Category Archives: Pseudoscience

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

Uncategorized

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: Cass Sunstein: Most Dangerous Czar By Far

Uncategorized

And very possibly, a future Supreme-Court justice. Sunstein, bosom buddy and intellectual soul mate to Barack, was confirmed the other day by the Senate. Cusses all around. The tenacious Glenn Beck, who forewarned about Van Jones, has been on the case. But WND’s Ellis Washington makes the clearer case (although he fails to appreciate that America IS already regulated to death):

Cass Sunstein: Regulating America to Death
By Ellis Washington

Animals should be allowed to sue their owners.

~ Cass Sunstein

Because people ascribe a degree of respectability to academics, intellectuals, philosophers and scholars, they can disregard the rights of the people much easier than a naked tyrant. In fact, Rousseau, Darwin and Nietzsche can go places Hitler, Stalin, Chavez and Obama could never dream.

As I have written many times, the Obama administration are the masters of misdirection and chaos theory; therefore, while the America people last week were transfixed on the resignation of “Green Czar” Van Jones, another even more dangerous fascist from the academy quietly slipped through the portals of power.

Last Thursday Cass Sunstein, a former colleague and mentor of Obama’s at the University of Chicago Law School, was confirmed by a Senate vote of 57-40 as the new director of regulatory affairs and information, an obscure but powerful agency within the Office of Management and Budget. Here is what the “regulatory czar” does: He regulates laws – past, present and future.

Sunstein is a friendly fascist who only “nudges” people to bow to his will. TV host Glenn Beck says of Cass Sunstein that he is “the most powerful invisible man you’ll ever see.”

Are we headed for a Nazi-style totalitarian abyss? Find out in “Defeating the Totalitarian Lie: A Former Hitler Youth Warns America” Judge Richard A. Posner, an intellectual mentor of mine and former colleague with Sunstein and Obama at the University of Chicago Law School, said the following about Peter Singer, a Princeton professor and a leading scholar on animal rights with whom Sunstein is often associated:

Since the publication of “Animal Liberation” [1975], Singer has received a wide range of philosophical challenges to his formulation of animal rights. … Richard Posner challenged that Singer failed to see the “radicalism of the ethical vision that powers [his] view on animals, an ethical vision that finds greater value in a healthy pig than in a profoundly retarded child, that commands inflicting a lesser pain on a human being to avert a greater pain to a dog, and that, provided only that a chimpanzee has 1 percent of the mental ability of a normal human being, would require the sacrifice of the human being to save 101 chimpanzees.

While Sunstein spent his entire career inventing rights for rats, dogs and pigs that would make the Constitution’s framers spin in their graves, he is even more despicable in casting aspersions against constitutional rights plainly delineated in the Bill of Rights. For example, here is Sunstein views on the Second Amendment right to bear arms:

“My coming view is that the individual right to bear arms reflects the success of an extremely aggressive and resourceful social movement and has much less to do with good standard legal arguments than [it] appears.”

In 2008 Sunstein co-authored “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness” with economist Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago. “Nudge” discusses how public and private organizations can “help people” to make better choices in their daily lives since apparently Sunstein and his busybody socialist colleagues of the academy think that We the People are too stupid to live our own lives our own way and accept the consequences. Thaler and Sunstein argue that: People often make poor choices – and look back at them with bafflement! We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself. Space will not allow me to adequately detail the utter tyranny and naked assault on our constitutional rights Sunstein plans to launch against American capitalism in his new role as regulatory czar.

Here is a summary of the autocracy Americans can expect from Czar Sunstein: * Sunstein advocates a “Second Bill of Rights” even more totalizing and all-consuming than initially proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the 1930s. Among these rights are a right to an education, a right to a home, a right to health care and a right to protection against monopolies. * Sunstein notes that personhood need not be conferred upon an animal in order to grant it legal standing for suit. * Sunstein has argued that “we should celebrate tax day.” * Rumor has it that Obama is grooming Sunstein as a future Supreme Court justice.

Last week Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano said, “[Sunstein] is to the left of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” The leitmotiv of Sunstein’s entire legal philosophy and worldview is encapsulated in two very evil and failed philosophies of the past: 1) Social Darwinism [evolution], and 2) Moral Relativism – a theory, especially in ethics or aesthetics, that conceptions of truth and moral values are not absolute but are relative to the persons or groups holding them.

In other words, nothing has more intrinsic value than anything else. Sunstein’s ideas on judicial minimalism and behavioral economics belie the fact that for almost 30 years he has assaulted the Judeo-Christian traditions of Natural Law so venerated by the Constitution’s framers to preserve America’s republic.

