OK, that’s not what the headline is, but it’s what it ought to be.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
My Saturday Night In Hell
I actually know the place well, having been born and raised not far from it:
…the tattooed woman was impressed by my dancing. When the song ended, I went outside to cool off in the chilly winter night air and relax with a cigarette. The tattooed woman followed me outside and started talking to me. “Where are you from?” she asked.
“Originally from Atlanta,” I said.
“Oh, I just love your accent,” she said.
My Southern accent was quite unusual to her because, you see, just like Mama always told me, Hell is full of damned Yankees.
Yes, it is. And this time of year, it is frozen over.
Eco-Destruction
…and the nature of fakery. Just what is it these people are at war with, really?
The Climate Skeptics
Why they (that is to say, we) are winning.
[Update a while later]
Peter Gleick and America’s [other] dumbest criminals.
Catastrophic Global Warming
…is it like the Millennium Bug?
As he says, it’s pseudoscience in the service of politics. Of course, the nice thing about the Millennium Bug was that we knew to the second when it would occur.
A Nation Of Villeins
Thoughts on our current state from Michael Auslin:
…in relations with the federal government, we are increasingly seen and treated as serfs, with no protections save what the lord at the time deigns to give us. The courts have long acted as a type of lord, arbitrarily decreeing what our freedoms should be; now they are joined by an activist president and his minions. The apparatus of the state towers over the representatives of the people, half of whom currently support the ever-encompassing grasp of government, the other half being too fractured and outmaneuvered to champion the rights of individuals (and usually reversed when a president of a different party is in power). Rather than legally passed legislation, it is executive order that more and more determines the nature of the interaction between villein citizens and the government. Let us be clear (to use a phrase currently in vogue), when the state gets to determine what counts as a religious organization, and when it determines what that organization must do, then we are not free men, but serfs to an increasingly confident master. That is the nub of the HHS-mandate ruling.
As he says, it may be time for a new Magna Carta.
The President’s Energy Speech
The five biggest whoppers. And those are just the biggest ones.
[Update a couple minutes later]
“We’re focused on production.”
Fact: While production is up under Obama, this has nothing to do with his policies, but is the result of permits and private industry efforts that began long before Obama occupied the White House.
Obama has chosen almost always to limit production. He canceled leases on federal lands in Utah, suspended them in Montana, delayed them in Colorado and Utah, and canceled lease sales off the Virginia coast.
His administration also has been slow-walking permits in the Gulf of Mexico, approving far fewer while stretching out review times, according to the Greater New Orleans Gulf Permit Index. The Energy Dept. says Gulf oil output will be down 17% by the end of 2013, compared with the start of 2011. Swift Energy President Bruce Vincent is right to say Obama has “done nothing but restrict access and delay permitting.”
And this is worthy of comment:
Obama said in his speech that Americans aren’t stupid. He’s right about that, which is why most are giving his energy policy a thumbs down.
Actually, it’s not clear that he’s right about that. The fact that he was elected president would seem to be evidence against the proposition.
[Update a few minutes later]
Rising gas prices: all part of Obama’s plan? All you had to do was to listen to what he was saying in the 2008 campaign.
While this position may be slightly unfair to the President (Mr. Chu was not yet in the Administration at the time he made the remarks, so any link between it and administration policy is tenuous), the quote devastatingly reveals just how tone-deaf and myopic white-collar, progressive intellectualism can be. The delusion that jacking up energy prices is part of a “good government” agenda is one of the pieces of insanity that keeps the blue intelligentsia from consolidating its position as a natural governing class.
More surprising here is that Politico is jumping on the bandwagon—although it notes that Chu’s remarks have been detrimental to Obama, the piece laments that the goal of raising gas prices doesn’t get the sympathetic attention it obviously deserves, given the support of numerous “experts.” With thinking like this dominating media and intellectual circles, it’s little wonder that the mainstream media is perceived as elitist and out of touch.
I disagree that the link between Chu’s remark and policy is “tenuous” at all. He was appointed precisely because he believes such nonsense. And in this case at least, the perception is the reality.
Cheer Up, Liberty Lovers
Schumpeter was wrong.
You Know Who Are The Real “Deniers”?
Two Sets Of Ethos
An interesting example of how climate skeptics treat private documents versus the settled-science types:
…no skeptic I know of, including me, has yet “outed” the early drafts and author notes contained in Phil Jones JGR account. It would have been easy to do so, to publish Dr. Jones first submitted draft for the broadest peer review possible on the Internet. But no skeptic (that I know of as of this writing) did.
That’s a distinction of difference compared to the actions of people who created Fakegate via potentially criminal actions.
There’s a world of ethical difference between an Anthony Watts and a Peter Gleick. But we’re the ones they want to shut up, or herd off to the reeducation camps.