Time to eliminate this subsidy to the rich.
Help, I’ve Fallen Down!
…and I can’t testify about Benghazi.
I’m sure the timing of this is purely coincidental.
Brain Food
If you want to be mentally sharp, lay off the sugar. It’s bad for you in lots of other ways, too.
A False Sense Of Security
It’s past time to put an end to “gun-free” zones.
Also, what can we do to stop massacres? Disarming the law abiding is exactly the opposite of what we need to do.
[Update a few minutes later]
The key difference between the Clackamas mall shooting and Sandy Hook Elementary.
Off The Air
Because I’m going in the air, to Missouri until Christmas. Probably no blogging until tomorrow.
Autism
The vast number (like 99.999….)% of autistics, and particularly Asperger’s sufferers have not, and will not slaughter kindergarteners. So let’s stop talking about the autistic sociopath?
My Fearless Prediction From The Latest Massacre
Someone will propose that kindergarten teachers with autistic children not be allowed to own guns.
The Doctor Won’t See You Now
Thoughts on the current state of the American health-care system, from Mark Steyn:
They gave her the usual form to fill in, full of perceptive inquiries on her medical condition: Do you wear a seat belt? Do you own a gun? How many bisexual men are you now having sex with? These would be interesting questions if one were signing up for eHarmony.com and looking to date gun-owning bisexuals who don’t wear seat belts, but they were not immediately relevant to her medical needs. Nevertheless, she complied with the diktats of the Bureau of Compliance, and had her medical records transferred, and waited . . . and waited. That was August. She has now been informed that she has an appointment with a nurse-practitioner at the end of January. My friend pays $15,000 a year for health insurance. In northern New Hampshire, that and meeting the minimum-entry requirement of bisexual sex partners will get you an appointment with a nurse-practitioner in six months’ time.
Why is it taking so long? Well, because everything in America now takes long, and longer still. But beyond that malign trend are more specific innovations, such as the “Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology,” which slipped through all but unnoticed in Subtitle A Part One Section 3001 of the 2009 Obama stimulus bill. Under the Supreme National Coordinator, the United States government is setting up a national database for everybody’s medical records, so that if a Texan hiker falls off Mount Katahdin after walking the Appalachian Trail, Maine’s first responders will be able to know exactly how many bisexual gun-owners she’s slept with, and afford her the necessary care.
If she’s really paying over a thousand a month for insurance, she’s overpaying. She should cut back to a high-deductible catastrophic plan, and just pay the doctor (or nurse practitioner) herself.
And ObamaCare is just going to make all this much worse.
Potential Massacre Mitigation
By coincidence, the (lame duck) Michigan legislature passed a bill allowing concealed carry in places where it had formerly been outlawed, including schools and day-care centers. But they still have the option of banning it themselves. Still, it’s a big step forward.
No Gravity Required
This is good news for space settlement:
The scientists ran their experiment on Arabidopsis plants—a go-to species for plant biologists. The control group was germinated and grown at the Kennedy Space Center (A), while the comparative group was housed on the International Space Station (B). For 15 days, researchers took pictures of the plants at six-hour intervals and compared them. Their results surprised even them: the plants in space exhibited the same growth patterns as those on Earth.
The researchers were looking for two specific patterns of root growth: waving and skewing. With waving, the root tips grow back and forth, much like waves. Skewing occurs when a plant’s roots grow at an angle, rather than straight down. Scientists don’t know exactly why these root behaviors occur, but gravity was thought to be the driving force for both.
So much for that theory. This means the potential for fresh food at ISS, if you’re a vegetarian (or even if not). They should be learning how to do weightless hydroponics. Of course, we still don’t know if animals, and particularly humans, can gestate, or how, and that’s true of partial gravities as well. And we’re not likely to until SSI gets funding for its variable-gravity lab.