Category Archives: Media Criticism

The Parasite Has Been Growing

…while the host has been losing weight:

[Rasmussen] asked likely voters — his usual sample, which tilts more Republican than all adults — whether increased government spending is good or bad for the economy.

The results were unambiguous. Good for the country? 28 percent. Bad for the country? 52 percent.

He got similar results when he asked whether increasing the federal debt is good or bad for the economy. Likely voters believe it’s bad for the economy by a 56 percent to 17 percent margin.

There is some dissent, from the voters Rasmussen labels the Political Class. These are voters who trust the judgment of America’s political leaders over that of the American people, who do not believe the federal government has become a special interest group and who don’t believe government and big business work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors.

In other words, they’re the people the New York Times’ David Brooks refers to as “the educated class.” Or those voters in Cambridge and Brookline who stuck with the Democratic nominee in the special Senate election last January.

Around here, we refer to them as the parasitic idiot class. And David Brooks is at the head of the class.

[Update a couple minutes later]

This seems related: thoughts on the academic/industrial complex. I wonder if it will survive the bursting of the academic bubble?

[Update a while later]

Gee, this seems related, too. Electric car subsidies as handouts for the rich.

And thoughts from Roger Simon on the continuing myth of Democrats as the party of the people:

We live in an era — the worst economically since the Depression — when the daughter of the first couple of the Democratic Party has a multi-million dollar, Marie Antoinette-style wedding with port-a-potties almost as luxurious as a toilette in Baden Baden; it’s self-proclaimed environmental leader, the first global warming billionaire, sprouts “green” McMansions from Nashville to Montecito; and its already multi-billionaire senator from Massachusetts moors his yacht in another state to escape taxes we hoi polloi could only dream of paying.

But wait, as they say, there’s more. At this moment, two of their leaders from a supposedly disadvantaged minority are about to be tried for ethical transgressions (read: thievery) even Congress couldn’t sweep under the rug. Never mind that these transgressions mostly exploit the very minority these people purport to represent. It’s part of the game. Convince minorities they should act like victims. Extort guilt payments from the majority and keep the change. Meanwhile, nothing improves for the minority because it would interrupt the system.

They’re the new Bourbons, of whom it was said that they have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing. But I think they’re in for a big lesson this fall.

True Science

…versus cargo-cult science:

When the attorney general of Virginia sued to force Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame to provide the raw data he used, and the complete computer program used to analyze the data, so that “you” could decide, the Faculty Senate of the University of Virginia (where Mann was a professor at the time he defended the hockey stick) declared this request — Feynman’s request — to be an outrage. You peons, the Faculty Senate decreed, must simply accept the conclusions of any “scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards.” Feynman’s — and the attorney general’s and my own and other scientists’ — request for the raw data, so we can “judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at,” would, according to the Faculty Senate, “send a chilling message to scientists … and indeed scholars in any discipline.”

According the Faculty Senate of the University of Virginia, “science,” and indeed “scholarship” in general, is no longer an attempt to establish truth by replicable experiment, or by looking at evidence that can be checked by anyone. “Truth” is now to be established by the decree of powerful authority, by “peer review.” Wasn’t the whole point of the Enlightenment to avoid exactly this?

That old “Enlightenment” thing is for fogies. We’re all postmodernists now.

Matt Labash

…doesn’t seem to fear having his…whatever shoved through a plate-glass window. His thoughts on Mr. Ackerman:

From his hermetically sealed masturbatorium, he can…rhetorically threaten people who have soft hands and who type about politics for a living, but who could still pound the Bad Brains out of him (punk reference!) if they ever came face to face, even if it devolved into a girls-school windmill slap-fight, which it probably would. Though they won’t come face-to-face, of course, because being a tough-guy Washington blogger is a bit like being a phone-sex operator: you can pretend you’re sexy, even when you’re wearing a ratty terry cloth robe, hot curlers, and bunny slippers. Just like as a tough guy blogger, you can pretend on the outside that you want to crease the skull of Frank Foer with a baseball bat or annihilate Ryan Lizza in front of his toddler, while on the inside, you’re a moony-eyed trembling fanboy who writes unicorn-and-silly-bandz sentences such as “Yes we did!” when your swain wins an election. Which is sooo not punk rock. But that’s where the Black Flag t-shirt comes in. It’s a symbol. And what it symbolizes is that Hackerman is a dangerous man, not to be trifled with, since Black Flag was an ur-punk band whose former lead singer, Henry Rollins, was a genuine American badass, the Attackerman of his day. You could tell this, because he swore a lot, and wore tight black t-shirts. Even now, screwing with Rollins is like making a death wish. There’s no telling what that muscled wall of menace might do. He might write a really bitchy spoken-word piece about you, then release it as a podcast.

There’s a lot more where that came from. I wouldn’t want to be these “progressive” dweebs. Of course, I would have never wanted to.

[Via Treacher]

Quake in your boots.