…that few in the media seem to want to talk about, because it doesn’t fit The Narrative.
Another madman:
[Updaate mid morning]
The madness lobby. It is kind of bizarre to have a lobby for an illness that fights to prevent treatment.
Category Archives: Science And Society
Deferred Gratification
What’s the present value of a future marshmallow? Even five minutes into the future?
It’s made all the harder of course, not just by the fact that kids have lower impulse control, but by the fact that a minute lasts forever when you’re a kid.
I also think that this is a parable for our current economic straits.
Reining In The EPA
Will the Senate do it?
I think there’s a good chance. There are a lot of Democrats up for reelection next year who aren’t going to be willing to fight it. The question is whether or not the president will be willing to risk a veto. Especially if it may get overridden.
Deinstitutionalization
I wrote yesterday that there are no acceptable changes to current law that would have prevented Saturday’s horrific events, but Clayton Cramer says that perhaps there is one:
In 1950, a person who was behaving oddly stood a good chance of being hospitalized. It might be for observation for a few days or a few weeks. If the doctors decided that this person was mentally ill, they would be committed, perhaps for a few months, perhaps longer. Hospital space was always at a premium, so generally, if someone was kept, there was a reason for it. The notion that large numbers of sane people were kept for no reason just has not survived my research efforts.
I will not claim that the public mental hospitals back then were wonderful places. They were chronically underfunded from the 1930s through the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, conditions in some were the shame of civilized people everywhere. (Ken Kesey wrote the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest after taking LSD and going to work at a mental hospital, and the film by that name is not a documentary.) But it did mean that many people who were mentally ill were either locked up (where they did not have access to guns, knives, or gasoline) or at least not sleeping on a park bench, catching pneumonia.
A large fraction of the “homeless” population are people who in earlier times would have had “homes,” though little or no freedom. But it’s not clear the degree to which people who are slaves to the roiling and chaotic chemical impulses of their brains can be said to be free, either, and some percentage of them endanger the rest of us, as we saw. But speaking as someone with a history of this in his family, it’s a very tough problem.
[Tuesday morning update]
“Politically incorrect” thoughts from Dr. Helen.
[Bumped]
One Down
…but plenty to go. The House Global Warming Committee is no more.
Good riddance. It’s morning in America.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
There is a lot of plastic trash floating in the Pacific Ocean, but claims that the “Great Garbage Patch” between California and Japan is twice the size of Texas are grossly exaggerated, according to an analysis by an Oregon State University scientist.
I’m shocked, shocked that an environmental issue has been overhyped by the media. This part had me scratching my head, though:
Calculations show that the amount of energy it would take to remove plastics from the ocean is roughly 250 times the mass of the plastic itself;
Huh? If they’re talking about the mass equivalence of the energy in an Einsteinian sense, that’s obviously nonsense, but I’m sure that’s not what they mean. But what do they mean?
They’re Not Light Bulbs
They’re highly efficient miniature heaters. And as a bonus, they give off some light.
How did we manage to have major industrial countries be run by idiots?
Botched Environmental Predictions
Here are eight.
Speaking of which, here’s some new research (yes, “peer reviewed”) indicating that most of the warming modelling done to date is invalid. I’m shocked, shocked.
Decades from now, scientists, real ones, are going to be amazed at the hubris of today’s generation of climate “scientists,” given how little we really understand this complex and chaotic phenomenon.
A Man-Made Famine
Fresno is the agricultural capital of America. More food per acre in more variety can be grown in the fertile Central Valley surrounding this community than on any other land in America – perhaps in the world.
Yet far from being a paradise, Fresno is starting to resemble Zimbabwe or 1930s Ukraine, a victim of a famine machine that is entirely man-made, not by red communists this time, but by greens.
That’s why they call them watermelons. There’s not much difference between green and red these days.
The Reality-Based Community
“Liberals” are more likely than conservatives to believe in ET.
One of the annoying things about being a space policy and technology expert is that many assume that you are knowledgeable about, and have in interest it, this topic. If you’re doing a call-in show on space, it’s inevitable that someone will call in about it.