Freeberg has the skinny.

When seconds count, police respond in minutes.

Read it.

This will clear up a lot of the confusion.

They lie when the truth would suffice, and they hold on to that lie, even doubling down on it, regardless of what evidence to the contrary comes to light.

When President Obama’s “If you like your plan you can keep your plan” lie was finally and irrefutably exposed, he didn’t apologize or explain why he’d lied. He just said he was sorry people got the wrong impression from his words, which, of course, could not have been clearer.

…

But the Bergdahl lie was hardly an orphan this week in the pantheon of progressive lies. Hillary Clinton, our next president as far the casual observer of mainstream media knows, told a doozy this week.

Read it.

After all, how dare a Catholic Archbishop come out in support of Catholic teaching?

As SFGate reports, in a letter to Cordileone, Pelosi, a self-proclaimed Catholic who supports abortion on demand and same-sex marriage – both of which are against the teachings of the Catholic Church – described the March for Marriage event as “venom masquerading as virtue” and said the participants show “disdain and hate towards LGBT persons.”

In the Good Old Days, she’d have long since been excommunicated. (Actually, the way it really works, she would have been recognized as having excommunicated herself.) But these are not those days.

And, of course, nothing is said of the ‘disdain and hate’ that ‘LGBT persons’ show toward normal people. ‘Degenerate is the new normal’ I guess.

Read it.

And we see how effective that has been. (I didn’t know it was up to them.)

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

That’s because all the affirmative action in the world can’t fix stupid.

In an interview with MSN.com, First Lady Michelle Obama explained she used to struggle to feed her kids right—even though she received an education from Harvard and Princeton.

Well, there’s the problem, right there. If she’d gone to Yale, it wouldn’t be a problem — except that you still can’t fix stupid.

Read it.

Instead the climatistas continue to behave like a cross between a religious cult and the mafia.  The latest outrage concerns Caleb Rossiter, a left-leaning professor of media studies at American University and a fellow with the very-left Institute for Policy Studies who wrote a terrific op-ed for the Wall Street Journal entitled “Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change.”*  Rossiter makes a simple point that escapes the climate policy “reality deniers” (sauce for the goose I say) that requiring expensive energy in an energy-staved world is to condemn millions of people to continue their lives of misery.

…

In an exclusive interview with Climate Depot, Dr. Rossiter explained: “If people ever say that fears of censorship for ‘climate change’ views are overblown, have them take a look at this: Just two days after I published a piece in the Wall Street Journal calling for Africa to be allowed the ‘all of the above’ energy strategy we have in the U.S., the Institute for Policy Studies terminated my 23-year relationship with them…because my analysis and theirs ‘diverge.’”

“I have tried to get [IPS] to discuss and explain their rejection of my analysis,’ Rossiter told Climate Depot. “When I countered a claim of ‘rapidly accelerating’ temperature change with the [UN] IPCC’s own data’, showing the nearly 20-year temperature pause — the best response I ever got was ‘Caleb, I don’t have time for this.’”

Read it. (PDF)

Burt Rutan lays it out in black & white.

Jim Goad follows the President no matter how far down he goes.

President Barack Obama—who would never lie…at least not intentionally…or at least he wouldn’t admit it…recently spoke at a Massachusetts school where he claimed that “30 to 40 percent” of the pupils are “DREAM kids,” which basically means that they are dreaming if they think they are here legally. He added that “our future rests on their success.”

Is this encouraging?

Most of the DREAMers are from Mexico, a nation of 120 million whose residents love their country so much, they keep fleeing it to live in the United States.

Apart from a mean IQ of 87, what will these diminutive and swarthy newcomers bring to the table in terms of success? In his book Travels in Mexico and Life Among The Mexicans, Frederick Albion Ober speaks of the nation’s “inventive genius.”

OK, then, what have Mexicans invented?

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Steve Sailer enlightens you.

Native populations within Mexico are pretty much the people who stayed home and didn’t out-marry. The working definition of an Indian in Mexico has been somebody who wears the distinctive clothes of his or her Indian people. If somebody leaves home and makes a new life in a different area, they typically wear the European-style clothes of the mestizo majority. If you put on European clothes, you are assumed to have chosen to belong to mestizo, because even if you are still 100% Indian, your descendants will likely be mestizo.

