It continues, but the marks aren’t falling for it any more.
Category Archives: Business
Steve Goddard Explains
“Why I do this”:
I have been an active environmentalist for almost my entire life. At age 16 I testified before a Congressional hearing in support of a proposed wilderness area in Utah. I worked to get the Clean Air Act passed, and worked for two summers as a wilderness ranger in New Mexico. I do all of my local transport and shopping by bicycle, and buy almost exclusively organic and free range food.
The reason I blog is because catastrophic global warming is junk science, used by unscrupulous people for unscrupulous political and financial purposes. It keeps environmentalists from doing anything useful, and provides progressives an excuse to push toward totalitarianism.
The global warming scam needs to be stopped. It has spiraled completely out of control, and no longer has any pretense of science behind the lies.
Pretty much, yeah.
The GM Scandal
It may be worse than you think:
…does anyone believe that the Obama administration took as hard a look at GM as it did Toyota?
Because it was Government Motors, and a payoff to the president’s ally, the UAW, and a rip off of the taxpayer.
What Keeps Women Out Of STEM
Among other things, they don’t like the dating pool. I wonder if The Big Bang Theory helps, or hurts with that perception?
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems vaguely related: Redefining boyhood. As a disease to be treated.
I guess you could say it’s a pre-existing condition.
The Seven Million Bigots
But why stop there? According to Wikipedia, 7,001,084 people voted for Prop 8. Why do any of those people still have jobs? Shouldn’t they all be forced to resign? And why should they have the privilege of living in California at all? I say round them up and move them someplace where they won’t do any harm.
Oh, and let’s find every media figure, writer or actor or musician, who voted for Prop 8. Surely they’re a special danger. Someone should start an investigation — form a committee to investigate un-American activities like that, expose the malefactors, and make them identify anyone else they know who was involved. Let’s make it clear that differing on these opinions is unacceptable. Like Eich, they should be blacklisted and never allowed to work again.
Damn straight.
[Update a while later]
Glenn has a lot more. Apparently Mozilla is getting a lot of negative feedback, but as he points out, OK Cupid should be taking a lot of heat, too, particularly considering their hypocrisy.
[Update mid morning]
The “liberal” mob claims another scalp.
People who behave this way are many things, but liberal is not one of them.
[Early afternoon update]
“The Internet just cut off its nose to spite its Facebook.”
I would never defend a homophobe—but does “pure hate” homophobia include dedicating oneself to outreach to “marginalized” LGBT developers, as Eich did almost immediately? Does Mozilla further its cause-privacy uber alles and the free flow of information—by making its pioneers into pariahs in social media, while issuing blatantly hypocritical statements which claim to treasure “religious diversity” at Mozilla? (And did anyone flinch when Mark Zuckerberg held GOP fundraisers?) Is what we want ”politically correct web browsing” where the Twittersphere and “socially conscious corporations” determine whose ideas are disseminated? Is this the open internet, or shall the open-source web be verboten to those “on the wrong side of history”?
This is a very very ugly precedent.
[Update a while later]
Andrew Sullivan continues to fight the good fight on this issue:
There is not a scintilla of evidence that he has ever discriminated against a single gay person at Mozilla; he was dedicated to continuing Mozilla’s inclusive policies; he was prepared to prove that the accusations against him were unfair, and that his political views would not affect his performance as CEO. But this was not enough. He had to be publicly punished for supporting a Proposition that is no longer in effect. This is absolutely McCarthyism from an increasingly McCarthyite left.
The only problem the Left ever had with McCarthyism was that they were McCarthy’s target.
The Immigration Coalition
Cracks are forming in it.
Good.
Venezuela
It wants to spread the suffering:
As with the old lady and the fly, Venezuela’s government may be running out of encores. It can crack down on black-market activity, but that won’t make the shortages go away. It might redistribute the suffering a bit, but that’s not all it will do. The black market is often a sort of release valve for bad policy; shut it down, and you turn the formerly annoying into the totally intolerable.
There is, as Adam Smith once observed, “a lot of ruin in a nation.” President Nicolas Maduro seems determined to find out exactly how much Venezuela has left.
This is always how socialism ends. They’ve run out of other peoples’ money down there.
Those 7M “Sign Ups”
Why yesterday’s champagne-cork popping in the Rose Garden was meaningless propaganda.
[Update a few minutes later]
Want medical insurance? Get in line:
The first thing we thought of when we saw the pictures was the photos we’ve recently seen on Twitter of Venezuelans waiting in bread lines. Waiting in line to purchase necessities is a characteristic not of a prosperous free society but of command economies under repressive regimes. Closer to home, one doubts even the Transportation Security Administration would be so tone-deaf as to advertise long airport lines as an indication it’s doing a great job.
So what in the world could the White House have been thinking? Here’s a guess: They look at the ObamaCare lines and think not of communist subjects queuing up for bread or toilet paper, or Americans for driver’s licenses, but something more like the lines of consumers eager to be the first to get the new iPhone or the latest Harry Potter book. Affluent people often wait in line for things about which they have a particular enthusiasm–or for special experiences, like an amusement park ride, concert or meal at a favorite restaurant.
One obvious difference is that whereas the iPhone and Harry Potter queuers are eager to get the new thing first, the ObamaCare ones are presumably anxious not to miss the deadline (even if it’s not rigorously enforced). ObamaCare lines might have been impressive if they’d begun to form in the last days of September. At the end of open enrollment, the White House boast is akin to the IRS’s citing a “surge” in filing of tax returns two weeks from now as evidence that the income tax system is popular and well designed.
Command economies under repressive regimes seems to be the goal.
Government Motors
It’s not that GM’s new owners didn’t care. It’s just that they cared more about their political backers: the UAW.
Spacecraft Tech Expo
OK, now that I have my health care squared away (just under the wire), I’m heading down to Long Beach. Not sure how much I’ll be able to blog from there, but I’ll take a laptop.