Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

Technology Law

2 Comments

…will soon be reshaped by people who don’t use email:

as Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Parker Higgins convincingly argues, it’s not the justices’ lack of personal experience with technology that’s the problem; it’s their tendency to not understand how people use it. Returning to Justice Roberts’s concerns about villains with two phones: if he is in fact unaware of how common that behavior is – he certainly didn’t watch Breaking Bad – then that suggests a major gap in his understanding of society.

This lack of basic understanding is alarming, because the supreme court is really the only branch of power poised to confront one of the great challenges of our time: catching up our laws to the pace of innovation, defending our privacy against the sprint of surveillance. The NSA is “training more cyberwarriors” as fast as it can, but our elected representatives move at a snail’s pace when it comes to the internet. The US Congress has proven itself unable to pass even the most uncontroversial proposals, let alone comprehensive NSA reforms: the legislative branch can’t even get its act together long enough to pass an update our primary email privacy law, which was written in 1986 – before the World Wide Web had been invented.

So the future of our privacy, of our technology – these problems land at the feet of a handful of tech-unsavvy judges.

Kind of scary.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

The Deindustrialization Of California

Why both Nissan and Toyota left the no-longer Golden State.

I’ll bet if South California happens, they’d consider returning there.

In fact, that brings up a point that a lot of people miss when analyzing what the new states’ politics would be. They do so (as far as I know) by analyzing the current population of each region. But as I’ve said, if it really happened, I’d pull up stakes in LA County and head to Orange County. I’ll bet a lot of other people would as well. Which means that whatever sensible voters are currently in what would be West California would likely abandon it, making it even more socialist, and accelerating its fiscal collapse.

[Update a few minutes later]

I hadn’t read the whole piece when I posted the above, but this is an interesting point, in terms of why Nissan and Toyota were there in the first place:

As did the oil industry, the auto industry, and, particularly, its Asian contingent, came to Southern California for good reasons. Some had to do with proximity to the largest port complex in North America, as well as the cultural comfort associated with the large Asian communities here. Back in the 1980s, the expansion of firms like Honda, Toyota and Nissan seemed to epitomize the unique appeal of the L.A. region – and California – to Asian companies. Today, only Honda retains its headquarters in Los Angeles (Nissan left in 2005), while Korean carmakers Hyundai and Kia make their U.S. homes in Orange County.

First, note that the Koreans wouldn’t have to move — they’d already be in the new state. Also, the port is just a few miles north of the Orange County line. That is, just a few miles north of the new state line. So it would make a world of sense for the Japanese companies to move back to South California, and for Honda to head a few miles south. Particularly if the new state had no state income tax…

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Congressional Standing

7 Comments

Can Congress sue the president for not faithfully executing the laws?

Sure seems like it to me. It would be nice to see what the Founders intended: checks and balances between the branches, instead of between political parties.

Apropos of nothing in particular, David Rifkin is one of my attorneys in the Mann suit.

[Update a while later]

Why are the House and Senate surrendering so much power to the Executive branch?

The American people do not understand what their congressmen and women are saying. Simply put, the legislative branch is legislating the American people out of their favor with bills that both they, and the American people, cannot understand. Legislators need to understand their own bills. The American people need to understand. The American people want to understand. The president is more appealing and more trusted than the Congress because his message is simpler. The president’s message, delivered in friendly, fatherly sound bites, is comprehensible to the people. It is clear, concise and easy to understand. Congress’ message with 2,700 page bills and 1,200 page bills is simply incomprehensible, unfathomable. Consequentially, legislators are deemed untrustworthy by the American people.

The legislators in the legislative branch need to act and they need to act quickly, very, very quickly. They need to pass rules that limit their own largess in order to prevent the progressives’ “legislators are corrupt” campaign from succeeding. They need to save our country by returning the people’s house to the people. They have let it be run by lawyers. They have leveled Americans’ trust with legalese.

The legislators need to simplify, simplify, simplify. They can start by reducing the number of pages in their bills and by summarizing their objectives. Comprehensive bills are compromising our republican form of government. The American people are turning to the wrong branch of government – the executive branch, the president, the branch that is most vulnerable to tyranny and corruption. Ironically, the American people are trusting the branch that can enact the most uncensored control over the people if left unchecked.

Maybe no so much any more, though, fortunately. At least judging by recent polling.

Humor, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture

Dudes

1 Comment

All the president’s dudes:

Let’s start with that ten p.m. phone call between Obama and Hillary on the night of the terror attack. (I’m sorry –video demonstration.) We don’t know what they actually said. And since it was only the two of them, we probably never will. But we do know this — they hate each other. But at the same time their futures were inextricably tied in this case. Talk about drah-mah…. all that gnashing of teeth and swallowing of emotion while being forced to agree on their farshtinkener story. The dialogue writes itself.

