It’s what’s for dinner.
I think it’s another campaign backfire by the Obamaites. They’re probably regretting picking on Romney about Seamus about now.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
More Space Property Rights Commentary
It’s sort of turning into a telephone game, like this piece:
Simberg, an aerospace engineer, says a new law granting the United States conditional permission to claim extraterrestrial land is internationally legal. His view: failure of the 1979 Moon Treaty to get even one signature nullifies the Outer Space Treaty.
a) The Moon Treaty has fourteen countries who have acceded to it.
b) I didn’t say that the Moon Treaty’s failure nullifies the OST.
Other than that, they get it completely right.
Conduct Unbecoming
I have some thoughts on the Secret Service imbroglio, and presidential vetting, over at PJMedia.
A Sharp Rise In Retractions
And they wonder why conservatives and other sensible people don’t have faith in scientific institutions. As Glenn notes, all the government funding leads to corruption, and not just in the climate-change industrial complex.
Derb And Discourse
A long, but thoughtful post on the “racism” of John Derbyshire.
I continue to wonder if they cancer treatments have impaired his judgment.
Charles Stross On Amazon’s Business Model
In which he ignorantly bashes libertarians:
I’m not going to lecture you about Jeff Bezos either, although I do want to note that he came out of a hedge fund and he’s ostensibly a libertarian; these aspects of his background make me uneasy, because in my experience they tend to be found in conjunction with a social-darwinist ideology that has no time for social justice, compassion, or charity. (When you hear a libertarian talking about “disruption” and “innovation” what they usually mean is “opportunities to make a quick buck, however damaging the long-term side effects may be”. Watch for the self-serving cant and the shout-outs to abstractions framed in terms of market ideology.)
Emphasis mine. Jonah Goldberg, hit this guy with a cluebat.
The United Nations Today
The absurd and inconsequential nature of the General Assembly is reflected in the bodies and commissions that depend on it. Groups like the Commission on Human Rights are international laughingstocks and rightly so. At best they are irrelevant; at worse they actively undermine the causes they were, theoretically, established to advance.
…The Security Council represents a 1945 compromise between power realities and political correctness. That is, the UK, the US and the USSR were great powers in 1945. China and France weren’t, but it was convenient to pretend otherwise. Today, a majority of permanent Security Council members aren’t great powers, and there are significant powers (like India and Japan) who aren’t permanent members.
A majority of the Security Council’s permanent members are European states and ex-great powers to boot. This is farcical, and the Security Council’s growing weakness is the natural and inevitable result.
Like the UN, the Outer Space Treaty is outdated as well. In my talk at Space Access on Saturday, I pointed out the real problem with Article VI — its assumption that space activities, and particularly human space activities, would be performed by governments, for governments. Its nanny approach and demands that a government be responsible for anything its citizens do off planet is utterly impractical in a modern era of private spaceflight.
Obama’s Gaffes
…are his own. It’s hilarious that the Telegraph thinks that this kind of error is “uncharacteristic.” They must have missed “liberating Auschwitz” and “all 57 states,” and the notion that “Texas has been a pretty Republican state for historic reasons.”
As a commenter notes, the leftist media will never let go of the fantasy that George W. Bush was an intellectual pygmy and that Obama is brilliant.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More smart diplomacy: Obama’s gaffe could start a war. You’d like to ask “what was he thinking?” but I think the answer is the usual — he wasn’t.
Joe The Plumber
May be going to Congress: “In retrospect, his question, Obama’s answer — and in particular the vicious and law-breaking politico-media smear campaign launched against him in response — perfectly prefigured the Obama Presidency.”
And based on the Ann Romney attacks last week, it seems likely to continue until November.
“Peace-Loving” Nations
Some thoughts.
Graves, I’ve noticed, are very peaceful places.