Culinary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society, Weird

Holy Chilole

4 Comments

I like me some chiles, but these people are nuts:

Mr. Bosland claims to have broken the two million Scoville mark in February 2012 with his Trinidad Moruga Scorpion. That is the same strength as police-grade pepper spray — a substance no sensible person would let travel through his digestive tract. Mr. Bosland hasn’t yet submitted paperwork to Guinness for the official record, and his claim really burns up Mr. de Wit, who insists his pepper is still the hottest. Only chemical chromatography that measures several samples for their average level of capsaicin, the chemical that gives peppers their bite, can establish a record claim. But Mr. Scott, one of the few people on Earth who has tasted both varieties, says the Moruga Scorpion is clearly hotter.

I used to grow habaneros on the patio (and I still have a container of dried ones, years old, to spice up a chili), but I hadn’t realized that they were now growing peppers in the mega-Scoville range.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

California

3 Comments

If you’re unhappy about the way things are going in the no-longer-Golden State, you’re obviously a racist.

[Update a while later]

And if you support gun-control laws, you’re a racist.

Really.

I’m going to just start saying that, completely unironically, because it certainly is objectively so in its impact. When someone argues for gun control, say that that’s a racist position, and explain why. They do it to us, with a lot less basis.

Same thing applies to wage controls, and immigration amnesty, all things that are highest on the president’s agenda. They all have disparate impact on blacks.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Bob Woodward

21 Comments

The truth about him.

I disagree that Nixon’s first term was a success, domestically, unless by that you simply mean that he accomplished what he set out to. His policies were hardly conservative — he introduced wage and price controls, and the double nickel speed limit, the idiotic bane of my youth that wasn’t really undone until we got a Republican Congress in 1994. But I agree that the impeachment mood was driven far more by personal dislike for him than actual guilt. Bill Clinton got away with many things, and worse things, that Nixon was merely accused of. His primary crime, if it was one, was hiring ethically-challenged aides. It is interesting to speculate how much better off the Vietnamese would have been if he had been president in 1974.

[Update a while later]

I celebrated Nixon’s resignation at the time, but I’d been raised to hate him by Democrat parents. But the Clinton administration was when I finally turned my back on the Democrats as irredeemably corrupt and partisan. Nixon was hounded out of office, with the support of members of his own party, who found his behavior rising to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, even though he was probably innocent of any actual crime. Clinton, on the other had, had his party circle the wagons around him, even though he had committed multiple federal felonies, after taking an oath to see that the law was faithfully executed, in the service of seeing that a young woman over whom he had great power and was sexually abused by him, didn’t get a fair trial, and sending out his winged monkeys to trash the reputations of her and other women that he raped and molested. There were a few honest Democrats in that episode, but the vast majority of them were disgusting partisan hypocrites, never to be taken seriously again.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Economist’s Climate Alarmism

9 Comments

Thoughts on their backing off:

…in January, they gave up on the global climate treaty approach, and are now acknowledging the many nuances inherent to climate modeling. This is a sign that the global intellectual and political establishment is gradually distancing itself from the climate radicals and taking a more thoughtful and balanced approach. We also hope it’s a sign that they’re beginning to realize a more fundamental truth about the politics of climate change: that green hysteria and doom-mongering are leading causes of climate skepticism.

I’ve always been appropriately skeptical about the modeling:

I guess I am a denier. Here’s what I deny.

I deny that science is a compendium of knowledge to be ladled out to school children like government-approved pablum (and particularly malnutritious pablum), rather than a systematic method of attaining such knowledge.

I deny that skepticism about anthropogenic climate change is epistemologically equivalent to skepticism about evolution, and I resent the implications that if one is skeptical about the former, one must be similarly skeptical about the latter, and “anti-science.”

As someone who has done complex modeling and computer coding myself, I deny that we understand the complex and chaotic interactions of the atmosphere, oceans and solar and other inputs sufficiently to model them with any confidence into the future, and I deny that it is unreasonable and unscientific to think that those who believe they do have such understanding suffer from hubris. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, extraordinary policy prescriptions require extraordinary evidence.

The world seems to be catching up to me.

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