Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Low Fat, High Carb

31 Comments

I’m sure that this is just a coincidence:

It’s an interesting coincidence that this increase in obesity started roughly at the same time that the U.S. government started to advocate low-fat, high-carb diets. I remember that period pretty clearly, because I thought it was wonderful. Entenmann’s came out with no-fat pastries — the no-fat cherry coffeecake was one of my favorites — I could eat as much rice as I wanted, pasta was good and more pasta was better, as long as you didn’t use butter because of the evil saturated fat and cholesterol. But margarine, rich in transfats made by hydrogenating corn oil, was much better.

I remember that period clearly, too. It was during that time, after my father’s first heart attack at age 44, that the health gurus told him to go low-fat and eat more grains. Ten years later, he had another one, from which he died a month later. I blame the FDA/nutrition-industrial complex for his death (though it didn’t help that he smoked and had grown up on bagels, knishes and potatoes). And I find it particularly galling when idiots think that it’s anti-science to not buy the health-destroying junk science of the conventional wisdom, when the actual science indicates that it’s killing us.

[Update a couple minutes later]

In reading the Yglesias piece, it’s worth pointing out the flaw in the logic. No one is claiming that humans aren’t capable of rapidly evolving to accommodate dietary changes. That’s a straw man.

The issue is whether or not there is any evolutionary pressure for us to evolve to be healthy with a modern big-agro diet. In short, there is not. If you’re lactose intolerant in a dairy-based society, you’re unlikely to thrive or reproduce. But when it comes to grains, people do just fine on such diets when young, in terms of reaching reproductive age and rearing kids. The bad effects hit us generally later in life, when our genes no longer care (yes, I’m anthropomorphizing, but you know what I mean) whether we live or die, or are healthy or ill. So we go on, generation after generation, continuing to eat crap that’s bad for us, and our bodies not bothering to adapt.

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

“If It Saves Just One Life”

11 Comments

I agree with this take on how the terrorists won in Boston. This sort of irrational risk aversion is the theme of my book. “Safe” is never an option, in any absolute sense. In order to prevent a potential death of a citizen, the authorities shut the whole town down, costing hundreds of millions of dollars to the local (and probably national) economy. The whole town, that is, except for the Duncan Donuts shops. Which, as he says, really tells you everything you need to know. It was security theater, just like TSA.

Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

George W. Bush

…and the historians’ rush to judgment:

The animus that scholars have directed toward Bush has at times made a mockery of the principle of academic objectivity. At the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in January 2009, a panel on the Bush-Cheney years organized by a group called Historians Against the War featured scholars from Columbia, Yale, Trinity College, New York University and Yeshiva University. They compared the Bush “regime’s” security practices to those of Joseph McCarthy and various “war criminals.” The cover illustration of the roundtable’s report showed Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, seated on a pile of human skulls.

All of this overheated rhetoric and fear-mongering has come from academics who profess to live the life of the mind. In their hasty, partisan-tinged assessments of Bush, far too many scholars breached their professional obligations, engaging in a form of scholarly malpractice, by failing to do what historians are trained to do before pronouncing judgment on a presidency: conduct tedious archival research, undertake oral history interviews, plow through memoirs, interview foreign leaders and wait for the release of classified information.

I was no big fan of George Bush, but he was better than the available alternatives, and the fact that these hacks and mediocrities have such irrational hatred for him only increases my own respect for him. He must have done something right to get their leftist panties in such a twist.

Popular Culture

Paper Tigers

2 Comments

I was thinking about going to Anaheim this weekend to see Detroit play the Angels, but I’m sure glad I didn’t go today. I just turned on the game, and saw that they were down 9-0 in the bottom of the first inning Must have been a real pitching collapse. And not much hope for a comeback, given how lousy they’ve been hitting recently.

Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Two Terrorists

5 Comments

A tale:

As I said, people of a certain age remember this history. For those that don’t, Robert Redford is kindly about to release a movie recounting the Rockland robbery (albeit relocated to Michigan). By all accounts, the film lionizes the Weather Underground terrorists, Boudin and her accomplices.

Perhaps to bring it full circle, Professor Boudin can soon guest-lecture at a film class at Columbia when the Redford movie is screened.

Other than the passage of time, one can find no real distinction between the cowardly actions of last Monday’s Boston murderer and the terror carried out by Boudin and her accomplices. Yet today we live in a country where our leading educational institutions see fit to trust our children’s education to murderers and Hollywood sees fit to celebrate terrorists.

The Web site of Columbia’s School of Social Work sums up Boudin’s past thus: “Dr. Kathy Boudin has been an educator and counselor with experience in program development since 1964, working within communities with limited resources to solve social problems.”

“Since 1964” — that would include the bombing of my house, it would include the anti-personnel devices intended for Fort Dix and it would include the dead policeman on the side of the Thruway in 1981.

We have a sick culture, particularly in Hollywood and academia.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

Miranda

20 Comments

Some people are making silly (dare I say ridiculous?) comments in this thread about how I’ve suddenly become a big-government authoritarian because I don’t think that the Boston bomber should be read his Miranda rights, or necessarily questioned with a lawyer present. I think that this criticism arises largely from ignorance of the law and Constitution (along with a healthy dollop of hysteria). Orin Kerr explains the legal situation:

A lot of people assume that the police are required to read a suspect his Miranda rights upon arrest. That is, they assume that one of a person’s rights is the right to be read their rights. It often happens that way on Law & Order, but that’s not what the law actually requires. The police aren’t required to follow Miranda. Miranda is a set of rules the government can chose to follow if they want to admit a person’s statements in a criminal case in court, not a set of rules they have to follow in every case. Under Chavez v. Martinez, 538 U.S. 760 (2003), it is lawful for the police to not read a suspect his Miranda rights, interrogate him, and then obtain a statement. Chavez holds that a person’s Miranda rights are violated only if the statement is admitted in court, even if the statement is obtained in violation of Miranda. See id. at 772-73. Further, the prosecution is even allowed to admit any physical evidence discovered as a fruit of the statement obtained in violation of Miranda — only the actual statement can be excluded. See United States v. Patane, 542 U.S. 630 (2004). So, contrary to what a lot of people think, it is legal for the government to even intentionally violate Miranda so long as they don’t try to seek admission of the suspect’s statements in court.

