Category Archives: Media Criticism

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

Another Space Kickstarter

17 Comments

Over here. I have to say, I’m not encouraged by either the people he’s interviewed, or the intended thrust. Or his level of knowledge. I really don’t care what Dr. Tyson thinks.

The Chinese are not about to surpass us, and space isn’t about science. Looks like it will be just more of the same. Space is really important, NASA needs more money, it will save STEM, blah blah blah.

I’ve been thinking about putting together a Kickstarter for a space documentary, or a series of web videos, with Bill Whittle. Tentative title: Everything You Know About Space Is Wrong. I wonder how much support I could get?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

That Didn’t Take Long

13 Comments

It hasn’t been twelve hours since the latest massacre, and people in the media are already using it to call for gun control that would be very unlikely to have prevented it. And of course, it goes without saying that it’s Rush Limbaugh’s and the Tea Party’s fault. I predict that Sarah Palin will be fingered by the end of the day.

Idiot demagogues and rhetorical ambulance chasers.

I will say that it might be useful not to allow costumes in movie theaters, though. Something like this was inevitable.

[Update a while later]

ABC News: “Oops, sorry about that.”

Note that their first instinct is always to blame “right wingers” and (more recently) the Tea Party, whereas they always go to ridiculous lengths to downplay any possible connection to jihad. And if the guy turns out to have connections to the Occumorons, we’ll never hear about it. Most likely, though, it will just turn out to be a nut, like Jarred Loughner.

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Credentialed, Not Educated

27 Comments

Employers have finally caught wise to the academic scam:

Employers, because they realize that many college graduates aren’t really educated, now routinely quiz job seekers on what they majored in and what courses they took, a practice virtually unknown a generation ago. Good luck if you majored in gender studies, communications, art history, pop culture, or (really) the history of dancing in Montana in the 1850s.

They themselves got scammed by con artists like Barack Obama, who told them that they had to get a degree, even if they have to go into unaffordable debt undischargable in a bankruptcy, while not bothering to tell them that what they get a degree in matters out in the real world.

[Update a while later]

“This is a terrible social policy. It is deeply destructive.”

Unfortunately, that’s been true of many, if not most of our social policies over the past eighty years, and particularly over the past twenty. And we’re starting to reap the whirlwind.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“You Didn’t Build That”

32 Comments

Obama’s latest plagiarism from Atlas Shrugged is providing a lot of graphical fodder. And he did earn that. More devastating, I think, was Romney’s response.

[Update a while later]

The ultimate takedown of Obama’s speech:

When Obama implied at the Roanoke, Virginia rally that some businessmen refuse to pay for public works from which they benefit, he presented a thesis which, like a three-legged stool, relies on three assumptions that must all be true for the argument to remain standing:

1. That the public programs he mentioned in his speech constitute a significant portion of the federal budget;
2. That business owners don’t already pay far more than their fair share of these expenses; and
3. That these specific public benefits are a federal issue, rather than a local issue.

If any of these legs fails, then the whole argument collapses.

And all of them fail. As he notes, it’s significant because it really was revealing, and an Atlas Shrugged moment.

[Update late morning]

It’s a miracle!