Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Federal Dietary Guidelines

…are based on “pseudoscience.”

I think that’s being kind. They’re based on junk science. And they’re deadly:

The confluence of self-interest, institutional inertia, and scientific incompetence has led us to where we are today. The federal government has massively increased spending on nutrition and obesity research over the past few decades, and now spends over $2 billion of taxpayer’s money per year. Unfortunately, the people that control that funding are the same researchers that use these anecdotal methods, train the next generation of researchers, and control the publication of scientific papers. As such, new methods and innovative research is stifled. The same researchers are getting funded to do the same research year after year after year. This inertia and self-interest are exacerbated by the exorbitant amount of grant funding established researchers receive. As with many things in life, follow the money.

Say, isn’t there another field of science with profound public-policy implications that operates under the same incentives and pressures?

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Camille Paglia

10 Comments

An interesting interview:

Next was the argument over hormones. Again, screaming argument over hormones. I was told by the founding members of the Women’s Studies Department at the State University of New York at Albany that I had been brainwashed by male scientists to believe that hormones even existed, much less had any role in the shaping of our identity and character.

So I was banned from the women’s movement from the start, but I kept going on. I was pro-pornography, pro-prostitution on libertarian grounds. For years, my wing of feminism—which had been silenced and ostracized by the Steinem wing, the establishment wing, partisans of the Democratic party, my party, but nevertheless, I don’t feel that feminism should be subordinated to any party—finally, we rose in the ’90s and the pro-sex wing of feminism won in the ’90s thanks to Madonna having changed the culture.

…If you’re going to be a woman president, she must communicate strength, reserve, and yet compassion. That formula—I’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for it. The only person in America who’s had it as far as I’m concerned was Dianne Feinstein, and she didn’t put herself forward for whatever reason as president.

But Hillary does not have it. Hillary is a mess. And we’re going to award the presidency to a woman who’s enabled the depredations and exploitation of women by that cornpone husband of hers? The way feminists have spoken makes us blind to Hillary’s record of trashing [women]. They were going to try to destroy Monica Lewinsky. It’s a scandal! Anyone who believes in sexual harassment guidelines should have seen that the disparity of power between [Bill] Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was one of the most grotesque ever in the history of sex crime. He’s a sex criminal! We’re going to put that guy back in the White House? Hillary’s ridden on his coattails. This is not a woman who has made her own career. The woman failed the bar exam in Washington! The only reason she went to Arkansas and got a job in the Rose Law Firm was because her husband was a politician.

And then there’s this:

I’m happy that this talk about medical sex changes was not in the air, because I would have become obsessed with that and assumed that that was my entire identity and problem. This is why I’m very concerned about the rush to surgical interventions today.

At any rate, I was attracted to men—I dated men—but I just fell in love with women and always have. Yes, there’s absolutely no doubt: I was on the forefront of gay identification. When I arrived at graduate school at Yale, 1968–1972, I was the only openly gay person, and I didn’t even have a sex life. To me, it was a badge of militance. And I was the only person doing a dissertation on a sexual topic. It’s hard to believe this now.

I’m sorry, but isn’t it blindingly obvious that if you’re attracted to men, and also attracted to women, that you are not gay, but bi? I wonder how she’d respond to this question.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Arguing About Destinations

9 Comments

…is getting us nowhere.

Yes, it’s pointless and distracting. We need to be developing capabilities to go wherever we want. But there’s not enough graft in that.

I should note that while my Kickstarter is about clearing the roadblock to Mars, it’s really about clearing the roadblock to everywhere, which is the false perception that we cannot go beyond earth orbit unless NASA builds a giant rocket. It’s all part of ending the old Apollo cargo cult.

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

White Is The New Black?

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Some thoughts on race and affirmative action:

If gender is merely a matter of self-identification, should not race be also? I have always thought that, given the affirmative action-laden higher education admissions process, applicants should self-identify as “black” or “Native American” whenever they so desire. I mean, why not? If they feel black or Native American, should not they be able to claim such an identity, as Rachel Dolezal has done? Doing so would quickly cause affirmative action to collapse of its own ridiculous weight.

Indeed, all of this race balkanization–with such extreme emphasis as belonging to this or that race–only further divides us, as race baiters like Al Sharpton well know. So why not accept the progressives’ terms of the debate–that our gender and race is all simply a matter of self-identity–and identify as a member of races that are favored/more protected by law? After all, no one can ever really know what lies in another’s heart. Does Bruce Jenner sincerely believe he is a female, or does he simply like to dress up in women’s clothes? Does Rachel Dolezal sincerely believe she is black? No one can possibly know the answer, perhaps not even Mr./Ms. Jenner and Ms. Dolezal.

What would a university do if an applicant self-identified as “black” on an application but showed up looking “white”? And if the university made such a judgment, what on earth would that mean? How would the university defend its belief that a student didn’t “look” black? What sort of bizarre racial stereotypes would it rely upon in making such an appearance-based judgment? And if the university actually decided to take action against the student for racial misrepresentation, what on earth would that mean? How would the university judge whether the student was really “black”? What percentage of blood would suffice for such a progressive institution? Fifty percent? Ten percent? One percent?

For decades I’ve been saying that “white” people should put down “black” on racial quiz forms, and defy anyone to prove them wrong. Race is, after all, a social construct.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Satire, Social Commentary, Weird

The Fake Black NAACP Leader

6 Comments

Somehow, this story reminds me of my old satire about Trent Lott:

In a prelude to his upcoming appearance on BET, he appeared at a sparsely-attended press conference outside his local office, resplendent in a colorful daishiki, with his formerly shellacked hair frizzing freely in a three-foot diameter “afro-style” hairdo.