And speaking of the former secretary of State, how’s this for a scene — Hillary at the Benghazi victims’ funeral reassuring the grieving parents they’ll get that “evil filmmaker” who’s behind their sons’ murders when all the while she knows that’s baloney? Wow. Great stuff. Straight out of a vampire movie – Dracula or even the classic Nosferatu. Angelica is just made for it. (I know wrong hair color, but that can be fixed and she’s been there before. She killed as Morticia Addams. Just think what she would do with the scenery chewing iconic “What difference does it make?” scene? Ladies and gentlemen of the Academy, need I say more?)

Dude.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Big Fat Surprise

2 Comments

Another victory for low carb, high fat.

That Eisenhower anecdote is sad. Nina Teicholz’s new book looks interesting, too:

The fact is, there has never been solid evidence for the idea that these fats cause disease. We only believe this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics and bias.

Gee, sort of like climate “science.”

[Sunday afternoon update]

How the war against saturated fat created carb overload, obesity and heart disease:

…there was no turning back: Too much institutional energy and research money had already been spent trying to prove Dr. Keys’s hypothesis. A bias in its favor had grown so strong that the idea just started to seem like common sense. As Harvard nutrition professor Mark Hegsted said in 1977, after successfully persuading the U.S. Senate to recommend Dr. Keys’s diet for the entire nation, the question wasn’t whether Americans should change their diets, but why not? Important benefits could be expected, he argued. And the risks? “None can be identified,” he said.

In fact, even back then, other scientists were warning about the diet’s potential unintended consequences. Today, we are dealing with the reality that these have come to pass.

One consequence is that in cutting back on fats, we are now eating a lot more carbohydrates—at least 25% more since the early 1970s. Consumption of saturated fat, meanwhile, has dropped by 11%, according to the best available government data. Translation: Instead of meat, eggs and cheese, we’re eating more pasta, grains, fruit and starchy vegetables such as potatoes. Even seemingly healthy low-fat foods, such as yogurt, are stealth carb-delivery systems, since removing the fat often requires the addition of fillers to make up for lost texture—and these are usually carbohydrate-based.
The problem is that carbohydrates break down into glucose, which causes the body to release insulin—a hormone that is fantastically efficient at storing fat. Meanwhile, fructose, the main sugar in fruit, causes the liver to generate triglycerides and other lipids in the blood that are altogether bad news. Excessive carbohydrates lead not only to obesity but also, over time, to Type 2 diabetes and, very likely, heart disease.

First emphasis mine. In that, it has much in common with climate “science.”

And as I’ve often noted, my father was a fatal casualty of that war, back in the late seventies.

[Update a few minutes later]

One other point, that I’d never considered before. The American Heart Association is probably responsible for more heart disease and cardiac (and stroke) fatalities than any other organization.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Executions

31 Comments

I’ve asked this question before, but don’t recall if it was ever resolved. Just before the Shuttle flight one pad rat was killed and others injured from hypoxia when they entered an area with a nitrogen purge:

When the workers stepped into the compartment, they would not have smelled anything peculiar or have had any other warning that they were entering a deadly area. All five men were reported to have passed out almost immediately, and soon afterward they were evacuated from the compartment. Dies Aboard Helicopter

John Bjornstad, a 50-year-old senior chemical technician, died aboard a helicopter that was carrying him to a hospital in nearby Titusville. The medical authorities explained that the nitrogen itself was not poisonous – it makes up nearly 80 percent of ordinary air – but such an exposure deprives a person of all oxygen. He dies of what is known as hypoxia, which is lack of oxygen.

Seems like a pretty painless way to go to me. Why not just a gas chamber and run nitrogen through it until brain death?

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Benghazi Lies

27 Comments

…continue to collapse:

A newly-released government email indicates that within hours of the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya; the State Department had already concluded with certainty that the Islamic militia terrorist group Ansar al Sharia was to blame.

The private, internal communication directly contradicts the message that President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice and White House press secretary Jay Carney repeated publicly over the course of the next several weeks. They often maintained that an anti-Islamic YouTube video inspired a spontaneous demonstration that escalated into violence.

You don’t say.

It’s nice to see Sharyl Atkisson finally free to do real reporting now that she’s out from under the strictures of the Democrat-enablers at CBS.

[Mid-morning update]

Boehner is (finally!) going to establish a special Select Committee. Rumor is that Trey Gowdy will lead it, which should have these criminals very worried.