Media Criticism

I Wish It Were True

6 Comments

Ed Driscoll thinks that the seppuku of the MSM is complete. I doubt it. For one thing, to perform seppuku requires that one have some semblance of a sense of honor. I agree, though, that the CNN reporter’s behavior was shameful:

Roesgen didn’t bother angrily confronting that protester who compared the President to Hitler when Bush was in office. No, she used them as a prop to illustrate her story. Double standard much?

But that’s all right because, as we all know, Bush really was just like Hitler, if not much worse.

[Afternoon update]

Here’s a video of the righteous reaction of some of the protesters to Roesgen’s hackery.

[Another update]

The Boston Globe is amazing:

When the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reported that the Boston Globe-Democrat hadn’t run a single story on the national “Boston Tea Party” movement (key word: Boston), I’ll admit I was surprised. Their blatant political bias is obvious, and every rational reader knows their “news” coverage is driven by their politics. But not one story? From a journalistic standpoint, it’s utterly indefensible.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I picked up the BG-D this morning–the day after thousands of BOSTON-are citizens gathered at BOSTON Harbor for a BOSTON Tea Party to protest (in part) the taxpayer abuse by our BOSTON-based state government…and found a single local story in the BOSTON paper. Buried on page A16 there was a small AP story with the dateline “Frankfort, KY.”

I guess the Boston Globe-Democrat staff just couldn’t resist a “KY” reference…

To add ignorance to incompetence, the AP story spreads the canard that our Tea Party was part of some national Republican effort. They link it to FreedomWorks and the GOP–neither of whom had anything to do whatsoever with our event…though I’d be happy to send them the invoice for our expenses.

Here’s the Boston Globe-Democrat’s model for journalistic success:

1. Ignore a national story inspired by local Boston history for as long as possible;
2. Refuse to cover the story when it becomes local;
3. Misreport the story with a wire report from Kentucky;
4. Then wonder why you’re losing $1 million a week.

Or blame it all on Craigslist.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“The Meeting Was Really Kind Of Creepy”

5 Comments

Nope, no fascism to see here. Move along, people, move along.:

One topic under the microscope, our insider said, was on-air CNBC editor Rick Santelli’s rant two months ago about staging a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest the president’s bailout programs — an idea that spawned tax protest tea parties in other big cities, infuriating the White House. Oddly, Santelli was not at the meeting, while Jim Cramer was, noted our source, who added that no edict was ultimately handed down by the network chieftains.

As he notes, that’s the same White House that pretended yesterday that it was unaware of any of the tea parties.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

President Of The World

2 Comments

Victor Davis Hanson:

He is beginning to mention the novelty of his racial heritage a lot, usually in the context that we are now in a new world of Obama, and that his very presence is a rejection of the old and illiberal America.

That the veteran Colin Powell and Russian-speaking Condoleezza Rice ran American foreign policy the last eight years, in a way unthinkable in Europe, is never voiced. Suggesting that China would have an Uighur foreign minister, that Saudi Arabia would have a Christian foreign minister, that France would have an Algerian foreign minister, that Germany would have a Turkish foreign minister, or that Russia would have a Chechen foreign minister is as absurd as suggesting that a Powell or Rice was never a big deal.

So what Obama leaves out about America is telling. He touches on slavery, lack of voting rights for blacks in the South (although he conflates this issue and implies to foreigners that African Americans could not vote in the North as well), our past treatment of Native Americans, and the dropping of the bomb against Japan.

These transgressions are rarely put in any historical context, much less referenced as sins of mankind shared by all of his hosts (the pedigree of murder, exploitation, and rapine of his foreign interlocutors is quite stunning). We don’t hear many references to the American Revolution, or the great tradition of American ingenuity embodied by Bell, Edison, or the Wright brothers.

