Category Archives: Science And Society

Business, Economics, History, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Don’t Know Much About History

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In attacking his critics as “flat earthers,” Obama screws up.

Yes, people who, unlike him, actually understand the math and physics (and business prospects) of alternative and conventional energy are “flat earthers.”  Once again, the man is impervious to irony.  And how insufferable this kind of thing is.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Heh: “Obama in Tucson & today: “Make sure we talk with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds, you Flat-earthers.”

[Update a few minutes later]

Where Obama gets his history.

Doesn’t explain the Rutherford B. Hayes slander though. And against a man who was wounded four times freeing Obama’s ancestors. Wait, what?

[Update a while later]

Don’t know much about energy, either. The US has sixty times as much oil as Obama claims.

It’s almost as though he just makes stuff up.

[Update mid afternoon]

#BarackObamasPresidentialFacts:

“Purple Hayes” was the first Jim Hendrix song about a president.

They’re hilarious. I think I’ll steal MfK’s from comments and add it to the mix.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Un-Manned

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The Journal takes on the Jerry Sandusky of climate science:

…for all his caviling about “smear campaigns,” “conspiracy theorists” and “character assassination,” Mr. Mann is happy to employ similar tactics against his opponents. Patrick Michaels, former president of the American Association of State Climatologists and a past program chair of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Applied Climatology, is introduced as “a prominent climate change contrarian at the University of Virginia primarily known for his advocacy for the fossil fuel industry.” (Nowhere does Mr. Mann explain why a scientist might be more easily corrupted by a check from, say, a coal company than by one from a politically controlled institution.)

Instead of molesting children, though, he molests the data and his critics.  But unlike Sandusky, Penn State continues to whitewash it.

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society, Weird

Adaptation

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Some have said that the cost-effective solution to climate change is to adapt (I’m in this camp). But I think this may be going overboard:

Some of the proposed modifications are simple and noninvasive. For instance, many people wish to give up meat for ecological reasons, but lack the willpower to do so on their own. The paper suggests that such individuals could take a pill that would trigger mild nausea upon the ingestion of meat, which would then lead to a lasting aversion to meat-eating. Other techniques are bound to be more controversial. For instance, the paper suggests that parents could make use of genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth smaller, less resource-intensive children.

What could go wrong?

And of course, it’s all about the liberty:

It’s been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China’s one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions—what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that’s the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says “you can only have one or two children.” A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.

Yes, that’s what we really care about — a fixed allocation of greenhouse emissions per family.

More thoughts from Mark Wilson at Ricochet.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Science And Society

Nitrates And Nitrites

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The junk nutritional science:

…a 2005 study by scientists with the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute with investigators supported by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, found that sodium nitrite infusions led to the production of nitric oxide which increased blood flow and protected the hearts and livers in mice undergoing experimental heart attacks and liver injuries, reducing heart muscle and liver tissue damage.

All of this experimental research is preliminary but does illustrate that in the past 15 years, “we’ve gone from considering all of these things to be toxic and carcinogenic to realizing that [nitrites are] playing a fundamental homeostatic role,” said Dr. Ferric Fang, M.D., professor of laboratory medicine and microbiology at the University of Washington in Seattle. They’re a normal, natural part of a healthy body and not chemicals to fear.

So, hotdogs and processed meats are condemned as junk food because they contain nitrates, which they don’t, while vegetables are declared health food because they’re free from the same chemicals, which they’re not. It may be awhile before people will get to the point of calling bacon and hotdogs health food.

Woody Allen’s notion in Sleeper is looking more and more prophetic.

[Update mid morning]

Some disgusting anti-bacon propaganda.