…posts more pitiful results.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Bombs In Iraq
How they saved lives in Boston.
As the old expression goes, it’s an ill wind that blows no good.
Earth Day
German taxpayers have poured $130 billion into subsidizing solar panels, but ultimately by the end of the century, this will postpone global warming by a trivial 37 hours. The electric car is even less efficient. Its production consumes a vast amount of fossil fuels, and mostly it utilizes fossil fuel electricity to be recharged. Even if the U.S. did reach the lofty goal of 1 million electric cars by 2015 — costing taxpayers more than $7.5 billion — global warming would be postponed by only 60 minutes.
These beguiling policies cost a fortune but make little difference to the environment because the technologies are still not ready. That’s why we need to invest more in long-term research and development for green innovation. This would be much cheaper than current environmental policies and would end up doing more good for the climate.
But it wouldn’t pay off political cronies.
As he notes, it’s time to start having sensible, not economically stupid environmental policies.
[Update late morning]
The EU carbon market continues to collapse.
Good.
Yearning For Some Global Warming
It’s too wet and cold to plant this spring.
The Lame-Duck President
Clarice Feldman knows why he squawks.
It’s all he knows how to do.
[Update a while later]
Thoughts on the brilliant political strategery of Maureen Dowd:
One interesting thing about Ms. Dowd’s description of “hardball” political tactics is just how dainty and genteel her brass knuckle suggestions actually are. A speech, an appeal to reason: there is nothing here about lucrative contracts for political supporters, promises of sinecure jobs for politicians who lose their seats, a “blank check” for administrative backing on some obscure tax loophole that a particular politician could award to a favored client; there’s not even a delicate hint about grand jury investigations that can be stopped in their tracks or compromising photographs or wiretaps that need never see the light of day. Far be it from Ms Dowd to speak of or even hint at the kind of strategy that actual politicians think about when words like ‘hardball’ come to mind. Ms Dowd speaks of brass knuckles and then shows us a doily; at some level it speaks well of Ms. Dowd as a human being that even when she tries she seems unable to come up with an offer someone can’t refuse.
This is more broadly a problem of gentry liberal politics. Gentry liberals desperately want politics to be clean, to be about the “issues.” And they yearn for their heroes to eschew all those nasty tricks of machine politicians. Thus liberal columnists like Dowd give liberal heroes like Obama two contradictory missions: fight the fight cleanly, but win big. Even when she’s buffeting President Obama over the head with her laptop, screaming at him to fight harder and dirtier, she can only think in terms of ineffective gestures, talking points more clearly recited, and speechmaking.
Maureen Dowd will clearly not be in much demand as a political strategist after this column, but the President needs to pay it some attention. Many liberals like Ms. Dowd have extremely unrealistic ideas about where the country stands and how politics work. They genuinely believe that a huge majority (90 percent!) is slavering at the bit to get more liberal legislation passed. They genuinely believe that the presidency is invested with awesome and numinous powers that can translate the will of the 90 percent into sagacious liberal laws without doing anything dirty or distressing.
When, inevitably, reality falls short of their hopes, they don’t re-examine their ideas about how politics work or where the country stands. Instead they blame the President for failing to deliver what he clearly could if only he were willing to try.
The delusions have no end. Not to imply, of course, that the president is competent. But as this failed presidency gets longer in the tooth, the long knives will be out among the Left against its author. Revolutions always eat their own.
Being Normal
Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt:
You see, the human desire to mimic and fit in is one of our strongest instincts. We are social apes. And we take our cues from stories, whether those stories unroll before our eyes, are in a sacred book, are passed down in the culture, or are poured at us in books and TV.
Now, here’s the thing – the Marxists understand this all too well. A few of you, before, when I called them a religion (there is no such thing as a secular religion, btw. Believing in afterlife is not needed for a religion. If I’m informed correctly some older forms of Judaism are at least mum on the subject. Communism is a mystery religion, relying on “something happens” to make their paradise come about right here on Earth. To their credit they work towards the ‘something” that is to transform man. To their lack of credit, both their goal and their methods are repugnant.) But they are. They have created their fantastical past paradise – the supposedly communitarian past/female dominant option not included, though they let the feminists run with it – their fall from grace – the introduction of private property – their sin – “greed”, meaning wish for personal improvement in circumstances – and their hope of paradise – the emergence of the homo Sovieticus, though I suppose they don’t call it that now. After that, of course, it would be the return to the communitarian paradise.
(They fail to understand that their communitarian paradise is actually a h*ll of individuals being treated as things, and that, because the collective can’t ever decide things as a collective, an individual ends up taking control. Which takes us right back to feudalism. But let that pass. And having told a commenter not to trust enemies of a religion as information on it, I’m bound to say I’m not. I was taught by true believers. It just didn’t take.)
I’ve always found normality to be highly overrated, myself. It’s not normal, for instance, to be much smarter than average, by definition. I’m always amused when people complain about gays wanting to “normalize” their behavior (which is clearly abnormal), as though there is a moral component to statistics.
Low Fat, High Carb
I’m sure that this is just a coincidence:
It’s an interesting coincidence that this increase in obesity started roughly at the same time that the U.S. government started to advocate low-fat, high-carb diets. I remember that period pretty clearly, because I thought it was wonderful. Entenmann’s came out with no-fat pastries — the no-fat cherry coffeecake was one of my favorites — I could eat as much rice as I wanted, pasta was good and more pasta was better, as long as you didn’t use butter because of the evil saturated fat and cholesterol. But margarine, rich in transfats made by hydrogenating corn oil, was much better.
I remember that period clearly, too. It was during that time, after my father’s first heart attack at age 44, that the health gurus told him to go low-fat and eat more grains. Ten years later, he had another one, from which he died a month later. I blame the FDA/nutrition-industrial complex for his death (though it didn’t help that he smoked and had grown up on bagels, knishes and potatoes). And I find it particularly galling when idiots think that it’s anti-science to not buy the health-destroying junk science of the conventional wisdom, when the actual science indicates that it’s killing us.
[Update a couple minutes later]
In reading the Yglesias piece, it’s worth pointing out the flaw in the logic. No one is claiming that humans aren’t capable of rapidly evolving to accommodate dietary changes. That’s a straw man.
The issue is whether or not there is any evolutionary pressure for us to evolve to be healthy with a modern big-agro diet. In short, there is not. If you’re lactose intolerant in a dairy-based society, you’re unlikely to thrive or reproduce. But when it comes to grains, people do just fine on such diets when young, in terms of reaching reproductive age and rearing kids. The bad effects hit us generally later in life, when our genes no longer care (yes, I’m anthropomorphizing, but you know what I mean) whether we live or die, or are healthy or ill. So we go on, generation after generation, continuing to eat crap that’s bad for us, and our bodies not bothering to adapt.
SF On TV
Michael Stracynski explains why most of it is awful.
Lachrymosity
Why do humans cry? Actually, I’d like to know if science has an explanation for why John Boehner does.
The EU Carbon Market
…is dying.
Can’t happen too soon.