…takes on the Chinese over The Big Bang Theory being banned in China.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
The Age Of Obama
Time to start thinking about its passing, and what comes after.
It’s not passing fast enough for me.
53 percent in the 2014 poll say it is more important to have Republican congressional majorities to check Obama’s policies, compared to 39 percent who believe it is more important to have Democratic congressional majorities to support those policies.
I continue to think it not outside the realm of possibility that the Republicans could run and win on a ticket of repealing and replacing the Democrats in the White House. Particularly as new revelations come to light about the IRS. At some point the scandals will metastasize into one big one.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: The Benghazi deniers continue to panic.
As I tweeted a while ago, it’s pretty amusing to watch all the concern trolling from Democrats about the new investigation.
[Update a few minutes more later]
Chris Stevens was one of them, a Team Obama loyalist. But they abandoned him and dishonored him in death because the President’s political needs outweighed his life. The heartlessness of all these caring, compassionate Democrats would impress Putin – if it was ever applied to America’s enemies.
Indeed.
[Update a while later]
Building the case for Obama’s impeachment. Should be a very timely book.
The National Climate “Assessment”
Judith Curry has the goods on this latest bout of junk science:
My main conclusion from reading the report is this: the phrase ‘climate change’ is now officially meaningless. The report effectively implies that there is no climate change other than what is caused by humans, and that extreme weather events are equivalent to climate change. Any increase in adverse impacts from extreme weather events or sea level rise is caused by humans. Possible scenarios of future climate change depend only on emissions scenarios that are translated into warming by climate models that produce far more warming than has recently been observed.
Roger Pielke approves.
Universities
It’s not really a new thing, but this is the latest indication that most universities aren’t. They clearly want a diversity in everything except opinion.
[Update a few minutes later]
“I blame Rice as much as the bullies. By withdrawing, Rice sends a message to other campuses that the tactic works.”
Sadly, yes.
Swing That Thing
An interspecies blues jam session.
“So”
So, I was reading this article about how people shouldn’t start a response to a question with the word, “so.”
I’ve noticed this trend for the past few years, and it seems to be on the increase.
I have been known to do that in blog posts, but a new blog post actually is a change of subject.
Stop doing it when publicly responding to questions. Just stop.
The Big Fat Surprise
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.
Executions
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?
Is Obama Too Smart To Be President?
I still await evidence that he’s smart at all, other than all of the bien pensant telling me he is. If he’s all that smart, he hides it well. As I noted on Twitter earlier:
This administration has more corruption than Nixon's, with none of the competence.
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) May 2, 2014
Animal Farm
Who knew that the book was a warning against rampant capitalism?
Someone needs to tell George Orwell.
I’d like to say it merely helps to be insane to work at MSNBC, but I’m starting to think it really is a job requirement.