Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Media Criticism, Space

More On The SpaceX Anomaly

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…from Alan Boyle. I don’t think this is quite right, though:

What caused the engine’s sudden pressure release, which was apparently strong enough to blow off the fairing?

I think this is a misstatement of the issue. I could be wrong, because we’re still awaiting clarification from SpaceX, but my understanding is that when they shut the engine down, and there was no pressure field coming from the nozzle, the differential pressure resulting from Max Q resulted in it “imploding” inward and breaking off (and perhaps taking the nozzle with it, but that’s less clear). All that is clear is that SpaceX claims that the powerhead itself wasn’t damaged, because they continued to receive telemetry from it.

I should note that if this is the case, it eliminates any earlier concerns about the upper-stage engine causing a catastrophic failure, though questions remain about about why Orbcomm is in the wrong orbit. This is clearly a second-stage issue.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Here’s the current story from Joe Pappalardo at Popular Mechanics. I’ll probably be elaborating on it after getting more info from SpaceX.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The Midsummer Night’s Dream

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Is it the end, after four and a half long years, and not just a midsummer night?

You may remember the plot. Titania, queen of the fairies, has been placed under a spell by Oberon with the help of the mischievous Puck. It has caused her to fall in love with a cloddish man named Bottom, who has in turn been placed under a spell that has turned his head into that of an ass. Later on she receives the antidote that magically undoes the spell. Looking at the creature she formerly adored, she is now not only repelled, she wonders how it was that she could have ever been so thoroughly fooled:

TITANIA: My Oberon! what visions have I seen! Methought I was enamour’d of an ass.

OBERON: There lies your love.

TITANIA: How came these things to pass? O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now!

We in this country have had many kinds of presidents, good and bad, beloved and detested. But have we ever before had a president whose career and persona have been based to such an enormous extent on a carefully constructed narrative that in turn rests on weaving a spell over a charmed public? And was the antidote finally administered last Wednesday night, at the hands of that not-so-very-Puckish guy, Mitt Romney?

Let’s hope so. For those of us never bought in, it’s been a long nightmare.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Ruh Roh

13 Comments

GM may yet have to go through a real bankruptcy:

Well, what do you know, the Obama Administration didn’t reveal all the details to the judge. Is anyone surprised that this gang of Chicago thugs decided that the judge didn’t need to know the sweetheart deal that would save their union buddies?

It sounds like Judge Gerber is ready to reopen the whole thing, essentially forcing GM into a real bankruptcy, including having to pay back the $27 billion to the Treasury… which, given that they only have about $30 billion on hand, could spell the end of GM.

Or at least the end of the sweetheart deal.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Journalistic Hate Speech

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…from Lara Logan:

“There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”

Logan stepped way out of the “objective,” journalistic role. The audience was riveted as she told of plowing through reams of documents, and interviewing John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan; Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and a Taliban commander trained by al-Qaida. The Taliban and al-Qaida are teaming up and recruiting new terrorists to do us deadly harm, she reports.

She made a passionate case that our government is downplaying the strength of our enemies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as a rationale of getting us out of the longest war. We have been lulled into believing that the perils are in the past: “You’re not listening to what the people who are fighting you say about this fight. In your arrogance, you think you write the script.”

There’s an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. Guess that a brutal gang rape can have the same effect.

But hey, it’s not the Muslims’ fault they’re so misogynistic and rapey and stuff. It’s just the way they were raised. We have to have sympathy for them.

Seriously, this should be serious debate fodder for Romney, in both debates, but particularly the final one.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Problem With The Dems’ Post-Debate Spin

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This has struck me as bizarre as well:

The Democrats also don’t seem to have fully considered what their excuses are communicating about Romney’s agenda. Romney advanced a series of principles and policies in the debate, and rather than argue that these are bad for the country, the Democrats are basically arguing that Romney’s ideas are too good to be true—so good, moderate, and sensible that they couldn’t really be Mitt Romney’s, and therefore that Romney is not telling the truth about his agenda. These charges of dishonesty aren’t just false (though they are false), they’re also downright strange. A Republican candidate stands before 60 million voters and commits to an agenda and his opponent responds that this isn’t really his agenda, and that voters should instead look to Democratic attack ads and liberal think-tank papers to learn what the Republican is proposing. That’s the strategy?

