Category Archives: Democrats

Update III: On Boobs And Balloons (‘Hyper Inflation’)

Democrats, Family, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, Science, Technology, The Zeitgeist

The excerpt is from my new WND.COM column, “On Boobs And Balloons”:

“If you needed incontrovertible proof that homegrown retardation is far more pressing a problem than homegrown terrorism in modern-day America – 6-year-old Falcon Heene’s flight of fancy provided it.

The contagion that gripped the nation began on Oct. 15. Anyone turning on the boob tube was treated to a live broadcast of a levitating dome-shaped ‘homemade flying saucer.’

MSNBC’s David ‘Shyster’ informed his unfortunate viewers, matter-of-fact, that the small son of Richard and Mayumi Heene of Fossil Ridge Road in Fort Collins, Colo., had climbed into a carriage attached to the helium-filled contraption, which had become untethered. Boy and balloon were now scaling heights of 10,000 feet. …

Other TV entertainment outlets masquerading as news media hawked the Falcon pie-in-the-sky as fact. If anything, both the authorities and the media proceeded from the premise that Falcon was in fact flying two miles above them, rather than hiding somewhere on terra firma.

When you’re slothful, stout and stupid, it’s easier to look to the heavens than search high-and-low below. …”

The complete column is “On Boobs And Balloons.” If you miss it on WND.COM, be sure to catch it on Taki’s Magazine on the weekend.

Update I (Oct. 23): A NOTE FROM NASA. Edifying too:

Ilana,

It amazes me how the media are constantly duped by attention seekers such as these. I was at work when this was occurring and just like the rest of the fools out there, had to find out more what was going on.

Having launched hundreds of weather balloons, my initial reaction was “no way could a 6 year old boy be lifted by that balloon.”

If you use some math to deduce how much weight a 15 foot high and 5 foot wide balloon could lift at that altitude using helium gas, you come up with about 30 pounds. Not too may 6 year old boys weigh 30 lbs.

We were switching the channels at work to watch the coverage and noticed even the Weather Channel was carrying this. Now, did they use some basic buoyancy equations to figure out the impossibility of a boy being lifted by this balloon? Of course not! But then again the Weather Channel is now owned by NBC, so what do you expect.

Enjoy your articles!

Mark
Johnson Space Center

Update II (Oct. 24): I feel sorry for the Heene woman; she looks so sad. There are times when its obvious a brassy woman pretending to be abused is anything but. In this case, it’s plain to me that Mayumi Heene, while perhaps not abused, is certainly subservient to her husband. Via Drudge:

The mother of the 6-year-old boy once feared missing inside a runaway helium balloon admitted the whole saga was a hoax, according to court documents released Friday.

Mayumi Heene told sheriff’s deputies that she and her husband Richard “knew all along that Falcon was hiding in the residence” in Fort Collins, according to an affidavit used to get a search warrant for the home.

She allegedly told investigators the incident was a hoax meant to make them more marketable to the media.

Update III (Oct. 24): The column has been titled deliciously “Hyper Inflation” on Taki’s and appended with appropriately odious images. Added are some must-read links.

Update III: On Boobs And Balloons ('Hyper Inflation')

Democrats, Family, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Pop-Culture, Pseudoscience, Science, Technology, The Zeitgeist

The excerpt is from my new WND.COM column, “On Boobs And Balloons”:

“If you needed incontrovertible proof that homegrown retardation is far more pressing a problem than homegrown terrorism in modern-day America – 6-year-old Falcon Heene’s flight of fancy provided it.

The contagion that gripped the nation began on Oct. 15. Anyone turning on the boob tube was treated to a live broadcast of a levitating dome-shaped ‘homemade flying saucer.’

MSNBC’s David ‘Shyster’ informed his unfortunate viewers, matter-of-fact, that the small son of Richard and Mayumi Heene of Fossil Ridge Road in Fort Collins, Colo., had climbed into a carriage attached to the helium-filled contraption, which had become untethered. Boy and balloon were now scaling heights of 10,000 feet. …

Other TV entertainment outlets masquerading as news media hawked the Falcon pie-in-the-sky as fact. If anything, both the authorities and the media proceeded from the premise that Falcon was in fact flying two miles above them, rather than hiding somewhere on terra firma.