“As you all know, Bill Clinton was the first black president. Well, I’m the first black Senate Majority Leader. It’s truly a proud day for the Republican Party and the African-American community.”

“I know that many of you will be surprised to learn that I was ‘passing’ all of these years. It was a deep, dark family secret.”

“My great-great grandmother was a house nigra on a plantation outside of Biloxi. My great-grandfather was a mullatto, my grandmother was a quadroon, and my mother was an octaroon, which makes me a hexidecaroon. As all of you from hereabouts know, just a touch of one hair of the tarbrush means that I can never be truly white.”

I guess life imitates art, or something.

[Update a while later]

A lot more links: “She’s trans-black. Don’t shame her.”

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Screw Dick Shelby

9 Comments

“…and the lobbyists he road in on.”

An epic rant (IMHO) over at my underfunded Kickstarter project.

[Friday-morning update]

I’ll re-run the rant here:

I’ve been writing all week, in various venues, about the mess that we’ve gotten ourselves into with Russia, whose space systems seem to be having reliability issues, despite the successful landing today of the Soyuz (the same Soyuz that on Monday fired an uncommanded thruster for half a minute, resulting in an attitude and course change to the ISS that took a couple hours to get under control). For background, here is my latest post on that, with links to previous ones at Ricochet and (from last weekend) PJMedia.

As you’ll note, the House had previous cut about a quarter of a billion from Commercial Crew in its appropriations bill, about a 20% cut in NASA’s request. The Senate, under the “leadership” of CSJ Chairman Richard Shelby (DickShelbyParty – Alabama) (and full appropriations committee Chairman Thad Cochran, R-Mississippi, who also gets a lot of SLS jobs in his state) just passed out of committee an appropriations bill that ups (or downs?) the ante, cutting it by over a third of a billion dollars.

This, despite repeated warnings from NASA that such a cut would delay commercial crew beyond 2017 (Senator Nelson actually went on the floor yesterday and said by as much as four years, but that’s probably hyperbolic — SpaceX isn’t going to wait that long to get ready to support their commercial human spaceflight customers). Note that however long the delay is, it is of great benefit to Vladimir Putin, who will continue to defy INKSNA with impunity, continuing to provide aid to Iran in developing nuclear weapons and missiles, and continuing to enrich himself and his cronies from NASA payments to Roscosmos and other Russian space entities. I started a hashtag over on Twitter called #DickShelbyLovesPutin, and I think it’s entirely appropriate.

Why did they do this? Senator Shelby will blame sequestration, and that NASA just doesn’t have enough money to do all that they want to do, but as Jeff Foust’s article at Space News notes, they cut the Commercial Crew budget in the same bill in which NASA had an overall increase.

Folks, this is not about money.

It is about preserving and protecting the Senate Launch System, in two ways.

The first is that all of the money taken from Commercial Crew (and other money presumably taken from somewhere else) was used to up the SLS budget by hundreds of millions of dollars over the NASA request. As I noted in the video, this is crazy. No manager can sensibly spend a sudden increase of hundreds of billions of dollar dumped in her lap in a given year. The fact that they just come up with arbitrary numbers (e.g., the House simply slashed the budget to an even billion) indicates that zero thought or planning has gone into this.

But the other point is that, if Commercial Crew succeeds, it will simply be another nail in the coffin for one of the (insane) justifications for SLS — that it is an “insurance policy” should Commercial Crew “fail.” Yes, these people in Congress actually put forth the economically lunatic notion that a launch system that won’t fly with people until 2021 at the earliest, and will cost multiple billions per flight, is somehow a way to eliminate our need for the Russians.

Now you know that’s nuts. I know that’s nuts. But too many people don’t pay enough attention to understand why that’s nuts.

And this isn’t the first time this has happened. Every year, Shelby comes up with another scheme to hobble Commercial Crew because he knows that it’s a threat to his pork. Last year, the failed scheme was to cripple SpaceX with unnecessary accounting rules. He hates Commercial Crew, but he’d tolerate it if he could be assured it would go to Boeing, which is why, in his socialistic way, he continues to insist that the taxpayer would somehow be better off with no competition. What he really hates is SpaceX.

But now it’s gone beyond simply wasting tax dollars for pork in Huntsville (and Michoud, and Promontory, and…). It’s to the point that this is keeping us dependent on the Russians, into the indefinite future. Simply put, Dick Shelby doesn’t give a damn about that. He is Vlad’s BFF.

Beyond that, he doesn’t give a damn about our future in space. He doesn’t give a damn about taxpayer dollars, as long as they can be deployed to get him re-elected.

He has nothing resembling political principles, other than the importance of Dick Shelby keeping his Senate seat.

He’s not a Democrat. He’s not a Republican. He’s the one and only member of the Dick Shelby Party (emphasis on the first word). But sadly, because he caucuses with them, and he’s got seniority, too many Republicans go along with this treachery against the nation and against our future in space. And yes, that’s the word I use. It is, in the words of a Continental Army officer some time back, “Treason, treason, black as hell.”

And he gets away with it. This whole thing is happening because too many people think that SLS is necessary, and resist cutting it for that reason, even though it is absorbing all the money needed to develop things actually needed to move America into space. Ending that perception is not a sufficient condition to put an end to this madness, but it is a very necessary one

The purpose of this project is to show that this perception is simply untrue. Senator Shelby just gave you more reasons to support it. If you can afford more, please up your donation. If you can spread the word, please do so. Don’t let him get away with this.

[/rant]