Category Archives: Health

Bill Nye

…the climate huckster guy:

Admittedly, climate science is complex. There might be perfectly reasonable scientific justifications for what’s happening on the tornado front. Although, surely, there are just as likely interesting scientific arguments that challenge The Science Guy’s chilling and reckless assertions meant only to scare you into adopting leftist economic policy, not to teach you anything. Nye’s “science” is, at the very least, arguable.

But that’s not the reason Nye is dishonest. Or, at least, not the only reason. His biggest lie—and he makes these sorts of claims all the time—is that people are increasingly suffering because of global warming, and thus by extension they are suffering because of the use of fossil fuels.

This is simply untrue. Life, by nearly any quantifiable measurement, is better today for more people than it has ever been. One of the externalities in the spike of comfort and health is that more people are emitting carbon into the air. Fewer people are suffering. On top of the huge, if inadvertent, moral benefits of oil, gas, and coal, we should add that far fewer people are dying from drastic weather events—or any weather, actually.

These charlatans shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t take them seriously.

John Roberts

How he gave us Donald Trump.

That was certainly a huge factor. That ObamaCare decision was a legal atrocity.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Trump has shown that conservatism doesn’t really matter to the GOP.

I think we sort of figured that out with the first President Bush (that Veep pick was probably one of Reagan’s most damaging decisions). This is just the natural culmination of the process.

I was noting this morning on Twitter that Rush Limbaugh must be kicking himself to realize how easy it is for a wealthy communicator to have taken over the party. I’d have happily supported him.

Losing Weight And Keeping It Off

The amount of unconscious junk science in this NYT article is staggering.

Note the underlying assumption: that calorie counting is useful, that burning calories (i.e., exercise) is useful, and that the type of calories you consume is irrelevant. And it’s all about the weight (they didn’t mention BMI, but I’ll bet they were measuring it). Did any of them do strength training? Because exchanging muscle for fat will increase metabolism.

The Vegetarian Myth

Dr. Eades reviews what appears to be a very interesting book.

My thoughts: No, we can’t sustain the current human population without agriculture. But then, we’re not sure how we’re going to sustain a human population in space, either. We need advances in technology to solve either problem. I suspect that we’ll be manufacturing meat in the not-too-distant future that will have the taste, texture and nutrition of the real thing, and that will be good for all, including wildlife. But even absent that, I’d amend the old bumper sticker. Grains aren’t food. Grains are what food eats.

Those Space Mice

Eric Berger has the story, including the fact that we’ve done absolutely no research in partial gravity, which will be necessary if people want to procreate on Mars.

I’d note that while it’s never officially been confirmed, it seems unlikely, given the nature of astronauts, that no one has ever done it in space.