I continue to be amazed that people think that this president is honest, when there is such a huge ongoing gap between words and deeds. Who was foolish enough to believe that he would actually cut the federal budget? Of course, as was the case with many of his campaign promises, I assume that his supporters just assumed and hoped that he was lying.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Journalism, Then And Now
I think, sadly, that Mickey is right:
I had a revealing argument with a politically sophisticated friend–call him “Max”– when the “game changer” charge first surfaced. Max’s argument: Suppose it were a scandal sufficiently big to sink Obama. Any red-blooded Times reporter would be proud to publish it and tack Obama’s scalp to the wall. To have taken down a presidential nominee–that would be a professional achievement, maybe a Pulitzer. They’d be high-fiving in the newsroom.
I think my friend is right about the culture of the newsroom–about 45 years ago. As for today, I think he’s living in a dreamworld. Even if the Times had published such a story, Times reporters would certainly not have high-fived the colleague who’d cost Obama the election. Not after two terms of Bush. And I have no faith the paper would even have published it (before allowing the reporter to slink out of the building). In part, that’s because I have no faith that I’d publish it. The old adversarial ethic–I play my role and let the system take care of the moral consequences–rightly went mostly out the window with the ascension of the Sixties cohort.
Yes, the cohort that thinks it won the Vietnam war (not the one to keep South Vietnam to go communist, but rather the one at home against the Amerikkkan fascist pigs who thought that not going communist was a good idea). And now they work to make sure that America never again wins a war, and that people who favor free minds and free markets never win elections.
Lileks Versus Mastercard
…and creeping, creepy ecofascism:
Isn’t it interesting how Dad looks like the sort of delayed-adolescent types most likely to be already concerned about these things, and spending his day working on developing websites for sustainability, hosted on servers powered by methane captured from pig excreta? For that matter, who would like this ad? Wives who regard their husbands as overgrown boys in need of the Moral Guidance of those who will inherit the earth, perhaps…
…One more thing: if the kid didn’t learn these steps to righteousness at home, where did he get them?
The state knows best.
Where’s My Flying Car?
And what happened to my space colonies?
Yes, it was never a mass movement, and even with the merger of NSI and L-5, I don’t think that NSS has ever had more than a hundred thousand members. I do think, though, that it is sufficiently appealing to a sufficient number of people that when we break out of the NASA paradigm, and the supply actually responds to demand, some people will live in space in the future.
[Evening update]
Clark Lindsey responds to Dwayne Day’s dyspeptic space colony post:
In the 1970s space had become a niche topic little noticed by the general public. Within that niche area one could search around and find a tiny sub-niche dealing with in-space orbital space colonies. Sure, there were the occasional articles and a handful of books about O’Neill space colonies and a small group of people had a high interest in them. However, you could say the same thing about a million other topics as well. Orbital space colonies never came close to being a topic that most people were aware of, much less considered in any thoughtful way.
If in 1980 you asked a randomly selected group of a thousand people what they thought about space, a thousand would say, probably in the first sentence, that space was wildly expensive. If you asked them if they had read an article about space colonies in the past decade, I doubt even fifty would say yes. And most of those fifty would say such colonies might be a great idea but are impractical while space travel is so wildly expensive.
Yes, as is the case of much of space policy, it’s all about information and perspective. (I’ve added “Media Criticism” to the categories for this post, and bumped it…)
The Left’s Conundrum
How to blame George Bush for Europe’s recession:
Do you notice anything funny about these numbers? Here is what I notice: the recession in the US is milder than that of Europe. Every country on this list had more economic shrinkage from 2008 to 2009 (Q1 to Q1) than did the US.
How could this be? Did they all have George Bush for President? Did they all succumb to free market ideology in the last eight years? Did they all repeal part of Glass-Steagall? Did they all spend wildly on an unnecessary war in Iraq? Did they all bankrupt themselves with out-of-control defense spending?
It’s a mystery.
Fascist Democrat Thuggery
Apparently, these people are impervious to irony:
We were outraged to read in today’s New York Times that you are actively opposing our efforts to achieve a diminuation in foreclosures by voluntary efforts… We have set a hearing for November 12, and we invite you now to testify. We believe it is essential for our policymaking function for you to appear at such a hearing, and if this cannot be arranged on a voluntary basis, then we will pursue further steps.
