Kate McMillan contrasts the fawning media coverage from a couple of years back about Obama's brilliant use of social media with the revelation that over 60 per cent of Obamacare Facebook comments come from just 100 users. She adds:
It doesn't matter if you "win" the social media battle. What matters is that you convince an incurious, supportive media that you've won. That's why they spend so much effort on faking it.
This is true, and an important point. Almost every aspect of Obama's "cool" - from his peerless communication skills to his genius at cutting-edge social media - is totally bogus. His real genius is in pulling the wool over the media's eyes, and given that they walk into the room wearing back-to-front ski-masks that doesn't take much doing, either. For example, Jonathan Gruber couldn't get away with his contempt for the American people if he didn't also have a contempt for the American media. In the latter case at least, it's well deserved.
The real social media "winners" of our time, as I said on Rush a few months back, the Islamic State. They use Facebook, YouTube, Twitter et al far more effectively than Obama. They've used social media as a recruitment tool to attract thousands of western Muslims to grab their passports and head to Syria and Iraq. They've social media them as a way to mainstream beheading, to the point where people are taking it up in London, New York, and Moore, Oklahoma. And they've used social media to decapitate their hostages and entirely bypass that same "incurious, supportive media" which would otherwise be airbrushing them into "so-called extremists", as the BBC calls the Islamic State.
If Obama was so great at social media, wouldn't you think he'd be better at stopping these fellows having the run of the Internet? If you think "winning social media" means holding up a cardboard hashtag while putting on a pouty face, the Obama guys are geniuses. If you think it means using new media technology to accomplish your strategic goals, the Islamic State fellows are running rings round us.
~Speaking of "an incurious, supportive media", Steve Sailer draws my attention to this column from The Atlantic, in which Noah Gittell bemoans the fact that Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar isn't quite up to snuff as by-the-book climate-change propaganda:
Interstellar is set in a near-future Earth on the verge of total ecological collapse, with drastic changes in weather patterns and devastating food shortages driving human beings to the brink of extinction. We never learn exactly what caused this devastation (there is a vague reference to a crop disease called "a blight")... And so it stands to reason that whatever planet the humans in Interstellar end up colonizing, they will destroy it just as surely as a virus destroys its host.
Sometimes it helps actually to watch the movie that's been made rather than the one you think the guy should have made. It's not "a vague reference" to the Blight, but actually quite a thought-out explanation for it. As I wrote the other day:
Nolan actually goes to a bit of trouble to identify the problem as "non-anthropogenic" climate change. NASA's top boffin (Michael Caine, not on best form) explains that the Blight feeds on nitrogen - which is 80 per cent of the atmosphere, but, unlike CO2 emissions, nothing to do with man.
It would have been easy to make the Blight something to do with "global warming" and get Gittell hailing it as the greatest thing since The Day After Tomorrow. And yet Nolan chose not to...
Hmm.
In one scene, he shows in the background, on a distant ridge line, a row of wind turbines.
In other words, this shrunken, impoverished, backward world appears to have done everything the Gittells want - and this is the result: a world in which wind turbines blow nothing but a ferocious, ravening, poisonous dust.
There are other clues, too: There is no livestock. Is everyone perforce vegetarian? There are no Blight-proof GM crops. Did they get banned?
As you know, my main interest in Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar is that the villain is a climate scientist called "Dr Mann". So I took my kids along to the film on Friday night, and concluded:
Given the film's themes, it's difficult to believe the Nolans' choice of name for their bad guy is pure coincidence.
Once he's on his new world, he sends back data telling NASA what a perfect climate it is. When Coop & Co get there, they discover it's an ice planet - a vast frozen wasteland in which even the clouds ice up. Consigning the man who eliminated the Medieval Warm Period to a giant planetary icebox again seems too good a jest to be coincidental.
But this guy at The Atlantic, Noah Gittell, persists in seeing the film as some sort of metaphor for global warming that's a bit too elliptical for his tastes. As Steve Sailer says:
Something I've noticed over the years is that liberals are increasingly unable to notice when they are being satirized.
I used to write for The Atlantic, and one day the owner David Bradley took me to lunch in the Watergate building, which he owns. Over a cheeseburger, he told me that what he liked about my column was that a lot of the rest of the magazine was "earnest" and my stuff leavened the earnestness ...just enough - because, after all, a lot of the readers were earnest, too. But there's a big difference between being "earnest" and being as plonkingly unknowing as Mr Gittell is here.
~Speaking of Doctor Fraudpants, what's the real Michael E Mann up to? Over at Anthony Watts' site:
Evidence That Dr Michael Mann Misled A Court
Indeed, he did. In this case, Lord Monckton explores the fairly obvious contradiction between Mann's court filing, wherein he claims an "overly simplified" graph is "absolutely nothing to do with Dr Mann", and Mann's website, where the self-same "overly simplified" graph is listed among his published works. I wrote about this two months ago under the headline "Michael E Mann Repudiates His Own Hockey Stick":
Dr Mann may be kind to his dog and help old ladies across the street, but he is a serial liar. That's just the way he rolls. One gets the sense that he simply tells the lie that serves his purpose at that moment and does so on such a scale that he can't reasonably be expected to remember which lie he told a few weeks later...
But his attorneys, John Williams and Peter Fontaine, can't be similarly indulged. They're officers of the court and they have an obligation not to lay before it what is, in the objective sense, untrue. It is at best negligent and at worst fraudulent to assert that "Dr Mann did not create this depiction" when he boasts about creating it on his own CV.
It is well past time for the Court to rebuke Mann's counsel for the serial falsehoods in their pleadings. I will be interested to see if the DC Court of Appeals takes up this point when Mann stands before them on November 25th.
