Author: Moe_Lane

#rsrh Waitasecond. The DNC convention starts on LABOR DAY?

The Democratic party picked Labor Day weekend for their nominating convention in Charlotte, North Right-to-work Carolina?

Apparently.

Wow.  That’s the funniest damned thing that I’ve seen all day.

(pause)

Oh, well, it’s not like Big Labor doesn’t deserve the contempt shown to it by the Democrats.  I can’t respect people who won’t respect themselves, sorry.

Moe Lane

African children vs. Greenpeace?

The good news? Researchers have worked out a method to genetically modify cassava plants that causes them to produce significantly larger amounts of protein.  In practical terms, this means that within a decade African farmers might have a staple crop that can counter protein-energy malnutrition in African children – and protein-energy malnutrition is nasty.  Not to mention deceptively treatable, if you can make sure that the kids get the protein.  Which is why the plan is to distribute the plants to the farmers themselves, thus distributing the extra protein from the bottom up.

The bad news?  The above means that said researchers will have to fight groups like Greenpeace every step of the way on this, as Greenpeace in particular is adamantly and explicitly against releasing genetically-modified crops “into the environment” – which, again, is the plan of the researchers.  That would be because Greenpeace gets almost no money from African children with preventable dietary deficiencies, and quite a bit of money from scientifically-illiterate, white Euro-American liberals whose interest in anything African is directly proportional to how… sanitized it is.

Hey.  Be grateful that I didn’t say ‘bleached.’

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: Mind you, if moving forward Greenpeace wants to start explicitly repudiating its Luddite fanaticism, here would be an excellent place to start…

#rsrh I’m going to go with “No extra cameras…”

“…for C-Span.”  The current system fixes the cameras on the floor podium and Speaker’s dais, which adequately covers the ostensible reason for C-Span coverage.  Allowing the cameras to pan out from there… well, this means three things will happen:

  • More candid shots of Members of Congress picking their nose.
  • More temptations for outside groups to disrupt the proceedings with staged antics.

Both of these are merely aesthetic issues, and easily survivable.  But here’s the real problem:

  • Control over the cameras means that C-Span gets a vote in deciding what is newsworthy.

I find that I don’t want C-Span’s input on that, actually.  They do an excellent job of presenting the actual business of the government with a calm, impartial eye; I don’t want them having on the spot editorial authority.

Moe Lane

PS: Yup, they do commentary.  And opinion pieces.  But they don’t get to muck about with the raw feed.

#rsrh Our (former) woman in Luxembourg.

OK, I’m not overly inclined to be hypocritical about how the White House made a major campaign contributor Ambassador to Luxembourg.  I said it before: that’s how this works.  The prestige posts – and the Western European ambassadorships are automatically ‘prestige’  – are Presidential largess.  Sure, it’s business as usual and the President said that he wasn’t going to be business as usual… but, seriously: everybody knew that he was lying, right?  Nobody smart actually believed that nonsense?

What, that person over there is saying that he did believe that Obama was different?

(pause)

Doofus.

But I digress. Continue reading #rsrh Our (former) woman in Luxembourg.

Lila Rose fights the Man.

Choice of phrase deliberate: one of the most entertaining things about today’s state of activism is that the Professional Left is just now starting to realize that they have somehow become the agents of reaction without ever quite noticing how it happened.  Lila Rose, on the other hand?  Her pro-life organization Live Action is a classic guerrilla theater operation designed to target the weaknesses of a frankly sclerotic tool of the Establishment… in this case, Planned Parenthood.  It’s not quite the same as the Sixties groups, though: the Right has never been all that interested in getting our opponents to admit that we were right and they were wrong.  Winning is sufficient validation, thanks.

And this is where I think that the above Christian Science Monitor article featuring Lila missed the fundamental point.  In my opinion, the CSM author approached Live Action’s program in terms of an attempt to sway public opinion; which is after all how the Activist Left always does it.  But the reason that the Left always does it that way is because the Activist Left always has to convince a majority of the American public that their ideas are correct.  The Right doesn’t have that problem in this country.  To use this specific example: Live Action doesn’t have to start by convincing people that abortion is disgusting, because people already find abortion personally disgusting.  All Live Action has to do is show that the horrid things said about abortion providers and abortion advocates are actually true. Continue reading Lila Rose fights the Man.

#rsrh NBC is a bunch of humorless toads.

Which you knew already – MSNBC, after all – but CrunchGear confirms it with this report that NBC has canned the person who uploaded the Couric/Gumbel video from 1994 where they were asking what this ‘Internet’ thing was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUs7iG1mNjI&feature=player_embedded

CrunchGear went on to note that people weren’t laughing at Couric & Gumbel, just with them.  Well… possibly there was a little bit of laughing at them, but nothing malicious, I swear.  In 1994 I was just starting to use Mosaic (remember that?) to look up things at school while relying on AOL* for most of my online needs.  No Google.  Hell, no Yahoo.com until later.  I don’t want to go all stone knives and bear skins here, but this was back in the day, computationally speaking.  Just because those questions sound stupid now didn’t mean that they sounded stupid back then.

But you know what is stupid?  Making this thing more of a story than it needed to be.  Firing somebody for uploading 89 seconds of slightly embarrassing video could end up being a bit more of a hit to NBC’s reputation than the video itself…

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh NBC is a bunch of humorless toads.