Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Name Changes

7 Comments

…but the game remains the same:

Back in the gloriously unregulated 1950s, when your average red blooded American kid could still buy cherry bombs and M-80s without a bunch of nanny-state do-gooders getting their knickers in a twist, and my favorite toy was a home lead smelter for making toy soldiers, the kids in my family used to play Blind Man’s Bluff in the rec room down in the basement. The person who was ‘it’ put a pillowcase over their head and tried to catch the other kids; the only rule was that the kids trying not to be caught couldn’t touch the floor. You had to jump on the furniture — from chair to chest to couch and, if you were good, to the magazine stand.

It was an excellent game; unfortunately the combination of giggles and loud bangs and crashes as we bumped into each other and knocked over the various lamps and vases that somehow kept getting in the way soon attracted my mother’s attention. She’d open the door to the basement, peer down into the noisy darkness and shout “What are you kids doing down there?”

“We’re just playing Blind Man’s Bluff,” we said with that innocent little voice kids use.

“Well stop it,” she said, unsympathetically.

That was the end of our fun for a while, until my brother Chris had a brilliant idea: we’d change the name of the game. We wouldn’t play Blind Man’s Bluff anymore; we’d just play Pillowcase Risk. We tried to keep the noise down for a while, but that didn’t last. Soon the basement was as noisy as ever, and once more my mother came to the door.

“Are you kids playing Blind Man’s Bluff?”

“Oh, no, Mommy,” we said in tones absolutely oozing with sincerity.

“Well keep it quiet down there.”

This worked for a while, but my mother is a cynical and suspicious person. After a couple more trips to the door to stop the riots downstairs, she shouted “If you aren’t playing Blind Man’s Bluff, what are you doing down there?”

“We’re just playing Pillowcase Risk.”

“I don’t care what you call it,” she said. “You aren’t making that kind of racket in my house.”

This is pretty much what is going on in the Congress. “What are you kids doing down there,” ask the voters, who’ve noticed some banging and crashing in the basement. “Are you kids writing a Carbon Tax?”

The greens check quickly with the focus groups and pollsters before shouting back up, “No, Mommy, of course not. We aren’t playing Carbon Tax. We’re playing Cap and Trade.”

Let’s just cut to the chase and call modern environmentalism what it has become — another form of socialism.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Projection Watch

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I (and others) have often noted the tendency of leftists to do psychological projection — that is, to impute to their political enemies their own beliefs, traits and political tactics. Obvious examples: accusing them of lying, accusing them of being willing to do anything to attain/maintain power, being full of “hate,” being “racist.” I’m thinking about starting a web site to track this ubiquitous phenomenon

Anyway, if I had such a site running, here would be another example. They often accuse the right of being violent, but look at these lurid fantasies coming from JournoListers. They don’t just want to kill stories — they luxuriate in thoughts of injuring and killing people with whom they disagree:

Considering Weigel’s talk of setting Matt Drudge on fire, Ezra Klein’s off-color recommendation for Tim Russert, and now Ackerman fantasizing about putting conservatives through plate-glass windows, there is a bizarre addiction to lurid, violent, threatening language — not just among the commenters of liberal blogs, but among the folks who we are told represent their best and brightest. It’s disturbing, and the fact that it doesn’t bother more people is disturbing.

And then we have this, from Sarah Spitz:

If you were in the presence of a man having a heart attack, how would you respond? As he clutched his chest in desperation and pain, would you call 911? Would you try to save him from dying? Of course you would.

But if that man was Rush Limbaugh, and you were Sarah Spitz, a producer for National Public Radio (update: Spitz was a producer for NPR affiliate KCRW for the show Left, Right & Center), that isn’t what you’d do at all.

In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would “Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out” as Limbaugh writhed in torment.

In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. “I never knew I had this much hate in me,” she wrote. “But he deserves it.”

Spitz’s hatred for Limbaugh seems intemperate, even imbalanced. On Journolist, where conservatives are regarded not as opponents but as enemies, it barely raised an eyebrow.

I wouldn’t say that no one on the right does this, but I can’t imagine such things being uncommented on were there such a thing as a right-wing JournoList. One occasionally sees such things at Free Republic, but the poster is usually admonished when it occurs. In fact, one thing that I have noted over there is that even when someone with whom the Freepers disagree politically (e.g., Ted Kennedy) actually is dead or dying, the general response is prayers and condolences to the friends and family, not glee. I have certainly never wished death on anyone for their political beliefs or advocacy of them, and like Rush Limbaugh, can’t get my head around the nature of someone who does. I guess that’s one reason I’m not a leftist.

