Doug Ross notes that when it comes to goreball worming, the Boston Globe’s readers are more than a few steps ahead of its writers:
As Doug writes, “Pity these nearly bankrupt lard-asses can’t bother to surf the inter-tubes like their readers. Some of the comments are priceless.” Click over to his site to read them.
Meanwhile, Newsbusters’ P.J. Gladnick spots a similar incident at the Houston Chronicle: “Climategate: MSM Writers Try to Ignore Scandal in Global Warming Stories But Readers Bring Them Back to Reality.”
Lift up a rock and another snake comes slithering out from the ongoing University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) scandal, now riding as “Climategate”.
Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU’s unfolding Climategate scandal. In fact, according to files released by a CEU hacker or whistleblower, Holdren is involved in what Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball terms “a truculent and nasty manner that provides a brief demonstration of his lack of understanding, commitment on faith and willingness to ridicule and bully people”.
Gee, does this mean Holdren likely won’t soon be launching rockets full of pollution into the upper atmosphere to stop the Phantom Menace?
It’s sort of a zen koan (or Zen Cohen, for all you Brothers Judd fans, not to mention a paraphrase of an old Lileksism): as Key Luke would have said on ABC’s old Kung Fu series, tell me, Grasshopper, where does the MSM end and the DNC begin?
NPR brass reacted negatively after veteran reporter Nina Totenberg consistently referred to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel by his first name only.
Henceforth, the White House Chief of Staff will be known only as “Rahm Emanuel.” The customary second reference using only the person’s last name is being set aside in this case because Rahm is rarely referred to as “Emanuel” in Washington circles.
Shepard said she disagreed with the special second reference for Emanuel and thinks he should simply be called by his last name on second mention, like most others referred to on NPR.
This was no rookie mistake by Totenberg and NPR reacted quickly to make it clear that all reporters need to use both the first and last name of their subjects. Even though the report wasn’t favorable towards Emanuel in this case it still calls into question why Totenberg felt comfortable enough to refer to him by his first name only. Just how chummy is Totenberg to Emanuel and the White House?
So much for reporter objectivity and credibility at NPR.
And that’s on top of the infamous “David Axelrod — well, we loved you in the HBO documentary, and umm, uhh, we’ll always have the New York-23rd” moment between NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and Axelrod earlier this month:
Like the Swift Vets breaking the embargo on John Kerry’s Vietnam-era radical chic past in 2004, and the National Enquirer reporting on John Edwards’ extramarital extracurricular activities last year, watch for ClimateGate to become yet another story that everyone knows, even though nobody in the traditional sense reported it.
Update: At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey notes that CBS’s Website at least is covering this story. And as Howard Kurtz adds in his latest column, which links to our Sunday blogpost on ClimateGate, the Washington Post has weighed into the story in an article that’s gotten relatively good feedback in the starboard half of the Blogosphere.
Kurtz seems to sort of dismiss the underlying story a bit, even though, as Jennifer Rubin writes about another Post item on the grudging acceptance among the left of nuclear power, it has enormous ramifications for the nation’s energy and transportation policies, and the prices consumers pay for such services.
There may be a major silver lining for conservatives and for America’s future thanks to the foreign and domestic policies of President Obama and the Democrat-controlled House and Senate: For the first time in their lives, millions of Americans are coming to understand the left.
It is difficult to overstate how important this is. For decades, the left has largely controlled the news media, the arts, the universities and the entertainment media. And vast numbers of Americans have imbibed these leftist messages and the leftist critiques of conservatives. What these Americans have never been able to do is to see what the left would actually do if in power.
Of course, all one had to do was look at California and see how a left-wing legislature brought the country’s largest state economy to near insolvency and bankruptcy, chased away many of its most productive citizens, and wasted tens of billions of dollars thanks in large measure to union domination of the state’s politics.
But most Americans do not observe other states. Most Americans are preoccupied with their lives and, unfortunately, with what is on television.
And speaking of which, Allie Duzett of Accuracy In Media notes that TV and the rest of the legacy media are doing damndest to keep the information floodgates as hermetically sealed as possible:
Leave it to the New York Times to put soccer fixing above revelations about faked global warming data. As of Monday’s edition, there has been no follow up-instead, they carried a piece on the Sunday opinion page calling for the Senate to do more about climate change.
However, to be fair, many other papers mentioned it even less.
The Express, a condensed version of the Washington Post, had this headline on the front page: “Hot Topic: Warming worse than feared, scientists say.” The article discusses how global warming “has exceeded worst fears,” and calls for more action to combat climate change. There is an inset article two sentences long about the emails-mentioning that the emails exist and that the “researchers” involved “say the emails have been taken out of context.” This is hardly giving the emails the press coverage or consideration they deserve.