Emphasis mine.

It’s just that simple. There is no need to get his testimony in court, because the other evidence against him is overwhelming. What there is a need to do is to find out if there are other co-conspirators, and other bombs, and other plans. And as Orin also points out, there are even ways to get the evidence into trial even under these circumstances, should it be necessary.

History, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

The Warsaw Uprising

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Thoughts on the seventieth anniversary:

I think it’s fair to say that the world has learned something from the war and the Holocaust. When hateful people begin referring to enemy groups as insects or clods of human feces or as sons of pigs and monkeys, we all know now, much better than we did in the 1930s, that this is part and parcel of the dehumanization that invariably precedes genocide. This is a hopeful collective memory earned from the war, and of course it applies universally.

Needless to say, there have been other, literally monumental efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust, and of the heroisms great and small of World War II. But as the generation that lived during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the war flies from us with each passing day, we Jews, anyway, ought to know better than to rely on stone and glass monuments and buildings and sculptures and physical structures to preserve memory. That is not the Jewish way. Other civilizations throughout history have built great buildings—pyramids and palaces and castles and cathedrals and great walls, and some have even carved huge idols in mountainsides. Yet all of those civilizations have either perished, been layered over to oblivion, or are likely one day to be layered over. Jews instead built palaces of memory in the hearts and minds of their children using words and melodies, not bricks and stone. Jews have translated their historical experiences into ramparts of the spirit.

That’s the purpose of the Seder, to preserve memories, and rituals like that grow more important as the events of seven decades past pass from living memory with the aging and deaths of their participants.

Space

The High Frontier

13 Comments

I just got an announcement from the Space Studies Institute:

At Space Access 2013 SSI President Gary Hudson announced the release of Gerard K. O’Neill’s classic The High Frontier as an exclusive Amazon Kindle ebook.

Today we have another announcement: From Saturday April 20th to Tuesday April 23rd, the Kindle edition of The High Frontier is absolutely free. Just open the Kindle app on your iOS, Android, Windows PC or Mac and type High Frontier in the Kindle store, or get your free Kindle edition directly from the Amazon.com website.

The High Frontier was a milestone in the work to make the dream of Space Settlement real for everyone. So many lives were changed by this book. Now a new digital generation can learn the needs, the goals and the potentials that Professor O’Neill made so clearly understandable.

With The High Frontier Kindle edition you get the full original artwork by Don Davis, the cover art of the 1988 second edition by Pat Rawlings (in full color on supported devices), full text searching and the bonus chapter “The View from 1988” that Dr. O’Neill added to the SSI second edition.*

Already own a copy of The High Frontier? Go ahead and get your Kindle version for free today and save your print version for special times.

Have friends who have never read The High Frontier? Pass this email along… and tell them to pass it along too!

Yes, proceeds from sales of The High Frontier Kindle edition at its regular price of $6.99 do add up to help the important research and projects of The Space Studies Institute and the free promotion does not, but we think that getting The High Frontier out there in the hands of a new generation is worth it. Don’t you?

Of course if you do think that supporting the work of SSI and promotions like this one are a good thing for the cause, we would welcome your your membership or donation. There is a simple PayPal link at SSI.ORG that you can use to show your support at any time.

Remember, this is a limited time free offer. Saturday April 20th to Tuesday April 23rd only.** After that, the retail price is back in effect. So get your FREE copy of The High Frontier Kindle edition today!

That book significantly altered the trajectory of my life when I was in college.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The “Right Wing” And The Media

24 Comments

Phil Klein describes what’s infuriating about media coverage of extremist violence:

…the reason why conservatives get irked when “right wing” is used in reference to major acts of violence — often without an iota of evidence to back it up — is that the term “right wing” is broadly applied by the media to the entire conservative movement. I don’t think “right-wing” Jennifer Rubin and Sheldon Adelson get pumped every April for Hilter’s birthday, that “right-wing think tanks” like the Heritage Foundation burst out the champagne on the Columbine anniversary, or that “right-wing rock star” Scott Walker is a big fan of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Even putting aside the bias issue, it’s just lazy and imprecise journalism to use the term “right-wing” so broadly that it could refer to anybody from a libertarian who believes in a small centralized government to somebody who wants to restore the Third Reich.

As a rule of thumb, I think journalists should avoid terms like “right-wing” and “left-wing” in basic news coverage. But given that the idea of a right vs. left dichotomy is so ingrained in our political lexicon, it’s unlikely that shying away from this terminology would make a difference at this point. Instead, I think that if reporters mean to refer to a threat presented by a specific group — neo-Nazis, Islamic radicals, anarchists, white supremacists, or so on — they should do so. If they have broader category in mind, they should use a broader term, such as “domestic extremism.” But throwing around a term like “right wing” whenever violence strikes — which is associated with conservatism in the American political context — is irresponsible.

It’s worth pointing out, though, that there is an asymmetry here. The Left is generally proud to wear the label (when they’re not attempting to mislead by calling themselves “liberal” and “progressive”). I don’t know very many conservatives (maybe none) who refer to themselves as “right wing,” and no libertarians who do so. I certainly don’t accept the label, and never have.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!