Category Archives: Political Commentary

Political Commentary, Science And Society

Was Barbie Wrong?

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Girls have caught up with boys at math.

Does this vindicate all of the mature, liberated women who had to hie to their fainting couches at Larry Summers’ comments a few years ago?

Not really. He never said that boys were better, on average, than girls. His comment was that there was a much higher standard deviation for boys, which was why there were more brilliant mathematicians among them (it also means that there are more innumerates among them). This was posited as a possible explanation for the disparity in math PhDs and faculty between men and women, a conservative proposition for which he was hounded from the presidency of Harvard (though it was really just the last straw, and excuse).

Political Commentary, War Commentary

Israeli Thoughts On The Messiah Visit

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From Carolyn Glick:

I generally try to stay as far away as I possibly can from people who say they can make oceans recede. Our paths didn’t cross. In fact, I managed to be out of the country on Wednesday.

…Obama acts like a European leader in his treatment of Israel. On the one hand, he professes this profound respect for Israel and the Jews, and goes on and on about how our security is important to him. On the other hand, he espouses policies that undermine Israeli security and threaten its survival, and demands that the Jewish state become the only state that turns its other cheek towards our enemies as they try to kill us. This is the same sort of message that we hear from all Europeans leaders. And it is tiresome and insulting.

Beyond that, Obama is in a unique situation because of the adulation he enjoys from the U.S. and Western media. The media is willing to ignore all of the substantive contradictions inherent in his policy pronouncements and to base their support for him on a quasi-religious faith. I don’t remember this ever happening before in an American election — at least not to the same extent. It is an interesting sociological phenomenon that is worthy of academic research. On a political level, it makes debate very difficult since Obama is treated more as a symbol than a politician. And it is hard to debate a symbol.

How long before this bubble pops? Robert Bidinotto thinks it may have already started.

Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Fat Fight Continues

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John Tierney has the latest:

What we have to keep in mind here is that nutrition is a science (or at least should be) and science is about generating hypotheses, making predictions from our hypotheses, and then seeing if they hold true. The relevant hypothesis here — i.e., what we’ve believed for the past 30-odd years — is that saturated fat causes heart disease by elevating either total cholesterol or LDL cholesterol, specifically. So our prediction is that the diet with the higher saturated fat content will have a relatively deleterious effect on cholesterol. We do the test; we repeat it a half dozen times in different populations. Each time it fails to confirm our prediction. So maybe the hypothesis is wrong. That seems like a reasonable conclusion. No one is proving anything here — as some of your respondents like to decry — we’re just looking at the evidence and trying to decide which hypotheses it supports and which it tends to refute.

…These latest trials just happen to be the best data we have on the long-term effects of saturated fat in the diet, and the best data we have says that more saturated fat is better than less. It may be true that if we lowered saturated fat further — say to 7 % of all calories as the American Heart Association is now recommending — or total fat down to 10 percent, as Dean Ornish argues, or raised saturated fat to 20 percent of calories, as Keys did, that we’d see a different result, but that’s just another hypothesis. The trials haven’t been done to test it. It’s also hard to imagine why a small decrease in saturated fat would be deleterious, but a larger decrease would be beneficial.

I think that what the nutrition industry and the FDA have done over the past decades with their pseudoscience war on dietary fat borders on the criminal. I’m pretty much convinced at this point that the biggest culprit in both our health and weight is starch and refined sugars, and that the FDA “food pyramid” has been, and remains (despite recent improvements) quackery, not science.

Political Commentary, Satire

He Brought Light Unto The World

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Gerard Baker finally sees the light himself:

As word spread throughout the land about the Child’s wondrous works, peoples from all over flocked to hear him; Hittites and Abbasids; Obamacons and McCainiacs; Cameroonians and Blairites.

And they told of strange and wondrous things that greeted the news of the Child’s journey. Around the world, global temperatures began to decline, and the ocean levels fell and the great warming was over.

The Great Prophet Algore of Nobel and Oscar, who many had believed was the anointed one, smiled and told his followers that the Child was the one generations had been waiting for.

And the polar bears rejoiced.

Political Commentary

We Are The World

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Lileks reviews Obama’s empty speechifying in Berlin. It’s not a pretty sight:

He also called for an end to nuclear weapons. (This was also Reagan’s dream, but he had a different way of going about it.) Of course, this isn’t going to happen, but it sounds nice. Who wouldn’t want a world in which everyone decommissions the nukes, and Iran says “wait, what? We thought these were cool. Well, then, we’ll give them up. Geez, next thing you’ll tell us, Izod shirts with popped collars are out.” We will never poke the Genie back in the bottle, and Obama knows this. But the words loft well on the breath of the assembled. The problem, however, is that he didn’t just set forth ideas humanity would be wise to make manifest – he made them moral imperatives that must be done now, because the THIS IS THE MOMENT, and NOW IS THE MOMENT THAT THIS IS, and the moment to come in a few moments is also the moment, but it’s a few moments past the previous moment, which was also now. THIS IS THE MOMENT to do something about Darfur. Fine. What? THIS IS THE MOMENT to do something about Burmese dissidents. Fine. What?

Nothing will be done about either; they are, unfortunately, matters inconsequential to the general order of things. This is not to say that they are not obscene, or horrific, or more evidence of human perfidy both general and specific, but just as the world summed the strength to turn away from Rwanda and Cambodia, it will manage to struggle with the daunting task of doing nothing about Darfur or Burma. The drone of a jet engine outside your window, bearing you to another international conference, does an admirable job of masking the sound of a machete striking bone down below.

As always, read the whole thing.

[Update a while later]

I have to also say that the unexplained image of the Magritte painting in response to the Obama campaign claim that the campaign speech was not a campaign speech was brilliant. One of the things that’s great about Lileks is that he respects his readers’ intelligence.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Space

Not This Again

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The “rocks have rights” crowd are worried again about vandalizing space:

Edward O Wilson has suggested that biophilia, our appreciation of Earth’s biosphere, is a by-product of evolving in this environment. If he’s right, we might find we don’t care about other worlds in the same way. This raises the alarming prospect of rapacious lunar mining altering the view from Earth.

Maybe our biophilia will kick in here: after all, our view of the Moon is one of Earth’s natural vistas. Surely we can agree that we don’t want that changed? It is an awesome thing to look up and remember that human footprints once marked the Moon’s surface. It’s quite another to imagine the moon looking like an abandoned quarry.

No, we can’t agree. Note that this was in the context of a discussion on “eco issues” on the moon.

Here’s the “eco issue” on the moon (and in the rest of the universe, as far as we know right now). There is no “eco” there. There is also no “bio” for our “biophilia” to kick in about. Ecology and biology are about life, something that exists only on earth. It’s one thing to want to preserve an ecosystem, but when one simply wants to preserve the entire universe in its current “pristine” state, there’s something unsettling and misanthropic going on.

Why is it all right for a meteroid to slam into the lunar surface and leave a crater (which has happened billions of times throughout history, and continues today) which is how the moon got to look the way it is, but a pit for mining is verboten? Would he object to seeing the lights of a lunar city up there? Does he have any idea how far away it is and how much mining one would have to do to see it from earth, even with a telescope?

What is this worship of entropy? What is this loathing of humanity? What is this apparent loathing of life itself?