Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The War On Industry

9 Comments

Make that industries:

So starting as a presidential candidate, Obama has:

Called for bankrupting the coal industry.
Raised gas prices by forcing domestic production to a crawl.
Demonized bankers and automatic teller machines.
Went to war against Fox News, talk radio, and Twitter user Kevin Eder.
Alienated Wall Street, which backed him in 2008 — and will probably do so again.
Nationalized the car industry.
Forced Chrysler to terminate 25 percent of its auto dealers.
Demonized Las Vegas.
Alinskyized the Chamber of Commerce.
Blocked Boeing from expanding into a Right to Work State.
Is busy transforming the insurance industry into the equivalent of quasi-government utilities.
Created an uncertain (to say the least) regulatory environment, making new hiring a challenging proposition.
And is now Alisnkyizing private planes, despite having temporary custody of the greatest “private” plane of all.

As Doug Ross wrote last fall, “Unlike Tricky Dick Nixon, Obama Wears His Enemies List On His Sleeve.”

And yet, when only 18000 jobs were created last month, and unemployment is at 9.2%, it’s “unexpectedly.”

[Update a couple minutes later]

See?

U.S. employers added 18,000 workers in June, the fewest in nine months, and the unemployment rate unexpectedly climbed, indicating a struggling labor market.

Emphasis mine.

[Update a few minutes later]

Economic calamity:

…Keynesian economics is a total fail. Fred Barnes quoted FDR Treasury Secretary this morning in the WSJ:

“In FDR’s time, a surge in spending by Washington was a cornerstone of New Deal efforts to lift the country out of the Depression. But unemployment never dropped below 14% in the 1930s and rose to 19% by the end of the decade. “Now, gentlemen, we have tried spending,” Henry Morgenthau, FDR’s Treasury secretary, confessed to House leaders in 1939. “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.”

Combine that with James Pethokoukis column yesterday that lays out exactly how dire the future budgeting and debt of the US is and you have an actual, not manufactured, crisis that needs to get resolved today.

This isn’t rocket science. But it does require the progressive wing to give up their reliance on economic theory that only works in a textbook. Economics is a social science and a study of human behavior. Keynes postulated a theory and we have numerous empirical examples of that theory failing miserably. How long will it take?

Einstein said the theory of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. There, my friends, is the core principle of Democratic policy. Insanity.

Frighteningly, almost half the electorate shares their affliction.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Cargo Cult

12 Comments

…of credentials.

[Update a few minutes later]

More thoughts from (uncredentialed) Mark Steyn:

The justification for this absurd prolongation of adolescence is that it opens up opportunities for the disadvantaged. But credential-fetishization has the opposite effect. Remember Ronald Reagan, alumnus of Eureka College, Illinois? Since then, for the first time in its history, America has lived under continuous rule by Ivy League – Yale (Bush I), Yale Law (Clinton), Harvard Business (Bush II), Harvard Law (Obama). In 2009, over a quarter of Obama’s political appointees had ties to Harvard; over 90 per cent had “advanced degrees”. How’s that working out for you? In my soon to be imminently forthcomingly imminent book, I point out that once upon a time America was the land where guys without degrees (Truman) or only 18 months of formal education (Lincoln) or no schooling at all (Zachary Taylor) could become president. Credentialization is shrinking what was America’s advantage – a far greater social mobility than Europe. We’re decaying into a society where 40 per cent of the population do minimal-skill service jobs and the rest run up a trillion dollars of debt in order to avoid that fate, and ne’er the twain shall meet, except for perfunctory social pleasantries in the drive-thru lane.

We’re looking at education upside down: We should be telescoping it, not extending it.

But think of all the academic bureaucrats! Won’t someone think of the academic bureaucrats?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Heinlein, Fascist

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The LA Times interviews some young idiots in fandom:

As the literary and academic worlds open to science-fiction and genre writing, Heinlein lacks the cachet of J.G. Ballard, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, Neal Stephenson, cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson and others. Films based on Dick’s books, good and bad, keep coming. But Heinlein’s film adaptations, in the last half century, since 1950’s “Destination Moon,” culminated in 1997’s “Starship Troopers,” widely disliked by his fan base.

Non-SF writer William Burroughs probably has more influence inside the genre’s literary wing than Heinlein, who won four Hugos (the award voted by the fans), sold millions of copies, and was termed the field’s most significant writer since H.G. Wells.

“His rabid fan base is graying,” said Annalee Newitz, who writes about science fiction for Wired and Gawker. “To literary readers, the books look cheesy, sexist in a hairy-chest, gold-chain kind of way. His stuff hasn’t stood the test of time,” because of characters’ windy speechifying and their frontier optimism.

“Here at the store I actively resist promoting him, because he was a fascist,” said Charles Hauther, the science fiction buyer at Skylight Books. “People don’t seem to talk about him anymore. I haven’t had a conversation about Heinlein in a long time.

And you’ve obviously never had an intelligent one.