Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“This Is My Last Election”

39 Comments

Andrew Malcolm says that the president’s hot-mic gaffe yesterday feeds right into Romney’s campaign strategy:

A main strain of Romney’s assaults has been basically, Given the spending, chronic ineptness and apologies for America, can you imagine what Barack Obama would do in a second term unrestrained by any need to face voters ever again?

That’s an effective line because it leaves the worst things possible to voters’ imagination. And there is no response. What can Obama say, “My secret plans aren’t as bad as you think”?

What makes Obama’s Monday blunder so bad is that it doesn’t come from any sort of dismissable ignorance by someone who spent formative childhood years in Indonesia. It was clearly backstage conniving on Obama’s part and feeds directly into Romney’s ‘Can you imagine’ line.

Plus, it fits with the suspicions of millions that the community organizer has unspoken plans to take America in a transformative direction involving much more government. How else to explain his baldly touting more domestic energy while reducing federal drilling permits and torpedoing the Keystone pipeline?

The Etch-a-Sketch line by a Romney aide played into the meme that he might remake himself for the general election, something every successful primary candidate does to reach the broader audience necessary to win beyond one party. In 2008, the autumn Obama promising a centrist fiscal policy was a far cry from the spring primary fellow vying with Hillary Clinton for union support.

Now, Obama’s gaffe suggests to opponents their suspicions are credible about the Democrat’s hidden agenda that he sought secretly to discuss with the Russian.

But here’s something I haven’t seen anyone comment on — the title of this blog post. There are, after all, two possible interpretations of what he said. The conventional explanation is that he means that, since the Constitution as amended only allows two terms for a president, he won’t be running again. But considering his radical background, if one were of a conspiratorial bent, one would wonder if what he really meant was that after the next election, he’ll come up with some way to hold on to power indefinitely. Fortunately, given the attitude of much of the military toward him, a constitutional suspension is pretty unlikely, regardless of any interest he might have of being president for life.

[Update a while later]

Obama is enabling a return of the USSR. Well, again, given his red-diaper upbringing, that would make sense.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Science And Society

Bad Cholesterol

39 Comments

…is there no such thing?

I’m kind of amused by the commenter who fantasizes that he’s making some kind of point by claiming that “Eades is not a scientist.” What does he think a scientist is, or does?

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of nutritional science, this is junk nutritional science:

“Overall, we found that obese rats fed a high-fat, low-carb diet — comparable to that humans would consume — had larger, more damaging and deadly heart attacks than rats fed the control diet,” Lloyd says. “Our findings also suggest that, at the cellular level, a high-fat, low-carb diet impaired recovery of heart function in obese rats immediately following a heart attack.”

Only one problem. You can’t extrapolate dietary results for rats to humans. We have a different physiology and natural diet. Actually, there’s a lot of junk science based on rat research.

[Update a while later]

Link was missing. Fixed now.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Obama’s Failed War

25 Comments

…on energy production:

Overall, oil and gas production on federally controlled land is down by 40% since Obama took office.

So how is it possible that oil production can increase when the Obama administration is so overtly anti-oil?

Easy. As Gerard explains, there’s nothing they can really do to stop it.

While oil production is up, the increase relates almost entirely to investment and leasing decisions made before, sometimes long before, this administration came into office. The increase is also due to oil and gas development on private and state lands over which the administration has little or no control at all.

…while it’s true oil production in America is up, this is clearly in spite of Team Obama’s best efforts. Because the Founding Fathers limited the authority the federal government has on private and state lands, hundreds of small oil companies — not “Big Oil,” as environmentalists want you to believe — are able to drill for oil on private and state land, unencumbered by the heavy hand of Obama’s anti-oil agenda.

For him to take credit for this is like the crowing rooster who thinks it made the sun rise.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Green Gullibility

16 Comments

…and hyperpartisanship:

What we have here is a death spiral: the worse things get for the movement, the more scrupulously and cautiously it needs to behave, but the more incautiously and emotionally it becomes — leading to more failure and worse advocacy.

The root cause of all this remains, in VM’s opinion, a truly idiotic set of policy proposals that, no matter the state of the underlying science, simply cannot and will not be implemented.

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make green. Just ask Peter Gleick.

To get back to the source material for Mead’s post, this phenomenon of conservatives/libertarians comprehending the left’s positions much better than vice versa is just a special case. Jonathan Haidt has an interesting piece in this month’s issue of Reason (not on line yet) on the consistent and persistent asymmetry of this miscomprehension, which is described in a review of his book at the New York Times:

The hardest part, Haidt finds, is getting liberals to open their minds. Anecdotally, he reports that when he talks about authority, loyalty and sanctity, many people in the audience spurn these ideas as the seeds of racism, sexism and homophobia. And in a survey of 2,000 Americans, Haidt found that self-described liberals, especially those who called themselves “very liberal,” were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. Liberals don’t understand conservative values. And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.

From the Reason article:

We asked more than 2,000 American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answer as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing peoples’ expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and right. Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the study came when liberals answer care and fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with statements such as “one of the worst things one can do is to hurt a defenseless animal” or “justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality) and you listen to the Reagan narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people and gay people. He is more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.

If you don’t see that Reagan is pursuing positive values of loyalty, authority and sanctity, you almost have to conclude that Republican see no positive value in care and fairness. You might even go so far as Michael Feingold, theater critic for The Village Voice, when he wrote in 2004, “Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet…Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.” One of the [many] ironies in this quotation is that is shows the inability of a theater critic–who skillfully enters fantastical imaginary worlds for a living–to imagine that Republicans operate within a moral matrix that differs from his own.

Not also the leftist eliminationist rhetoric from the people who deign to lecture us, the great unwashed, about civility.

As I said, Gleick was just a special case of this broader problem. Many of the leftist warm mongers continue to fantasize that the faked Heartland document is real, while it was almost immediately obvious to those on the other side, even those sympathetic to the AGW thesis, like Megan McArdle, that it was faked, because no conservative would have written such a thing in such a way. Gleick wrote it that way, and his partners in fraud thought it perfectly plausible, exactly because they lack this ability to understand the motivations of their political opponents.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s another example of the new civility: Twitter explodes with Cheney hate after his heart transplant. Aren’t these people sweet? And more proof that they can’t imagine that Dick Cheney may not be evil.

[Early evening update]

First link fixed, thanks to the commenter who pointed it out.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Space

Princess Of Mars

36 Comments

If that had been the title of the movie mistitled John Carter, I am confident that it would be doing much better at the box office. It was the title of the book on which it was based and, unlike Disney, Edgar Rice Burroughs knew how to sell books. It would help as well, of course, if the trailers had offered ample views of Lynn Collins rather than Mars monsters. It would have brought in the adolescent males by the hordes, just as DiCaprio brought the female tweens into Titanic.

We took the afternoon off (from normal weekend chores) to go see it at the matinee in 3-D IMAX, and we had a great time. Yes, it’s harder to suspend disbelief about the features of the planet than it was in E. R. Burroughs’ day, but it’s still a great story. Sadly, the theater was almost empty, both because of Disney’s awful marketing, and because it was competing with the opening weekend of a movie about teens hunting each other down.

I was amused to hear at the end someone talking about how it was a rip off of Star Wars. Obviously, whoever said it had no concept of what George Lucas was reading as a boy. I imagine that it was pitched as “Star Wars meets Gladiator,” but it’s a lot more than that. I highly recommend, and I particularly recommend it for families, who want a great role model for their daughters.