Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

More Bloggiversary Celebration

7 Comments

Ed Driscoll writes about ten years of Instapundit. So does Bryan Preston.

My recollections are here, at an interview I did with Pundit Press a few weeks ago:

When and why did you start Transterrestrial Musings?

It was October 2001, a few weeks after 911. But it wasn’t a result of 911 — it was a result of something that fortuitously happened a week or two earlier. Glenn Reynolds had started a blog, and a mutual friend of ours (Jim Bennett, who would later write The Anglosphere Challenge) emailed me with a link, writing, “Hey, look what Glenn is doing.”

A few days later, 911 happened, and the rest is history for his blog, but I saw him doing the kind of “letters to the editor” thing without needing an editor, and said to myself, “I could do that, too.” So I found some blog software (Graymatter), installed it on my server, and I was off to the races. Unfortunately, due to some glitches in software changes/updates over the past decade (frightening to think that it’s coming up on both Glenn’s and my tenth bloggiversary), I’ve lost the very earliest posts, but most of it is still there in one form or another. I’ve been on WordPress for the last two or three years after giving up on Moveable Type.

Interestingly, if you look back through his archives, you’ll note that his posts used to be a lot longer when he first started, because he didn’t have as many outlets for his writing. The same has happened to me over the years. I now only write long blog posts when I don’t think I can place them somewhere else where they’ll find a greater, more appropriate audience (e.g., Pajamas Media, Popular Mechanics). I won’t deny that knowing him before he was Instapundit probably helped me get started, because he was probably more willing to link my stuff in the beginning, but he’s always been very much about introducing new voices to the blogosphere, regardless of whether he knew them or not, if he found them.

And still does, I think. I would also note that before there was the blog, I had been on an email list with Glenn and several other libertarian types (including Bennett). Starting the blog was probably just a natural extension of that.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Inertia Of The Federal Apparatus

28 Comments

Some thoughts from Yuval Levin:

The American system of government is designed to restrain radical change and, as Alexander Hamilton put it, “to increase the chances in favor of the community against the passing of bad laws through haste, inadvertence, or design.” Our institutions are set up to oppose one another in ways that make sudden major steps unlikely, and that force significant and lasting actions of the government to take the form of painful plodding. Our republic takes a lot of time to turn and reaches decisions slowly, often over several election cycles and through a process of coming to terms.

The yearning for a cleaner, smoother process more amendable to technocratic control which is so central to the president’s rhetoric now (and a form of which was also at the heart of S&P’s defense of its downgrade of American credit last week) is a rejection of the American system of government dressed up as a defense of that system—a favorite gambit of progressives since at least Herbert Croly. At the core of its contemporary iteration on the left is a misreading of American politics in the two decades following World War II. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama speaks of a “time before the fall, a golden age in Washington when, regardless of which party was in power, civility reigned and government worked.” He has in mind in particular the early and middle 1960s—a period he suggests was the high-water mark of the American regime.

But in fact, that period marked a temporary but very costly failure of the adversarial controls essential to the American system. That failure did not occur (as some others have) because of a terrible war or a grave economic calamity. It happened in the midst of peace and prosperity. It had its roots in an unusual postwar elite consensus on social policy and in the catastrophic failure of the Republican party to offer a plausible alternative to that consensus in the 1964 election. The result was a brief but significant explosion of policymaking that yielded the hasty and careless creation of a massive artifice of entitlement and discretionary programs we have come to know as the Great Society. The peculiar combination of factors that enabled that spurt of reckless activism did not last long, and our politics soon returned to a more balanced state in which our governing institutions and parties staunchly resist one another’s advances and change is relatively slow and measured. But precisely that return to normality has meant that the products of the Great Society have been very hard to undo or reform. Our system of government was never supposed to allow such hyperactivity, and so is not well equipped to reverse its excesses.

We need at least one more election, and probably more, to make true progress (and not of the “progressive” kind).

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Credit Downgrade

37 Comments

…isn’t the Tea Party’s fault — it’s a symptom of the Marxist disease:

It is time to call a spade a spade — this is Marxism we are talking about, pure and simple.

This bubonic plague of the last century killed tens of millions in the Soviet empire alone, but a young generation of Americans who know little about its destructive power decided to give it a new lease on life. In November 2008 the Democratic Party won the White House and both chambers of the U.S. Congress, and soon after that the United States began being changed from a country belonging to “We the People” into one managed by a kind of Marxist nomenklatura with unchecked power.

This new American nomenklatura started running the country secretly, just as all Marxist nomenklaturas did. “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,” the leader of the nomenkatura in the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, once told the media. That was a first in U.S. history. It did not take long before this American nomenklatura took control of home mortgages, banks, auto-makers, and most of the health care industry. When tens of thousands of Americans objected to the cloak of secrecy under which all this was taking place, the same Nancy Pelosi called them Nazis. That was exactly what all post-WWII Marxist nomenklaturas called their opponents.

This is why Fukuyama’s thesis about the “end of history” after the Cold War was so nonsensical. One of the paradoxes of Marxism is that while it defies human nature, it is in fact human nature to believe its tenets, and so the lesson must be relearned with each generation.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Kings Are So Eighteenth Century

19 Comments

Thoughts on the collapse of the Obama cult.