We hear nothing about our Gettysburg, or our entry into World War I. Iwo Jima and the Bulge are never alluded to. Drawing the line in Korea and forcing the end of the Soviet monstrosity are taboo subjects. That we pledged the life of New York for Berlin in the Cold War is unknown. Liberating Afghanistan and Iraq from the diabolical Taliban and Saddam Hussein is left unsaid. The Civil Rights movement, the Great Society, affirmative action, and present billion-dollar foreign-aid programs apparently never existed. Millions of Africans have been saved by George Bush’s efforts at extending life-saving medicines to AIDS patients — but again, this is never referenced.

This is how far you have to go to parody the guy.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Major Category Error

32 Comments

This comment just showed up in my post on media double standards on the DHS thing, and it makes a very common error among the left.

Amazing – Republicans are outraged when the DHS, a monster of their own creation, turns against them.

Two points. First, I am not now, and have never been, a Republican. The people who are outraged are not “Republicans” but rather, small-government types and veterans, the two groups that were slandered. It may be that many of them happen to be Republicans (and certainly many more than are Democrats), but this is not about Republicans.

The second point is that I was never in favor of a Department of Homeland Security, so the notion that I’m somehow hoist on my own petard here is hilariously ignorant.

Moreover, I was opposed to many things that the Bush administration did, and continue to be. That doesn’t mean, though, that I was going to vote for the Democrats, because on most of the issues on which I disagreed with the Bush administration, the Dems would have been even worse. And that’s what the tea parties are about. They’re not Republican rallies, because many of those attending them are as angry at Republicans as they are at Democrats. They are an expression of anger at the political class as a whole.

And for those who whine about the lack of tea parties over the Bush deficits, sometimes quantity has a quality all its own. There’s a concept called a tipping point. There was anger over the Bush spending (anger that I expressed myself, often), but it only became incandescent when it became so outrageous, with a projected budget that generates more deficit and debt in a few months than the Bush administration had generated in almost eight years. This anger didn’t start when President Obama took office, though he has certainly increased it. It started last fall, when the Bush administration started handing out taxpayer money by the hundreds of billions with no oversight or accountability.

No, I’m not a Republican. But the Republicans have a chance to finally make me one, if they can listen to the tea partiers today, and recognize the error of their ways. I won’t hold my breath, though, based on a lifetime of experience.

Philosophy, Political Commentary

Classical Versus Modern Liberals

3 Comments

Alan Wolfe says there’s no distinction between them. Jonah Goldberg says that this is palpable nonsense:

Classical liberalism believed in objective rules constraining and delineating the role of government. Modern liberalism, born at the beginning of the twentieth century, holds that there are no rules rooted outside the prevailing sentiments of liberals themselves. It’s all up to what liberals decide is necessary. Stuart Chase — who reportedly coined the phrase “the New Deal” — argued that it was vital that liberals be put in charge of an “economic dictatorship.” “Why,” he asked, “should the Russians have all the fun remaking the world?” Thurmond Arnold, one of the intellectual titans of the New Deal, defined liberalism as “deuces wild.” Dewey believed there was no such thing as natural rights and argued for things like “social control.” Wilson believed that the U.S. Constitution — a classically liberal document, I think it’s fair to say — needed to be scrapped for a new, living constitution. Call me crazy, but I find these to be contrary, not merely “evolutionary” perspectives.

And he has some interesting thoughts from Albert Jay Nock:

…one never knew what Liberals would do, and their power of self-persuasion is such that only God knows what they would not do. As casuists, they make Gury and St. Alfonso dei Liguori look like bush-leaguers. On every point of conventional morality, all the Liberals I have personally known were very trustworthy. They were great fellows for the Larger Good, but it would have to be pretty large before they would alienate your wife’s affections or steal your watch. But on any point of intellectual integrity, there is not one of them whom I would trust for ten minutes alone in a room with a red-hot stove, unless the stove were comparatively valueless.

Liberals generally,—there may have been exceptions, but I do not know who they were,—joined in the agitation for an income-tax, in utter disregard of the fact that it meant writing the principle of absolutism into the Constitution. Nor did they give a moment’s thought to the appalling social effects of an income-tax; I never once heard this aspect of the matter discussed. Liberals were also active in promoting the “democratic” movement for the popular election of senators. It certainly took no great perspicacity to see that these two measures would straightway ease our political system into collectivism as soon as some Eubulus, some mass-man overgifted with sagacity, should manoeuvre himself into popular leadership; and in the nature of things, this would not be long.