ABC News and the Washington Times have chosen to run the same article from the Associated Press, apparently not finding the story worth investigating further on their own. At least they’re running the story at all: CNN’s website has yet to mention the emails.
It is not too surprising to find that many “scientists” have been strategically promoting false data when it comes to global warming; it is far more surprising that major news networks are completely ignoring one of the largest scandals the modern scientific world has ever seen.
The fact is, this information could completely destroy any credibility global warming alarmists once claimed. And with the American economy hanging in the balance with cap and trade legislation, it is dismaying, though not terribly surprising, that major news organizations are not plastering this information on every front page. It is shameful that “respectable” newspapers and networks are devoting more time to the Gosselins, Taylor Swift and Twilight than to covering the story that could make or break our constitutional republic.
Not at all — it’s only shameful to the legacy media if they believe that their most important function is to disseminate information, not withhold it. Perhaps it was an entirely unconscious collective decision, but the MSM, at least at the top of its food chain, long ago decided that their real job was the latter.
Seeing as they each impact key pillars of what today passes for liberalism, there seems to be more than a few connections between the recent ACORN stings by Giles, O’Keefe and Breitbart, and the recent hacking of the emails of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, or “Global WarmingGate”, as Charlie Martin dubs it elsewhere at Pajamas. Not the least is that they each sent the legacy media into full gatekeeper mode, hoping to prevent exciting, important news of current events from ever reaching their readers. Or perhaps, like the scandal last year involving John Edwards, sitting on the stories for so long, while making claims that they have to endlessly research them to verify their authenticity — Keep rockin’! — that when the legacy media decides to go “public” with news that everyone already knows, they can dramatically dilute the ultimate impact of these stories.
In September, we noted the L.A. Times’ hypocrisy when they wrote, “O’Keefe’s hidden-camera methods are distasteful, and the extent to which his videos were edited is unknown” — as opposed to the hidden camera videos run almost every week by their fellow liberal brethren on 60 Minutes since the show debuted on CBS over 40 years ago.
And as a nice sequel of sorts to our previous post on leftwing cognitive dissonance, Orrin Judd spots this staggering moment of hypocrisy from the New York Times’ Andrew C. Revkin of their “Dot Earth” blog on Friday:
The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.
And they don’t contain any obvious state military secrets as well, unlike say the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War or more recently, the secrets of War on Terror, or any of a number of other leaked documents the Times has cheerfully rushed to print.
Back in 2006, when his paper disclosed the previously confidential details of the SWIFT program, which was designed to trace terrorists’ financial assets, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said on CBS’s Face the Nation, “one man’s breach of security is another man’s public relations.” Of course, much like the rest of the media circling the wagons with ACORN, it’s not at all surprising that the Times circles the wagons when it’s necessary to save the public face of their fellow liberals.
Incidentally, Tom Maguire explains the perfect way to square the circle:
If Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe are done tormenting ACORN maybe they can figure out how to pose as underaged climate researchers…
Update: At the Weekly Standard, Michael Goldfarb adds, “As a journalist, there is no greater glory than publishing materials that were not meant to be published”:
If I could, I would only publish emails and documents that were never meant to see the light of day — though, unlike the New York Times, I draw the line at jeopardizing the lives of American troops rather than jeopardizing the contrived “consensus” on global warming.
And of course, the Times has those priorities exactly reversed. But then, for the Gray Lady, small government Republicans are “Stalinists”, but actual totalitarian governments are worthy of emulation and respect.
Update: On Twitter, “Justkarl” asks, “You don’t suppose the real reason Revkin won’t publish the CRU e-mails is that he’s implicated in them?”, adding, “Revkin CRU e-mail. Likely here too.”
Related: For those who would like to “Wear The Decline”, T-shirts are now available in the lobby!
Update (11/23/09): And speaking of bringing things full circle, the commenters below note that the Times had few ethical concerns when they linked to the hacked emails of Sarah Palin last fall during the presidential election.
Back in September, we referenced the World Wildlife Federation’s botched advertisement associating global warming with 9/11; this ad by the appropriately named “Plane Stupid” attempts to do much the same. What else does one think of when watching bodies fall from the sky in an urban environment filled with high rises? At least until ascertaining that those bodies are the wintry cousins of Yogi, Boo Boo, Smokey, and their Build-A-Bear brethren?
