Remember the idiot reporter on CNN? Apparently the “Science” Guy didn’t exactly cover himself in glory, either.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
A New Space Policy Petition
While it’s conceptually appealing, this seems far too vague to be useful.
The Space Review
Happy tenth anniversary to Jeff, who is asking the big space policy questions for the next ten years.
[Update a few minutes later]
I have to comment on this:
“NASA needs to have more than one half of one percent of the federal budget,” Bingham said at the FAA conference last week, emphasizing he was speaking only for himself. That call has been echoed by others in recent years who have sought to at least double NASA’s share of the federal budget to one percent.
There is no magic “correct” percentage of the federal budget that NASA should get. Traditionally, it used to be about one percent, but the budget hasn’t actually declined that much. It’s now half a percent because of the monstrous budget growth in other areas over the past several years, and NASA didn’t keep up. NASA should get as much budget as it needs to accomplish its assigned tasks, regardless of the budget percentage. Of course, since some of its assigned tasks are wasteful and useless, like Jeff Bingham’s Senate Launch System, it could actually be doing a lot more with the money that it’s being given, if Congress wouldn’t force the agency to waste so much.
Obama’s Latest Scheme
He wants Congress to fix the sequester he suggested with the new taxes he’s wanted all along.
John Brennan
Is he a secret Muslim?
Given some of his statements in the past, it wouldn’t shock me.
[Update a while later]
Brennan’s evasions. Even if he’s a Zoroastrian, there are many reasons to not confirm him.
The Intrinsic Violence Of The Left
Andrew Klavan, with some thoughts on the invisible (and voluntary) versus the very visible hand of the Left, as most recently demonstrated by L’Affaire Chris Dorner:
The left has never bought into the central revelation of the Enlightenment: things are made to work perfectly fine without much control from above. This Enlightenment insight was inspired by the earlier work of Isaac Newton who discovered that God didn’t have to move the stars around in the sky or cause the apple to fall to earth. The Big Dude had cleverly put machinery in place that worked pretty much on its own. The economist Adam Smith translated this insight into economics when he pointed out that individuals working in their own interest frequently promote the interest of everyone as if by an invisible hand. The founders translated the idea into politics by creating a system in which individuals could act without too much government interference. These geniuses didn’t trust in individual goodness, not at all. They trusted in the handiwork of the Creator — that is, they trusted the overall human system was built to work without kings and aristocrats — or a democratic mob — forcing people to do what they wanted.
Jean Jacques Rousseau, the founding saint of modern leftism, rejected that Enlightenment wisdom. He hated the modern world and thought humanity had been better off in a state of noble savagery. In that state, Rousseau believed, men were truly free because their laws naturally followed the general will. If people in the corrupt modern age violated the general will, they had to be “forced to be free.”
The logic of Rousseau led to the guillotine.
As it led to the deaths of tens of millions over the past century. And of course, it is one of the reasons (but of course by no means the only one) that they don’t want us to have guns. They assume that they are as willing to kill for their ideology as they are, and we (or rather, they) can’t have that.
[Monday morning update]
More Huffpo readers who support mass murder. See, he’s got a grievance, so it’s perfectly understandable why he’d kill innocent people.
Boba Fett
Sorry, Gen-Xers, but not everything, or everyone, has a back story. And that’s particularly not the case with one of the most overrated movie franchises in history.
Han Solo you might be able to make a movie about, but Boba Fett? Really? If so, it’s just a final demonstration of cultural and moral decline.
A Worthy Cause
Go help out the Sun News. Richard Warman is one of the most vile, illiberal people in the west.
Not that I want you to not care about my lawsuit, but this one is even more important that my foofaraw with the disgustingly litigious Michael Mann. Warman is at war with the enlightenment itself.
Is There Anything Global Warming Can’t Do?
A CNN anchor wonders if it causes asteroids.
And they say that skeptics are at war with science.
The Memory Hole At NPR
What strikes me about this story is that it’s supposed to be taken as a given that the NRA and Wayne LaPierre should be remorseful and contrite about Newtown, even though it and he had nothing to do with it.