Category Archives: Media Criticism

Libertarians And Conservatives

Can they find common ground through the Constitution?

Preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution, especially its Bill of Rights, provides ample grounds for unity between libertarians and most conservatives. Many of our civil liberties — dear to libertarians and conservatives both — are under assault by progressive forces.

There is much to collaborate on: preserving freedom of speech, and of the press, and of the free exercise of religion; honoring the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances; not infringing the right to keep and bear arms; rehabilitation the right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonably searches and seizures; the right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. Even, casting the net a bit wider, the classical gold standard and the repeal of the Estate tax!

They’d better.

Matt Damon Movies

The five most destructive ideas in them. I liked this review of Elysium in comments:

Spoiler alert:

The liberals win and create a future society that makes the entire Earth into Detroit. Obamacare is in full effect and as a result — shock — there is a shortage of doctors, medicine and advanced medical equipment.

The conservatives leave the Earth (kinda aka Atlas Shrugged) and build this magnificent Space Station with all the trappings of a productive and prosperous people — replete with advanced medical technology.

Since they cannot build and create a similarly advanced and prosperous society, the liberals decide that they will take what they did not earn and ultimately (through violence and magic of course) heal everyone in the world — especially the babies.

I’ll wait until it’s on free television. I don’t really like to put any money in the hypocritical moron’s pocket.

A First-Amendment Violation

by the federal government:

Any government employees that observe that Islamic terrorists themselves wrap themselves in the mantle of doctrinal Islam will quickly find themselves without a job. And when members of Congress have confronted senior administration officials as to whether elements of radical Islam have declared war on the U.S., those officials have angrily protested that Congress merely asking such questions puts them in league with al-Qaeda.

Then there’s the constitutional problem. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment requires the U.S. government to remain agnostic on these sorts of questions. It’s doubtful that Jen Psaki is going to be denouncing respective sides in Northern Ireland as “enemies of Christ,” especially when State can’t bring itself to even admit that attacks on Christians by Islamic groups are religiously motivated.

And of course, this is an administration that calls confessed killing in the name of Allah “workplace violence.”

Who made Jan Psaki an expert on who is and is not an “enemy of Islam”? The first thing I thought when I heard that news this morning is that the ACLU, if they wanted to maintain the slightest level of non-hypocrisy, would be filing a lawsuit. I won’t hold my breath.

Being Honest About Major Hassan

Some thoughts from Mark Steyn:

Major Hasan is a Virginia-born army psychiatrist and a recipient of the Pentagon’s Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, which seems fair enough, since he certainly served in it, albeit for the other side. Most Americans think he’s nuts. He thinks Americans are nuts. It’s a closer call than you’d think. In the immediate aftermath of his attack, the U.S. media, following their iron-clad rule that “Allahu akbar” is Arabic for “Nothing to see here,” did their best to pass off Major Hasan as the first known victim of pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. “It comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers,” fretted Andrew Bast in a report the now defunct Newsweek headlined, “A Symptom of a Military on the Brink.”

Major Hasan has never been in combat. He is not, in fact, a soldier. He is a shrink. The soldiers in this story are the victims, some 45 of them. And the only reason a doctor can gun down nearly four dozen trained warriors (he was eventually interrupted by a civilian police officer, Sergeant Kimberly Munley, with a 9mm Beretta) is that soldiers on base are forbidden from carrying weapons. That’s to say, under a 1993 directive a U.S. military base is effectively a gun-free zone, just like a Connecticut grade school. That’s a useful tip: If you’re mentally ill and looking to shoot up a movie theater at the next Batman premiere, try the local barracks — there’s less chance of anyone firing back.

Maybe this Clinton-era directive merits reconsideration in the wake of Fort Hood? Don’t be ridiculous. Instead, nine months after Major Hasan’s killing spree, the Department of Defense put into place “a series of procedural and policy changes that focus on identifying, responding to, and preventing potential workplace violence.”

Major Hasan says he’s a soldier for the Taliban. Maybe if the Pentagon were to reclassify the entire Afghan theater as an unusually prolonged outburst of “workplace violence,” we wouldn’t have to worry about obsolescent concepts such as “victory” and “defeat.” The important thing is that the U.S. Army’s “workplace violence” is diverse. After Major Hasan’s pre-post-traumatic workplace wobbly, General George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff, was at pains to assure us that it could have been a whole lot worse: “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty.” And you can’t get much more diverse than letting your military personnel pick which side of the war they want to be on.

I’d like to think that this is the epitome of the absurdity and insanity of the government’s approach to the war. Sadly, though, I suspect that they will take it to greater heights.

Perpetuating Space Policy Myths

This kind of article drives me up the wall:

NASA Ames’ main goal now is to transfer technology for commercialization and the betterment of mankind… However, over the years, government and popular support for further space exploration has dwindled, despite its many benefits. So, I’ve made a list of the top 10 reasons we should continue to explore the outer depths, “to go where no man has gone before”.

It then goes on to list a number of earthly spin-offs, few if any of which have much to do with going “where no man has gone before, and at least one of which that isn’t related to space technology at all, other than it may have been helped by NASA on the aeronautics side. This irritates at least two of my pet peeves.

First is the notion that what NASA does or should be doing is “space exploration.” JPL does that, but it does it by sending robots where no robot has gone before, not man. The vast majority of NASA’s budget, and particularly the human spaceflight budget, has little-to-nothing to do with space exploration. Now, I don’t actually mind that this is the case, because I’m not that big on space exploration myself. I think it’s a worthwhile thing to do, but it’s a means to an end, not the end itself. But people who think that “exploration” is the be-all and end-all of what NASA does, or should be doing, are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Unfortunately, the public (and the media) has appropriated the word as a catch-all for orbital research, technology development, launching rockets (even for defense or commercial satellites), etc. — anything having to do with space. And as long as we misuse the language in such a way, we’ll continue to be unclear in our goals and our policy.

Second is the notion that spin-offs are a good argument for “space exploration,” even if space exploration actually results in the spin-offs (as already noted, they didn’t). The first reason is that they don’t generally come from “exploration,” even if they were a serendipitous result of some NASA expenditure. The other is that serendipity is by definition too unpredictable to use it as an argument for efficient technology development. The third is that it assumes that the technologies wouldn’t have been developed absent the space application. One of the favorite false myths of the spin-off crowd was that we wouldn’t have had large-scale-integration of semi-conductors in the absence of Apollo, which is simply nonsense. The technology was driven much more by military satellite requirements and miniaturization of warheads than by human spaceflight.

When I saw the headline, I expected to see the word “exploration” misused, because it seems as though it’s almost a professional requirement on the part of the media to do so, but I hoped to see some actual compelling reasons for continuing to fund spaceflight. For example: develop the ability to divert asteroids, utilize extraterrestrial resources beyond the silly example of “gold,” provide humanity backups in case things go sour on this one planet where we evolved, offer a new frontier for human freedom, even philosophical ones such as helping the planet to reproduce and spread the seed of life throughout the universe. But no, with the exception of orbital gold mines, it comes off as just more teflon and tang (both of which existed before NASA was formed).