The equipment for the home cook is getting better and cheaper.
Mine was very cheap. I just bought a controller for less than twenty bucks
The Modern Diet
Eleven charts that show what’s wrong with it.
It’s particularly interesting that the “obesity epidemic” started about the time the pseudo-scientists started recommending cutting back on dietary fat.
The Rushdie Fatwa
It’s been a quarter of a century:
Most analyses of the Rushdie Rules focus exclusively on the growth of Islamism. But two other factors are even more important: Multiculturalism as practiced undercuts the will to sustain Western civilization against Islamist depredations while the Left’s making common political cause with Islamists gives the latter an entrée. In other words, the core of the problem lies not in Islam but in the West.
Yes, and there is a deep rot in our universities, as demonstrated by groups like the American Studies Association.
Obama’s Other Health-Care Lie
Of course he knew that the the site was having problems.
As Jonah notes:
As the article points out this all flies in the face of countless denials from the White House that the president had any idea implementation of Obamacare would be spotty. If that’s the case, what in the world did Obama and Sebelius discuss at those meetings? It seems to me the only options are: She was utterly clueless and misled the president by accident. She wasn’t clueless and knew there were problems but misled the president on purpose. She wasn’t clueless and told the president the truth. I leave it to others to determine which of these three reflects best on the White House and the president’s managerial skills.
There was never any reason to think that the president had any managerial skills, other than “hope and change.” And he doesn’t seem to have acquired any after five years on the job.
From Russia, With Euphemisms
@JonahNRO on the historical ignorance of the Olympics coverage:
In America, we constantly, almost obsessively, wrestle with the “legacy of slavery.” That speaks well of us. But what does it say that so few care that the Soviet Union was built — literally — on the legacy of slavery? The founding fathers of the Russian Revolution — Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky — started “small,” merely throwing hundreds of thousands of people into kontslagerya (concentration camps).
By the time Western intellectuals and youthful folksingers like Pete Seeger were lavishing praise on the Soviet Union as the greatest experiment in the world, Joseph Stalin was corralling millions of his own people into slavery. Not metaphorical slavery, but real slavery complete with systematized torture, rape, and starvation. Watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, you’d have no idea that from the Moscow metro system to, literally, the roads to Sochi, the Soviet Union — the supposed epitome of modernity and “scientific socialism” — was built on a mountain of broken lives and unremembered corpses.
As he points out, imagine the outrage if similar language were used to describe the Nazi regime, complete with Swastikas. In a sane world, the hammer and sickle would draw just as much, if not more opprobrium.
The President’s Limiting Principles
…yesterday the president issued an executive order (probably preempted by the Fair Labor Standards Act, Service Contract Act, Davis-Bacon Act while violating the Walsh-Healey Act) raising the minimum wage for employees of certain federal contractors to $10.10 an hour. He did so, according to the text of the Order, to increase productivity and improve the economy. If a $10.10 minimum wage for a narrow sliver of the workforce will improve the economy, why not raise it to $20.10? Come on, boost it to $50.10 and really get the economy humming. A Mercedes in every garage.
Then there’s Obamacare. The president’s granted so many waivers and extensions completely contrary to the plain text of the statute it’s hard to keep track. He’s ostensibly done so to, among other things, give individuals and businesses time to comply with the law and avoid some of the immediate costs associated with compliance. Again, why stop with Obamacare? Why not extend this year’s income-tax filing deadline to 2017? Give taxpayers more time to comply and adjust to the costs of compliance. It’s the right thing to do.
Why indeed is $10.10 the right number? This complete arbitrariness reminds me of the story of how Roosevelt determined the daily price of gold:
…the exposure to investors that Morgenthau was getting through the gold purchase project of 1933 was already teaching him something. Investors didn’t like the arbitrariness. It took away their confidence. One day Morgenthau asked FDR why the president had chosen to drive up the price of gold by 21 cents. The president cavalierly said he’d done that because 21 was seven times three, and three was a lucky number. “If anyone ever knew how we really set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers etc., I think they would be frightened,” Morgenthau wrote in his diary. And they were: In the second half of 1933 a powerful stock rally flattened.
There is no more basis for the $10.10 number than there is for Roosevelt’s lucky number. But there are no limiting principles, as far as I can see. This is the totalitarian impulse.
Universal Pre-K
Forty-five reasons that it would probably be a waste of money.
It’s primarily a sop to the teachers’ unions.
Intelligence
Have they found a genetic basis for it?
It was always kind of loopy to imagine there isn’t one. That’s the sort of thing that only a leftist could believe.
Nutrition Science And Climate Science
How they’re alike:
Nutrition science and climate science share some common challenges: complex system(s) and many confounding factors. Severe tests for nutrition science can in principle be done, but they are very expensive and take decades. Severe tests for climate science require better observational evidence, particularly in the past.
When there’s no evidence to falsify what is merely a supposition,we are left with ”magical theories that explains absolutely everything – including diametrically contradictory phenomena, lack of logic and absence of evidence.”
There’s a lot of junk science associated with both.
The Second Amendment
Of course it secures the right to carry a gun. It’s astounding that anyone would argue otherwise.
[Update a few minutes later]
Eugene Volokh analyzes the ruling:
I think the Ninth Circuit majority’s analysis is correct on this, and the dissent’s is mistaken. The dissent keeps stressing that the case should be about whether the California ban on concealed carry is constitutional, and that Heller says that the concealed carry ban is indeed constitutional. But the California ban on concealed carry is part of a general scheme that bans the great bulk of all carrying in public for self-defense (unless one has a permit that the police may choose not to grant). It is this general scheme that violates the Second Amendment, even if a ban on concealed carry that left people free to carry openly would not do so.
The California ban was just an attempt to get around the Second Amendment, and even the Ninth Circuit recognized that.