So why, pray tell, do we spend so much time talking about suburban sprawl and sport utilities, and so little time talking about FedEx and European vacations?
The question answers itself, doesn’t it? Giving up air travel and overnight delivery is much more personally costly for the public intellectuals who write about this stuff than giving up a big SUV. If you live in one of the five or six major cities that contain virtually everyone who writes about climate change, having a small car (or no car), is a pretty easy adjustment to imagine. On the other hand, try to imagine giving up far-flung vacations, conferences, etc. — especially since travel to interesting locales is one of the hidden perks of not-very-well remunerated positions at universities, public policy groups, nongovernmental organizations, and yes, news organizations.
All this outrage is really an admission that Obama is weak, and can’t withstand the kind of criticism routinely directed at other presidents, from Nixon to Clinton to Bush. President Asterisk, indeed.
As I noted on Twitter:
Comparing Obama to a rodeo clown was an insult to rodeo clowns everywhere. @ponder68@WashTimes
One interesting aspect of this new survey is the unmistakably alarmist bent of the survey takers. They frequently use terms such as “denier” to describe scientists who are skeptical of an asserted global warming crisis, and they refer to skeptical scientists as “speaking against climate science” rather than “speaking against asserted climate projections.” Accordingly, alarmists will have a hard time arguing the survey is biased or somehow connected to the ‘vast right-wing climate denial machine.’
Another interesting aspect of this new survey is that it reports on the beliefs of scientists themselves rather than bureaucrats who often publish alarmist statements without polling their member scientists. We now have meteorologists, geoscientists and engineers all reporting that they are skeptics of an asserted global warming crisis, yet the bureaucrats of these organizations frequently suck up to the media and suck up to government grant providers by trying to tell us the opposite of what their scientist members actually believe.
I have added James Taylor to my list of people that I can’t trust a word they say. That article is a travesty, as are the ones he links to about meteorologist. How dare he say “only 36% of scientists” when the study studied geoscientists who work at Alberta petroleum? Pathetic. Or claim in the other links that “only a minority 30% is very worried about global warming”, ignoring that the study said an additional 42% are _somewhat_ worried. I’m not a big believer in AGW, but the man is obviously in the business of fooling people. You shouldn’t link him either.
Noted for future reference. But the point remains that a) the 97% number is bogus and b) the models are broken.
Musk has a long history of political entanglement — usually with people trying to scuttle his various big-think projects. SpaceX has been a target of regulatory concerns from the get-go, most recently from Texas legislators who opposed letting Musk build an airport for spaceships at a site near Brownsville. Tesla has also clashed with lawmakers in New York and other states who have tried to stop the company from selling electric vehicles directly to consumers. These are the kinds of obstacles no tech CEO wants to face — and yet, because of the scope and scale of Musk’s ambitions, he has to climb over them.
For years, government has been a nuisance to Elon Musk. It’s slowed him down. It’s required him to spend his valuable time lobbying his Twitter followers for support in the New York legislature instead of building rockets. It’s required him to explain his mind-bending technical innovations to grayhairs in Congress as if he were speaking to schoolchildren. Over and over, the public sector has convinced Musk that it is hopelessly lost when it comes to matters of innovation, and that anything truly revolutionary must spring from the ambitions of the private sector.
Yup. NASA is an excellent example of that problem.
It is increasingly common for the Left (and its reliable water boys in the loyal opposition like McCain) to demonize its opponents. In Hiss’s day, it wasn’t so common, but his case was the first big instance of it. It is now generally accepted among leftists that those who dare to stand against any aspect of the politically correct agenda are not only wrong. They are evil, morally bankrupt, and stupid to boot – except for the diabolical ingenuity they employed to frame their pure-as-the-driven-snow victims.
This is a pernicious tendency that conservatives should identify and reject whenever and wherever it appears, for the simple fact that even if all her accusers are terrible people who kick their Shih Tzus and don’t recycle, that would not in itself tell us anything about Huma Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. She could still be a Muslim Brotherhood operative even if her accusers were Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy. And to hear the Left tell it, that’s exactly who they are: Alger Hiss and Huma Abedin are innocent, and if you don’t believe that, or even think the questions worthy of investigation, be ready to be bound hand and foot and cast into the outer darkness by an increasingly authoritarian and thuggish Left.
It actually does have elevators. I don’t think I blogged about it at the time, partly because it seemed so hard to believe that a building could get all the way from planning to completion with no one pointing out the problem.
Like the moguls of the early 20th century, who bought and sold senators like so many cabbages, the new elite constitute a basic threat to democracy. They dominate their industries with market shares that would make the old moguls blush. Google, for example, controls some 80 percent of search, while Google and Apple provide the operating system software for almost 90 percent of smartphones. Similarly, more than half of Americans, and 60 percent of Europeans, use Facebook, making it easily the world’s dominant social media site. In contrast, the world’s top 10 oil companies account for barely 40 percent of the world’s oil production.
Like the Gilded Age moguls, the tech oligarchs also personally dominate their companies. Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, for example, control roughly two-thirds of the voting stock in Google. Brin and Page each is worth more $20 billion. Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, owns just under 23 percent of his company; worth $41 billion, Forbes ranked him the country’s third-richest person. Bill Gates, the richest, is worth a cool $66 billion and still controls 7 percent of his firm. Newcomer Mark Zuckerberg’s 29.3 percent stake in Facebook was worth $16 billion as of July 25, according to Bloomberg.
This combination of market and ownership concentration needs to be curbed.
…Conservatives, for their part, can only face up to the new “axis of evil” by stepping outside their ideology strictures and instinctive embrace of wealth. The increasingly monopolistic nature of the high-tech community, and its widespread disregard for the privacy of the individual, should concern conservatives, as it would have the framers of the Constitution.