Pro tip to Vilsack. An “informed opinion” not based on scientific facts is an uninformed opinion.
And here’s a nice bit of illogic:
Lawmakers also noted that federal nutrition guidelines could be considered a failure because of the country’s high obesity rates. But Burwell fought back, arguing that obesity would be much worse had the guidelines not been in place.
“We are on the wrong trajectory, but would the trajectory have been worse?” Burwell said, acknowledging there was an obesity problem.
Since it was the original crap low-fat guidelines from the government that caused the problem, no, there’s no reason to consider them a success, or to not end the insanity.
I got up early this morning, flew to El Paso, and then drove up to Alamagordo to the space history museum. In Las Cruces now. I’ll check in from the event tomorrow.
I realize that true believers don’t need rational reasons for their religion, but it would be nice to see a little soul-searching in regard to some stats in the article: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in the front of the plane, it’s more like 100,000 bottles — and you have to make sure not to rinse any of them with hot water, because that little extra energy could more than cancel out any greenhouse benefit of your labors.
It does seem like poor judgment. Back in ’98, a month after Patricia and I took a cruise on it (and a couple months before she started a job in Puerto Rico), the Fantome went down in Hurricane Mitch, with all hands (though they’d dropped off non-essential crew in Belize City). It was kind of shocking, because we just had met many of them. They were trying to take the ship out to sea, to keep it from getting battered in the harbor. But hurricane tracking wasn’t as good back then. They thought it was going to head toward the Yucatan, and so they headed southeast, but the storm took a turn and they went right into the heart of it.
Ironically, a Honduran woman who was washed out to sea in the flooding was rescued, after she was found holding on to some floating debris by aircraft patrols looking for debris or survivors from the ship. If it hadn’t gone down she probably would have died.
[Monday-morning update]
Sad, but not surprising news. The Coast Guard is declaring the ship sunk. That’s pretty much a foregone conclusion when you’re in a major hurricane with no propulsion.