Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Pulling Clearances

2 Comments

…is only a start:

If we had a real media and not the world’s most pompous Democrat transcription service, the CIA’s blown Chinese spy ring disaster would be front page news but hey, Omarosa! In any case, the only consulting anyone should do with the members of this class of unmitigated failures whose incompetence brought us 9/11, Iraq, Libya, ISIS, and a future where we would all be wise to learn Mandarin, is to ask their opinion and then do the opposite – Costanza style.

Let’s look at our elite’s track record of success. Don’t worry – it won’t take long. We’re still chasing bandits in Afghanistan after nearly 17 years, the Navy can’t stop running into other people’s boats, and our best and brightest in the FBI are texting each other like teens while they try to undo the election. They can’t be bothered with things like, I don’t know, following up on warnings about psychotic freaks who get online and announce their plan to shoot up schools. Oh, and remember the 2008 economic collapse? I’m thinking you weren’t the one making bad bets with billions of dollars that brought it all tumbling down. By the way, guess how many people the feds tossed in the pokey for the 2008 meltdown that cost you and me a trillion bucks? One. Uno. A single dude.

Business, Education, History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

The First Amendment

4 Comments

…and the lesson of Robespierre:

Once we stop treating the Internet as just a medium like newsprint and start treating Internet hosting companies as publishers, we make them vulnerable to oppressors and we can be sure that some of them will not have what we see as the “public good” in mind.

This is the lesson of Robespierre: once you establish that something may be done for you, you establish that it can be done to you.

Similarly, as Barry Goldwater and others have said, a government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take it all away.

Business, Economics, Education, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Gender Is A Social Construct

10 Comments

…except when it’s not:

A foundational tenet of academic feminism holds that alleged differences between males and females are socially constructed. This credo usually maximizes the opportunities for charging sexism, yet it will be discarded in an instant if acknowledging the innate biological and psychological differences between men and women yields an additional trove of feminist complaint. The current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine shows how the game is played.

For years, medical research neglected “sex and gender differences” in health, according to the magazine. “Historically, the narrative of medicine has been driven by data derived from white men around the age of 40,” the associate dean for curriculum at the Yale Medical School told the magazine’s reporter. Clinical trials only occasionally included females and when they did, the results were rarely analyzed by sex. It’s mysterious why this alleged neglect should matter, if sex differences are “socially constructed.” If males and females are the same psychologically and physically before the patriarchy starts assigning sex roles, then medical research need not distinguish between males and females, either.

It turns out, however, that males and females differentially respond to stress, environmental risk factors, drugs, and disease, as an initiative called Women’s Health Research at Yale devotes itself to documenting. . . .

Such discoveries should be the death knell for social constructivism. Along with many others like them, they buttress the possibility that uneven sex ratios in various fields are in part the result of males and females’ different average dispositions toward competition, risk, and abstract rather than people-centered work (an observation that got computer engineer James Damore fired from Google).

And yet, feminist social-justice warriors are perfectly capable of proceeding on several contradictory fronts simultaneously.

It’s almost as though they select these whacko theories only in order to serve an agenda.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related: No, the professional engineering exam is not gender biased.

Business, Economics, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

The Fate Of The ISS

18 Comments

Matt Fitzgibbons says it’s like the ancient Roman roads. I’m not sure the analogy works very well, but I do think that it would be wasteful to deorbit it. When he says it’s “only” three or four billion a year, I don’t think he appreciates how much more we’ll be able to do for much less in the near future, But I also think in the next decade we’ll have the ability to move it higher, and preserve it as a museum.

History, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Peter Strzok

3 Comments

…got his start in the FBI’s dirty Boston Office.

Mueller is guilty of framing people and withholding exculpatory evidence in the past. Why should we think he’s not doing the same thing now?

Saturday-morning update]

Lee Smith has a pretty comprehensive description of everything that was going on.

[Saturday-evening update]

Related: Watch Kimberly Strassell dismantle the WaPo “fact checker” on Bruce Ohr.

As an aside, Twitter threads have become a way of routing around the limitations of first the 140, then 280-character limit of the medium, to turn them effectively into blog posts, at which one can jump in at any time.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!