Upper Body Strength And Political Beliefs

It’s not as simple as reported:

Put another way, this study says that liberals are a coalition of rich wimpy men and strong poor men. Bu contrast, conservatives are a coalition of rich strong men and poor weak men.

The study found that women are different from men: a woman’s upper body strength did not affect her politics.

Partisans would like to think that it is the smart people who support their side. In reality, though, that doesn’t work: both sides have their share of both smart people and dumb people.

Yes, the notion that smart people are naturally “progressive” is just one of their many conceits.

The Obama Psychodrama

…of the Mainstream Media:

The big question now is how many of the liberal media will return to form as this process unfolds itself with more whistleblowers emerging, and with documents subpoenaed and witnesses put under oath over the coming months. To be sure some already have reverted to their default position of excuse-making support, floating rationalizations to minimize the damage: Obama is too remote and disconnected (even, it may even be intimated as a fallback concession, a bit lazy what with all that golf and partying) to have actively instigated these shocks.

This would be the face-saving option for both Obama and the journalists who wish to remain invested in his cause, albeit at lower intensity now that they have conceded incompetence and perhaps sloth. He has disappointed them a little, but any overestimation they may have engaged in was out of the best of motives.

But others will take a different tack. Having devoted five plus years to the narrative of Obama the good, they will be ready to follow a new story line now, because it has the ultimate virtue in the news business: it is new. If the special committees which will investigate the scandals do their job, there will many veins to mine in uncovering and telling the stories of wrongdoing. In the 1970s, nobody made a good career move defending the Nixon administration’s use of the IRS against its opponents, after all.

It will be fascinating to see how they respond.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Some in the media have apologized to the Tea Partiers for not taking their concerns seriously:

“One of the guys said, ‘I’m sitting here looking at what you sent me last year and I’m embarrassed that I didn’t cover,’ and I said ‘I understand, this is so surreal, we didn’t know what we were dealing with,’” Zawistowski said.

Well, he should be embarrassed. They all should be. And an apology is the very least they could do after all of the lies and calumny that have been raining down on people who just wanted to see a return to Constitutional government. If they want to apologize, the best way to do it would be to start doing their damned jobs and stop carrying water for these incompetent thugs.

And they should follow the advice of Bob Woodward (and apologize to him, too):

I would not dismiss Benghazi. It’s a very serious issue. As people keep saying, four people were killed. You look at the hydraulic pressure that was in the system to not tell the truth, and, you know, we use this term and the government uses this term, talking points. Talking points, as we know, are like legal briefs. They’re an argument on one side. What we need to get rid of talking point and they need to put out statements or papers that are truth documents.

Don’t expect that from this gang. The media needs to learn that when it comes to Obama and the Democrats, they should not trust, and and they have verify everything.

The Climate Models

…are getting worse than we thought:

The author hypothesizes the reasons for this are that attempts in the latest generation of models to reproduce observed changes in Arctic sea ice are causing “significant and widening discrepancy between the modeled and observed warming rates outside of the Arctic,” i.e. they have improved Arctic simulation at the expense of poorly simulating the rest of the globe.

It continues to amaze me that so many supposedly smart people take this junk science seriously. You know what this stuff looks more and more like to me? Epicycles.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!