Update: Found in the comments of Tim Blair’s blog, scientists, circus performers, and astute urban developers are already teaming up to provide innovative solutions to the nation’s plummeting bear market:
Then: Shut Up And Play Your Guitar, as Frank Zappa used to say. Now: shut up and call your attorney, as Gibson Guitar Corporation’s Nashville manufacturing plant runs afoul of the eco-police, and gets raided:
Federal agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and local police today seized wood, guitars, computers and boxes of files from Gibson Guitar’s Massman Road manufacturing facility.
Sources say the Nashville-based guitar manufacturer is being investigated for violating the Lacey Act, a key piece of environmental law, for importing endangered species of rosewood from Madagascar.
Rosewood is widely used in the construction of guitars and sells for $5,000 per cubic meter, more than double the price of mahogany. The island nation off Africa’s east coast is a key producer of the hardwood, the export of which has links to international criminal activity.
A statement from Gibson released late Tuesday afternoon says the company is “fully co-operating” with the investigation.
“Gibson Guitar is fully cooperating with agents of the United States Fish & Wildlife Service as it pertains to an issue with harvested wood. Gibson is a chain of custody certified buyer who purchases wood from legal suppliers who are to follow all standards. Gibson Guitar Chairman and CEO [Henry Juszkiewicz] sits on the board of the Rainforest Alliance and takes the issue of certification very seriously. The company will continue to cooperate fully and assist our federal government with all inquiries and information,” the company’s statement said.
Madagascar has struggled financially since a January coup and new President Andry Rajoelina issued an executive order in September legalizing the export of rosewood and ebony. The move was decried by environmental groups and political leaders worldwide, as hardwood forests are key to Madagascar’s unique ecology and serve as a habitat for a dwindling lemur population.
Sources tell NashvillePost.com Gibson was involved in a scheme that shipped the wood from Madagascar to Germany and then to the United States.
Ironically, if they made a movie of this, as the old Hollywood legend goes, it would likely be cut up into guitar picks after failing at the box office, thereby bringing things full circle.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute believes that it has finally come with the scratch big enough to tempt Al Gore to finally debate global “warming”:
Dubbing Al Gore “The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man”, Newsweek has yet another of its unintentionally ironic headlines. (At least we think the irony is unintentional, although Conquest’s Third Law is always a potential factor.)
And while we won’t say a word about the inherent sexism in the headline coming from such an archliberal publication, at Newsbusters, Tim Graham writes:
Permit a late word or two on Newsweek’s thoroughly in-the-tank cover story for Al Gore. Sharon Begley oozed about Gore’s favorite quote in his book – but never seems to note that Gore’s “philosopher” expert is a Marxist. It comes near the very end of the piece:
His favorite quote in [his new book] Our Choice is from the philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903–1969): “The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power … has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”
Adorno, and his colleagues in what is called the “Frankfurt School,” are Marxists. Al Gore and his liberal admirers in the press (see this Seattle Times dispatch) aspire to make it through Adorno’s impenetrable prose. British journalist Alastair McKay brightly reported that in Scotland in 2006, Gore lauded the entire school of Marxists:
“After World War Two there were a group of very thoughtful, humane, decent philosophers – Germans – who were so horrified, humiliated, shamed by what had happened in Germany that they became what is known as the Frankfurt School – Jurgen Habermas is probably the best known.
They devoted themselves over decades to exploring the question: what in the hell happened? And one of them, a philosopher named Theodore Adorno – conducted a philosophical autopsy of the Weimar and the emergence of the Third Reich. And he identified the first significant symptom of their descent into hell. He said this: ‘All questions of fact became questions of power’.
Gore’s entire construction of the global-warming debate is between reason (that’s the we’re-almost-roasted-marshmallows doom) and unreason, superstition, and capitalist propaganda (that’s conservatives). We face a “democracy crisis” because people have failed so far to bow to his genius. After a windy account of how the Enlightenment and the printing press allowed a new “rule of reason,” Gore launched into an attack on television for ruining democracy:
“The information ecology defined by the printing press was displaced 40 ears ago in my country by the television, and it’s now so dominant that the average American watches television for four hours and 39 minutes a day. It has a quasi-hypnotic effect [It certainly did on Al -- he launched his own little-watched TV channel in 2005 -- Ed], and the internet’s a great source of hope and it replicates that meritocracy of ideas but it does not have that hypnotic effect that television has.
“I see the internet as a source of hope. To use the Star Wars analogy, the rebellion is alive and well on the internet on some far galaxy, connected to ours, and it is growing, and I do believe that it is changing the operation of our political dialogue, democratising it, opening it up, so that questions of fact become questions of truth instead of power, so that there’s not censorship of global warming studies.”
