Category Archives: Social Commentary

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space

The Safety Culture

11 Comments

Some cogent thoughts from Mollie Hemingway:

Many parents just can’t accept the reality that we’re not in as much control of our children as we wish. Last week my nephew went to an outdoor camp in Colorado with the rest of his 5th-grade class. They were supposed to stay just one night. Floods hit the region, the roads washed out and filled with boulders. There was nothing anyone could do. After being stranded for three days, the parents heard about plans to airlift the kids out via Chinook helicopter. That plan was halted when some parents complained it was too dangerous. Who knew that helicopter parents would be threatened by actual helicopters?

Never mind that riding on a Chinook would be the adventure of a lifetime for a 10-year-old. Perhaps because there were no other reasonable options, the airlift commenced the next day. Every child survived and my nephew reported that “No one ever had so much fun in a natural disaster.”

Look, I’m a mother. I care deeply about my children’s safety. But safety is just one important thing to teach our children. And it’s not even anywhere near the most important thing. Keeping your kids from dying or getting hurt is of secondary importance to teaching them how to live. Safety isn’t even a virtue. If you’re teaching your kids more about safety than you are about honesty, kindness, respect for others, responsibility, gratitude, integrity, cooperation, determination, social skills, enthusiasm, compassion and manners, you’re doing it wrong.

That’s the kind of culture that breeds the hypersafe culture of spaceflight that my book is all about.

And then there’s this:

My neighborhood is in Northern Virginia, an area that has been rewarded for playing it safe and going after government cash. Many of my neighbors are government employees, lawyers and lobbyists. Many of them have found success regulating other people’s businesses out of existence, destructive acts all too frequently predicated on fears that somebody somewhere might get hurt. It’s not surprising, in that context, that my neighbors would call for regulation of the lemonade stand or lawn mowing business run by the kids next door.

The fact is that America is now run by people who profit from keeping everyone else from taking risks. It’s lucrative work if you can get it. Six of the ten richest counties in the country are next to Washington, D.C., for good reason. [“It’s where the money is.” — Willie Sutton] But this isn’t a recipe for prospering culturally or politically.

Yup.

Business, Culinary, Health, Humor, Social Commentary

Whole Foods

12 Comments

A survival guide:

I see the gluten-free section filled with crackers and bread made from various wheat-substitutes such as cardboard and sawdust. I skip this aisle because I’m not rich enough to have dietary restrictions. Ever notice that you don’t meet poor people with special diet needs? A gluten intolerant house cleaner? A cab driver with Candida? Candida is what I call a rich, white person problem. You know you’ve really made it in this world when you get Candida. My personal theory is that Candida is something you get from too much hot yoga. All I’m saying is if I were a yeast, I would want to live in your yoga pants.

Next I approach the beauty aisle. There is a scary looking machine there that you put your face inside of and it tells you exactly how ugly you are. They calculate your wrinkles, sun spots, the size of your pores, etc. and compare it to other women your age. I think of myself attractive but as it turns out, I am 78 percent ugly, meaning less pretty than 78 percent of women in the world. On the popular 1-10 hotness scale used by males the world over, that makes me a 3 (if you round up, which I hope you will.) A glance at the extremely close-up picture they took of my face, in which I somehow have a glorious, blond porn mustache, tells me that 3 is about right. Especially because the left side of my face is apparently 20 percent more aged than the right. Fantastic. After contemplating ending it all here and now, I decide instead to buy their product. One bottle of delicious smelling, silky feeling creme that is maybe going to raise me from a 3 to a 4 for only $108 which is a pretty good deal when you think about it.

Read the whole (foods) thing. It’s pretty funny.

Popular Culture, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Captain Video

1 Comment

Lileks has a review:

Now. Let’s think. The escape portion is the rear. It has no controls or power, according to Captain Video. Yet that’s where the engine was. So the escape pod is powerless and rudderless even though it has the engine, and that’s what you get into to escape. From onrushing asteroids. How? By disengaging from the front half, which cuts off the engines, which makes the escape capsule fall.

Captain Video and the Ranger landed on the planet when the gravity of Atoma took their escape capsule and laid it down gently about 14 feet from the front door of the evil bad guy’s lair. What a stroke of luck! They dress up as natives. Aliens always dress like 19th century Arabs with big futuristic guns.

It was amazingly bad, almost Plan-9-like.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The Shooter’s Politics

15 Comments

An inconvenient truth:

While it has no bearing on this guy going nuts and killing 12 people, it’s rather ironic that he’s a liberal Obama supporter considering the left always jumps at the chance to paint a killer as a Christian or conservative.

And of course, if he was a Christian or a conservative, it would obviously be the motive.

[Update a few minutes later]

“If we’d had ammunition, we could have cleared that building.”

But it was an unarmed victim “gun-free” zone.

Oh, and here’s a bonus from that idiot Piers Morgan. The type of gun used is obviously very important, until it isn’t.

[Update a while later]

The media remains obsessed with AR-15s, even though the shooter didn’t use one, and didn’t even attempt to get one. Instead, he used a Joe Biden special.

[Late-morning update]

If Obama had a fan, he’d look like Aaron Alexis:

Now we learn that Alexis was a Prius-driving, African-American liberal who liked Obama. Facts aren’t much fun, eh, libs?

So now the MSM narrative will magically transform this mass murder from “yet another damning indictment of gun-toting, right-wing racist America” to “the completely isolated actions of a misunderstood victim of society.” Just watch. It happens every time. And every time, they think we won’t notice.

Meanwhile, their ratings and their circulation numbers continue to plummet, and they blame everybody but themselves.

What tools they are.

Education, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Noble, Objective Scientist

29 Comments

…exists primarily in mythology:

There is deeply ingrained in American culture — particularly nowadays on the Left — the stereotype of the scientist as pure in intent and action, caring only for the Truth, let the chips fall where they may. The scientist works readily with other scientists (except when s/he is working alone, late into the night, thinking deep thoughts), accepts — nay, encourages — challenges to her/his theories and findings, welcomes new information and hypotheses, and is always willing to change his/her mind based on better data, models, and/or reasoning.

It is, to quote the late Douglas Adams, a load of dingos’ kidneys. A very large, steaming, rotting load of dingos’ kidneys.

Particularly when it comes to a politicized field like climate “science.”

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Fiction Imitates Life

A brief, but amusing review from Instapundit:

Set in an America that has become a corrupt state, run by an inbred political class drawn from just a few select universities and overseeing a populace of “cogs” who have no real legal protection against the state, while the civil government is sharply divided from the military, these science fiction books provide an excellent source of escapism from the unpleasant realities of today.

We laugh, so we don’t cry.