Is California the death knell? Let’s hope so, at least for government-subsidized systems. I do think that an LA-Vegas run could make sense.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Up? Or Down?
The latest from Bill Whittle, with contrasting thoughts on Chris Hayes and Elon Musk.
Food Nannyism
Thoughts from Lileks on the new Puritans:
Let’s get one thing clear: when the TV talk-show people lavish praise on the idea, it has nothing to do with some abstract notion of the costs of obesity. They just don’t like fat people. Fat people, at best, are a rebuke their own finicky vanity – I look good, why can’t you? – and at the worst, aesthetically unpleasant. If they all went away, the trim pert types woudl miss them after a while, and realize that people no longer came pre-packaged in a style that made them easy to dismiss.
A thin woman with three children by three men who can’t get by is an object of concern. A fat women with two kids who can’t get by is a toad, and probably a smoker.
A culture that redefines food choices as moral issues will demonize the people who don’t share the tastes of the priest class. A culture that elevates eating to some holistic act of ethical self-definition – localvore, low-carbon-impact food, fair trade, artisanal cheese – will find the casual carefree choices of the less-enlightened as an affront to their belief system. Leave it to Americans to invent a Puritan strain of Epicurianism.
I do have to agree that sugar is bad for you. But people have a right to eat things that are bad for them. Until the rest of us are forced to pay for their health care, of course…
Not Just A Fake Indian
Apparently Lieawatha is a fake scholar, too.
Considering what a heroine Fauxcahontas is (or at least was) to the loony left, this gets more hilarious by the day.
[Update late morning]
Thoughts on Elizabeth Warren, the scholar, from Megan McArdle (who is about to move from The Atlantic to Newsweek — good for Newsweek, hopefully not bad for her):
It matters that we get this stuff right. I am among the majority who would like to see bankruptcies reduced in this country, and we’re not going to be very effective at that if we run around thinking we can cure 2/3 of them by putting a national health care system in place, when in reality a third or less have any strong causal relationship with medical bills. Obviously, this was also held out as an argument for PPACA, making an implicit promise to the American people which I believe to be false.
But it also matters because a large part of Warren’s prominence comes from the fact that she’s an academic. If she came from . . . well, the sort of think tank that publishes this sort of advocacy science . . . she would have considerably less glamor, and power.
And perhaps it mattes most of all because this woman is now under consideration to head a powerful new agency. If this is how she evaluates data, then isn’t that going to hamper her in making good policy? If we’re going to have a consumer financial protection agency, I want one that has a keen eye to the empirical evidence on consumer welfare — not one that makes progressives most happy by reinforcing their prior beliefs.
Well, we know what they want.
Midway
Alan West remembers the seventieth anniversary (well, not literally — I don’t think he’s that old). That was back in the olden days, when we were allowed to win wars, and Democrats actually wanted to do that, instead of “end” them.
The Unbearable Straightness Of Being
Some amusing thoughts from Mark Steyn on how Americans have been propagandized into dramatically overestimating the number of homosexuals in our midst.
A Landslide
That’s what Wayne Allyn Root thinks that Obama is going to lose in.
Britain
“…is already dead — it just hasn’t been buried yet.”
The Diet Debacle
“Two seemingly benign nutritional maxims are at the root of all dietary evil: A calorie is a calorie, and You are what you eat. Both ideas are now so entrenched in public consciousness that they have become virtually unassailable. As a result, the food industry, aided and abetted by ostensibly well-meaning scientists and politicians, has afflicted humankind with the plague of chronic metabolic disease, which threatens to bankrupt health care worldwide.”
We’ve had the green revolution. Now we need a new revolution in food tech that provides adequate healthy food for the world.
[Update a few minutes later]
“Is this any way to lose weight?” Yes. I’ve been eating like this for a year and a half, and I’ve lost ten pounds (though that wasn’t the goal). Fat doesn’t make you fat. Carbs do.
[Early afternoon update]
A testimonial from Bruce Webster.