When you’re slothful, stout and stupid, it’s easier to look to the heavens than search high-and-low below. …”

The complete column is “On Boobs And Balloons.” If you miss it on WND.COM, be sure to catch it on Taki’s Magazine on the weekend.

Update I (Oct. 23): A NOTE FROM NASA. Edifying too:

Ilana,

It amazes me how the media are constantly duped by attention seekers such as these. I was at work when this was occurring and just like the rest of the fools out there, had to find out more what was going on.

Having launched hundreds of weather balloons, my initial reaction was “no way could a 6 year old boy be lifted by that balloon.”

If you use some math to deduce how much weight a 15 foot high and 5 foot wide balloon could lift at that altitude using helium gas, you come up with about 30 pounds. Not too may 6 year old boys weigh 30 lbs.

We were switching the channels at work to watch the coverage and noticed even the Weather Channel was carrying this. Now, did they use some basic buoyancy equations to figure out the impossibility of a boy being lifted by this balloon? Of course not! But then again the Weather Channel is now owned by NBC, so what do you expect.

Enjoy your articles!

Mark
Johnson Space Center

Update II (Oct. 24): I feel sorry for the Heene woman; she looks so sad. There are times when its obvious a brassy woman pretending to be abused is anything but. In this case, it’s plain to me that Mayumi Heene, while perhaps not abused, is certainly subservient to her husband. Via Drudge:

The mother of the 6-year-old boy once feared missing inside a runaway helium balloon admitted the whole saga was a hoax, according to court documents released Friday.

Mayumi Heene told sheriff’s deputies that she and her husband Richard “knew all along that Falcon was hiding in the residence” in Fort Collins, according to an affidavit used to get a search warrant for the home.

She allegedly told investigators the incident was a hoax meant to make them more marketable to the media.

Update III (Oct. 24): The column has been titled deliciously “Hyper Inflation” on Taki’s and appended with appropriately odious images. Added are some must-read links.

Updated: Lackeys On The Left (‘Olby’)

Ann Coulter, Barack Obama, Bush, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Military, Morality, War

During the Bush and Fox News reign of war, I welcomed the anti-war monologues delivered by the verbose Keith Olbermann of MSNBC’s Countdown. When last has this Obama lackey said something about the lives the new war president has squandered? I don’t need a repeat of Olbermann’s Bush-era, interminable, self-aggrandizing soliloquies, but a word about Obama’s failure to bring the troops home would not go unnoticed. Moreover, how ridiculous is Olbermann’s signature sigh-off—“so and so days since the declaration of mission accomplished in Iraq”—given the failure of his man Obama to change the status quo.

The administration has stated that Fox New is the organ of the Republican Party. This is true about many of the networks operatives. But what then is MSNBC, and especially Rachel Maddow and Olbermann? The two are uncritical slaves to the ship of state just as long as the pirates at the helm are Democrats.

A contrast to those two clowns is Andrew J. Bacevich, a military man as well as a man of the mind whose lovely son was killed in Iraq. Bacevich has provided consistent, principled commentary throughout. This via Daily Kos (I’m afraid):

Fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible. Not for nothing has the place acquired the nickname Graveyard of Empires. Americans, insistent that the dominion over which they preside does not meet the definition of empire, evince little interest in how the British, Russians, or others have fared in attempting to impose their will on the Afghans. As General David McKiernan, until recently the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, put it, “There’s always an inclination to relate what we’re doing now with previous nations,” adding, “I think that’s a very unhealthy comparison.” McKiernan was expressing a view common among the ranks of the political and military elite: We’re Americans. We’re different. Therefore, the experience of others does not apply.

Of course, Americans like McKiernan who reject as irrelevant the experience of others might at least be willing to contemplate the experience of the United States itself. Take the case of Iraq, now bizarrely trumpeted in some quarters as a “success” and even more bizarrely seen as offering a template for how to turn Afghanistan around. Much has been made of the United States Army’s rediscovery of (and growing infatuation with) counterinsurgency doctrine, applied in Iraq beginning in early 2007 when President Bush launched his so-called surge and anointed General David Petraeus as the senior U.S. commander in Baghdad. Yet technique is no substitute for strategy.

