Category Archives: Social Commentary

Hardened Mummy Arteries

Wow, is this article a nutritionally ignorant mess.

I find it not at all surprising that ancient Egyptians suffered from heart disease. We already knew that they had diabetes. Both are caused by a diet heavy in grains.

The assumption that eating fatty foods is the problem is just typical lipidophobia. And I didn’t think that smoking hardened arteries — I just thought that nicotine constricted them.

What is puzzling, though, is the Aleutian hunters. I wonder what their diet was? I’d have thought it similar to Inuit, who despite their high intake of blubber, didn’t have any significant diabetes or coronary disease until they started eating imported flour and sugar.

[Update a while later]

Living to be a sesquicentennarian through super resveratrol. That would be great. It would put my mid-life crisis about a decade and a half ahead of me, instead of behind.

Green Cars’ Dirty Little Secret

They’re not very green. All they do is move the emissions to a different location.

The electric car might be great in a couple of decades but as a way to tackle global warming now it does virtually nothing. The real challenge is to get green energy that is cheaper than fossil fuels. That requires heavy investment in green research and development. Spending instead on subsidizing electric cars is putting the cart before the horse, and an inconvenient and expensive cart at that.

It’s not about the economics. It’s about feelings, which are of course the highest value.

Reining In The Idiots

I’d like to see a bill like this pass in every state:

The bill also includes a section mandating counseling for school officials who fail to distinguish between guns and things that resemble guns. School officials who fail to make such a distinction more than once would face discipline themselves.

The discipline should be firing. Anyone stupid enough to do such a thing twice, after counseling, shouldn’t be allowed within two hundred feet of a kid.

Who Can Defend Hugo Chavez?

Idiots:

In a different era, he might have been called a fascist. After all, Hugo Chávez was an anti-Semitic demagogue and chauvinistic nationalist who hated Israel, hated the United States, hated democracy, and favored state control of the economy. A onetime paratrooper and failed coup leader, Chávez aggressively militarized Venezuelan society, creating pro-government citizen brigades to serve as his own praetorian guard and arming them with Russian-made assault rifles. He threatened neighboring countries and constantly warned of looming foreign invasions. He promulgated wild conspiracy theories about Jews and Americans. He befriended the most reactionary and fascistic governments on earth, including the theocracy in Iran, the gangster regime in Russia, and the racist Mugabe dictatorship in Zimbabwe.

I’m happy to call him one in this era. And he is living proof of Jonah Goldberg’s thesis.

Gun Guys

What “liberals” need to understand about them:

I want to go back to the gun law history. In 1987, Florida responded to a wave of crime by loosening restrictions. Were you surprised by what happened as a result?

At the time, I thought, “Oh, this is going to be a bloodbath.” And it wasn’t. The late ’80s were a very violent time in the U.S. The crack cocaine thing was in full flower. Then Florida did this, and most liberals thought it was crazy. But crime dropped. A lot. Crime there is now half of what it was before then.

…These are precisely the kind of people the Democratic Party says it exists to serve. Over and over, people I met on my trip would say, “I don’t get it. Democrats are the party of the working man. How can the Democrats do this?” They feel so alienated that they won’t listen to the Democrats on climate change or health care or immigration or anything else. As a Democrat, it broke my heart to hear this over and over and over again. These are our guys. These are our people, and they hate us. We take this anti-gun position and we’re giving these people away, and we’re getting nothing in exchange. We are not making the country safer.

He might want to reconsider some of the other things that “liberals” think are crazy.

Really, Facebook?

I just got this email from them:

Steve Mims mentioned you in a comment.

Steve wrote: “The ACLU wholeheartedly supports Senator Paul’s efforts to make the Obama administration explain why it feels it has the right to kill Americans on American soil when they are not attacking America.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/03/06/Exclusive-ACLU-backs-Rand Simberg

Apparently the bot that makes these connections is confusing me with Rand Paul, to the point that it’s actually substituting my name for his.

[Update a few minutes later]

OK, I’ve deleted the link to the Facebook discussion, per comments.

[Update a while later]

OK, here‘s a safer link to the original FB post.