Category Archives: Media

Updated: Foul Tom Friedman

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Journalism, Media, Neoconservatism, Pseudoscience

Thomas Friedman, the mustachioed crunchy-neocon, can’t go wrong. He was wrong about Iraq, but that didn’t come back to bite him. What’s a little war between friends? He purports to understand free market economics, yet, on the Late Night Show, he complained that not enough capitalists were developing green technologies—the most lucrative potential market there is, says Friedman.
Let’s see: Is this because capitalists are not as smart as Tom Friedman, a statist ponce who pimps for the powers that be? Naturally, Friedman is being holier than thou. Scientists are fiddling with green technologies all the time; industrialists, not so much, since the scientists have yet to find a way to make these technologies commercially viable.
The profit motive, Mr. Friedman, ensures resources are directed to their most efficient use. Technologies that aren’t commercially viable are too expensive; aren’t profitable and are, therefore, invariably wasteful—of the very resources they aim to preserve.
Friedman, who got behind the neoconservative Manifest Destiny, is hungry for a new National Greatness Agenda. I guess exporting democracy didn’t go that well. In the Green Agenda he sees “a new unifying political movement for the 21st century.” Hence his motto: “Green is the new red, white and blue.”
Reincarnation of the Reds” is more like it.
Americans have been fooled by the likes of Friedman, but the British Times Literary Supplement panned his last book—the reviewer had little good to say about Friedman’s reasoning.
As I’ve said, my only consolation is that the gangreens “are worried sick about the planet—genuinely…The Worry Factor may just increase the rate at which this particular invasive species falls off the earth.”
Come to think about it, the ethically challenged Friedman didn’t care much about the casualties of an unjust war; I’m sure he doesn’t lose sleep over alleged global warming.
Friedman’s grammar: he said “more fit,” and “more strong,” when he should have said “fitter and stronger.” And he polluted with a mouthful of cute coinages, such as “global weirding,” and by saying we should have an “earth race” (as opposed to an arms race, supposedly) with China. Puke.

Update (Feb 27): Cooling Trend. From “Daily Tech,” via WorldNetDaily:
“Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.
No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.”

Update II: George Reisman, Ph.D, sends along this apropos comment:

“As the ice thickens in the Arctic and in Antarctica and record cold temperatures are recorded practically across the world [SEE BELOW], so too does the ice thin—under the feet of the environmentalists and their global warming crusade. It may almost be time to begin speculating on what will follow global warming as the next great scare.”

George is referring to the appropriately humorous title of Sen. Inhofe’s circular: “Earth’s ‘Fever’ Breaks: Global COOLING Currently Under Way.” You can find a good collection of up-to-date articles here on the Inhofe EPW Press Blog.

America’s Best Export

Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Media

[B]ows and basses rather than arms and armor…

“North Korea presented a lavish welcome on Monday to its latest visiting delegation, the New York Philharmonic…The North Koreans opened the door to some 400 people, the largest contingent of Americans to visit this isolated, totalitarian state since the Korean War ended in 1953. The group includes musicians, orchestra staff, television production crews and 80 journalists, as well as patrons who paid $100,000 a couple.

The Philharmonic will play in the East Pyongyang Grand Theater, where music of Gershwin, Dvorak and Wagner, not to mention the American and North Korean national anthems, is to be broadcast live on state radio and television. That will be a novelty for a populace shut off from the world by government censorship.”

And it would have been a novelty in the US had stations other than CNN broadcast this positive event. Perhaps America would once again adopt the “novel” idea that genuine change is best achieved through peaceful trade and voluntary exchange of cultural products.

America's Best Export

Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Media

[B]ows and basses rather than arms and armor…

“North Korea presented a lavish welcome on Monday to its latest visiting delegation, the New York Philharmonic…The North Koreans opened the door to some 400 people, the largest contingent of Americans to visit this isolated, totalitarian state since the Korean War ended in 1953. The group includes musicians, orchestra staff, television production crews and 80 journalists, as well as patrons who paid $100,000 a couple.

The Philharmonic will play in the East Pyongyang Grand Theater, where music of Gershwin, Dvorak and Wagner, not to mention the American and North Korean national anthems, is to be broadcast live on state radio and television. That will be a novelty for a populace shut off from the world by government censorship.”

And it would have been a novelty in the US had stations other than CNN broadcast this positive event. Perhaps America would once again adopt the “novel” idea that genuine change is best achieved through peaceful trade and voluntary exchange of cultural products.

Updated: Militant Mama Obama

America, Barack Obama, Democrats, Education, Elections 2008, Media, Race

Exhibit #2 in my case against Barack’s bride: “As a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station.” So spoke M. Obama.

Indeed, “Michelle Obama’s gaseous swipe reminds me of the last two black men picked off while pumping gas. Wait a sec, I got my facts topsy-turvy. Two of the D.C Snipers’ 13 victims were murdered in gas stations. Neither was black. The Snipers, on the other hand, were both black. The pattern of racial victimization in the country Mrs. Obama will likely officiate as first lady is unidirectional.

In “Militant Mama Obama,” I make the case that, “if anything, her charmed life has made Michelle Obama more racially militant.”

Updated: “Michelle Obama thesis was on racial divide,” reports Jeffrey Ressner of the Politico.
So the moribund media is catching up with us and reporting on the thesis I mentioned in Militant Mama Obama.

Questionnaires, the kind M. Obama relied on to arrive at her conclusions, are notoriously unreliable and riddled with bias. Methodology aside, this woman is an identity activist through-and-through.

She concluded:

“I hoped that these findings would help me conclude that despite the high degree of identification with whites as a result of the educational and occupational path that black Princeton alumni follow, the alumni would still maintain a certain level of identification with the black community. However, these findings do not support this possibility.”

In Mama Obama’s view, blacks at Princeton assimilated excessively. Also, in her first sentence above, she ought to have written, “I HAD hoped…”