Category Archives: Media Criticism

Asteroid Missions

Are they really harder than landing on Mars?

Sorry, but with all respect, that’s nuts. We know all we need to know about asteroids to plan a mission to them, including the space radiation environment. All you need to do is pick one. And landing on Mars is hard.

That’s not to say that I think that NASA should be doing an asteroid mission, of course. And especially it shouldn’t as long as it continues to spread the nonsense that it needs the SLS/Orion for it.

[Update a while later]

I think that this is mostly FUD from people who don’t want to do an asteroid mission.

The Left Still Loves Guns

But they only want guns capable of killing large numbers of people quickly in the hands of the state:

Leftists are by nature not liberals, no matter what label they have adopted. Scratch a liberal, and find a Fascist.

Except the latter “liberal” needs appropriate scare quotes. Funny thing, I don’t know of any corporation or individual who murdered people by the millions in the last century.

Meanwhile, newsflash for Piers Morgan: the AR-15 is today’s musket.

[Update a while later]

Extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds:

Lefties are fond of lecturing (and writing books, and plays, and movies) about the famously dark days of McCarthyism, where right wing Bircher paranoiacs supposedly were looking for a ‘Red under every bed.’ I suppose to a certain extent they had a point, but the sum total impact of that brief 50’s reign of terror seems to be that a couple of Hollywood writers lost screenplay deals.

Contrast that with our new age of left wing paranoia. Now that the national boogie men are Gunnies rather than Commies, there ain’t no bed, or closet, or playground safe to hide from our brave safety crusaders. No one is above suspicion, and so holy is their cause that even crayon-scrawled representations of Demon Gun must be banned. Obviously, we have to arrest children precisely because it’s For The Children. Welcome to New Salem, with the Reverend Piers Morgan as our new Cotton Mather.

It’s no coincidence that the heart of Leftism is in Massachusetts. They’re the direct descendants of the Puritans, who came seeking religious freedom for themselves, including the freedom to restrict others’ freedom.

[Bumped]

Karl Rove

…is no conservative. Well, duh. Neither is George W. Bush (or his father).

One point he missed — Bush’s flouting of the Constitution in signing McCain-Feingold while declaring it unconstitutional. The House should have threatened him (appropriately) with impeachment for that. It was a blatant violation of his oath of office.

If you have a half an hour, you might also want to listen to Mark Levin’s righteous rant on this topic.

The Coming War

…in the Middle East:

We can envision, then, a sectarian war raging across the whole of the Fertile Crescent, drawing in all the former territories of Turkish Arabia. The prospect will be a frightening one for the region’s major powers. Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia could one day find chaos rather than functioning states on their permeable borders. If Al Qaeda/Nusrah can establish a base in Jordan, Saudi Arabia will find itself threatened by Al Qaeda franchises on both north and south that will be well-positioned to resume the pursuit of Al Qaeda’s core goal of toppling the Saudi monarchy and “liberating” the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

The Saudis showed great resiliency in defeating a serious Al Qaeda insurrection in 2004-2008, but that was a strictly internal threat that lacked a real foreign base. Simultaneous Al Qaeda bases in Jordan and Yemen would pose a more serious, if not an existential, threat to Saudi rule. If watching the fall or near-fall of half a dozen regimes in the Arab Spring has taught us anything, it should be that the Arab states that appeared serenely stable to outsiders for the past half century were more brittle than we have understood. The implosion of Turkish Arabia would test those regimes to the limit, and we cannot assume that the rulers of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait would be any better equipped to defeat the potential challenge than Muammar Qaddhafi and Bashar al-Assad were.

The rulers of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran are surely not blind to this nightmare scenario. As the situation in Turkish Arabia continues to unravel, those regional powers will be compelled to become ever deeper involved in an attempt to keep the tide of war from breaking on their own lands. This conflict could very well touch us all, perhaps becoming an engine of jihad that spews forth attackers bent on bombing western embassies and cities or disrupting Persian Gulf oil markets long before the fire burns out.

Arabia has always had bloody borders. At some point, it will become logically impossible for even the most virulent anti-semite to blame this on Israel. Not that it will stop them, of course.

The Leftist Barack Obama

unmasked.

The notion that he was ever a moderate was always lunacy, but he fooled a lot of the rubes, like Warren Buffett and David Brooks (not to mention Christopher Buckley, Peggy Noonan, et al) over the past five years.

[Update a while later]

Bad link, sorry.

For those who wonder why I occasionally have bad links, what happens is that I highlight the new link, but forget to ctrl-C, so the previous post’s link gets pasted, and I don’t notice.

If you want to attribute it to a senior moment, have at it.

SLAPPing The Mann Again

We filed our final response to Michael Mann’s ridiculous lawsuit on Friday. It’s the last filing prior to a hearing on the motions to dismiss, which will likely occur in April. CEI General Counsel notes:

As our reply demonstrates, while Mann paints himself as a reluctant warrior in the global warming debate, he’s quick to fling epithets at his critics. Mann characterizes his opponents and their positions, variously, as “pure scientific fraud,” “bogus,” “hired assassin,” “shills,” “crimes against humanity,” and the ever-useful smear of “denier.” The professor claims that he’s been exonerated by numerous investigations, but those reports raise more questions than they answer. And his view of First Amendment freedoms is so incorrect that, in addition to the Nobel Prize he wrongly thinks he won, he may now end up with a Pulitzer — but it won’t be for nonfiction.

From the filing itself:

Continue reading SLAPPing The Mann Again