Automakers ask Pruitt to roll back the Obama rules on mileage.
CAFE should be repealed, period. Also federal toilet-tank standards, and light-bulb laws. The federal government has no business whatsoever telling us what how efficient our personal items should be.
I’m no Trump fan, but I think all the pearl clutching from the media over his “so-called judge” tweet was ridiculous. So does Jonathan Turley. And as always, it’s particularly ridiculous coming from people who probably had no problem with Obama upbraiding (and in the process lying) the Justices who had honored him with their attendance at the State of the Union over Citizens United.
…as a metabolic disease. A long but interesting essay.
At least the community is starting to wake up to the hazards of sugar. I’ve seen a proposal to make food stamps ineligible for items containing it. Makes sense to me. It could help a lot with the obesity epidemic.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related thoughts from Glenn Reynolds.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Health authorities continue to fail us:
Considering the above, no one in their right mind would take any kind of dietary advice provided by the authorities at face value. It’s little wonder then that so many are taking matters into their own hands. Thirty years ago, if the USDA, AHA, or AMA told you something was bad for you, you stopped eating it. You didn’t question, because they were the ones with credibility and years of study. It was simply too much trouble for the average person to find the information they needed. Thankfully with the internet, all of the information needed is now available to anyone who wants it. We no longer have to put blind trust in authority figures because we can sift through the information ourselves and ask the right questions. If anything, the glut of information shows that the public’s trust in nutrition advice given by the authorities and media was sorely misplaced.
Same thing with climate, for the same reasons: there’s a lot of public policy, and money, at stake.
This post is related to this one. I agree with Ben Shapiro:
Unfortunately, many conservatives have embraced this sort of binary thinking: If it angers the Left, it must be virtuous. Undoubtedly, that’s a crude shorthand for political thinking. It means you never have to check the ideas of the speaker, you merely have to check how people respond to him.
That’s dangerous. It leads to supporting bad policies and bad men. The enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend. Sometimes he’s your enemy. Sometimes he’s just a dude sitting there minding his own business.
You don’t have enough information to know.
The logic of “if he melts snowflakes, he’s one of us” actually hands power to the Left, by allowing leftists to define conservatives’ friends. It gets to choose whom we support. This isn’t speculative. It happened during the 2016 primaries, when the media attacked Trump incessantly, driving Republicans into his outstretched arms. The media’s obvious hatred for Trump was one of the chief arguments for Trump from his advocates: If, as his detractors claimed, he wasn’t conservative, then why would the leftist media hate him so much?
And yes, many of Trump’s policies are bad, and he is in many ways a bad man. I’m glad she lost, but I don’t have to be glad he won, and because I was never a supporter, I don’t have to reflexively defend everything he does, though I will in fact defend him when the attack is unfair.
Read the whole thing.
[Thursday-morning update]
How Trump could create a Republican split. Or lovefest.
BTW, I’ve never predicted that the Senate would remove Trump. Just that, unlike her, it could.
Trump is beating it at its own game.
I’m glad someone finally is, but I wish it were someone both more knowledgable and less childish. It’s possible to play that game without being him. I could certainly do it.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Trump haters: Do these two thought experiments. I can easily imagine the latter, and would vastly prefer it. Though I’d prefer him with policies less economically ignorant.
…never really died. A brief bio of Bob Ettinger.
Of course, it’s worth noting that cryonicists do believe that patients in suspension aren’t dead. That only occurs after information death (as occurs rotting in a grave, or being cremated).
…are flawed. That’s putting it mildly:
Professor Curry said: “It’s not just the fact that climate simulations are tuned that is problematic. It may well be that it is impossible to make long-term predictions about the climate – it’s a chaotic system after all. If that’s the case, then we are probably trying to redesign the global economy for nothing”.
I’ve been saying that’s likely the case for years. I’ll look forward to reading her paper.
This is a good overview of the issues involved in deciding to fly crew on the first flight. If they decide to do this, I don’t want to hear a single word about delaying Commercial Crew until it is “safe” enough.
[Update a while later]
Wow, never been a big George Abbey (senior) fan, but he’s calling for cancellation of SLS:
Abbey thinks the architecture of NASA’s future plans should be thoroughly examined and redrawn. It won’t even require a budgetary increase — just a smarter allocation of the currently available funding. For instance, he suggests scrapping the SLS program altogether. There’s too much redundancy in the heavy-lift rocket market — SpaceX is working on their Falcon Heavy, Blue Origin is busy developing the New Glenn booster, and United Launch Alliance is drawing up plans for a Vulcan rocket.
From his lips to Trump’s (and Congress’s) ears.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Another call to end SLS/Orion, over at Scientific American, from Howard Bloom:
If NASA ditched the Space Launch System and the Orion, it would free up three billion dollars a year. That budget could speed the Moon-readiness of Bigelow’s landing vehicles, not to mention SpaceX’s Falcon rockets and could pay for lunar enhancements to manned Dragon 2 capsules. In fact, three billion dollars a year is far greater than what Bigelow and Musk would need. That budget would also allow NASA to bring Jeff Bezos into the race. And it would let NASA refocus its energy on earth-orbit and lunar-surface refueling stations…plus rovers, lunar construction equipment, and devices to turn lunar ice into rocket fuel, drinkable water, and breathable oxygen. Not to mention machines to turn lunar dust and rock into building materials.
This new Moon program could be achieved within NASA’s current budget. In fact, members of the group I run — the Space Development Steering Committee — estimate the total cost of what I’ve described (Moon landings plus a permanent moon base) at ten billion dollars. That’s just three years’ worth of the money currently being funneled into the SLS and the Orion.
At some point, this will become conventional wisdom.
[Update a few minutes later]
Wayne Hale has a prescription for NASA that is politically impossible to fill. I’d note that there’s nothing new about this; many of us observed these problems in the 80s and 90s. It’s what happens to a bureaucracy when what it does is not nationally important, it’s captured by its customers, and Congress can do whatever it wants secure in the knowledge that none of it will affect an election.
People complaining about this from Trump (as with many other things they complain about from Trump) have short memories:
Even the Washington Post had to admit all was not well in Obama world when they reported that the White House wasn’t ready for conflicts over policy: “President Obama’s advisers acknowledged Tuesday that they were unprepared for the intraparty rift that occurred over the fate of a proposed public health insurance program, a firestorm that has left the White House searching for a way to reclaim the initiative on the president’s top legislative priority.”
Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics was “stunned” that Obama “would be caught off guard by this,” adding that his “lack of foresight” was “absolutely inexcusable.” “How could they not have anticipated this?” Cost asked. “How could they possibly have been surprised that the left and right flanks of the party would not see eye to eye?”
Seems like things haven’t changed that much, at least rhetorically. “But Trump is worse!” many might claim. Yet that isn’t true at all. What’s worse is the way it’s being reported and repeated. The claims of incompetence are rushing like a torrent from every direction and with such hysteria that you’d think the chaos of Armageddon was upon us.
But that was Saint Barack! How could it be?
Working on a new venture, an op-ed about the hypocrisy of the NASA safety culture, renovating the house, and a long essay on the potential for private robotic planetary exploration.