Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Is The Left Right?

July 24, 2011 Rand Simberg 19 Comments

Claire Berlinski is suffering a little cognitive dissonance.

My brief response, without a lot of deep thought. I can’t speak for Europe, which never had anything resembling our Constitution and Bill of Rights, but I think that the biggest flaw of the Founders was in failing to recognize the apparently ductility of the Commerce Clause, which has basically rendered the 9th and 10th amendments moot. They also perhaps didn’t anticipate the degree to which the courts might come to aid and abet to that end. But at bottom, it is not a failure of freedom, but a failure to adhere to the original intent of the Constitution to limit government.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Open-Source Warfare

July 24, 2011 Rand Simberg 22 Comments

Zenpundit has been slogging through the Oslo terrorist’s writings, and found some interesting things (check some of the other posts as well):

…the British, too, come in for a measure of contempt, via a quotation from none other than Osama bin Laden:

“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse”. Perhaps its unsurprising that the author is something of an admirer of bin Laden’s means, if not his ends.

This came to me via an email from James (Anglosphere) Bennett, who comments:

For the past decade people concerned about the consequences of multiculturalism have warned that one of its hazards will be an inevitable response, which a short perusal of European history will quickly suggest will not be very nice. Looking at this, my thought is “well, here it is”.

And there may be more of it to come.

[Update a few minutes later]

Was he influenced by the Unabomber?

Of course, given the similarities, maybe it was Al Gore.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The Father Of Transhumanism

July 24, 2011 Rand Simberg 2 Comments

…has deanimated:

In 1947 Ettinger wrote a short story elucidating the concept of human cryopreservation as a pathway to more sophisticated future medical technology: in effect, a form of “one-way medical time travel.” The story, “The Penultimate Trump”, was published in the March, 1948 issue of Startling Stories and definitively establishes Ettinger’s priority as the first person to have promulgated the cryonics paradigm: principally, that contemporary medico-legal definitions of death are relative, not absolute, and are critically dependent upon the sophistication of available medical technology. Thus, a person apparently dead of a heart attack in a tribal village in the Amazon Rainforest will soon become unequivocally so, whereas the same person, with the same condition, in the emergency department of large, industrialized city’s hospital, might well be resuscitated and continue a long and healthy life. Ettinger’s genius lay in realizing that criteria for death will vary not just from place-to-place, but from time-to-time. Today’s corpse may well be tomorrow’s patient.

Ettinger waited for prominent scientists or physicians to come to the same conclusion he had, and to take a position of public advocacy. By 1960, Ettinger realized that no one else seemed to have grasped an idea which, to him, had seemed obvious. Ettinger was 42 years old and undoubtedly increasingly aware of his own mortality. In what may be characterized as one of the most important midlife crisis in history, Ettinger reflected on his life and achievements, and decided it was time to take action. He summarized the idea of cryonics in a few pages, with the emphasis on life insurance as a mechanism of affordable funding for the procedure, and sent this to approximately 200 people whom he selected from Who’s Who In America. The response was meager, and it was clear that a much longer exposition was needed. Ettinger observed that people, even the intellectually, financially and socially distinguished, would have to be educated that dying is (usually) a gradual and reversible process, and that freezing damage is so limited (even though lethal by present criteria) that its reversibility demands relatively little in future progress. Ettinger soon made an even more problematic discovery, principally that, “…a great many people have to be coaxed into admitting that life is better than death, healthy is better than sick, smart is better than stupid, and immortality might be worth the trouble!”

I’ve never understood the resistance, either.

Rest in peace, but not in perpetuity.

[Update early afternoon]

Adam Keiper has a link roundup over at The New Atlantis, with a promise of more to come.

[Another update a few minutes later]

This is the first time I became aware that Mike Darwin (long-time cryonics pioneer) has a blog. I’ll have to add it to the blogroll.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Stupidity Of The “Assault-Weapons” Ban

July 24, 2011 Rand Simberg 1 Comment

Part 2. Bob Owens calls it “silly,” but I’m going to go with “stupid.” And in some cases, even evil (see project “Fast and Furious,” in which it becomes clear that the federal government in this administration wants to make sure that criminals can get weapons, but that law-abiding citizens can’t, and then stonewall and cover up when they get caught in the act).

I particularly enjoyed this unintended consequence.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

That Actually Took Longer Than I Thought

July 23, 2011 Rand Simberg 60 Comments

It took almost a day for some on the left to start blaming Sarah Palin for what happened in Norway. It probably took a while for them to get over their cynical shock that it actually was a white guy this time.

I will note, though, as an aside, that like school shootings in “gun-free zones,” this was another catastrophic failure of gun control. Just a few rifles in the hands of the older kids on that island, with training, would have ended this pretty quickly. Instead, they were fish in a barrel for him.

[Saturday evening update]

Bruce Bawer:

It is chilling to read my own name in postings by this mass murderer. And it is deeply depressing to see this evil, twisted creature become the face of Islam criticism in Norway. Norwegian television journalists who in the first hours of the crisis were palpably uncomfortable about the prospect of having to talk about Islamic terrorism are now eagerly discussing the dangers of “Islamophobia” and “conservative ideology” and are drawing connections between the madness and fanaticism of Breivik and the platform of the Progress Party.

