…for the defenders of child rape in Hollywood. I don’t think they have any concept of how much this kind of thing costs them at the box office.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
How To Be A Bigot
This isn’t really anything new. The Democrats are simply staying true to their party’s roots. They just express the racism in different ways.
Of course, the new socially acceptable bigotry is against southerners, and Christians.
More Advice For “Liberals”
From Frank J. How to deal with angry conservatives:
Call them racists: If we shout “Racist!” every time they say something, maybe they’ll finally reflect on the racism that motivates them against a black president and give up whatever silly cause they think they’re pushing. If they dispute the racism accusation, point out how sensitive they are about the charge and how that further proves it’s true (people who really aren’t racist shouldn’t have any problem with being called racist). If further evidence is needed, point out to them that the president is black and they are white and that it’s obvious to everyone that a white person saying bad things about an underprivileged black person is quite racist. If the conservative isn’t white, though, this can be confusing. Make sure to give that person a pamphlet describing the political views he is supposed to have based on his race. If the person doesn’t read the pamphlet, you might have to try using a racial slur. It’s okay, if the person deserves it.
Point out how much smarter Obama is than they are: Obama is obviously very smart (obviously!), but somehow conservatives are overlooking that simple fact. Maybe they’ll be less angry if we keep emphasizing how Obama and his staff are much, much smarter than they are, and in fact they are very stupid compared to Obama and other liberals. Then conservatives will realize that Obama, being smarter than them, probably knows what he’s doing, so there is nothing to fear and be angry about unless you’re a really stupid person.
It’s great advice. Let’s hope they keep taking it.
ACORN And Donkey 2010 Prospects
Some thoughts from Eric Raymond. It is kind of amusing that the troll in the comments section stupidly thinks that “sounding like Fox News” is an insult.
Send More Money
I find it hard to get behind efforts like this, because there is no discussion of what NASA should actually be doing with the money, and it’s assumed that there are no problems at NASA that money won’t fix. But absent major reforms and ways of doing business, sending more money to NASA is like sending more booze to a teenager behind the wheel.
[Update a couple minutes later]
From the “About” page:
We hope you’ll join us in showing your support for NASA and human spaceflight by sharing this website with your friends and family, and by contacting your elected representatives.
Note the implicit assumption that NASA is identically equal to “Human spaceflight.” How naive. And counterproductive. When I look at Constellation, I have to channel William Proxmire: “Not one penny for this nutty fantasy.”
[Update Sunday morning]
Jeff Foust has further thoughts on the petition:
The site…just rehashes many of the old arguments, the ones that have not proven compelling in the past. The site includes a letter you can sign to send to your representatives, but the call to action is weak: “I urge you to provide adequate investment in our nation’s space program.” What may be one person’s “adequate investment” may be another’s wholly inadequate—or simply unaffordable.
[Bumped]
[Late Sunday afternoon update]
More thoughts from Clark Lindsey:
I know these guys mean well…but I can’t support giving more money to an agency that would waste it on absurdly expensive projects like Ares I/Ares V. If the cost of access to space cannot be reduced substantially from currently levels, it is pointless to continue with human spaceflight. These projects neither lower space access costs nor lay a technology development path towards lower costs.
Yes. As I’ve noted often, even if these programs were successful by their own metrics, they would be an utter failure in terms of opening up space to humanity, as all of NASA’s human spaceflight programs have been to date.
Fifty-Two Percent
That’s the (devastating) unemployment rate for young people:
Al Angrisani, the former assistant Labor Department secretary under President Reagan, doesn’t see a turnaround in the jobs picture for entry-level workers and places the blame squarely on the Obama administration and the construction of its stimulus bill.
“There is no assistance provided for the development of job growth through small businesses, which create 70 percent of the jobs in the country,” Angrisani said in an interview last week. “All those [unemployed young people] should be getting hired by small businesses.”
There are six million small businesses in the country, those that employ less than 100 people, and a jobs stimulus bill should include tax credits to give incentives to those businesses to hire people, the former Labor official said.
