Category: media and media people

education and schooling media and media people

Erroneous About the Eclipse

Post author By Redactor
Post date April 12, 2024
5 Comments on Erroneous About the Eclipse

The View is not something to audit on a regular basis. It may decrease IQ. Nevertheless, we may have to defend Sunny Hostin for her silly ramblings on eclipses, cicadas, earthquakes, TDS and The Rapture.

I’m not sure. She sure seemed to be saying that the recent eclipse and climate change were integrally related.

But the banter of the women was so light-hearted that maybe we shouldn’t hold her to high standards.

Besides, Whoopi was there to provide rational pedantry — no matter how inaccurate she was. (Contra Ms. Goldberg, there are thousands of cicada species, and you may respectably pronounce the word in a variety of ways). It could be that Sunny was merely trying to be funny about the Sun.

As the man said at the end of Chinatown, “Forget it, it’s The View.”

But how hopeless was Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s little lecture to the students at Booker T. Washington High School? She was instructing the students and taking credit for their “opportunity” to go outside and see the eclipse.

“A Full Moon is that complete, rounded circle which is made up mostly of gases,” she mis-explained, “and that’s why the question is why or how could we as humans live on the Moon? Are the gases such that we could do that?”

Well, no, the Moon is not mostly composed of gases. It possesses the scantest of atmospheres, but does have water — or so I last read.

Even eclipsing The View, sending embarrassing, ultra-ignorant politicians to teach astronomy in the inner cities is — Lunacy!

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags media, science, The View

general freedom media and media people meme

Eclipse

Post author By Editor
Post date April 8, 2024
No Comments on Eclipse

Tags propaganda, truth

general freedom media and media people national politics & policies

Awkward for Ideologues?

There’s good news about inequality?

In late March, George F. Will argued that the truth about inequality in America, according to his op-ed title, is “awkward for the left and right.”

He points to the reality of transfer payments in the United States.

Ignoring that reality is what leads to awkwardness.

On the left, critics of capitalism portray low-income earners as a growing class of the impoverished . . . and high-income earners as a growing class of filthy rich.

But by “not counting about 88 percent of government transfer payments that enlarge the buying power of lower-income households, and not counting taxes that lower the wealth of higher-income households, government statistics purport to prove that the average income in the top quintile of earners is 16.7 times that of the average in the bottom quintile. Counting transfers and taxes, however, the actual ratio is 4 to 1.”

So leftists ignore the “successes” of the very system they set up, the better to complain and demand more of what has already been done.

But what do rightists ignore?

That’s where Mr. Wills’s Washington Post editors (a class of professionals who usually determine titles and blurbs) may have given us the wrong impression. Most of his column explodes leftist interpretations of contemporary reality. But he does talk about “the populist right,”: the “national conservatives” who mimic the progressive left in favoring “industrial policy” that, he notices (as I’ve noticed here at Common Sense) “regressively funnels money upward to corporations.

“The populist right advocates protectionism (tariffs to shield corporations from competition), and the populist left advocates hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies (for semiconductors, electric vehicles, solar panels, etc.).” Both favor the rich when it comes to regulations, while complaining about the rich in other contexts.

A poor way to help the poor.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Congress, poverty, redistribution, taxes, wealth

Accountability government transparency media and media people

Transient Stars

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, UFOs and “flying saucers” made newspaper headlines, and government officials had contradictory things to say about them. Then, soon after 1952’s summer UFO flyovers of Washington, D.C, the government got into the denial game, and the general tenor of the conversation changed.

The federal government, it seems, had instituted a policy of “cover-up.”

This has changed in the last few years, after a military investigation into UFOs went public, and as Congress began making public and confidential inquiries.

What do we really know?

Not much.

Still, that startling 1952 UFO wave appears to have received some additional evidence . . . from an unexpected quarter.

A team of astronomers compared old sky plates from the Palomar Observatory —photographed in the 1950s — to modern digitized pictures of the heavens, searching for “vanishing stars.” Appearing and disappearing stars are a fascinating study, in this research the aim being to detect “instances where a star directly collapses into a black hole.” The scientists found none of these “failed supernova” events.

But what they found surprised them: “several images where multiple star-like objects appear in a single snapshot of the sky, never to be seen again.”