So let me get this straight. Barney Frank, Maxine Waters et al are trying to get banks to do something “voluntarily” by threatening them with “further steps.”
But we shouldn’t worry about threats of tax audits.
What If We Encouraged Gun Ownership?
Some thoughts from the real “reality-based community.”
The Perfect Energy Source
I have commenters who refuse to start their own blogs, so I’ll have to create my own guest-blog posts for them. Here’s Carl Pham:
I wouldn’t say I’m enthusiastic about sequestration, aside from the aesthetic pleasure I get from acres of active sequesterers, particular those in genus Sequoia, but it sure beats the hell out of (1) deindustrialization and refeudalization (I know who wants to be my feudal lord), or (2) flinging irrecoverable resources down the rabbit hole of “alternative energy” sources.
I mean, it amazes me that people think because it’s possible to formulate a sentence like we must search for alternative energy sources that they must exist, whereas a few moments informed thought would tell you this is a sentence like we must search for Atlantis or we must search for a new element with stable isotopes, and coming perilously close to we must search for a perpetual motion machine.
The way I see it, there are four forces. Gravity gives us waterfalls and windpower, tech known since the 8th century, thoroughly exploited. The strong force gives us fission and fusion, also well understood. Fission has been ruled out because we’re stupid. Fusion is tough because of that staggering activation barrier, the size of the match you need to light the fire. The weak force gives us radioactivity, but if you’re going to use that you might as well use fission, so that’s that.
What’s left? The EM force, which gives us solar energy and chemistry. Direct solar power is futile, because the power density at the Earth’s surface is too low, so you’ve got to have some collection and storage system, which inevitably brings us to chemistry, that being the way you store electromagnetic energy (barring the invention of stupendous capacitors).
Problem is, the Earth is a closed system, and it’s had 4 billion years to come to equilibrium. There aren’t many chemical reactions left that (1) have plentiful fuel lying around, but (2) magically enough, have failed to already run sometime over the past million millenia.
Except for one. That would be combustion. And the reason is simple, because we live in a giant photosynthesizing hothouse, a mad biosphere that soaks up gigartons of CO2, reduces it to carbohydrates for storage and transport, and then oxidizes it again for energy and movement. It’s a nice, neat, closed cycle, and has been running stably for millions of years. Humble logic suggests the obvious thing to do is tap into this cycle for our own needs, peel off 0.1% of the carbon for our own purposes.
Which we do — but only on the oxidation side. So logic suggests, once again, that we enlist our chlorophylled neighbors to help us out there by reducing the carbon we so merrily oxidize, balancing the books. And, amazingly enough, just as we’re aware of the problem, we discover the tools necessary: our ability to directly manipulate the genome, so that we can tailor plants and bugs to reduce CO2 just the way we want.
I mean, heck, if only combustion and the carbon cycle had just been discovered, it would be the coolest, most clever, greenest tech, and Obama would be wanting to pour billions into it. But, you know, since the tech is as old as pencils, we sit around thinking No, that can’t make sense. Make marks with a piece of charcoal encased in wood? They did that in the 16th century, back when people were stupid and uneducated. There MUST be a better way.
In Defense of Speaker Pelosi
It’s all part of a vast, nonpartisan conspiracy:
Poor Nancy Pelosi. For more than two years, our beloved House Speaker has been fighting for the public interest, toiling to restore “integrity and civility” to the Capitol’s lower chamber, and striving to shape the most ethical Congress in world history. And what is her reward for this selfless service? The cruel wrath of a vicious, widespread, nonpartisan conspiracy—designed to convince the American public that she is lying and playing politics with national security. This cabal is especially insidious because it involves so many disparate, and seemingly unrelated, players. Further still, its nefarious and remarkably prescient architects had the foresight to begin crafting the phony case against Pelosi years ago, fabricating evidence and coordinating lies as far back as 2002. These people must be exposed and thwarted to preserve Mme. Pelosi’s honor.
That’s just the beginning.
The First Hundred Days
…of President Palin.