I’d say something snide and funny about this but it really doesn’t need it:
MICHAEL MOORE WANTS IPHONE LAUNCH DELAYED, ATTACKS STEVE JOBS
Wednesday, June, 26 2007 Posted: 2:50 PM EST (1250 GMT)
Cupertino, CA (HLN) – Controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore is accusing Apple Inc. and AT&T of using the iPhone to distract attention from his new movie “Sicko”, which opens in US theaters on the same day the hyped phone goes on sale.
“This is an appalling display of greed and jealousy,” said Moore after a recent screening of his new movie. “Apple and AT&T obviously don’t care about fixing America’s healthcare system. They only care about how many iPhones they’re going to sell.”
Al Gore, champion of the environment and science, apparently isn’t too thrilled with the scientific method:
Too little, too late: Gore blames scientists for climate crisis
US could have acted sooner if experts had reached consensus
By Jonathan Owen
Published: 24 June 2007
In an extraordinary outburst aimed at America’s failure to tackle global warming, Al Gore says that if scientific agreement on the climate crisis had been reached sooner it would have been easier to “galvanise the public and persuade Congress to act”.
Apparently reaching the correct conclusion, which still hasn’t been decided Al, is less important than acting right away. The only way to get people to panic and pour money into things that will make you rich is for it to be done NOW. For a person that claims science is on his side Al Gore seems amazingly ignorant of how science actually works.
Jamie posted this at 3:28 PM HKT on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 as Convenient Truth
In analyzing Michael Moore’s Sicko, the Stiletto discusses what happens when bad things happen to you abroad:
Several years ago, The Stiletto was vacationing in Norway with two friends. We were all injured when the bus we were riding in Oslo collided with a car. One friend suffered cuts and bruises, one fractured her forearm and The Stiletto thought she might have cracked a rib or two. Police took us to a nearby hospital, where we found out that our money was no good. No, we weren’t going to get free healthcare. We were going to get NO healthcare. You see, X-ray films, plaster for casts and other medical supplies are strictly rationed. The hospital had a set number of X-ray films, for instance, and could not get restocked if they ran out before December 31st of that year (it was the end of June). The ER did not want to “waste” any of their medical supplies on tourists – even though we would pay cash on the barrelhead – because their own citizens might have to go without by the end of the year. The Stiletto nearly caused an international incident to get her friend’s arm casted. She never did get her ribs X-rayed; turned out they were badly bruised but not broken. She received no painkillers or other treatment. That’s socialized medicine in a nutshell.
The bureaucratic mind works in mysterious ways.
Hubbard posted this at 9:39 AM HKT on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 as Commie Recrudescence
In the break room again, overhearing Fox and a preview of some show tonight, the O’Reilly Factor I think. What’s their lead story? Was it the coverage of the important cloture vote on an extremely unpopular bill granting amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants? Nope, it was an interview with Petra Nemcova about Paris Hilton. I poop you not. Not even a mention of the bill.
All joking aside, this is getting old. I would never say that news should be “all substance, all the time,” but “some substance, occasionally” would be a welcome break. Between celebrity crap I don’t care about (Paris), media crap I don’t care about (Rosie), and the murder victim du jour (since Aruba girl, I haven’t been able to keep track), Fox has turned into a live action tabloid. You’ll forgive me if I contain my excitement about Rupert Murdoch buying the Wall Street Journal.
Apollo posted this at 9:34 AM HKT on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 as Amer-I-Can!, Journalism
Jonah Goldberg has a smart piece on Dick Cheney that makes a compelling case for why he is a poor vice-president, and simultaneously serves as a kind of metaphor for the failures of the Bush Administration.
Jamie has made his disagreement with the Supreme Court over Morse v. Frederick, aka the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case. I’ve noted before that I’m unfond of the Supreme Court acting as a superlegislature. I think that Morse should have simply been dismissed: if ever there was a case that should have stayed at the school board level, this was it. Nevertheless, litigation is as American as Paris-Hilton-worship, so it went to the Supreme Court. Given that the court, the most unsubtle instrument of American domestic policy, got involved, I think they reasonably well, though Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion would be the majority one in an ideal world.