Notice how Gore is always making conservatives into the unspeakable evil in his analogies: the Nazis, in the Frankfurt School analogy, and Darth Vader’s forces in the Star Wars analogy. Press him, and he denies the analogy is exact; but that’s how he wants his liberal allies to feel about themselves, that they are the anti-Nazi Skywalkers in this perilous ecological era, fighting “the Assault on Reason.”
Apropos of nothing, I wonder if Gore, who spent time in South Vietnam as a young U.S. Army journalist realizes that he’s rooting for George Lucas’s sci-fi stand-ins for the NVA?
And the Frankfurt School? Why does that name ring a bell? Oh yeah…
(If you’re pressed for time, scroll about six minutes into their appearance in Bill Whittle’s must-watch video from late August.)
Update: Thomas Sowell recently wrote, “My first column, more than 30 years ago, was titled ‘The Profits of Doom.’ Recent news stories about the millions of dollars that Al Gore has made out of his ‘global warming’ hysteria suggest that some things haven’t changed much in three decades.” Meanwhile, George Will wonders if there now exists a “Bad Climate for Global Worriers.”
Back around 1988, I watched Ted Danson, then at the height of his fame as the star of Cheers appear on a late-night infomercial pitch for an environmental group. He ended the half-hour advertisement with his saying that “we only have ten years to save the world’s oceans”. (That’s a paraphrase, but as close as I remember the line.)
It’s a reminder that, with the exception of Hollywood’s greatest Greatest Generation-era stars (Cary Grant, Bogie, The Duke, Coop), Bill Whittle’s Lou Grant Effect is inviolable. Having a beer in Sam Malone’s bar while he recounts his glory days with the Sox sounds like infinitely more fun than listening to the doomsday prognostications of someone paid to recite lines written by others, with his performance calibrated by someone else.
Update: And speaking of Beck: “Victim In Fatal Car Accident Tragically Not Glenn Beck” in a botched parody at the Onion.
Update:Big Hollywood notes, “Longtime Limbaugh listeners know where Danson’s anger comes from.” Read on for Danson having to eat his 1988 “ten years to save the oceans” prognostication when called on it during a 2007 CNBC interview.
Yup, I gotta confess, that now-famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S. government to turn over Elian Gonzalez warmed my heart.
These days, when not praising totalitarian Cuba and China, Friedman has taken to calling President Obama’s efforts to radically reshape the U.S. economy “nation-building” — a word whose traditional meaning that certainly fell into disfavor in the offices of the Gray Lady for most of the naughts:
I am convinced that this kind of nation-building at home is exactly what Mr. Obama is trying to deliver, and should be his unifying call: We need universal health care because it would strengthen our social fabric and enable our businesses to better compete globally. We need to upgrade our schools because no child in 21st-century America should be left behind and because we cannot compete for the best new jobs without doing so. We need a greener economy, not just to mitigate climate change, but because a world growing from 6.7 billion people to 9.2 billion by 2050 is going to demand more and more clean energy and water, and the country that develops the most clean technologies is going to have the most energy security, national security, economic security, innovative companies and global respect.
But to deliver this agenda requires a motivated public and a spirit of shared sacrifice. That’s where narrative becomes vital. People have to have a gut feel for why this nation-building project, with all its varied strands, is so important — why it’s worth the sacrifice. One of the reasons that independents and conservatives who voted for Mr. Obama have been so easily swayed against him by Fox News and people labeling him a “socialist” is because he has not given voice to the truly patriotic nation-building endeavor in which he is engaged.
Obama has had at least one self-admitted Communist on his payroll in the form of Van Jones, as well as the Mao-quoting Anita Dunn and Ron Bloom. But perhaps one reason why Friedman puts scare quotes around the word “socialist” in the above passage is that Friedman is too enamored of the real thing, and Obama, even with his radical efforts, doesn’t go anywhere nearly far enough, fast enough to satisfy the Timesman in his heart of hearts.
Related: The great Anthony Daniels (who frequently writes as Theodore Dalrymple) on “The Costs Of Abstraction”:
My little collection has led me to the conclusion that the Soviet Union was valued by contemporary intellectuals not for the omelette, but for the broken eggs. They thought that if nothing great could be built without sacrifice, then so great a sacrifice must be building something great. The Soviets had the courage of their abstractions, which are often so much more important to intellectuals than living, breathing human beings.
Actor Ted Danson called Thursday for tough limits on subsidies that are promoting overfishing around the globe.
