Category Archives: Social Commentary

Seven Unhealthy Foods

…that turn out to be good for you. It’s hard to reconcile this, though:

…he scientific consensus on whether saturated fats are bad for us is changing. Now researchers are stressing that saturated fats like coconut oil actually lower bad cholesterol in our bodies.

With this:

If you consider popcorn something to douse with “butter-flavored topping” and shovel in your mouth at the multiplex, then keep it on the “bad” list. A study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest has concluded that movie theater popcorn—a medium tub, mind you—has 1,200 calories and 60 grams of the worst kind of saturated fat.

So what is the “worst kind of saturated fat”? I see nothing wrong with butter on popcorn (and to the degree there is, it’s the popcorn, not the butter).

She also reinforces the myth that “low calories” = “healthy.”

Peer Review

Over a hundred published papers have had to be withdrawn because they turned out to be computer generated:

Labbé emphasizes that the nonsense computer science papers all appeared in subscription offerings. In his view, there is little evidence that open-access publishers — which charge fees to publish manuscripts — necessarily have less stringent peer review than subscription publishers.

This sort of thing is why I pay no attention to warm mongers who tell me to publish in a peer reviewed journal. Peer review, to the degree that it’s done with any rigor at all, turned out to be “pal review” in climate science, as revealed by the CRU emails.

Venezuela

Chavez’s legacy and deadly end game:

As the economy has deteriorated, the government has resorted to dubious stopgaps such as price controls. The price controls have produced more shortages, leading to more stopgaps … and more political repression to control complaints about the shortages and stopgaps. People made much of the fact that Chavez won elections — but less of the fact that he won them in the context of government policies that required television stations to broadcast hours of his speeches every week. And that he silenced stations that opposed him.

This has only continued to get worse under President Nicolas Maduro. Having shrunk the space for legitimate opposition so far, its only outlet seems to be the streets.

They’re streets that the murderous Maduro should be dragged through. But the White House, and much of the media, remains silent.

Climate Parasites

That’s actually a much better rejoinder to “climate deniers” than global-warming Nazis:

The name “climate parasites” performs two jobs with exactly two words. It derails completely the enemy’s position that our side consists of people who are totally ignorant of climate science, or choose to ignore it. We acknowledge without hesitation that climate change is a proven fact of nature. The name also, however, marginalizes the other side by putting its members into the same category as indulgence sellers and rainmakers: opportunistic frauds who preyed on superstition and natural disasters respectively to separate honest people from their money.

Which is exactly what’s been happening, with Al Gore as king of the con artists.

[Via Judith Curry, who has additional interesting links on the collapse of the “consensus,” which was never anything but the fallacious band-wagon psychology.]