[Update a while later[

Limbaugh responds.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Space History

Apollo Anniversary Thoughts

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Nothing has happened since the fortieth anniversary to change my opinions in the long essay I wrote last summer.

Four decades have passed since the first small step on the dusty surface of our nearest neighbor in the solar system in 1969. It has been almost that long since the last man to walk on the Moon did so in late 1972. The Apollo missions were a stunning technological achievement and a significant Cold War victory for the United States. However, despite the hope of observers at the time—and despite the nostalgia and mythology that now cloud our memory—Apollo was not the first step into a grand human future in space. From the perspective of forty years, Apollo, for all its glory, can now be seen as a detour away from a sustainable human presence in space. By and large, the NASA programs that succeeded Apollo have kept us heading down that wrong path: Toward more bureaucracy. Toward higher costs. And away from innovation, from risk-taking, and from any concept of space as a useful place.

As I wrote, Apollo was a magnificent technological achievement, but in terms of opening up space, it was not only a failure, but the false lessons learned from it have held us back ever since.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

As Dave Weigel Was To Conservatives

9 Comments

So is Steve Pearlstein to businessmen.

I heard that interview in the car, and was just shaking my head. How is it that someone this clueless about business and businessmen covers them as his beat? Just another reason that the legacy media is going down the tubes. As one commenter noted, that interview could have come right from Atlas Shrugged.

Via Instapundit, and yes, Amity Shlaes’ history of the Depression makes a hell of a lot more sense to me than any others I’ve read of it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

An Urgent Call To Action

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Thoughts on tomorrow’s Senate vote on NASA authorization, from Henry Vanderbilt of the Space Access Society:

…let them both know that you support full funding for NASA Commercial Crew, and full funding for NASA space exploration technology, and that you are very much against any new NASA heavy lift booster development as very likely being a massive waste of taxpayer dollars.

Read the whole thing.

[Post Instalanche update]

More background and related links here.

[Thursday morning update]

Clark Lindsey has some links to the latest on the bill, here, here and here.

He also has some thoughts on how it could have been a lot worse:

while I don’t want to sugar-coat this awful bill, I’m just saying that it is no cause for despair. My philosophy from the start of this website and blog has been based on a belief that progress usually comes in step-by-step increments. It will be disappointing if the 2011 NASA budget doesn’t make the huge step initially promised. Nevertheless, even this bill is a step forward.

I never have high hopes for space policy. The bill could be a lot better, but just getting rid of Constellation, and particularly Ares, is a huge improvement. I’m willing to take if for now, and start to educate the Republicans so we can get better policy when they take over next year, and hope that they don’t try to undo everything that Obama did, and restore the disastrous Bush policy, simply on partisan grounds. It’s important to have a serious discussion on what we’re trying to accomplish, and how best to do it, regardless of the genesis of various policies. It hasn’t happened yet, but hope springs eternal.

[Update a while later]

No word about the press conference yet, but here is Hutchison’s official statement.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

A Magnificent Achievement

14 Comments

Thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson, on just how big Barack Obama has blown it:

What is strange about all this is how the clueless behavior only intensifies. We expect each day another crazy outburst from another fringe appointee, another “battle” to push through something the public does not want — all overseen by the “healer” of “no more red state/blue state” fame.

In short, in just 18 months, Obama has ended talk of permanent Democratic majorities and may well do to the Democratic party what Carter did in 1980 and Clinton in 1994, all while taking a once-obsequious press down with him. With idols like Obama, Mort Zuckerman, Chris Matthews, and Evan Thomas hardly need enemies.

I never had much hope for him, but I do have to admit that it’s quite impressive, and he’s done the Republic a great favor by putting a blast furnace under the kettle so that the frog noticed in time.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire

Two Randy Vicars

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Iowahawk has the sordid tale:

It happened that in Washingtown-on-Beltway there once ministered to the shire folk two vicars of remarkable and resolute piety. Polite history shall record their names and peerages as the Reverend John St. Edwards, Lord Plaintiff of Durham, and the Reverend Albert des Gores II, Earl Carbonet of Greenhouse. It shall likewise note well that each man, in his fashion, was a virtuoso upon his respective pulpit. What it shan’t record, however, is each man’s slavish indenture to the base desires of the flesh. As every schoolboy knows, as well he does his Latin infinitives, few are those men whose breeches are immune to the Devil’s disturbances. In the case of our two ill-fortuned subjects, Lucifer himself seemed to take particular delight in presenting ribald temptations and the debasing consequences that follow. Herein lies their tale.

Well, it actually lies at the other end of the link.