Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Name Names, Governator

96 Comments

I’m getting more than a little tired of Arnold the RINO decrying hypocrites in his ostensible party, who supposedly rail about the Porkustimulus bill, while going out to cut ribbons at events funded by it and taking credit for them. And yet somehow, he never provides an actual example.

I’m willing to believe that such people exist (Republicans do have some repugnant people in the party, Scharzenegger being quite prominent among them), but if you’re going to damn the party to which you claim to belong in such a way, it would seem that, at a minimum, one should offer some evidence for it. Or admit that one is just blowing it out his…abs. And of course, the press (in this case Greta) never calls him on it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

There Seems To Be A Step Missing

36 Comments

In all the media discussion over Iran’s incipient nuclear capabilities, two phrases seem to be intermingled. The headline on Fox News uses the word “warhead,” while Jamie Colby is talking to John Bolton, who continues to use the phrase “nuclear weapons.” While Iran having nuclear weapons is obviously nothing to sneeze at (though the White House seems to have a different view), nuclear weapons are not warheads. A warhead is a specific kind of nuclear weapon — one that not only works, but is light enough to be delivered on a missile, and has reentry and guidance systems to deliver it to its target. One does not go from enriching uranium to building warheads in a single step, but I hear no discussion of this. I wish I did.

Humor, Media Criticism

Dramatic

9 Comments

I think that MSNBC should consider Dramatic Chipmunk as a replacement for Olby. The commentary would be much more intelligent.

[Via Nick Gillespie, who has a lot more, if you enjoy seeing Olby rhetorically beaten to a thin pulp.]

Any chance that comment will get me honored as the Worst Person In The World?

Probably not.

Speaking of Olbermann, so much for his “racist” tea parties.

Up yours too, Janeane.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Going Post-Doctoral

79 Comments

One line stuck out to me in this piece about Professor Amy Bishop:

“You have to talk about Amy Bishop’s mental health in this situation as one of the variables, but being denied tenure when you’re in your mid-40s at an out-of-the-way obscure rural campus in the deep South is a catastrophic loss, and people don’t understand that,” says Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.

This looks like northeastern Ivy bigotry to me, and it seems to be driven by ignorance. I think that most people at UAH would be surprised to learn that their university is “out-of-the-way,” “obscure,” or “rural.” Huntsville is a non-trivial city (it has a major NASA center, and Army R&D facility, and a vast aerospace contractor industrial base), and UAH has an excellent engineering school, particularly for aerospace (despite their having picked up Mike Griffin as a professor, though it’s probably a job to which he’s much better suited than running NASA). I suspect that, to Mr. Levin, its real crime is being in the “deep” south (just below the Tennessee border). And he probably thinks that for someone with a post-graduate degree from Harvard, her willingness to subject herself to such a benighted place is just one more sign of a mental disorder.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Problem With First-Dollar Coverage

19 Comments

Thoughts from Megan McArdle. One of the big problems with health care is that people have come to see every-day costs as an entitlement that someone else should pay, instead of the old days (and not that old — within my lifetime) when you paid for doctor’s visits (and they would even make house calls) out of pocket, with insurance reserved for catastrophe. We’ll take our car to the shop, our pet to the vet, but the current mess has accustomed many of us to thinking that we somehow shouldn’t have to pay for a doctor visit. As Megan notes, when you’re not spending your own money, you’re going to use the service a lot more, and you won’t care about the price. This is the key point of how screwed up the market is as a result of employer-provided insurance:

With all the layers in between consumers and the providers in the ordinary market, the natural battle between consumers seeking better value and producers seeking higher prices is terribly distorted in ways that don’t make us healthier.