As Robert Bork noted some time ago, our problem with free speech in schools began with Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent Community School District. Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion, made this point:
And because Tinker utterly ignored the history of public education, courts (including this one) routinely find it necessary to create ad hoc exceptions to its central premise. This doctrine of exceptions creates confusion without fixing the underlying problem by returning to first principles. Just as I cannot accept Tinker.s standard, I cannot subscribe to Kuhlmeier’s alternative. Local school boards, not the courts, should determine what pedagogical interests are “legitimate” and what rules “reasonably relat[e]” to those interests. Justice Black may not have been “a prophet or the son of a prophet,” but his dissent in Tinker has proved prophetic. 393 U. S., at 525. In the name of the First Amendment, Tinker has undermined the traditional authority of teachers to maintain order in public schools. “Once a society that generally respected the authority of teachers, deferred to their judgment, and trusted them to act in the best interest of school children, we now accept defiance, disrespect, and disorder as daily occurrences in many of our public schools.” We need look no further than this case for an example: Frederick asserts a constitutional right to utter at a school event what is either .[g]ibberish,. ante, at 7, or an open call to use illegal drugs. To elevate such impertinence to the status of constitutional protection would be farcical and would indeed be to “surrender control of the American public school system to public school students.” Tinker, supra, at 526 (Black, J., dissenting).
I join the Court’s opinion because it erodes Tinker’s hold in the realm of student speech, even though it does so by adding to the patchwork of exceptions to the Tinker standard. I think the better approach is to dispense with Tinker altogether, and given the opportunity, I would do so.
Let these cases be decided at the school board level. Students in Berkeley will get to protest to their little hearts’ content; students everywhere else can live in normality. I am reasonably certain that my co-bloggers would agree that a teacher’s first amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion are not violated when a school board forbids the teaching of intelligent design—which is at least as big a mishmash of gibberish and religion as that ridiculous sign. If teachers must live within limits, so must the students.
I seem to recall a few men, say oh about 230 odd years ago, who had something to say on this issue. They too got in trouble for sayingthingsthatpromotedillegalactivities. They got together and crafted a document that guaranteed the right to free speech.
If only someone would appoint justices whose goal it was to preservetheoriginalintent of the founding fathers.
Professor Scott Armstrong of Wharton School of Management wants Al Gore to put up or shut up.
An inconvenient bet?
By: Anthony Campisi
Posted: 6/21/07
For the past year, Al Gore has been the darling of environmentalists, as his popular documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, made their case about the dangers of global warming to people worldwide.
But now, Scott Armstrong, a Wharton Marketing professor, wants Al Gore to put his money where his mouth is.
Armstrong has challenged the former vice president to a 10-year bet, in which $10,000 from the two would be set aside in escrow as Gore pits his forecast of how much global temperature will increase during that time against a so-called “naive model,” in which temperature would be expected to stay the same.
The winner would get to donate the $20,000 and accumulated interest to the charity of his choice.
Armstrong explained that the idea of a bet arose out of research a colleague and he – both specialists in forecasting – had done on global-warming forecasts put out by Gore and organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-sponsored entity formed to help achieve scientific consensus on climate change.
Armstrong said that he discovered that most climate-change forecasts use bad methodology.
I say the chances of Al actually taking this bet are somewhere between slim and none. We all know how these kind of bets work out for environmentalist wackos. Just ask Paul Ehrlich.
Jamie posted this at 1:02 PM HKT on Monday, June 25th, 2007 as Convenient Truth
Darth Cheney claims that he is not subject to oversight because he is not part of the executive branch, so the Dems come up with an interesting solution:
Washington, D.C. – House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel issued the following statement regarding his amendment to cut funding for the Office of the Vice President from the bill that funds the executive branch. The legislation – the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations bill — will be considered on the floor of the House of Representatives next week.
“The Vice President has a choice to make. If he believes his legal case, his office has no business being funded as part of the executive branch. However, if he demands executive branch funding he cannot ignore executive branch rules. At the very least, the Vice President should be consistent. This amendment will ensure that the Vice President’s funding is consistent with his legal arguments. I have worked closely with my colleagues on this amendment and will continue to pursue this measure in the coming days.”
Ugh, I just linked to Kos, I’m going to go shower now.
