We need an FDA commissioner who sees it. That also would apply to criminally terrible government dietary advice.
Category Archives: Science And Society
The Paleo Diet
Gee, so it turns out that it won’t kill you after all:
Even short-term consumption of a Paleolithic-type diet improved glucose control and lipid profiles in people with type 2 diabetes compared with a conventional diet containing moderate salt intake, low-fat dairy, whole grains and legumes.
The biggest nightmare for Big Pharma is that we can treat Type 2 diabetes (which seems to be a diet-related “disease”) with an improved diet.
Lawsuit Update
Tomorrow is the deadline for filing amicus briefs on our behalf. Judith Curry has filed another one. I haven’t read it yet, but I expect it to be good.
[Update a while later]
Reading through it, it would seem to make a strong case for her own defamation, though she’s above that.
[Update late morning]
Some thoughts on “alternate facts” in the climate debate:
My tweet asked the climate scientists on my feed whether they agreed with the statement specifically the use of the word “all”. My expectation was that a reasonable core of climate scientists would agree that Dr. Mann had overstepped the science. This was not the case. Instead, what I got was overwhelming support for Dr. Mann with not a single non-skeptic initially commenting negatively. It was as if Dr. Mann was the pope and the climate community his congregation. Nothing he said could be considered to be anything less than the truth, even if it took huge convolutions of logic to make it true. In the last couple weeks the term “alternative facts” has entered our lexicon. Well in the next few paragraphs I want to unpack Dr. Mann’s “alternative fact” and see if it is indeed defensible. Then I will go into what I feel this means for the climate change debate.
RTWT.
First-Amendment Rights
..of public employees: A quick cheat sheet.
What I found amusing about the tweets from Badlands National Park yesterday (which were cheered by the supposed fans of “science”) were how either they weren’t “scientific facts” (no, it is an opinion, not a fact, that last year was the “hottest on record”) or trivial and irrelevant chemistry (“A gallon of gasoline puts X pounds of carbon into the atmosphere when burned). But I was also amused at the concern that the employees who had done so had probably been fired.
One of the many reasons federal employee unions are terrible. It's almost impossible to discipline people. https://t.co/quxjqIG9t6
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) January 24, 2017
@michelelfrost A high-level friend of mine tells stories about how he couldn't get rid of bad secretaries, except to promote them.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) January 24, 2017
Badlands National Park, fully sentient now, lumbers towards Washington, DC to exact its revenge. pic.twitter.com/ZLoL6ajq6t
— pourmecoffee (@pourmecoffee) January 24, 2017
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the story for those who don’t know what I’m talking about.
Scott Pruitt And The Environment
Yes, this is an argument about what constitutes “pollution” and how best to deal with it, not whether or not we are indifferent to it. But of course, if the Left had no strawman arguments, they’d have no arguments at all.
Anti-Biotic Resistance
Reversing it with a single molecule.
Faster, please. I don’t want to go back to the early 20th century.
Greg Autry
…is one of the first political appointees to NASA. That’s good news, I think. He knows what a programmatic disaster SLS is.
[Monday-morning update]
Thoughts from Bob Zimmerman, who agrees that it’s potentially bad news for SLS/Orion (i.e., good news for people who want to actually accomplish things in space with NASA funding).
As he notes, it’s probably also bad news for Gavin Schmidt and GISS.
We Have A New POTUS
I’m glad Obama’s gone. I’m less thrilled that we have Trump. As others have noted, it was a pretty protectionist inaugural address.
But I’m happy with his picks, and I think that Gelernter would be a good pick for science adviser. And here’s one more reason Trump won.
A Yale professor who is a pioneer in parallel computing is anti-intellectual because he doesn't like Obama, guyshttps://t.co/tRvPN9mede
— Robert Mariani (@robert_mariani) January 19, 2017
[Update a couple minutes later]
And yes, Trump should defund the National Endowment for the Arts.
To me, it's not about saving money, because it's a trivial amount. It's about ending federal involvement in things it shouldn't be doing. https://t.co/Jctm6RwGvD
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) January 19, 2017
Herpes
They may have found a vaccine/sort-of-cure for it.
Our Petition For Rehearing
We’ve requested a rehearing en banc (that is, the full court) by the DC court of appeals on the mistaken ruling in December of a division of that court. Amici (and I’d expect at least as many as the last time) have another week to file.
[Late-morning update]
Cato has filed an amicus brief:
Political thinkers would certainly like to believe that historical analogies are integral to expressing their views on important political choices. Just in the last year, one candidate for office has been compared to Hitler, 21 Hitler, 22 Hitler, 23 Hitler, 24 and Mussolini. 25 Indeed, that public figure was so annoyed by this criticism that he threatened to “open up the libel laws” to prevent such speech in the future. Luckily for him, the division’s decision has done this work for him.
I don’t think they realize what a can of worms they opened.
[Later-afternoon update]
National Review has also filed a petition.