…is a fish in a teacup. And Pejman takes after him with a fully-automatic belt-fed twelve-gauge shotgun. There should be some sort of blogging pity rule about this sort of thing, but Yglesias wouldn’t deserve it.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Ronald Reagan’s Space Legacy
Mark Whittington has an essay on it, but he misses the biggest part of it — the creation of the Office of Commercial Space Transportation (now FAA-AST), which enabled the development of the commercial spaceflight industry, as I described when Reagan died in 2004.
And, Mark, please stop demonstrating your profound ignorance of the meaning of the word “subsidy.” COTS and Commercial Crew are not subsidies.
Good Question
In the midst of appropriately ridiculing Al Gore, Charles Krauthammer raises an interesting point:
Look, if Godzilla appeared on the Mall this afternoon, Al Gore would say it’s global warming…
[Laughter]
…because the spores in the South Atlantic Ocean, you know, were. Look, everything is, it’s a religion. In a religion, everything is explicable. In science, you can actually deny or falsify a proposition with evidence. You find me a single piece of evidence that Al Gore would ever admit would contradict global warming and I’ll be surprised.
OK, so how is the global warming religion falsifiable? What would it take?
Why I Eat Saturated Fats
Because they taste good, and they have essentially no relationship with coronary risk:
Overall, the literature does not offer much support for the idea that long term saturated fat intake has a significant effect on the concentration of blood cholesterol. If it’s a factor at all, it must be rather weak, which is consistent with what has been observed in multiple non-human species (13). I think it’s likely that the diet-heart hypothesis rests in part on an over-interpretation of short-term controlled feeding studies. I’d like to see a more open discussion of this in the scientific literature. In any case, these controlled studies have typically shown that saturated fat increases both LDL and HDL, so even if saturated fat did have a small long-term effect on blood cholesterol, as hinted at by some of the observational studies, its effect on heart attack risk would still be difficult to predict.
Actually, I have a simpler explanation — it’s simply an appealing theory, from a common-sense standpoint. You are what you eat, right?
Of course, it’s always dangerous to rely on “common sense” when it comes to complex topics like biochemistry. And yet the FDA builds such murderous concepts as the food pyramid on such shoddy research and thinking. Not to mention agri-industry lobbying, of course.
Credentials Versus Education
More thoughts from Elizabeth Scalia.
When I was growing up, it never occurred to me to aspire to get an Ivy League degree. Of course, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go to college, and my high school grades (and lack of even taking the SAT) showed it.
[Update a while later]
“College for all” harms students.
More Thoughts On Neil Stephenson And Rockets
From Clark Lindsey.
Educating Ezra
When we last heard from Ezra Klein, he was explaining that it’s hard to understand the constitution because it’s over a hundred years old. Now, Jen Rubin takes the juice boxer to school on the nature of the judicial branch.
[Update a while later]
Losing a battle but winning the war against ObamaCare:
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) issued a statement stressing that Republicans had kept “their promise to seek repeal of the job-destroying health care law.” The House and Senate Republicans’ unanimity on ObamaCare repeal is an important message to the base and to independents who fret that politicians don’t keep campaign promises. Moreover, we now have a clear demarcation between the two parties on a central issue. If elections are about choices, voters will have a clear one in 2012. Republicans seem very happy about that. The Democrats? Not so much.
Well, they weren’t so unhappy as to not vote in lockstep with a political loser. People like Joe Manchin will have a tough reelection fight. That vote may have been suicidal, particularly after his campaign rhetoric.
Remember Those Noble Rabbis?
They’re being repudiated by those they cited. They’re hypocrites with a double standard:
While we have said many times that Nazi comparisons are offensive and inappropriate when used for political attacks, in my view it is wrongheaded to single out only Fox News on this issue, when both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, can share equal guilt in making trivializing comparisons to the Holocaust.
Furthermore, the open letter signed by hundreds of rabbis is a trivialization in itself—bizarrely timed for release on United Nations’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. At a time when Holocaust denial is rampant in much of the Arab world, where anti-Semitism remains a serious concern, and where the Iranian leader has openly declared his desire to “wipe Israel off the map,” surely there are greater enemies and threats to the Jewish people than the pro-Israel stalwarts Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and Glenn Beck.
It’s not about anti-semitism — it’s about shutting down the opposition and anyone who would out and criticize the left, and George Soros, a truly malevolent player on the world stage.
When Did The Left Turn Against Free Speech?
The answer is that the left has never been in favor of free speech, except for themselves.
[Update a few minutes later]
I should add that I used to be a great fan of Robert Wright. I thought that The Moral Animal
[Update a few minutes later]
As someone notes in comments over at Ann’s site, this is a perfect example of why leftists aren’t entitled to the label “liberal.”
Stop The Hate Speech
Politico is targeting Iowahawk. But don’t hold your breath waiting for the usual suspects to whine about this incivility. And if some deranged maniac attacks his double wide, we’ll know who to blame.