Thoughts on the degeneration of crony socialism.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
Astronaut Suicide Versus Astronaut Wonder
Thoughts from space anthropologist David Valentine on a couple contrasting photoessays.
Facebook And Conservatives
Some interesting (and surprising) observations from Glenn Beck:
It was like affirmative action for conservatives. When did conservatives start demanding quotas AND diversity training AND less people from Ivy League Colleges.
I sat there, looking around the room at ‘our side’ wondering, ‘Who are we?’ Who am I? I want to be very clear — I am not referring to every person in the room. There were probably 25–30 people and a number of them, I believe, felt like I did. But the overall tenor, to me, felt like the Salem Witch Trial: ‘Facebook, you must admit that you are screwing us, because if not, it proves you are screwing us.’
What happened to us? When did we become them? When did we become the people who demand the Oscars add black actors based on race?
Good questions. I agree that Facebook should do whatever it wants to do, but that it should be transparent.
[Update a while later]
House Cats
A review, from Elizabeth Lopatto.
Trump’s Wealth
I’m sure that you’ll be as shocked as I was to learn that he probably greatly exaggerates it. This is a great end quote:
“A fellow asked me that once and I said, ‘I don’t know,” Nelson Bunker Hunt once told a congressional panel grilling him about his net worth. “But I do know people who know how much they are worth generally aren’t worth much.”
Similarly, people who are always bragging about how smart they are generally aren’t that bright.
Trump 42, Clinton 37
Those are the latest numbers from Rasmussen. I’ve never been one to say that Trump can’t beat Hillary; I just think that would be almost as terrible an outcome as him not beating Hillary.
But what I find interesting is not who gets a higher plurality, but how many people share my desire for another candidate (at one in five, by that poll). And that doesn’t count the number who would switch from Trump or Hillary if someone else were in the race. There has never been a more promising year for a good independent candidate than this one.
[Update a while later]
Get ready for a Bernie third-party run.
It would be interesting to see a four-way race, if there were an actual conservative running. I think he or she would have a good chance.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Pop the corn, “liberal” pundits eating their own.
The Shirtstorm Social Experiment
Thoughts on how disconnected gender feminists and SJWs are from normal people.
Trump Versus Clinton
Tim Carney: You don’t have to choose the lesser of two evils:
As a conservative, I weigh the candidates against each other by considering the worst-case scenarios. On that score, there’s an irony: Hillary’s time as secretary of state — especially her disastrous and illegal war in Libya — doesn’t suggest supreme competence; Trump’s rhetoric, meanwhile makes many people think of fascism. But the “fascism” threat (an overblown word, of course) is probably greater with Hillary, and the incompetence threat is far greater with Trump.
They’re both incompetent fascist wannabes.
Bill Nye
…the climate huckster guy:
Admittedly, climate science is complex. There might be perfectly reasonable scientific justifications for what’s happening on the tornado front. Although, surely, there are just as likely interesting scientific arguments that challenge The Science Guy’s chilling and reckless assertions meant only to scare you into adopting leftist economic policy, not to teach you anything. Nye’s “science” is, at the very least, arguable.
But that’s not the reason Nye is dishonest. Or, at least, not the only reason. His biggest lie—and he makes these sorts of claims all the time—is that people are increasingly suffering because of global warming, and thus by extension they are suffering because of the use of fossil fuels.
This is simply untrue. Life, by nearly any quantifiable measurement, is better today for more people than it has ever been. One of the externalities in the spike of comfort and health is that more people are emitting carbon into the air. Fewer people are suffering. On top of the huge, if inadvertent, moral benefits of oil, gas, and coal, we should add that far fewer people are dying from drastic weather events—or any weather, actually.
These charlatans shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t take them seriously.
Aging
I’ve always believed that there is no law of physics that makes it inevitable, that it’s a matter of learning how to continue doing the cellular-level repair that occurs when we’re young. But here is an article that says it is caused by thermal chaos.
Not sure I buy it (it still doesn’t take into account artificial techniques for doing error checking in transcription), but it’s an interesting read.