Category Archives: Media Criticism

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Some New Year’s Resolutions

23 Comments

…from Frank J.:

While continuing to trust science, let’s make sure the scientists we’re getting it from aren’t douche nozzles.

I like science — we all like science — but if we’re going to throw a huge wrench into our economy, let’s make sure it’s not on the advice of scientists who treat data like a used-car salesman treats an old Chevy.

Next time we pick a leader, let’s make sure he has more qualifications than a bunch of empty slogans of the sort you’d use to sell carbonated beverages.

Yeah, we won’t get a chance in the next year, but let’s try and do that at least once this next decade. It’s hard, but we can do it. Yes we can.

If we have another economic crisis, let’s not hand a blank checkbook to a bunch of Democrats.

Politicians love spending money — Democrats especially. If we had a problem of having way too much money and needed to get rid of it quickly, you’d be a fool to elect anyone other than Democrats. But if the problem is that we’re running out of money, it may be a bad idea to put Democrats in charge, because their solution to having too little money will inevitably be to spend more money.

He has more.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Humpty Dumpty

8 Comments

…has been shattered:

…Those were heady times when Guantanamo was still a gulag with its hundreds of Solzhenitsyns, not psychopaths like Khalid Sheikh Mohammeds, when we could just leave Iraq by “March 2008”, and when there would be no lobbyists, no tax cheats, no insider buy-offs and horse-trading for votes. In such a dreamy world, geniuses like Timothy Geithner don’t pocket their FICA allowances, and Tom Daschles don’t fudge on their complimentary limo services.

And then tragically Obama got elected and discovered that the real world had no relationship whatsoever to his fantasy impressions of it. In a cosmos of radical Islam, Chinese bankers, Japanese exporters, and Arab oil producers, there were no more law school profs, Rev. Wrights, or Chris Matthews and Newsweek editors to wink and nod and reassure Obama that his mellifluous but empty rhetoric allusions were at all reality-based.

So here we are. A president of the United States does not want to rush to the microphones and swear he will hunt down the Abdulmutallabs of the world and their sponsors, or that there will be no more Major Hasans (so much easier to rush to call the Cambridge police “stupidly” acting, while employing “allegedly” for the bomb-making of Abdulmutallab).

It’s sort of like much of the country suffered from Bush-Derangement Syndrome last year, and are just finally coming out of it, and their Obamanian trance. I think that it’s a good sign for the elections next fall, though.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Hope! And Not Change!

12 Comments

Really.

Has Obama given up on ObamaCare?

If so, the anger at the political incompetence of the White House on the Hill among the Dems will go incandescent.

Plus, a bonus. A compendium of presidential (and presidential candidate) liesbroken promises, about health care. And it doesn’t even include my favorite: “If you like your current insurance, you’ll be able to keep it.” Well, I’m currently self insured. I’m not going to be allowed to keep it. Unless this monstrosity craters, and note the title of the post.

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

Punishing Us For Our Sins

27 Comments

High AGW Priest Tom Friedman thinks that we deserve to be hit by a massive storm:

Absent such a storm that literally parts the Red Sea again and drives home to all the doubters that catastrophic climate change is a clear and present danger, the domestic pressures in every country to avoid legally binding and verifiable carbon reductions will remain very powerful.

That will be our come-to-Gaia moment.

[Update a few minutes later]

Is global warming a dead issue?

It may well be. We’re now too broke to be able to afford such an ostentatious, gaudy and pointless religion.

[Update a few minutes later]

I kind of buried the lede in the link above — it cites a paper claiming that global temperature is more influenced by CFCs and cosmic rays than CO2. It’s peer reviewed, too.

If the biggest problems are cosmic rays and solar radiation, it’s hard to see how the power-hungry bureaucrats are going to leverage that into taking over the global economy.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

That Didn’t Take Long

2 Comments

When I wrote that denizens of the east coast had to shovel a couple of feet of global warming, I was right:

…this record-breaking snowstorm is pretty much precisely what climate science predicts. Since one typically can’t make a direct association between any individual weather event and global warming, perhaps the best approach is to borrow and modify a term from the scientific literature and call this a “global-warming-type” deluge…

Global warming. Is there anything that it can’t do?

More over at The American Spectator, where I got the link, with some history in comments:

The worst storm for the East Coast occured in late Jan 1888 (just a few weeks after the horrible Children’s Blizzard). The entire Mid Atlantic states were buried under 15-20 foot snow drifts

The strongest cyclone to hit the UK occured in the 17th Century, and resulted portions of upper Scottland be buried under 60 foot of sand.

Some of the most spectacular rain fall events for Europe occured in the 14th and 15th centuries, which caused widespread famine and starvation. In Normandy, during the summer of 1318 it rained every day but 3.

Ditto for China. The 14th through the 17th centuries saw both record droughts and rainfalls.

And none can be attributed to AGW.

Of course it can. The planet was anticipating our voracious energy usage in the future.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The New Utilities

18 Comments

Trust busting, or cartel building?

if you think monopoly bargaining is the problem in health care, our cost problem is going to get worse, not better. Think of the one area where we see the most customer complaints: quasi-public utilities like the cable and phone companies. They also have a rather ponderous rate of innovation, and no particular interest in controlling their costs. That’s not an accident; it’s a feature of a regulatory structure that starts from provider costs and works up to what extra percentage they will be allowed to charge essentially captive consumers.

The notion that we need the government to “compete” with insurance companies is economically insane. As I’ve said before, if they need competition, let them compete with each other. That they don’t is a result of flawed government policy, which the lunacy that is passing the Congress will only make much worse.

As a commenter there notes, this bill will essentially ban true private insurance. If this becomes law, expect to see an underground economy and black market in health care.