“If each of the businesses hired just one person, we would go a long way in growing ourselves back to where we were before the recession,” Angrisani noted.
…Angrisani said he believes that Obama’s economic team, led by Larry Summers, has a blind spot for small business because no senior member of the team — dominated by academics and veterans of big business — has ever started and grown a business.
But they went to Ivy League schools, and are smarter than us, so things will work out. Perhaps they just haven’t raised the minimum wage high enough.
Scrubbing The Atmosphere
Why aren’t we spending more money on it?
David W. Keith, a physicist at the University of Calgary, reviews some of the technologies for air capture of carbon and notes that there is not a single government program devoted specifically to that purpose. Dr. Keith estimates that less than $3 million per year in public money is currently being spent on related research, even though it could potentially be a bargain. He writes:
[Early] estimates suggest that air capture will be competitive with technologies that are getting large R.&D. investments. For example, the cost of cutting CO2 emissions by displacing carbon-intensive electricity production with roof-mounted solar photovoltaic panels can easily exceed $500 per ton of CO2. Yet even skeptics suggest that a straightforward combination of existing process technologies could probably achieve air capture at lower cost. And the fact that several groups have raised private money for commercialization suggests that there are investors who believe that it is possible to develop technologies to capture CO2 from air at costs closer to $100 than $500 per ton of CO2.
When I wrote about Richard Branson’s $25 million prize for figuring out how to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, I wondered if governments and other entrepreneurs would follow his example (and if we would someday have nanobots gobbling up carbon dioxide). So far, I guess, the answer is no, but perhaps Dr. Keith’s article will stimulate some interest.
Don’t count on it. It doesn’t give them enough control over our lives, or force us to tighten our hair shirts sufficiently.
[Sunday evening update]
Things seem to have gotten a little off track in comments. Let me restate the question, to get more useful responses. Given that the people currently running the country think that atmospheric CO2 is a problem, and given that we are currently spending much money to address this (wind, solar, other non-nuclear “green” tech, etc.), why are we not spending a higher proportion on this? I contend that I have already described why. The collapse of the Soviet Union having (at least temporarily) given socialism a bad name, the socialists have taken over the environmental movement, and are using it as a Trojan Horse for their (non-environmental) collectivist agendas. I’m looking for alternate explanations from the usual defenders of the watermelons. I’m also looking for plausible ones, but I don’t expect to see them.
Obama And NASA
Some thoughts from Chris Muir. I had similar ones a few months ago.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Alan K. Henderson has further thoughts.
Getting Chilly In Hell
An apology to Sarah Palin from a media outlet.
Breitbart
“It’s so obvious that the mainstream media needed the netroots,” said Breitbart. “It needed The Huffington Post and the Daily Kos and the Media Matters of the world to protect them from future Swift Boats and Rathergates.” The ACORN scandal, he said, was “Rathergate 2.0.”
“The left has done a very good job with Internet stuff,” said Flynn. “Josh Marshall has broken some interesting stuff at TPM. They ought to know that you don’t need a big backer to break news. This notion of this right-wing conspiracy — look, I’ve been inside what would be called the right-wing conspiracy for a long time, and there’s no planning. These people couldn’t plan a bake sale.”
On Wednesday afternoon, ACORN filed lawsuits against the filmmakers and against Breitbart. He has not responded to that yet; when he spoke with TWI, he was still laughing at how mainstream media reporters could get so excited about Abu Ghraib and so angry at his site and his reporters.
“This is the Abu Ghraib of journalism!” said Breitbart. “Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, Abu Ghraib, everywhere you go. I heard that two million times, from when they reported in 2004 to right now. This is the Abu Ghraib of Abu Ghraib. Abu Ghraibs for everyone! NEA Abu Ghraib! White House Abu Ghraib! ACORN Abu Ghraib! Journalism Abu Ghraib! You’ve all been exposed, you corrupt bastards.”
They’re like the dinosaurs, wondering what that approaching object is in the sky.