[Update a few minutes later]

The politics of “liberals” bashing Obama:

As I can fathom this August of discontent, it runs something like this: at best Barack Obama is too aloof, professorial and unable temperamentally or unwilling politically to mix it up with Republicans. Therefore he has compromised far too much on various budget deals, which in part explains his sagging ratings and the general laments in the American and European press that Obama lacks leadership qualities. The nearly $5 trillion in new debt since 2009 is a needed, if too timid, “stimulus”; and if it is seen by some as too excessive, it can be easily remedied by new taxes on the wealthy — something Obama talks about a lot but does little to enact, this buskin Theramenes who bends with the wind.

At worst, there is a sort of victimization that might be described as, “Obama mesmerized us and therefore we did not quite appreciate how inexperienced and unaccomplished he was until now when we sobered up — and when it is too late.”

…A number of us throughout 2008 and later were criticized for raising just these issues, both about Obama’s lack of experience and his Hamlet-like propensity of hesitation and his academic disengagement. But why this sudden about-face from former disciples?

They’re finally figuring out who the rubes were.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Not that it’s a shock that the president would lie, but it turns out that Joe Wilson was right:

There are between 12 and 20 million illegal aliens in the United States. The fact that immigration status will not be checked at these health centers means illegal aliens will be treated, at American taxpayer expense, and in contradiction to what President Obama said. He lied in the service of passing a bill that a majority opposed and which is helping sink the US economy.

Hey, the ends justify the means.

[Update mid morning]

The growing bipartisan consensus on Obama:

My favorite panegyric to Obama comes from the Times’s columnist David Brooks, recalling his first interview with then Senator Obama. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” says Brooks, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense that he knew both better than me.” Brooks went on to make this invaluable observation, “I remember distinctly an image — we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, (a) he’s going to be president and (b) he’ll be a very good president.” What would this precious Washington insider have reported if Senator Obama had been wearing pantyhose?

There are several things that the president could do to save both the country and his presidency. In no particular order, they would be: 1) Agree that the health-care bill is both unconstitutional and a mistake, and offer to sign a repeal; 2) Do the same for Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley; 3) Come up with a serious proposal to reform Medicare and Social Security to put it on a sound footing; 4) Come up with a serious proposal to reform the tax code, eliminating subsidies, the AMT and flattening the rate structure; 5) Sign an executive order ending all federal restrictions on the exploration and production of energy — in the Gulf, in Alaska and in the Mountain West; 6) Rein in the Environmental Protection Agency on carbon emissions; 7) Conduct a serious review of federal regulations in general, using Iain Murray’s book as a guide.

He could do those things, but he can’t, because he is too bound to his ideology. And so the country will continue to suffer another year and a half of his lack of leadership, and he will go down in history as a presidential failure on a monumental scale.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Weird

Want A Good Laugh?

24 Comments

Al Gore for president.

Please, please, please, please.

[Via Jim Treacher, who tweets an appropriate reaction]

[Update a while later]

Aaaaannnnnddd…let the campaign slogans begin:

He’s Fat, Restive, and Red-Faced

In Your Heart You Know He’s A Rabid Lunatic

Environmentalism In The Pursuit Of Billions In Carbon Offsets Is No Vice

[Update a couple minutes later]

OK, this one is good, too: “Release America’s 2nd Chakra”

What America needs — a crazed-sex-poodle-in-Chief.

[Evening update]

My spam filter caught a comment. I have the email address, but I won’t publish it (I don’t know whether it’s valid or not, but it probably is, being a Gmail address). I’m not going to approve it, but I thought it might edify my readers as to what kind of creature supports the former vice president and mindlessly vilifies his critics. I would also note that it is very unusual in both its lack of intelligence and its foul language, compared to the vast majority of comments here. And I will state the name it used — J_star, since it willingly put it in the form, and every commenter’s stated name is published here.

GO suck a f***ing c**k you f***ing useless piece of s**t.

With enemies like this, who needs friends?

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Biofuels

44 Comments

This looks like a pretty big breakthrough:

Just how fast are Rice’s single-celled chemical factories? On a cell-per-cell basis, the bacteria produced the butanol, a biofuel that can be substituted for gasoline in most engines, about 10 times faster than any previously reported organism.

“That’s really not even a fair comparison because the other organisms used an expensive, enriched feedstock, and we used the cheapest thing you can imagine, just glucose and mineral salts,” said Ramon Gonzalez, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice and lead co-author of the Nature study.

Gonzalez’s laboratory is in a race with hundreds of labs around the world to find green methods for producing chemicals like butanol that have historically come from petroleum.

“We call these ‘drop-in’ fuels and chemicals, because their structure and properties are very similar, sometimes identical, to petroleum-based products,” he said. “That means they can be ‘dropped in,’ or substituted, for products that are produced today by the petrochemical industry.”

I wonder what the catch is, if any?

[Update a while later]

The man-made miracle of oil from sand. And as Glenn Reynolds points out, it’s “ethical oil,” not “conflict oil.” And we’re a lot farther from “peak oil” than many want to think.

Stories like this make baby Algore, their lord and savior, weep bitter tears.