especially ATK are vilified as being the spawn of satin.”

And their children will be velvet.

Education, Media Criticism

Teaching Students How To Write

3 Comments

Some thoughts. I found this comment interesting, and it wouldn’t surprise me:

You guys have not read many manuscripts from academic writers, have you? As a long-time academic editor, I read hundreds–hundreds that were submitted for publication, no less.

Academics do not write well at all–most quite poorly. The three I knew who were truly gifted writers… to have lunch with them was to begin to study the wall for crack patterns, they were so introverted. Department chairs were absolutely incoherent, but there was substance there–they were simply quite used to having secretaries and copy editors do the hard work of making it readable for them. The legions of humanities and social science assistant and associate profs… one wanders across the tundra of their boggy prose delighted for even the tiniest patch of semi-solid jargon-free verbiage.

In my experience, good workman-like writing at any education level is quite rare.

I’ve often suspected that this is true of many “journalists” as well, and was one of the reasons that there was so much initial resistance to blogging — a lot of them really do need “layers of fact checkers and editors” to create their “product.”