The body is not that simple.
It sure would be nice if we’d do some actual science when it came to health care and nutrition.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Netanyahu
A subliminal reason that the White House has been freaking out about this is that the American people will once again see a strong, academically accomplished, articulate warrior and leader, and contrast him with Barack Obama.
[Update after the speech]
“Netanyahu is better in his second language than Obama is in his first.”
Yup.
Walker-Fiorina?
“Liberal” Academia
Kurt Schlichter has a modest proposal:
Understand that the purpose of modern American “education” is not to educate students. It is primarily to provide cushy, subsidized sinecures for liberal administrators and faculty while, secondarily, providing a forum to indoctrinate soft young minds in the liberal fetishes du jour. Actually educating students is hard, and a meaningful education is anathema to liberalism. In the liberals’ ideal world, the universities would simply fester with leftist nonsense and not even bother with trying to teach their charges anything at all. And today, it’s pretty close to being the liberals’ ideal world.
…As I discuss in my book Conservative Insurgency, and as others like Glenn Reynolds have observed, with modern academia we normal Americans are paying to support a suppurating abscess in our culture that, left untreated, will kill its host. We need to lance this boil and drain the leftist pus.
Except there’s nothing liberal about them.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is the kind of thing he’s talking about: Leftists outraged that a university won’t police the attire of students off campus.
As I said, there is nothing liberal about this. It’s totalitarian.
The Value Of College Degrees
Anyone who talks about the ROI of a degree without talking about the type of degree, or the relative value of one school over another, is either profoundly ignorant, or fraudulent. The fact is that there are a lot of degrees for which one would have to be a fool to put themselves deep into undischargeable debt to obtain. Unfortunately a lot of people don’t understand that, and are the most likely to get those worthless degrees.
Willie Soon
Strikes back against the inquisition.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the full statement:
I have never been motivated by financial gain to write any scientific paper, nor have I ever hidden grants or any other alleged conflict of interest. I have been a solar and stellar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for a quarter of a century, during which time I have published numerous peer-reviewed, scholarly articles. The fact that my research has been supported in part by donations to the Smithsonian Institution from many sources, including some energy producers, has long been a matter of public record. In submitting my academic writings I have always complied with what I understood to be disclosure practices in my field generally, consistent with the level of disclosure made by many of my Smithsonian colleagues.
“If the standards for disclosure are to change, then let them change evenly. If a journal that has peer-reviewed and published my work concludes that additional disclosures are appropriate, I am happy to comply. I would ask only that other authors-on all sides of the debate-are also required to make similar disclosures. And I call on the media outlets that have so quickly repeated my attackers’ accusations to similarly look into the motivations of and disclosures that may or may not have been made by their preferred, IPCC-linked scientists.
A double standard in the media. What a shock.
Roberts And ObamaCare
Damon Root’s take on why he’ll probably knock it down this time.
[Update late morning]
“Save us John Roberts, you’re our only hope.”
The Soon Et Al Paper
What is right, and wrong with it.
It’s always worth noting that the notion that CO2 is a greenhouse gas has never been in serious dispute, or even that the planet has been warming, in fits and starts, since the end of the LIA. The issue is feedbacks, and the limits of our ability to model them. We will probably get better at that in the future, but we currently suck at it, and it would be insane to base public policy on the models.
Anatomy Of A Smear
As I noted on Twitter, this provides a nice window into the leftist media’s mindset. Continue reading Anatomy Of A Smear
An Anti-Scientific Screed
…by a supposed climate “scientist.” Even ignoring the “denier” lunacy, this is wrong headed on multiple levels. No, science is not “an expert trust-based system.”
And then there’s this:
You cannot decide that you believe in penicillin or the principles of flight while at the same time disbelieve humans evolved from apes or that greenhouse gases can cause climate change.
I hope he understands climate better than he does evolution. I suspect he doesn’t.
Feynman wept.