In an interview with The Associated Press, the actor said the World Trade Organization needed to address the problem of boats fishing on the high seas longer and farther away from port thanks to billions of dollars in annual government handouts.
The subsidies are a major reason why 80 percent of the world’s fisheries are threatened, and why the industry is bringing in smaller catches despite the bigger fleets, Danson said.
“You are subsidizing the boats to do exactly the wrong thing,” Danson said at the WTO’s Geneva headquarters. “One of the fastest ways to deal with this problem, is to take boats off the water. If you cut subsidies, you are going to cut their ability to do the wrong thing.”
James Lileks continues his Halloween-week exploration of the original Universal Frankenstein movies of the 1930s, with Son of Frankenstein, including this passage:
The obligatory animation sequence isn’t as dramatic as the others; no one’s hoisted through a hole in the roof, interrogated by lightning. But we do have lens flares worthy of the latest Star Trek movie:
They must have been using the super-early Ver. 0.1 beta version of Knoll Light Factory back then…
As Lileks adds:
Electricity, the Animating Spirit! Six years away from the atom bomb, and the movie still echoes the author’s 18th century-derived fascination with the elemental power of electricity.
Back in May, after a nonplussed Associated Press calmly reported the wacky ideas to fight global warming/cooling/climate change/whatever it’s called this week from John Holdren, President Obama’s resident mad scientist, I did a Silicon Graffiti highlighting some of his loonier visions.
But as Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journalnotes in his profile of Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner, co-authors of SuperFreakonomics, global warming alarmists invariably love to propose Manhattan Project-sized initiatives*, to match their scope of their enviro-paranoia:
Suppose for a minute—which is about 59 seconds too long, but that’s for another column—that global warming poses an imminent threat to the survival of our species. Suppose, too, that the best solution involves a helium balloon, several miles of garden hose and a harmless stream of sulfur dioxide being pumped into the upper atmosphere, all at a cost of a single F-22 fighter jet.
Good news, right? Maybe, but not if you’re Al Gore or one of his little helpers.
The hose-in-the-sky approach to global warming is the brainchild of Intellectual Ventures, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm founded by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold. The basic idea is to engineer effects similar to those of the 1991 mega-eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines, which spewed so much sulfuric ash into the stratosphere that it cooled the earth by about one degree Fahrenheit for a couple of years.
Could it work? Mr. Myhrvold and his associates think it might, and they’re a smart bunch. Also smart are University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and writer Stephen Dubner, whose delightful “SuperFreakonomics”—the sequel to their runaway 2005 bestseller “Freakonomics”—gives Myhrvold and Co. pride of place in their lengthy chapter on global warming. Not surprisingly, global warming fanatics are experiencing a Pinatubo-like eruption of their own.
Mr. Gore, for instance, tells Messrs. Levitt and Dubner that the stratospheric sulfur solution is “nuts.” Former Clinton administration official Joe Romm, who edits the Climate Progress blog, accuses the authors of “[pushing] global cooling myths” and “sheer illogic.” The Union of Concerned Scientists faults the book for its “faulty statistics.” Never to be outdone, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman scores “SuperFreakonomics” for “grossly [misrepresenting] other peoples’ research, in both climate science and economics.”
* * *
Hence, too, it may well be that global warming is best tackled with a variety of cheap fixes, if not by pumping SO2 into the stratosphere then perhaps by seeding more clouds over the ocean. Alternatively, as “SuperFreakonomics” suggests, we might be better off doing nothing until the state of technology can catch up to the scope of the problem.
All these suggestions are, of course, horrifying to global warmists, who’d much prefer to spend in excess of a trillion dollars annually for the sake of reconceiving civilization as we know it, including not just what we drive or eat but how many children we have. And little wonder: As Newsweek’s Stefan Theil points out, “climate change is the greatest new public-spending project in decades.” Who, being a professional climatologist or EPA regulator, wouldn’t want a piece of that action?
Part of the genius of Marxism, and a reason for its enduring appeal, is that it fed man’s neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence. It’s just the same with global warming, which is what makes the clear-eyed analysis in “SuperFreakonomics” so timely and important. (Now my sincere apologies to the authors for an endorsement that will surely give their critics another cartridge of ammunition.)
As Ann Althouse adds, “For some people, it needs to be a religion, and to the extent that it is a religion, we need the blasphemers.”
And of course, this isn’t the first heresy against establishment leftwing thinking the two authors have committed.
Federal agents from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and local police today seized wood, guitars, computers and boxes of files from Gibson Guitar’s Massman Road manufacturing facility.
