Category Archives: Media Criticism

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Low-Fat Milk

…is the new sitting:

In 2006, a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition looked at the role of dairy consumption in weight regulation for 19,352 Swedish women between the ages of 40 and 55. Data was initially collected between 1987 and 1990, and then again in 1997. It found that for the women in the study, eating one or more servings a day of whole dairy products was “inversely associated with weight gain,” with the most significant findings for normal-weight women consuming whole milk or sour milk.

In 2013, the Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care published findings from a study that tracked the impact of dairy fat intake on 1,782 men. Twelve years after researchers took the initial measurements, they found that consumption of butter, high-fat milk, and cream several times a week were related to lower levels of central obesity, while “a low intake of dairy fat… was associated with a higher risk of developing central obesity.” (Central obesity means a waist-to-hip ratio equal to or greater than one—i.e. big in the middle.)

As I’ve said before, Michelle’s “healthy” school lunches, with low-fat milk, actually constitute government-sponsored child abuse.

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Soyuz

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They still don’t know what happened on the Progress failure.

I noted at the time that this could result in a delay of the planned crew rotation on the 26th, and it has. I had a discussion with Jim Oberg on Facebook, and he didn’t think there was sufficient commonality, but he seems more concerned now:

Whatever the conclusions of that report may be, lessons can already be drawn from the accident, Oberg said.

“This and recent similar failures highlight the foolishness of judging mission success reliability based on historical statistics. It’s not just that each launch is a new roll of the dice — it’s a first roll of NEW dice,” he said. “The quality of fabrication and mission preparations reflect the CURRENT human and industrial context, and Russian space industry leaders have been so alarmed by those levels that they’ve repeatedly replaced the Russian Space Agency head with outsiders with nothing to show for it.”

This is a serious issue, and Congress’s response? To cut the funding for a Soyuz replacement.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

“Leaving Orbit”

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An interview with Margaret Lazarus Dean, whose new book seems to rest on false premises, almost an alternate fantasy history.

Part-memoir, part-historical document, part-manifesto, Margaret Lazarus Dean’s perceptive new book Leaving Orbit: Notes From the Last Days of American Spaceflight (which will be released May 19) asks the question, ”What does it mean that we have been going to space for 50 years and have decided to stop?”

Ummmm…we haven’t “decided to stop.” We’ve been going into space continually since the Shuttle was retired. Within two years, we’ll be doing it on American vehicles from American soil.

I do think there is a popular attitude right now, popular among young and old alike, that government always mucks everything up by its very nature, that private enterprise can always do everything better, and that attitude is particularly dangerous to funding big unprofitable projects like spaceflight. I meet a lot of people who are under the impression that SpaceX is going to take over, and improve upon, everything NASA did, but that’s a misunderstanding of the scope of SpaceX’s plans. A project like going to Mars, which is the next logical step, is so massively expensive it can only be paid for by a federal government. So if we want to go there, we are going to have to learn to trust.

Nonsense.