To Sunstein ideas like “liberty,” “freedom” and “Natural Law” are irrelevant and counterproductive to his grand, socialist view of law rooted in moral relativism and social Darwinism. That’s how Sunstein can have a scholarship named after his dead dog while concurrently mandating environmental policies that will put tens of thousands of American farmers out of business by fostering ever expanding environmental, land and water regulations that will de facto make farming too cost-prohibitive.

What Mussolini, Stalin and Mao did in the light to harm their citizens and deny them their fundamental human rights, Cass Sunstein, as Obama’s regulatory czar, will do in the night by slowly, irrevocably regulating America to death. Sunstein reminds me of Shakespeare’s “Othello” when the sinister Iago repeatedly whispered his verbal venom into the receptive ear of Othello (Obama), which lead to his demise. Indeed, Sunstein said it best: “There is no liberty without dependency.”

Update I (Sept. 12): I’m not mad about the cheapened Argument From Hitler (in the Comments Section). So far, Barack is continuing the “work” Bush and others before him began. Few Republicans fussed about the breakneck speed at which the Bush Administration concentrated power in the executive, to give but one example. Or the way it expanded the warfare state, to give another. So far, I don’t see a qualitative difference between Bush and Obama; they exist on the same continuum of accreting statism.

Update II: I wonder if crazy Cass would come for me if he read my defense of Michael Vick: In Defense Of Michael Vick I & In Defense of Michael Vick, Part 2.

Update III (Sept. 13): To the imperious reader who is unhappy with my disinterest in the futile, immaterial evolution debate: We are not about to go off-topic and veer into evolution. Take it behind the scenes with Myron. As for the “not good enough” complaint: More so than most columnists and writers, I have applied libertarian thinking to a wide-ranging array of topics, from intellectual property to antitrust, to Just War, to economy, Hollywood, Islam—you name it, I’ve written about it. Far more important than the idiotic evolution debate has been my defense of the unique, privileged, preeminent nature of humanity in the universe. The articulation of that philosophical position is far more significant than the idiotic debates about evolution, engaged in by the Godless neocons/Republicans and their adversaries. Now, if the bitching reader were a major donor toward my generally thankless efforts at shedding light where darkness is the rule—then I might indulge him. But, alas, he isn’t.

Addendum: Here’s fodder for another fit over my unorthodox positions: Even more disinterested am I in whether God exists or not. I conduct my life with morality and ethics. Some would say that’s godly enough. Others would demand communal worship. Frankly, I don’t care. It makes no sense to assert or fight over the irrational and the supernatural; that which cannot be proven. I respect believers and defend the Western, Judeo-Christian tradition–this is the sum of my work. That’s all that matters. To me, at least. (At that’s what counts.)

Kennedy Reincarnated

Uncategorized

TED KENNEDY is back with a posse. “Beaches around Chatham, Mass., remain closed because of shark sightings made in the Cape Cod area before the busy holiday weekend. Reports of the sightings and closures — as well as the tagging by scientists of two great white sharks — make national news.”

In any event—and as I argued in “Animals Gone Wild”—“Steven Spielberg’s magnificent thriller Jaws is an infinitely better Guide For the Perplexed than the shark experts”:

The latter “insist that, if presented with a menu, sharks will choose fish over folks. (‘Too tough and chewy,’ confirmed a spokesfish for the shark community.)”

Dare I say that the alleged culinary preferences of sharks are because there are more fish in the sea than people? If the oceans were peopled more plentifully, sharks would adapt their refined taste buds to human flesh in a flash. A witness—a brave surfer who paddled to the rescue—confirmed that Sharky didn’t seem remotely put off, and was doing what powerful, flesh-eating animals with sharp teeth do: tucking in.

“Apparently, the bears and the sharks haven’t had the benefit of liberal expert propaganda.”

On Roadkill Radio

Uncategorized

Tonight, I’ll be reconnecting with a Canadian friend from the past: Terry O’Neill, one of the former editors of the ground-breaking BC Report, who now hosts a show: Roadkill Radio.

The BC Report—it morphed into a later, but not paler, version, The Report—was one of the best paleoconservative news and commentary magazines I have read. Moreover, it lacked the weird, anti-Israel element afflicting The American Conservative. So, in that respect, it presented a more coherent defense of the West—with a big emphasis on West Canada.

Terry had remembered that back in 2000-2001, I had argued forcefully against the disease model of addiction. Now, in 2009, some Johnnie-come-latelies have added their voices to a debate my good friends Drs. Stanton Peele and Thomas Szasz began and settled, to all intents and purposes.

The topic tonight: “Addiction: disease or choice?”
The time: 8:45 Pacific.

Terry’s co-host is Kari Simpson. Tune in (And do forgive me if I’m a rusty on the topic; it’s been some time since we in the US have had the luxury of dealing with a minor issue such as addiction and the Diseasing of America.)