This is, as he says, doubly tragic, and a setback in the war.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Why The Boehner-Obama Talks Fell Apart

July 23, 2011 Rand Simberg 38 Comments

Keith Hennessey explains:

President Obama used the Gang of Six’s plan as an exit strategy. He backtracked on taxes, knowing this would force the Speaker to abandon negotiations, and knowing he could use the Republican Senators in the Gang to argue from a position of increased rhetorical strength in the ensuing debate. It’s a clever strategy but it belies the President’s public posture.

The media narrative about the president being the “only adult in the room” is now, and always was, nonsense.

[Update a while later]

The president tries to panic the markets.

Well, you have to admit, it’s one of his few talents.

[Update a couple minutes later]

A reminder, the problem isn’t the debt ceiling — it’s the debt, and the continuing unwillingness of Washington to take it seriously. The Democrats in particular insist on living in a fantasy world.

[Update a while later]

Per the above, some very worrisome thoughts:

Here’s the position I think we may be in. We’ve been negotiating with the President and The Democrats in Congress on the assumption that they’re sane. It’s okay to play hardball with these guys because eventually, whether they like it or not, reality insists upon itself and they have to cave. It’s a painful process so you expect some tantrum throwing and caterwauling, but eventually they HAVE to accept reality. Except if they’re not sane. If they want five apples and there’s only two plus two but they CAN’T ACCEPT that two plus two equals four. Orwell wasn’t just writing a parable about the eventual end point of IngSoc. He was describing what human psychology can drive Ministers to inflict upon the populace for the sake of “justice.” I’m worried they’ll pull the trigger on default as just one more “political” step in the march towards freedom from want or whatever other principle they’re operating under. They’re playing this game as if they could win, as if taxes in a downturn are a good idea with benign consequences. As if debt equivalent to GDP is survivable for the world’s anchor economy/currency, let alone sustainable.

And so maybe, just maybe, Republican strategy (what little there is of it) has badly misread the opposition. Obama tried to add 400 billion in taxes to a deal he had already agreed with Boehner at the last minute. Boehner walks out cause Obama is negotiating in bad faith and has been all along, but what if Obama is actually incapable of good faith negotiation? I think right now that it’s actually possible we won’t see a deal at all. Because the Republicans are looking at the math and at reality and saying “Okay, Democrat demands can’t be serious because they can’t possibly work” and Democrats are looking at politics and how it works and saying “We don’t have to give in cause that’s not how you win these things. You pin it on the other guy politically and then reap the political dividends.” I wasn’t around for the start of WW I, but I get the feeling I understand Kennedy’s fascination with Tuchman’s Guns of August. I’m not talking about a shooting war, but about leaders overestimating and underestimating and just plain misjudging each other in a brinksmanship scenario. In short, it could be too late to do anything when people finally wake up. The crisis may have already arrived with an economic and fiscal momentum all its own that no amount of dealing or compromise or statesmanship can stop.

They’ve been demonstrating economic lunacy for the past two and a half years (longer, really, but they didn’t have enough power to actually implement it), as things continue to deteriorate. Why would they stop now?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Time To End The War On Salt

July 23, 2011 Rand Simberg 6 Comments

Are you reading this, Nurse Bloomberg?

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.

I absolutely agree that the government should not be telling anyone how much salt to eat, or how much to put in customers’ food, though I appreciate content labels.

As readers know, I’ve been engaged in my own personal war on salt for the past few months, and I have in fact reduced my blood pressure from ridiculously high to merely high levels in so doing. I did it primarily with the intent of BP reduction, though obviously I hoped that it would also decrease my heart attack risk. There are other reasons to reduce blood pressure than to mitigate coronary issues — it’s hard on other organs (such as liver and kidney function). I don’t have any other symptoms of problems caused by high blood pressure, but I’d like to prevent them from occurring. I do seem to have hit a plateau, though, in terms of how low salt reduction is going to get it, and while I’ll be doing other things, I may also not focus as much on the salt as I have been (because it really is a pain in the ass to have to prepare all your own food from scratch, and avoid all cheeses but fresh mozarella, and other things). The results that lower salt intake actually correlations with higher heart attack risk is disconcerting (this, as with cholesterol, makes me wonder if I treating a symptom rather than of a cause?) But I won’t go back to a diet of jerky, either. There is no doubt that I am salt sensitive, and as the article notes (and as is true in many things) every person is different.

Which is why the government shouldn’t be involved, other than perhaps to provide advice (something at which they’ve been notoriously awful for the past decades when it comes to nutrition, partly due to lobbying by the agriculture-industrial complex).

[Update a couple minutes later]

I’m definitely not going to cut back on the garlic and onions. And speaking of treating symptoms:

News reports of this negative trial failed to recognize that the cholesterol-lowering effects of garlic are not the same for all people and that any trial containing a large percentage of healthy men could miss an effect that might be found if the people studied were patients with diabetes or heart disease.

In addition, while there is so much focus on the connection between cholesterol and heart disease, the benefits of garlic in preventing heart disease are probably due to factors other than changes in cholesterol.

In particular, clinical experiments have shown that regular consumption of garlic decreased calcium deposits and the size of arterial plaque in coronary arteries, prevented unhealthy blood clotting and improved the circulation of the subjects who were studied.

I think people worry way too much about cholesterol, and that for many people, taking statins to reduce it might be engaging in a cure worse than the disease.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space