Category Archives: Media Criticism

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

TWA 800

6 Comments

I’m not sure why it’s all of a sudden gotten new play, but given all of the lies and cover ups that the government has been seen to be involved in recently, it’s probably fertile soil for it right now. I was always sceptical of the official story, given so much eyewitness testimony about missile streaks and such, but none of the alternatives make a lot of sense either. I have no firm opinion on it.

But you know what would be an interesting investigation to reopen in this environment? Or rather, in the coming environment of late 2015, early 2016? When the Democrats are holding their primary?

Someone should do a documentary on Vince Foster. Next month (on Moon Day, in fact) will be the twentieth anniversary of his death, the circumstances of which remain a mystery to anyone actually paying attention. I have no idea who killed him, and we may never know, absent a deathbed confession or something, but I think that the likelihood that he killed himself is slight, and that he died in Fort Marcy park, vanishingly small.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

General Kaus

12 Comments

He takes the lead in fighting this stupid bill on “comprehensive immigration reform”:

It’s time for the ants to swing into action. The Gang of 8 bill can still be stopped. But there are not many days left to scare away the fence-sitting senatorial swing votes. Again, it’s not that they don’t know what the issues are. It’s not that they don’t have a pretty good understanding of what the polls say about public opinion (voters are split on the idea of reform, but they overwhelmingly want border enforcement to come first). It’s that they are insufficiently scared that a vote for the Gang’s complicated mess-whatever they think of it – will bring them punishment at the polls.

They need to be scared. Here are two ways to do it.

Go read it all, and get off your butts.

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

Syria And Egypt

2 Comments

They can’t be fixed:

Sometimes countries dig themselves into a hole from which they cannot extricate themselves. Third World dictators typically keep their rural population poor, isolated and illiterate, the better to maintain control. That was the policy of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party from the 1930s, which warehoused the rural poor in Stalin-modeled collective farms called ejidos occupying most of the national territory. That was also the intent of the Arab nationalist dictatorships in Egypt and Syria. The policy worked until it didn’t. In Mexico, it stopped working during the debt crisis of the early 1980s, and Mexico’s poor became America’s problem. In Egypt and Syria, it stopped working in 2011. There is nowhere for Egyptians and Syrians to go.

That first sentence could apply to us, on the route we’re on. If we allow the Democrats to remain in charge, it will be our fate, and sooner than later. We just have to hope that we’re not there already. And then there’s this:

This background lends an air of absurdity to the present debate over whether the West should arm Syria’s Sunni rebels. American hawks like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, to be sure, argue for sending arms to the Sunnis because they think it politically unwise to propose an attack on the Assad regime’s master, namely Iran. The Obama administration has agreed to arm the Sunnis because it costs nothing to pre-empt Republican criticism. We have a repetition of the “dumb and dumber” consensus that prevailed during early 2011, when the Republican hawks called for intervention in Libya and the Obama administration obliged. Call it the foreign policy version of the sequel, “Dumb and Dumberer”.

Except it’s not funny. At all.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The “Ensemble” Of Climate Models

Is completely, statistically, meaningless:

Saying that we need to wait for a certain interval in order to conclude that “the models are wrong” is dangerous and incorrect for two reasons. First — and this is a point that is stunningly ignored — there are a lot of different models out there, all supposedly built on top of physics, and yet no two of them give anywhere near the same results!

This is reflected in the graphs Monckton publishes above, where the AR5 trend line is the average over all of these models and in spite of the number of contributors the variance of the models is huge. It is also clearly evident if one publishes a “spaghetti graph” of the individual model projections (as Roy Spencer recently did in another thread) — it looks like the frayed end of a rope, not like a coherent spread around some physics supported result.

This is not science. In many ways, it is the antithesis of it.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Spartacus Project

13 Comments

So, now that we know that they’re watching our web visits, web sites, social networks and email, and having seen what the IRS (and other agencies) have been willing to do against what they perceive to be enemies of the state, it might be time to start monkey wrenching them. While it was only a movie, I think we might take a page from the example of the Roman slave revolt.

Imagine if we were to flood the Internet with terms like “Tea Party,” “Benghazi,” “IRS abuse,” etc., to the point at which they’d have so many false leads that it would make it harder for them to track the people who are actually discussing such things? It can’t just be a standard list of the keywords/phrases — that would be easy to spot as a pattern. One could randomly shuffle them around, but that would still be easily detectable. Even generating random subsets of them wouldn’t do the job. What we need is an “enemy of the state” pattern generator, that would throw in a subset of the keywords/phrases, interspersed with a bunch of random English words to make it look to a machine as though they are being discussed in some kind of context, and no two messages alike. I’m imagining a perl (or python, or whatever) script, or whatever. The output might be spammed (OK, that’s the part I don’t like, but I’m not sure how to spread it to enough IPs otherwise — I’m open to alternative suggestions) to the world, and flood the zone to the point that they won’t be able to tell wheat from chaff. We can all be Spartacus, even those of us who had no intention to.

Thoughts?

[Update a couple minutes later]

It’s worth reading the comments at that old blog post, if you haven’t. Particularly this one on how to recognize the end of a Republic.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Mannsuit

5 Comments

The hearing for dismissal ended a while ago in DC. Now we’re just waiting for a ruling from the judge.

[Update a while later]

Note: it could be weeks before we get a ruling. The law says that it should be prompt, but that’s what it said about the hearing as well, and it’s been months since we filed (today’s hearing was originally scheduled for mid-April). But as long as there is no ruling, the case doesn’t move forward.