Violence in Iraq may be down, but evidence of the promised political reconciliation that the surge was intended to produce remains elusive. America’s Mesopotamian misadventure continues. Pretending that the surge has redeemed the Iraq war is akin to claiming that when Andy Jackson “caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans” he thereby enabled the United States to emerge victorious from the War of 1812. Such a judgment works well as folklore but ignores an abundance of contrary evidence.

More than six years after it began, Operation Iraqi Freedom has consumed something like a trillion dollars—with the meter still running—and has taken the lives of more than 4,300 American soldiers. Meanwhile, in Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities, car bombs continue to detonate at regular intervals, killing and maiming dozens. Anyone inclined to put Iraq in the nation’s rearview mirror is simply deluded. Not long ago, General Raymond Odierno, Petraeus’s successor and the fifth U.S. commander in Baghdad, expressed the view that the insurgency in Iraq is likely to drag on for another five, ten, or fifteen years. Events may well show that Odierno is an optimist.

Update (Oct. 22): COULTER ON KEITH, “The Grating Communicator”:

“I don’t blame Keith personally for this blatant distortion: He gets all his research material from Markos Moulitsas and other left-wing bloggers, so he can’t be held responsible for the content of his show. Keith’s principle contribution to the program is his nightly display of self-congratulation and pompous douche-baggery.

“Remember, Keith, like his MSNBC colleague Contessa Brewer, majored in “communications” in college, not a research-related field, such as political science. In his coursework, he learned such skills as: Dramatically Turning to Camera, Hysterical Self-Righteousness, Pausing Portentously and Gravely Demanding Apologies/Resignations From Various Public Figures.

Given this background, it’s understandable that Keith will make errors. As viewers witnessed recently, he can’t even pronounce the name of prominent American economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell. (Although he did spend three weeks at a Berlitz course in Arabic honing his pronunciation of ‘Abu Ghraib’ to razor-sharp prissiness.)

The bloggers and Keith bring different skill sets to the game. They provide the tendentious half-truths, phony opinion polls and spurious social science, while Keith provides his booming baritone, gigantic ‘Guys and Dolls’ suits and gift for ridiculous, fustian grandiloquence. Keith is far better equipped than, say, the pint-sized, girly-voiced, Frito Bandito-accented Markos Moulitsas to deliver the party line.

Again, in fairness to Keith, he’s never been a ‘content guy.’ He was a communications major. (The agriculture school Keith attended offered a degree in this field.) He lifts the material for his show from liberal blogs, overwrites it, and throws in his trademark smirking and snorts. But that’s all he does because, again, he was a communications major.”

Another Mao Man (Yawn)

Barack Obama, Communism, Democrats, Intelligence, Propaganda, Socialism

The energizer bunny that is Glenn Beck is relentless in tracking down Barack’s Bolsheviks. On the heels of the Dunn debacle comes this, also courtesy of Beck:

“Manufacturing Czar Ron Bloom is the latest in a long line of White House officials who seem to just love Chairman Mao. Mao, of course, is the loving former Chinese dictator who killed 70 million people during peacetime, so what’s not to love? Bloom also mocked capitalism, ‘We know that the free market is nonsense.’ This is of course the sentiment you want from the guy trying to create jobs in the manufacturing sector. Glenn plays the audio and reacts to the latest idiotic quote, this time from Ron Bloom.”

[SNIP]

Much to my surprise, I’ve heard it repeated on this blog of seasoned, cynical, politics watchers that the administration must have failed to vet this or the other communist functionary. The mind boggles at such a comment—especially on this forum. I’ve literally cut and pasted from a blog post I penned when that feeble excuse-making began gaining traction–back when I made “a prophetic prediction (NOT)”:

“There are many Van Jones’ in the Obama administration. You’ll meet them in the fullness of time. Quit feigning surprise when they crawl out from their dank corners.”

AND:

“Spare me a repeat performance of the Jeremiah Wright farce, only with Van Jones, the Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, substituting for the Obamas’ preacher; and surfacing in YouTube clips while delivering Wright-like jeremiads lambasting white men and Western civilization, as every liberal lunatic and wimpish WASP pretends Obamby hardly knew the jejune Jones.

Can we skip this? Can this country’s anointed cognoscenti at least pretend to be familiar with the concept of a learning curve?”

Sean keeps telling me to repeat the same themes in columns becasue nobody retains anything these day. Peter Brimelow once imparted the same lesson. I accept this truism—but not when it comes to regular readers of this space (with accesses to archives).