That market disconnect is what we need to fix, rather than finding some other peoples’ money to keep doing the same crazy things. And the way to fix it is to end the preferential tax treatment of employer-provided insurance versus personally purchased policies, and to allow purchase across state lines for real competition. If I hear one more moron saying that the way to provide competition for private insurers is with a government option, I’m going to plotz. Just make them compete with each other.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Green Genocide

21 Comments

Thoughts on the consequences of radical environmentalism, intended and unintended:

The motivation behind Silent Spring, the suppression of nuclear power, the global-warming scam, and other outbreaks of environmentalist lunacy is the worship of centralized power and authority. The author, Rachel Carson, didn’t set out to kill sixty million people – she was a fanatical believer in the newly formed religion of radical environmentalism, whose body count comes from callousness, rather than blood thirst. The core belief of the environmental religion is the fundamental uncleanliness of human beings. All forms of human activity are bad for the environment… most especially including the activity of large private corporations. Deaths in faraway Africa barely registered on the radar screen of the growing Green movement, especially when measured against the exhilarating triumph of getting a sinful pesticide banned, at substantial cost to an evil corporation.

Those who were initiated into the higher mysteries of environmentalism saw the reduction of the human population as a benefit, although they’re generally more circumspect about saying so in public these days. As quoted by Walter Williams, the founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, Alexander King, wrote in 1990: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guayana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” Another charming quote comes from Dr. Charles Wurster, a leading opponent of DDT, who said of malaria deaths: “People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”

Like the high priests of global warming, Rachel Carson knew what she was doing. She claimed DDT would actually destroy all life on Earth if its use continued – the “silent spring” of the title is a literal description of the epocalypse she forecast. She misused a quote from Albert Schweitzer about atomic warfare, implying the late doctor agreed with her crusade against pesticide by dedicating her book to him… when, in fact, Schweitzer viewed DDT as a “ray of hope” against disease-carrying insects. Some of the scientists attempting to debunk her hysteria went so far as to eat chunks of DDT to prove it was harmless, but she and her allies simply ignored them, making these skeptics the forerunners of today’s “global warming deniers” – absolutely correct and utterly vilified. William Ruckleshaus disregarded nine thousand pages of testimony when he imposed the DDT ban. Then as now, the science was settled… beneath a mass of politics and ideology.

These people are the greatest mass murderers in history. Why do we continue to give them so much power, both political and cultural?

[Update a few minutes later]

Apparently NASA is as scientifically corrupt as the CRU:

The emails show the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and suspect data management and integrity of NASA, wildly spinning in defense of their enterprise. The emails show NASA making off with enormous sums of taxpayer funding doing precisely what they claim only a “skeptic” would do. The emails show NASA attempting to scrub their website of their own documents, and indeed they quietly pulled down numerous press releases grounded in the proven-wrong data. The emails show NASA claiming that their own temperature errors (which they have been caught making and in uncorrected form aggressively promoting) are merely trivial, after years of hysterically trumpeting much smaller warming anomalies.

As you examine the email excerpts below, as well as those which I will discuss in the upcoming three parts of this series, bear in mind that the contents of these emails were intended to prop up the argument for the biggest regulatory intervention in history: the restricting of carbon emissions from all human activity. NASA’s activist scientists leave no doubt in their emails that this was indeed their objective. Also, please note that these documents were responsive to a specific FOIA request from two years ago. Recent developments — combined with admissions contained in these documents — beg further requests, which have both been already filed and with more forthcoming.

Read the whole thing. As DocZero says, we need to dramatically change the risk/reward ratio for this kind of fraudulent behavior, particularly when it’s used as a basis for public policy.

[Update a few minutes later]

Who trusts science now?

Recently, the president of the U.N. Foundation and former Sen. Tim Wirth said the manipulated evidence uncovered by the Climategate e-mail scandal was a mere “opening” to attack science that “has to be defended just like evolution has to be defended.”

Get it? Those unreasonable people who deny evolution — despite the overwhelming evidence — are the same brand of illiterate hoi polloi who won’t hand over their gas-powered lawn mowers on the word of an oracle weather model and haphazardly placed weather station.

In some ways, I’m even more infuriated by being lumped in with creationists than I am with being compared to a Holocaust denier. These people are intellectually bankrupt.