Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Economics, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Administrative State

4 Comments

Time to blow it up:

A smaller government would mean fewer phony-baloney jobs for college graduates with few marketable skills but demonstrated political loyalty. It would mean fewer opportunities for tax dollars to be directed to people and entities with close ties to people in power. It would mean less ability to engage in social engineering and “nudges” aimed at what are all-too-often seen as those dumb rubes in flyover country. The smaller the government, the fewer the opportunities for graft and self-aggrandizement — and graft and self-aggrandizement are what our political class is all about.

A more accountable government would be, in some ways, an even greater nightmare. Right now, when the federal government screws up, people often don’t find out — look at how the IRS and the State Department have stonewalled efforts to find out what happened with the Tea Party audits or the Benghazi debacle — and even when word gets out, it’s rare that anybody loses their job. (The EPA knew that Flint, Michigan’s water was toxic for months and didn’t tell anyone. Will there be consequences? Doubtful.)

Most of the time, the bureaucracy acts without any real oversight from Congress, or from the public. It’s able to enact political agendas that, if put to an open vote, would never pass. And to the bureaucracy’s supporters, that’s not a bug, but a feature.

It is indeed.

Business, Economics, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Fossil Fuels

13 Comments

Matt Ridley on how they’ll save the world.
The conclusion:

The one thing that will not work is the one thing that the environmental movement insists upon: subsidizing wealthy crony capitalists to build low-density, low-output, capital-intensive, land-hungry renewable energy schemes, while telling the poor to give up the dream of getting richer through fossil fuels.

(Yes, behind paywall, but google the headline and you should be able to read it.)

[Update a while later]

I’m very sorry to hear about Piers Sellers’ illness, and hope for the best, but this NYT op-ed seems to me to be delusional:

All this as the world’s population is expected to crest at around 9.5 billion by 2050 from the current seven billion. Pope Francis and a think tank of retired military officers have drawn roughly the same conclusion from computer model predictions: The worst impacts will be felt by the world’s poorest, who are already under immense stress and have meager resources to help them adapt to the changes. They will see themselves as innocent victims of the developed world’s excesses. Looking back, the causes of the 1789 French Revolution are not a mystery to historians; looking forward, the pressure cooker for increased radicalism, of all flavors, and conflict could get hotter along with the global temperature.

Last year may also be seen in hindsight as the year of the Death of Denial. Globally speaking, most policy makers now trust the scientific evidence and predictions, even as they grapple with ways to respond to the problem. And most Americans — 70 percent, according to a recent Monmouth University poll — believe that the climate is changing. So perhaps now we can move on to the really hard part of this whole business.

I hope that will change next January. As Ridley points out (as does Alex Epstein), it is the poor who would be hit the hardest byaabandoning fossil fuels (particularly with plunging prices), much more so than by “climate change.”

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Campus Turmoil

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…begins in high school:

…the discussion began, and it was the most unremittingly hostile questioning I’ve ever had. I don’t mind when people ask hard or critical questions, but I was surprised that I had misread the audience so thoroughly. My talk had little to do with gender, but the second question was “So you think rape is OK?”

Like most of the questions, it was backed up by a sea of finger snaps — the sort you can hear in the infamous Yale video, where a student screams at Prof. Christakis to “be quiet” and tells him that he is “disgusting.” I had never heard the snapping before. When it happens in a large auditorium it is disconcerting. It makes you feel that you are facing an angry and unified mob — a feeling I have never had in 25 years of teaching and public speaking.

After the first dozen questions I noticed that not a single questioner was male. I began to search the sea of hands asking to be called on and I did find one boy, who asked a question that indicated that he too was critical of my talk. But other than him, the 200 or so boys in the audience sat silently.

After the Q&A, I got a half-standing ovation: almost all of the boys in the room stood up to cheer. And after the crowd broke up, a line of boys came up to me to thank me and shake my hand. Not a single girl came up to me afterward.

This is almost Orwellian. OK, not “almost.”

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Political Poison

6 Comments

My home town, Flint, Michigan, has been in the news recently, and it’s been many decades since good news has come out of that city. Kevin Williamson notes the word that is rarely used in reporting on the story: “Democrat“:

We have a special problem in the United States, which is that the Democratic party is more of a crime syndicate than a political party, and it is deeply embedded in institutions ranging from the universities (where manufactured hate crimes and phony rape cases are used as political weapons) to the prosecutors’ offices (which bully law-enforcement personnel and file specious felony charges against politicians for such ordinary actions as vetoing legislation) to the unions (see California) and the schools. It doesn’t matter how many laws Hillary Rodham Clinton breaks, or how often she lies about it — the attorney general is a Democrat, and that’s that. Tom DeLay can be brought up on felony charges for allegedly having broken a law that wasn’t even on the books at the time he was said to have broken it (the case was eventually laughed out of court, after it had ended his political career, which was the point) but IRS criminal conspirator Lois Lerner is going to spend the rest of her days enjoying a fat pension at your expense.

And the media is complicit.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Blame the Chicago policy-shooting cover up on one-party rule.