Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Shameless

Here’s a good round up of the corruption and collusion between Congress and the financial industry:

While Americans were asked to foot the bill—for generations—to bail out Wall Street executives from their sub-prime, mortgage-mad, derivatives driven, un-regulated market—politicians from all parties lined up to feed at the trough—knowing full well that it was these same companies’ bad business practices that placed our financial system at systemic risk.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, who is being paid by taxpayers to oversee these institutions, should return the money on principle or resign from the committee.

Don’t hold your breath.

Political Commentary, Science And Society

You Don’t Say…

12 Comments

What would we do without psychologists?

“This is just the first study which was focused on the idea that men of a certain age view sex as a highly desirable goal, and if you present them with a provocative woman, then that will tend to prime goal-related responses,” she told CNN.

Just the first? Obviously, this needs much more research. I hope that adequate billions from Porculus will fund this vital area of study. After all, we never before had any idea whatsoever that men might be attracted to semi-naked women.

[Update a few minutes later]

Mark Steyn has further thoughts.

Political Commentary

Forget Liberaltarianism

What is the common ground between libertarians and conservatives? Looks like a reasonable list to me.

[Update a while later]

OK, we can’t get away from it. Jonah Goldberg on the perverse irony of liberaltaranism:

It is a sign of how profoundly statist a moment we are in that there’s this tempestuous debate — in a teapot to be sure — over whether libertarians, historically the purest of the sane anti-statists, should leave the nominally anti-statist party (the Right) in order to join the proudly statist party (the Left), when just about everyone agrees the net result of such a defection would be to make the anti-statist party significantly more statist. The only debate is whethere libertarians would make the statist party even marginally less statist or whether they would be rolled. And so far, the shaky consensus seems to be that the libertarians would get little to nothing for their defection while the country would (by libertarian standards) lose a great deal.

Of course, I’ve been opposed to this for years.

Political Commentary

Time For A Tea Party?

16 Comments

This isn’t a scientific poll, but I think that there are a lot of angry people out there, particularly when the “stimulus” includes welfare and job retraining for millionaires, and Rasmussen reports that there aren’t very many people who approve the latest mortgage bailout. I know I’m one of them. Here’s an interview with the latter-day Samuel Adams (though I’m sure that there are many other Sons of Liberty, as there were then). I don’t really want to wait until July, though (though I understand that it’s kind of cold in Lake Michigan this time of year).

I think that there’s going to be a big backlash against this, and the polls would indicate it as well. As Jim Bennett notes:

The Ghost Shirt Democrats are doing their dance, but the vast herds of union-member Democrat-voting buffalo will never return to the plains, and [the] magic ghost shirts will not turn the ballots of angry voters into water [in] 2010 and 2012. Of course, the Republicans could still blow it, but even if they do, the Democrats have shown in a few short weeks that they have no idea how to govern the country, just to loot it. They will be replaced, if not by Republicans, then by somebody else.

We can only hope. And if the Republicans don’t get their act together, I hope that the answer is “somebody else.” I could use a real change, for the first time in my life, that results in less government, not more.

[Update a few minutes later]

Santelli/Kudlow 2010! (From comments)

We could do a lot worse, and always do.

[Update again a couple minutes later]

What are we going to demand? I haven’t really thought about it, but if we had the tea party today, I’d demand that Congress and the president rescind Porculus in toto, and come up with something that we are actually allowed to see and debate before anyone votes on it. Preferably in multiple bills, as the Founders intended.

[Update at 8 PM Pacific]

From my keyboard to their ears:

“I would like to say tonight that if the American people will let the Republicans back in charge, the 60% of this bill that won’t be spent until after the next election, we’ll cut it off and let it go to the Americans.”

Obviously, at this point, that’s the change that I’m waiting for. I might even vote Republican.

Political Commentary

Infrastructure Change!

6 Comments

Apparently, Barack Obama is Bush III:

The economic stimulus signed by President Barack Obama will spread billions of dollars across the country to spruce up aging roads and bridges. But there’s not a dime specifically dedicated to fixing leftover damage from Hurricane Katrina.

And there’s no outrage about it.

Democrats who routinely criticized President George W. Bush for not sending more money to the Gulf Coast appear to be giving Obama the benefit of the doubt in his first major spending initiative. Even the Gulf’s fiercest advocates say they’re happy with the stimulus package, and their states have enough money for now to address their needs.

I guess that Barack Obama hates black people.

Political Commentary, Space

The National Environmental And Energy Administration

3 Comments

Jeff Foust talked to Neal Lane last weekend, who remains as misguided and illogical as ever:

“People don’t care about going back to the Moon and there’s no rationale for going back to the Moon. I would really like to see NASA go forward in a big way and have a larger and more exciting space program. But right now there’s not the support for it, and NASA’s flailing.”

That’s why, he said, he and Abbey decided that NASA would be better advised to focus on “solving the energy problem” and build public support for the agency that could be leveraged for other missions in the future. “If we keep blowing all our money on Constellation there will be nothing left,” he said. “Our hope was to put something out there that would actually be good for NASA, helpful, and give it a solid foundation to build from again until the American people get excited again about space exploration.”

He seems to be stuck in a mindless false choice between continuing with Constellation as is, or forgetting about space (other than his asteroid plans, which would require much of Constellation, other than the lunar lander, at least functionally). If NASA isn’t going to do space, there’s not much reason for it to exist. We already have government agencies responsible for energy and the environment, and there’s no reason to think that NASA personnel have any unique expertise in these areas. What would be the point of redirecting the agency in a direction that has little do with its charter or experience when it would simply be redundant? This is policy foolishness.

Lane said he hasn’t gotten any feedback from the Obama Administration about the study, but he believes that the administration will change course from the current exploration architecture. “I think it’s clear since Mike [Griffin] left that they don’t intend to go down the same road,” he said. “If you were going to just continue, why not keep him in, right?”

Wrong. Or rather, right, but not because they won’t stay the course in terms of goals. There are many ways to have a robust (and even much more robust) space program besides Constellation. Changing course can mean changing how we’re doing things, not changing the fact that NASA is going to do manned spaceflight.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Fighting The False “Consensus”

9 Comments

Frank Tipler on the tendency of the global warm-mongers to argue from authority rather than from the science:

…why did Halsey believe the meteorologists against the evidence of his own eyes? The report of the Board of Inquiry on the disaster answers that question. Halsey simply accepted the authority of his chief meteorologist, against his own experience. The report listed the “qualifications of this “expert” — his degrees, the numerous courses on climate studies he had taken, his years flying over hurricanes. But in contrast to Bryson’s successful forecasts, two of which I have described above, not one correct forecast was mentioned by the Court of Inquiry! I find this extraordinary. Imagine picking an admiral on the basis of the prestige of an officer’s education. Halsey himself had two famous victories, the Battle of Guadalcanal and the Battle of Leyte Gulf. I admire Halsey immensely, but he was wrong to give any weight at all to mere academic credentials, rather than performance credentials like his own. For true scientists, one knows the achievements, not the academic credentials. Albert Einstein discovered relativity (everyone knows E = mc2), he discovered the photon, and he discovered gravitational waves. But where did Einstein go to school? Who cares?

Not me.