[Thursday-afternoon update]
Heh. Barack and Raul are getting married.
[Bumped]
The Oxford Comma
5 Replies
That Lenin Statue In Kiev
I was wondering myself why it was even there.
Democrats, Then And Now
Historic Verisimilitude
Finally. I’m sure that you, like I have always wondered by Mary wasn’t depicted in her safety helmet as she rode the donkey to Bethlehem.
A Dashcam
Six reasons you should get one, if you don’t have one.
Some of them are surprisingly low cost
A Second-Amendment Victory
But despite a court ruling against it, a Florida university says that it will continue to violate the law.
Mark Morano
…took no prisoners on CNN last night in a debate with a couple warm mongers.
Raising A Jihadi Generation
A non-government handbook to train government employees, that corresponds to reality.
Climate And Weather
Judith Curry has a post up on today’s Congressional hearing.
The Price Of Milk
OK, can someone explain to me why prices will double if the farm bill isn’t passed? I always thought that dairy prices were propped up by the government program, not subsidized.
A Boycott Of Top Science Journals
…by a Nobel Prize winner:
…leading scientists know that the “prestige” academic journals are biased in favor of flashy and politically correct research findings, even when such findings are frequently contradicted by subsequent research. This is important in the context of the global warming debate because Nature and Science have published the most alarmist and incredible junk on global warming and refuse to publish skeptics. (Full disclosure: Nature ran a negative editorial about us a few years back and a much better but still inaccurate feature story.) Claims of a “scientific consensus” rely heavily on the assumption that expertise can be measured by how often a scientist appears in one of these journals. Now we know that’s a lie.
This was one of the revelations of Climaquiddick, that the warm mongers continue to try to paper over.
A Celestial Dance
The Juno probe provided the best view ever of the earth-moon system.
The Ethics Of Mars One
Since the 1960s – and following the Nuremberg trials – it has been standard practice for researchers to follow certain ethical standards in the treatment of human subjects. These rules include the requirement to submit research proposals to an ethics committee for prior approval, clearly explain clearly the risks of any procedures to potential research subjects, before obtaining their informed consent. Since Mars One now admits to planning research on the colonists themselves, the mission becomes bound to these same standards.
Mars One may not meet these conditions. As far as we know, no ethics committee has considered the Mars One plan or the risks it poses to the colonists. These risks will need to be communicated clearly before volunteers are recruited to take part in the mission.
I’ve previously expressed my own concerns, but I don’t agree that having it done by government space agencies instead is the solution, or that a disaster will inhibit human migration into space.
Julia
The real life:
SpaceShipTwo
Will it enter commercial service next year?
Doug Messier is skeptical. So am I, for the same reasons.
Let NASA Do Great Things Again
Commentary from Rick Boozer, on the venal idiocy of Congressional priorities for the space agency.
The Poison Of Protectionism
Sugar subsidies are a symptom of a much larger problem:
Protectionism is always a reverse–Robin Hood proposition. Farm protections force the poor to pay artificially higher food prices in order to pad profits for millionaire farmers. And the poor never even realize that they’re basically being defrauded by a conspiracy of government officials and their favorite special interests. When properly understood in their true economic light, these farm supports (like the abominable Wright Amendment for American Airlines) are tantamount to government collusion in a criminal price-fixing cartel. Contrary to what is an almost biblical tenet of progressivism, government cannot sanitize a price-fixing cartel. Government power can only make the cartel’s injury to the public far worse, both by protecting the cartel from the competition that would bring it down in a truly free market, and by making the cartel permanent. It is no surprise that the New Deal’s agriculture supports were foisted on the American public as emergency measures, but are still with us today.
They’re very pernicious.
Barack Obama’s Economic Ignorance
His proposals have been and will continue to be disastrous for the economy, and for the middle and working class:
Unfortunately, our visionary President knows little of the unintended consequences of legal intervention, so he continues to push hard on policies that fail. But he accuses everyone who disagrees with him of a form of “collective amnesia.” He caricatures them as believing that “we are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.” Both halves of that sentence grossly mischaracterize the opposition.
He’s the king of straw men.
[Update a while later]
“Income inequality,” the biggest lie of all.
[Early afternoon update]
How To Read A Scientific Paper
A translation guide:
It’s particularly useful for papers on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming.
Alan Grayson
He’s not only nasty, he’s stupid:
U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida lost $18 million in a scheme that cheated him and about 120 other investors out of more than $35 million, according to court papers.
My schadenfreude runneth over.
Government Motors
Remember how we were told that the GM bailout would be paid back to the taxpayer?
Well, we just took a ten-billion-dollar bath. As noted there, we’ll never know what useful things might have been done with that ten billion.
The Maria Problem
An update.
Launch Indemnification
Jim Muncy: Extend it indefinitely.
Also, the moratorium on regulating space-participant safety.
[Update a while later]
Not sure how the link got broken, but it’s fixed now I think.
The Moon Treaty
No, we don’t have to accept it to mine the moon.
The author ignores the other lunar-related entrepreneurial activities, focusing exclusively on the Google Lunar Prize. The people closest to getting to the moon in any serious way are private actors, not any government, because it’s only going to happen with a dramatic reduction in cost of access. Certainly China’s not doing anything significant.
A New Constitutional Right
This is nutty on multiple levels:
They argue that they have a constitutional right to a safe climate, that they have a right to receive from us a planet that supports all life, just as our forebears gave us.
Even ignoring that there is no such “right,” what the hell is a “safe” climate?
And I love this:
We know without a doubt that gases we are adding to the air have caused a planetary energy imbalance and global warming, already 0.8 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. This warming is driving an increase in extreme weather, from heat waves and droughts to wildfires and stronger storms (though mistakenly expecting science to instantly document links to specific events misses the forest for the trees).
Got that? We know that carbon is causing extreme weather events, but don’t expect us to provide any scientific basis for it.
Hansen is a loon.
Venerian Gas-Phase Processes
Jon Goff has another post up on utilizing the upper atmosphere of Venus.
Book Sales
The book
The Dinosaurs Of The Launch Industry
Their world was just hit by an asteroid, whether they realize it or not.
Statin Madness
This time, it’s personal:
How could any doctor in his/her right mind write such a prescription for an 86 year old, totally paralyzed man who has normal cholesterol? Even one who has elevated cholesterol? After about age 50, the higher the cholesterol, the greater the longevity. So, again, why would anyone write a prescription for a non-benign drug to an elderly patient? Plus, the chance for rhabdomyolysis is greater in the elderly who take statins as well as those who are taking a ton of other drugs, as is my dad. It’s a set up for disaster with no potential upside to balance the risk. It is blind stupidity to prescribe a statin under these circumstances.
And not just any old statin. The script was for a large dose of Lipitor, a fat-soluble statin. Fat soluble statins are much more likely to be involved in drug interactions, and they can induce insulin resistance and possibly cause diabetes. If you’re going to give an unnecessary drug, why wouldn’t you at least give one with the fewest side effects?
As I’ve noted in the past, I think that nutritional witch-doctory killed my own father a third of a century ago.
[Update a few minutes later]
A debate on the science of statins.
“This Is What Happens In Obama’s America”
What happens in Obama’s America is that people think that it’s intrinsically racist to criticize the president. If that cartoon had been published six years ago, with “Obama’s” replaced by “Bush’s,” would it have been racist then? If not, what would be the difference, other than the melanin content of the two mens’ skin? The editor shouldn’t have apologized, or retracted. He should have called out the detractors as the racialist demagogues they are.