Skip to main content

How the media distorts the news

Ok, so of course George Soros, Noam Chomsky and Vladimir Lenin think the US news media is controlled by "right-wing corporations".

The bias in the media is subtle, but it's there. I know it, you know it - but you just can't quite put your finger on it?

Here's an example.

July 20 (Bloomberg) -- The day before Tuesday's US Senate vote backing embryonic stem-cell research...

Bloomberg (a liberal rag run for the benefit of so-called "right-wing corporations") makes it sound as if George Bush is single-handed stopping stem-cell research.

This of course is not true. The bill would have spent federal government dollars on stem-cell research, which sometimes involves getting stem cells from aborted fetuses. This is controversial among some of the President's backers (ya think?) and so he vetoed the bill.

What Bloomberg does not bother to mention is that any private company can acquire fetuses and do whatever they want to with them - including harvest them for new stem-cell lines. All this can be done without increasing government largesse or increasing government intervention over and control of science.

Government is the one entity that should never ever be involved in scientific research (for anything other than weapons). If government funds something, it becomes politicized. Whether it happens becomes an issue for politicians to debate and vote against - depriving everyone of the potential benefits.

When private organizations do science, they do it in the hopes of eventually making a profit on it. They will do this by helping people, curing disease and preventing it. It doesn't matter if it is controversial, it doesn't matter if some people are opposed to its use. Without the power of the government, those people are free to act on their own conscience and not use such products or treatments - and have no power to stop the rest of us from benefitting from them.

George Bush, by refusing to use Federal money to fund stem cell research, is not only playing to the conservative base - he is ensuring that by keeping stem-cell research non-politicized, it will get done.

Liberal advocacy organizations will of course spend millions of dollars on lobbying and TV ads, saying how terrible Republicans are - when what they ought to be doing, if they feel so strongly about it, is put those resources directly into stem-cell research.

(Of course, liberals don't care about it, they prefer to demonize Republicans. They have to demonize Republicans, or nobody would listen to them at all).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Murder in the US

In 2011, I calculate the overall US murder rate as 4.6 per 100,000 population. But if you recalculate this, and assumed that black men murdered at the same rate as everyone else, the overall rate would drop to 1.9 out of 100,000 population. That would give the United States the 147th highest murder rate in the world - or, the 60th best. The insane disproportionate murder rate among US blacks is why the overall US murder rate seems so high. I don't understand why liberals refuse to talk about this. I don't understand why blacks refuse to talk about this. Blacks are just as often the victim as the offender - almost SIXTY PERCENT of murder victims in the US are black. Shouldn't they care about this? Where are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to talk about this? Yet they are silent. And it's not like this is any secret. This culture of violence, abuse of women, and plain thuggery is paraded around daily in pop music. It's glorified on TV shows like "...

The one thing that could help.

Megan, you overlooked one obvious thing that could help.  More regular, sane, well-adjusted people who are well trained in the use of firearms should be allowed to carry them concealed, in public. The reason the shooters pick malls, schools, restaurants and the like is that they know noone in any of these places will offer them any resistance. Because we have in our "wisdom" banned guns from these places - even by non-crazies. So when crazy shows up to a school there is *no way to stop it*. The meme is "Noone has ever committed a mass murder at a gun show." But it's truth. These shooters are, fundamentally, cowards. They want easy victims, and as you say, a sense of power. So they're going to go to places where we have banned guns and know they will get to exercise that power without resistance. Places that might resist won't give them the sense of power. The obvious solution you overlook, is to encourage, educate, and allow more people to defend thems...

Is Government "just the name we give to things we do together"?

"Government is just the name we give to the things we do together." Well, no. This is a truly deceptive statement. Because look here, there are many, many human institutions where people get together to do things. Churches. Clubs. Corporations. Non-profits. Families. And these all have their own unique characteristics. If government was simply a variety of these, or vice-versa, why would we bother to have a unique word for it? If government were *merely* a charity, wouldn't we just call it a charity? What is it about government then that makes it unique? I'll tell you. It's the use of force. Government is the sole human institution that legitimately exercises physical force against others. Churches don't commit violence. Corporations don't use physical coercion to get you to buy their products or to work for them. Families don't (shouldn't) do that. BECAUSE government's essence is the use of force, government simply should ...