One explanation for this bizarre (though surely temporary) breakdown on the left would have to be what psychologists call projection. On Face the Nation, David Axelrod said Romney “walked away from his record” in the debate. On Thursday, the president himself said “The man onstage last night, he does not want to be held accountable for the real Mitt Romney’s decisions and what he’s been saying for the last year, and that’s because he knows full well that we don’t want what he’s been selling for the last year.” Walking away from his record and trying not to be held accountable for his unpopular decisions—does that sound like anyone you know?

The real devastation to the Democrats’ campaign from the debate was that it not only blew up their strategy (on which they spent many months and millions of Chinese campaign donations over the summer) of portraying Romney as a coal-miners’-wife-killing, likes-to-fire-people, dog-torturing plutocrat, and spinning tall tales about his proposals, but it also destroyed both their and the media’s credibility. Axelrod is basically saying at this point, “Who do you believe about Mitt Romney, us, or your lying eyes”? Some in the media will try to continue to help them, but they know that their own credibility is finally at stake in a very real way. They’ve reached the point at which they have to come up for a little air from the Obama tank if they don’t want to lose whatever little semblance of objectivity they might still have among the low-attention types.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Obama campaign’s post-debate negativity shows that he has nothing to say. And they’ll say it loudly no doubt, on Thursday and at the next debate with Romney.

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

The Neo-Puritans

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…of both parties:

For the half hearted worldling like myself, who can never quite summon up all the moral fiber necessary for a grimly earnest New England crusade, all forms of Puritanism are suspect. But unlike the “Christianists under the bed” crowd over at the Daily Dish, I’m less worried about the puritanism of the right than the puritanism of the left these days. First, because American society is so firmly set against old fashioned right-wing prudishness, Romney’s “conservative” puritanism is probably a lesser threat to the freedoms of the people than the secular puritanism of the enlightened left. Public acceptance of homosexuality is likely to increase, for example, no matter who takes office next January; even after eight grim years of two Romney terms, you are still going to be able to see bare breasted women on “Boardwalk Empire” and “Game of Thrones.” Romney and the right are fighting the tide on many of these issues, so any efforts on their part to force more moral conformity on the population are unlikely to go all that far.

The other reason I worry less about the right’s tendency toward moralist dictatorship is federalism: the left likes its regulation at the national level and thinks the Federal government should set the tone for the whole country. The right on the other hand makes more room for the states. If we must be governed by meddling nanny state puritans, I would rather live in a country that had fifty petty moralistic dictatorships rather than one big one; I’d at least have a chance of finding a place where my favorite foods and amusements wouldn’t be banned by law. Surely there will be one state somewhere in this republic that will let me put some extra salt on my freedom fries.

Professor Mead doesn’t expand on the theme of this as being one of the folkways described in Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, but ever since reading that book it has always been clear that the “progressives” are the current incarnation of the Puritan tradition that came over from East Anglia in the seventeenth century. It was very clear that Hillary fell into that camp (whereas Bill was a redneck). But I had never thought before of the Mormons as being an offshoot of it. It makes sense. They’re not descended from Quakers, or the Cavaliers, and certainly not the Scots-Irish. So there are some similarities between Obama and Romney, but for the reasons that he mentions in the quote above, I’m much less concerned about Romney in that regard.

This discussion reminds me of my post from years ago about why we should worry much more about Leftist urges to control us than that of the social-issues right. Will Wilkinson disputed it at the time (though the specific example he used of Ashcroft’s fear of a marble tit turned out to be a Democrat urban myth). I wonder what he thinks now, given the economic disaster confronting us from the Democrat depradations of the last six years?