They tested many possible explanations for the mysterious data, and then an automated search coughed up a doozy: “The image showed three bright and beautiful objects looking just like stars in a POSS-I image from the 19th of July 1952 that appeared and vanished within a plate exposure. . . . The three bright objects seemed as real as Betelgeuse itself.”

These were not single bright dots on photographic plates, but multiple simultaneous dots.

As scientist Beatriz Villarroel writes, “our two most prominent and brightest cases of multiple transients coincided in time with the two weekends of the renowned Washington UFO flyovers.”

One wonders whether later mass-sighting events, such as the “Belgian Wave” (November 1989–April 1990) and Arizona’s “Phoenix Lights” (March 13, 1997), might have recorded similar transients above, ready for study.

Thankfully, we do not need to rely directly upon government agents to do the research.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

The Citizen Threat

“The Republicans,” said Tucker Carlson — speaking of elected Republicans — “who really do hate their own voters in a way that’s pathological, are just re-upping the spy laws to allow the Biden Administration to spy on their voters.”

Mr. Carlson is not wrong, at least about Republican leaders aiding Democrats in spying on conservatives and others who sometimes vote GOP.

Yes, the federal government’s surveillance and criminal “justice” apparatus has been directed by Democrats — the Biden Administration specifically, and whoever runs that — to target, as The Enemy, conservatives and others associated with (or merely adjacent to) the Republican Party.

This cannot be dismissed as a conspiracy theory. Democratic thought leaders pushed this new anti-terrorism paradigm from the first moments of the Biden Administration, in public.

Or at least on MSNBC, where John Brennan clearly reconceived opposition to his Democratic Party as a movement looking “very similar to insurgency movements that we’ve seen overseas.”

“Even libertarians,” he said, constituted “an insidious threat” to, not the Democratic Party, but “our Democracy.”

This perspectival shift, of seeing policy and political opposition as “insurgency,” is key to the new anti-democratic mindset.

And very real. It could end our small-r republican experiment.

Which brings us back to Republican politicians and their willingness to let Democrats institute a permanent pogrom against all who oppose Democrats’ big government programs.

Why do this? Out of hatred? Disdain? Fear?

Let’s not ignore the age-old impulse of politicians to squelch the speech of opponents. The longer in office, the more these careerists tend to view their own constituents as threats. After all, anyone might freely offer a complaint that emboldens or comforts the opposition. This is a bipartisan principle.

Better an enforced silence about the dictates of Washington, sadly, if you are a Washingtonian delivering dictates.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets media and media people political economy

Dollar Store Plague

Tucker Carlson said harsh things about “Dollar Stores” and “libertarian economics” on Glenn Greenwald’s System Update for December 16, as summarized in the show’s tweet:

“Libertarian economics was a scam perpetrated by the beneficiaries of the economic system that they were defending . . .

I think you need to ask: ‘Does this economic system produce a lot of Dollar Stores?’

And if it does, it’s not a system that you want, because it degrades people — and it makes their lives worse and it increases exponentially the amount of ugliness in your society.

And anything that increases ugliness is evil.

So if it’s such a good system, why do we have all these Dollar Stores?”

At Reason, Liz Wolfe fell for the same trap that has apparently ensnared Mr. Carlson. She defended progress in the U.S. since the time he was born. What?

Contra Liz Wolfe, and in defense of Tucker, I’d say we are indeed living in tough times. Inflation’s way up, the birth rate is down, life-expectancy’s dropping, and a whole lot of Americans struggle to pay bills and keep even, financially, much less “get ahead.” The proliferation of dollar stores shows that the upscale stores are too expensive for too many.

They are a refuge for the poor.

But are they evilly uglifying, though?

Perhaps not as pretty as Safeway or Target, but they’re clean and you can buy a can of soup for four bits, a dollar less than at an upscale market.

Are the rise of discount consumer goods stores, like Dollar Tree and Dollar General, especially hideous and indicative of a blow to . . . the American spirit?

Seems more revelatory of a weird elitist streak in Tucker.

And what does libertarian — free-market — economics have to do with it? Libertarian economists have opposed all the major drivers of the current system: central banking, deficit spending, sovereign debt accumulation, taxation for redistribution, subsidy. The policies that have truly “hollowed out” the last semblance of progress.

But Tucker blames libertarian economists’ defense of equity markets for not only social decline but Dollar Stores.

He’s fallen for the progressives’ perennial scam: see a problem in our mixed economy and blame the freer part . . . not the role of elitist schemers with political power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.