The Bergdahl Backlash

Why Team Obama was blindsided:

This is a fundamental culture clash. Team Obama and its base cannot comprehend the values still cherished by those young Americans “so dumb” they joined the Army instead of going to prep school and then to Harvard. Values such as duty, honor, country, physical courage, and loyalty to your brothers and sisters in arms have no place in Obama World. (Military people don’t necessarily all like each other, but they know they can depend on each other in battle — the sacred trust Bergdahl violated.)

President Obama did this to himself (and to Bergdahl). This beautifully educated man, who never tires of letting us know how much smarter he is than the rest of us, never stopped to consider that our troops and their families might have been offended by their commander-in-chief staging a love-fest at the White House to celebrate trading five top terrorists for one deserter and featuring not the families of those soldiers (at least six of them) who died in the efforts to find and free Bergdahl, but, instead, giving a starring role on the international stage to Pa Taliban, parent of a deserter and a creature of dubious sympathies (that beard on pops ain’t a tribute to ZZ Top). How do you say “outrageous insult to our vets” in Pashto?

Nor, during the recent VA scandal, had the president troubled himself to host the families of survivors of those vets who died awaiting care. No, the warmest attention our president has ever paid to a “military family” was to Mr. and Mrs. Bergdahl.

He’s from a different country than many of us.

Transfats

Hey, let’s come up with a new poison to replace them with:

“In icings, PHOs provide the air-holding capacity to achieve specific desired gravities, along with the melting and spreading characteristics that allow icings to be evenly spread on cakes,” said Tom Tiffany, senior technical manager, ADM Oils in Decatur, Ill. “The heat stability enables the icing to remain stable when exposed to a variety of transportation and storage conditions.”

Dr. McNeill said icings sold at retail may require a shelf life of up to 1.5 years. If shelf life fails to reach that duration, consumers may open a tub of icing and find it’s “like a piece of concrete,” Dr. McNeill said.

To replace PHOs and still keep the desired shelf life in icings, formulators may use palm oil along with a liquid vegetable oil such as canola oil or sunflower oil that may keep saturated fat as low as possible, he said.

Guys, there’s this thing called “butter.” And “lard.”

As Dr. Meade says:

The NRC Report On Human Spaceflight

Well, it’s out, and depressingly familiar. There seems to have been very little imagination, and its authors seems stuck in the sixties. It’s basically Apollo to Mars.

Joel Achenbach has the story. I’m glad that at least they’re pointing out the safety issues with flying SLS so rarely, but a bolder report would have discussed what a disaster the program will be cost wise. I’ll have to read the report to see if they addressed the real issue, which is launch costs, but since they seemed to get all their input from NASA, I suspect that it will be completely ignored.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here‘s Eric Berger’s take.

Peter Glaser, RIP

I don’t see any details, but apparently he died late last week. I hadn’t seen him in a couple decades, but I know that he’d been ill for quite some time. I imagine many younger people in the space movement haven’t heard of him, but he was one of the luminaries back in the seventies, creating the potential economic driver for O’Neill colonies. Anyway, John Mankins seems to have taken up the baton from him for space solar power.

Grant And Lee

“These guys needed cell phones.”

All summer we’ll see the sequicentennials of that bloody summer of 1864, as Grant marched down toward Richmond, after (unlike his predecessors) not retreating after the bloody battle at The Wilderness, as Sherman was in turn moving down into the deep south. The two campaigns ended up saving Lincoln’s presidency in the fall election.

Cold Harbor was one of the bloodiest, complete with the beginnings of trench warfare that was ultimately a presage to the first world war. The European observers, used to Napoleonic tactics, were appalled at the butchery of rapid-fire weaponry, a technological advance (if one can call it back) to which took decades for tactics to adapt. The only major change in the half century afterward of carnage, really, was the tank.

Dietary Animal Fat

It’s long past time to end the war on it:

The public MUST NOT let TBFS slip slowly into oblivion. Nina’s first story should create an outraged public that demands the following:

  1. Government-sponsored nutrition must be totally terminated.
  2. Freedom of information in valid nutritional sciences must be made widely available.
  3. All citizens must have the right to design their own nutrition plans.
  4. A primary prevention program based on eliminating the causes of diseases must be implemented.

It won’t happen unless we make it happen. It has to become a political issue. Attacking Michelle’s school-lunch tyranny would be a good start.

[Update a few minutes later]

And yet the USDA is still spending millions to propagandize us about low fat:

The USDA also proposed a study on changing how food is described on menus, labeling low-sodium and low-fat versions as “regular,” and “framing regular versions of certain snack products as high-fat or high-sodium.”

I’d like to see someone on the Hill make an issue of this.

Google Chrome

Go home. You’re drunk.

Messed Up Chrome

This is not atypical. After a while, every page starts to refuse to load, or becomes unreadable, and you can paint weird things on it by just waving the cursor over various areas. It’s version 35.0.1916.114 stable, running in Fedora 20.

In frustration, I uninstalled and tried running the current beta. It had its own problems, with continual tab crashes and freezing the machine.

I switched a while ago from Firefox, for various reasons. Opera starts chewing up half my CPU after being up a for an hour or so. It just seems like every browser sucks.

Mann Suit Update

We got what looks to be very good news today. While the appeals court didn’t actually rule on our case, they did issue an opinion in BuckleyBurke, which is closely related, as it has to do with the right to an interlocutory appeal under collateral-order doctrine in an anti-SLAPP case. Their arguments largely mirror the ones we make in our brief, and they seem to be quite aggressive in their defense of the First Amendment, so it seems likely that there’s a very good chance that they’ll actually address our merits, and perhaps ultimately end up dismissing.

[Daturday afternoon update]

Sorry, had the name of the case wrong. Here‘s Les Machado’s take:

Takeaway: the headline here is the Court’s conclusion that the denial of a special motion to quash is immediately appealable. While the Court was careful to not extend its ruling to the denial of a special motion to dismiss, parties who are currently appealing from the denial of special motions to dismiss have to be buoyed by the decision.

That would be (among others) me.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!