R&D and Drug Costs

Some of the issues relating to drug research and costs (and the politics of these issues) discussed a few weeks ago on Chicagoboyz are analyzed in a new TCS article by Sally Pipes and Benjamin Zycher.

Just Another Random Crime by Arab Muslims?

Reuters is on the case. The key sentence:

The attacker said he was Algerian, police said.

Those wacky Algerians! Of course it could have been anyone who randomly attacked an airplane crew with an axe: a Chinese, a Brazilian, an orthodox Jew. The guy was probably just upset because his reindeer died or something.

Random violent crime is rare in the Nordic nation, but one person was killed and five others wounded last month when a knife attacker stabbed passengers a tram in the capital Oslo.

In case we haven’t gotten the point, Reuters added this gratuitous paragraph to make clear that the last Norwegian mass-stabber was an immigrant nutcase (i.e., not an obvious Islamist terrorist). It appears that readers are expected to infer, though there is no logical reason to do so, that the plane attacker isn’t a terrorist either.

But we don’t know the attacker’s motives. Maybe they weren’t Islamist, but that’s not the way to bet nowadays. Reuters, rather than merely presenting facts, seems determined to force the story into an editorial template. However, most readers probably are not going to accept Reuters’s version of the story at face value, and will read between the lines and use common sense to draw their own conclusions. The truth will out, even if it isn’t a truth that ideologically-engaged media operators like.

Message From Planet Barbra

Jeez, what an idiot. Her tone is hysterical, her assertions are wrong and her premise (the press is intimidated but she isn’t?) is ridiculous. I can’t explain her apparent belief that she will succeed in SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER where lesser mortals fail. Maybe where she lives they don’t have Google and people still get their news from the afternoon paper. Whatever. Call me reckless but I don’t think she’s going to change many voters’ minds. I can’t imagine how Dick Gephardt was able to put up with this kind of nonsense when he was fundraising in Hollywood.

I gotta knock it off with the posts bashing lefty fools. It’s just too easy. I would say that it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, but it’s really more like fishing in a barrel with dynamite and the fish are already dead.

What Would We Do Without Dan Rather?

I’m serious. I would not have felt this way five years ago, but conservatives have gained so much ground through alternative media sources, including the blogosphere, that our voices are being heard regardless of major media bias. At this point, they have been completely countered.

With people like Rather on board, they will remain constrained because we have learned how to deal with them. Their politics will remain obvious, and they will continue to embarrass themselves. The games they play with bias will continue to appear absurd and provide fuel for conservative pundits. Most importantly, with these dinosaurs in place, they discredit and marginalize the liberal political message.

What more could we want? Even with Rather and his type gone, major media bias will remain. But it will take a more stealthy form. More subtle bias from replacement anchors who might convincingly appear to be in the political center would be worse than the status quo. Right now, Rather is our weapon; he has become our moral cudgel. His name is a call to arms. He is a living, breathing meme—a walking advertisement for liberal media bias.

The only thing better than Dan Rather at CBS would be more Dan Rathers—one for each network and maybe even a couple more for weekends.

(originally posted at The Perfect World)