All too prophetic.

[Early evening update]

Another nice find on Nock and liberalism:

The facts are clearly apparent. We now see on all sides the extraordinary spectacle of Liberals doing their best to destroy the cardinal freedoms and immunities which Liberals formerly defended, while all the forces which are historically and traditionally known as Tory or Conservative are arrayed in defense of those freedoms. Furthermore we see Liberals vehemently vilifying those who hold to the original basic principles of Liberalism, denouncing them as enemies of society, and doing all they can to discredit and disable them. These two are probably the strangest anomalies that recent history presents.

Of course, it’s become an old story by now.

Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

How Do The Numbers Work?

40 Comments

Sorry, but I just can’t buy this:

PG&E is pledging to buy the power at an agreed-upon rate, comparable to the rate specified in other agreements for renewable-energy purchases, company spokesman Jonathan Marshall said. Neither PG&E nor Solaren would say what that rate was, due to the proprietary nature of the agreement. However, Marshall emphasized that PG&E would make no up-front investment in Solaren’s venture.

“We’ve been very careful not to bear risk in this,” Marshall told msnbc.com.

Smart move.

Solaren’s chief executive officer, Gary Spirnak, said the project would be the first real-world application of space solar power, a technology that has been talked about for decades but never turned into reality.

“While a system of this scale and exact configuration has not been built, the underlying technology is very mature and is based on communications satellite technology,” he said in a Q&A posted by PG&E. A study drawn up for the Pentagon came to a similar conclusion in 2007. However, that study also said the cost of satellite-beamed power would likely be significantly higher than market rates, at least at first.

In contrast, Spirnak said Solaren’s system would be “competitive both in terms of performance and cost with other sources of baseload power generation.”

I just can’t see how. Unless there are going to be many satellites, the system has to be in GEO to provide baseload power to any given region on earth. They talk about putting up a 200 MW system with “four or five” “heavy lift” launches (where this is apparently defined as 25 tons).

Suppose the conversion efficiency of the cells is a generous 30%, the DC-MW conversion is 90%, the transmission efficiency is 90% and the MW-AC conversion efficiency is 90% (generous numbers all, I think). That gives an overall efficiency of 22% from sunlight to the grid. The solar constant in space is 1.4kW/m2, so that means you need 650,000 square meters of panels to deliver 200 MW to the grid. Suppose you can build the cells (including necessary structure to maintain stiffness) for half a kilo per square meter. That means that just for the solar panels alone, you have a payload of 325 metric tons. Generously assuming that their payload of 25 tons is to GEO (if it’s to LEO, it’s probably less than ten tons in GEO), that would require over a dozen launches for the solar panels alone.

That doesn’t include the mass of the conversion electronics, basic satellite housekeeping systems (attitude control, etc.) and the transmitting antenna, which has to be huge to get that much power that distance at a safe power density.

So even ignoring the other issues (e.g. regulatory, safety studies, etc.) that Clark mentions, I think this is completely bogus until I see their numbers. And probably even then.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Injustice Of The Death Tax

35 Comments

I hadn’t realized this.

It explains why Warren Buffet likes it.

Far from merely preventing people from buying “second yachts,” the death tax routinely forces small to medium-sized private businesses with a few million dollars in assets to be liquidated, simply in order to pay the tax. Such businesses usually have to be sold to large corporations at distressed prices. Two famous examples are the once-family-owned Buffalo News and Dairy Queen — both snapped up by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

Moreover, the death tax is an effective $12 billion annual subsidy to the life insurance industry, according to Dick Patten of the American Family Business Institute. As the purveyors of the financial product of choice for avoiding the tax, the industry has lobbied heavily to keep it in place. (It should come as little surprise that Buffett, who also made a fortune in life insurance, is a big supporter of the tax.)

Leeches.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!