Category Archives: Media Criticism

Media Criticism, Space

Don’t Believe The News

11 Comments

This is unintentionally hilarious:

Kerrick also spoke about the current status of the NASA Space Shuttle Program and its official retirement on Aug. 31. The media has caused a lot of worry and uncertainty about the future of NASA’s role in galactic travel, she said.

“Don’t believe the news,” she said. “Through this whole process, I learned not to trust the news.”

Although it is true that the program is gone, Kerrick said, NASA will be around until at least 2020. She also said Orbital, a private company based in Virginia, and SpaceX, a company based in California, are the primary sources of funding to continue the development of shuttles capable of going beyond low-Earth orbit.

It’s unclear whether she really said this stuff, or if the reporter just garbled whatever she actually did say, but there are at least four problems with that last paragraph.

[Via Jeff Foust]

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

What Occupy Harvard

…should tell their elite liberal parents on Thanksgiving:

The man you think is a “sucker” because he votes for Republican candidates who don’t seem to give a hoot about him will vote for them every time. He looks at you, the crowd of The-Fix-Is-Always-In, and he casts his lot with the crowd of wealth and initiative.

You see, Mom and Dad, they don’t lie about his prospects. They tell him that he has to sink or swim. They don’t disrespect his willpower by promising that government will make life easier for him. They tell him that they respect his individuality. They tell him straight out what you, the liberal elite, know to be true but will never say. They tell him that life in America is winner-take-all, and that they are the people who will let him keep what he has. They tell him that his religion, his wife’s capacity to reproduce, his children—whether they are “successful” or not—are his treasure. They tell him that they don’t care if he is a person of modest ambition, little sophistication, and humble means. What they value is his capacity to change his own life.

What you tell him is that he should put his life in your hands. Yet you scorn his religion. You mock his faith in the sacredness of conception. You deride his belief in family. You tell him that his love for hunting makes him a murderer, and that his terror at being economically displaced makes him a xenophobe and a racist. Then you emasculate his hope for the future by telling him that if his ship comes in—that dream of a ship that makes the grinding disappointment of daily life worth living through—you’ll help yourself to a big slice of it. And you expect him to believe your rhetoric about fairness and equality when, all the while, you are accusing him of gullibility in his politics and bad faith toward the least fortunate of his fellow citizens. When, all the while, you are living untouched by your own policies. When you are cushioned against life’s hardness, not by government, but by simply knowing other people in your class. You expect him to buy your talk about equitable distribution of wealth when you are sailing through tax loopholes off into the sunset. For this man, his emotions make all the rational sense in the world.

Indeed.

Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

What The Occupiers Believe And Why They Believe It

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It’s indoctrination:

During the 2008 campaign, Obama’s critics often called him a “radical,” a “socialist” or even a “Marxist” and were either dismissed as hysterics or condemned for “McCarthyism.” It was not widely noted that, for those too young to remember America’s Cold War struggle against Soviet tyranny, the accusation of “Marxism” doesn’t carry much weight, while “McCarthyism” is at most something they’ve read about in books. (Stan Evans’s Blacklisted by History probably isn’t on the collegiate reading list.) Voters who were 25 in 2008 were in first grade when the Berlin Wall came down. If they have some idea that the Soviet empire was a bad thing, they have little idea of why it was bad. And this ignorance is no accident.

To explain why the Bolshevik experiment failed so spectacularly would require that students be taught the errors of socialism, which would necessarily require an explanation of the superiority of the market economy to the socialist planned economy. And the left-wing orientation of today’s academic establishment — “Down With Capitalist Education!” to quote a sign in a protest today by Cal State university faculty — pretty much prohibits any such explanation.

Seventeen-year-olds taught that they are “the 99 percent” and that advocates of economic freedom are “f–king up our future” have not been merely miseducated, but have been quite literally indoctrinated. But as Buckley said, they would be “outraged by the suggestion” that they have not arrived at their beliefs “by independent intellectual exertion.”

These young people have not been taught Marx and Lenin. Rather, they have had their heads stuffed with nebulous ideas about “equality,” “rights” and “social justice” by teachers (and journalists and movie producers) who cherish romantic mythology about the righteous glories of Sixties radical movements.

The other problem is that Marxism is an emotionally appealing argument, to those who have never been taught how to actually think.

[Update a while later]

“The putrid stench of a century of folk Marxism.”

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Rick Perry Is An Idiot

16 Comments

At least based on his interview with O’Reilly.

No, the Occupy Wall Streeters are not looking for jobs, Rick. They’re looking for a big paycheck to cash in on their worthless college degrees, if they even have them.

But even worse, knowing that you were going into that interview that you would be asked about the president’s comments about “Americans being lazy” and knowing that your commercial had taken him out of context, in that he was talking about us bringing in foreign investment, did you point out that in fact that the president was wrong, and that there has been abundant foreign investment in the US because much of the money has nowhere else to go?

No, you just double down on the stupid.

Here’s some advice Rick Perry. Either listen to your political advisers, or fire them. Because this was a huge blown opportunity.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Since Carl Pham Abandoned Us

36 Comments

George Turner has become my favorite commenter:

I’ve been amused by all the liberals who keep pining away for OWS to become a real force for social[ist] change. They keep writing articles and posts saying “Let’s hope the OWS leadership is wise enough to do X and Y and then perhaps even Z,” giving advice about how they would run the movement and imagining a scenario in which the OWS folks aren’t a dysfunctional group of morons.

I’m tempted to comment “and if only monkeys would get organized and build a banana farm! It’s nice to dream about a world where chimps were smart and could accomplish anything, with of course you as their leader, but sorry, they’re chimps, OWS is chumps, and neither will accomplish anything more than screeching, flinging poo, raiding piles of food, causing local chaos, and picking lice out of each other’s hair. The most we can hope is that some budding Jane Goodall will study their behavior and explain up-twinkles to the rest of us.”

He should start a blog. Or join mine #EmailMe