UPDATE: In even sweeter news the douchebag judge has to pay the dry cleaners court costs. This is the kind of tort reform that should become permanent in America. I know that in Singapore, where I used to live, court costs for both parties always fall on the losing party and this more than anything serves to curb frivolous lawsuits. Now if the dry cleaners would kindly win a counter-suit for embarrassment, pain, financial and emotional damages to the tune of say oh $54M then maybe we could have some real justice.
I go back and forth on Megan McArdle. Sometimes she makes my daily reading for weeks on end; sometimes she says things so libertoid utopian that I’m curious why.
I find the argument that the problem with immigrants is illegal immigration pretty uncompelling. First of all, it’s almost (not always) made by people who don’t want to let those people (or equivalent numbers of their more law abiding compatriots) in legally, and react against any proposal to do so with exactly the vehemence that they complain about the illegal entry of illegal immigrants. The people making that argument may not be trying to be disingenuous, but ultimately, this is a pointless distraction: their real problem is that they don’t want that many immigrants here, regardless of whether they entered legally or not.
This level of ignorance makes me wonder whether she is paying attention. Of course we want to limit the number of immigrants who come here. A vast majority of the country does. That’s why we passed laws that limit immigration. Those laws aren’t organic, they didn’t appear out of nowhere. Complaining about “illegal immigration” is complaining about “immigration above that which we want.” The reason we don’t legalize infinity immigrants is because we don’t want infinity immigrants. The problem with uninvited party guests isn’t that they’re uninvited, it’s that there’s too damned many of them! The first one or two show up, and you may say “the more the merrier,” but when your party spills over into the neighbor’s yard and you have no clue who the people who locked themselves in your bedroom are, you realize why you only invited x people instead of infinity people.
It may be that some people want open borders. They may want tens of millions of the world’s poor pouring into America. But those people have lost the debate. The American people want limited immigration. Most of us understand that this wonderful country can only assimilate a limited number of people; beyond that, they begin assimilating us.
It is far from clear to me that being an illegal alien is a morally wrong, as opposed to legally wrong, act. It might even be a morally required act, if, say, your income is getting medical care and food for children back in Mexico who would otherwise died. But regardless of your opinion on the matter, you can’t simply say “But they’re illegal”; given that there is dispute about the moral status of our immigration laws, you first have to prove to your interlocutor’s satisfaction that the law ought to exist. None of the people I’ve talked to who say that their problem is not the immigrants themselves, but their legal status, has even tried to prove that our immigration restrictions are just and right–which is strange, because those people generally want to make them even more draconian.
It seems pretty obvious that there are only three options: unlimited immigration, limited immigration, or no immigration. Practically everyone wants some immigration (how many people would have had us turn away Rupert Murdoch?). McArdle, though, seems to be suggesting that it’s wrong for us to turn anyone away. After all, if they’re morally required to come here to provide medical care and food for children, isn’t it wrong for us to stop them from getting medical care and food for children?
So what if we just flung open the borders to any Mexican who wants to come north to work? Well, there are 108 million Mexicans still living in Mexico, which has a per capita GDP of $10,700. That’s 1/4 our per capita GDP, so obviously a lot of people would come. But why should this be limited to Mexico? Open borders means open borders. Why shouldn’t 80 million Egyptians ($4200 per capita GDP, less than 1/10th of ours), 234 million Indonesians ($3900), 85 million Vietnamese ($3100), 164 million Pakistanis ($2600), or 1.4 million Gazans (<$1000) get an equal shot? Which of these peoples is not entitled to provide medical care and food for their children? Are Mexicans the only poor people (and on a global scale they’re not poor, but middle class) deserving of such benefit because they were lucky enough to have a land border with America? Most of the world is poor beyond my ability to empathize, and I’d like it if they were better off. However, we cannot possibly let every poor person who can save for a plane ticket come here and remain a nation that even resembles our present self. There must be an arbitrary limit on how many we let in, and it is immoral for outsiders to exceed those rules. They ought not get a say on what sort of country we have unless we let them.
I used to be an open borders type. I didn’t change my opinion because the weather changed, I changed my opinion because I sought out the best arguments against me and found out that they were superior. For McArdle to say that people aren’t making the case for limiting immigration is more of a sign of how limited her thoughts and learning on the matter are. Or perhaps it’s just an instance where the need to have some limit on immigration is so stupefyingly obvious that few people need it spelled out to them.