Read it.

The paramount privilege at universities is not race, class, or gender but intellectual soft despotism. More revealing, those who have pushed the check-your-privilege religion have not grasped this lesson.

A student whose worldview clings to that of university administrators and professors has the advantage of accessing university resources, money, and time to drive his cause. These instruments are far more powerful in granting benefits to politically preferred groups in higher education than subconscious biases in favor of particular races or classes.

…

Implicit acts of intellectual congruity—or “micro-aggressions,” in check-your-privilege parlance—are no less powerful in molding students’ minds into believing political discourse is acceptable only within certain boundaries. Subconscious decisions to assign course readings polished with a liberal slant; use class time to disproportionately cover liberal paradigms; and grade “conservative” arguments more critically in writing assignments are inevitable in a field in which 96 percent of Ivy League professors showered political contributions on President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, and in a field in which almost 90 percent of its members self-identify politically as “far left,” “liberal,” or “middle of the road.”

Read it.

As we have reported extensively over the past week, a Muslim imam who was invited to participate in the “prayer for peace” event at the Vatican on June 8 went off-script and asked Allah to help him gain victory over the unbelievers. The Vatican at first denied that any such thing had happened, and an edited video of the event was released that supported their denial — the end of Sura 2 Verse 286 that the imam quoted from the Koran had been judiciously removed from the publicized version.

Jan-Werner Müller reviews Peter Mair’s Ruling the Void.

The evidence Mair marshals to demonstrate the decline of parties is overwhelming. Although turnout isn’t progressively lower in every successive election, record troughs occur more often and in more and more places. Surveys confirm that the number of people who identify with a particular party is falling, while party membership is dwindling dramatically. Indifference, Mair argues, goes together with inconsistency. Voting has become more volatile, and although we can’t be sure what voters are thinking, it’s plausible to assume that taking politics less seriously translates into experimenting more freely with one’s ballot. That said, rising volatility could also indicate the opposite: that citizens think more carefully about their choices; that they don’t blindly follow a party allegiance they may well have inherited from their parents. For Mair, though, this is a problematic development. Parties used to be based on distinct social identities. In other words, they truly represented distinct sections of the population. Partisanship didn’t detract from, but increased, the legitimacy of the political system. Parties were not one mechanism among others that made ‘mass democracy’ acceptable: they were the principal means of transmitting popular will and opinion from civil society to the state. Crucially, they remained anchored in the former. Hence the importance of what Mair calls ‘representational integrity’: politicians could not simply go in search of support from the people as whole or adopt what Mair terms ‘the politics of “what works”’. The question was not ‘what works?’ but ‘what works for us?’ And that self-interest on the part of multiple constituencies was precisely what made democracy work as a whole.

Read it.

In most war games, players are out for blood. But a soon-to-be-released game from 11 Bit Studios turns that shoot ’em up convention on its head.

In This War of Mine, survival is the only goal. By day, your group of civilians hides from snipers. By night, you sneak out for building supplies and medicine, or contrive ways to capture rainwater for drinking.

…

“While designing a new game,” lead designer Michal Drozdowski explained in a blog post, he and his team read a viral online account called “One Year in Hell,” written by a Bosnian about his life in the early 1990s. “We learned about his hardships and the horror of that experience. We decided to work around this idea and make something real, something that moves people and makes them think for a second. It’s about time that games, just like any other art form, start talking about important things.”

This is, of course, horseshit. Games are recreations, nothing more, in which people do things that take them away from the tedium that constitutes the bulk of most people’s daily lives. I’d like to see the author cram golf or tennis or bowling into her grimly ideological framework of ‘talking about important things’.

If someone wants to create a simulation of what it’s like to be a civilian in a war zone, then he is certainly free to do so, just as he is free to write a story about the same thing — but it isn’t a game except in the most academic sense.

Read it.

They are as compact as classical gas heaters that only produce heat. Moreover, they can comfortably be mounted on the wall and easily be maintained. With an output of one kilowatt, they cover the average current consumption for a four-person household. The Federal Ministry of Transport and digital infrastructure BMVI is promoting Callux. Currently, in the European demonstration project ene.field (www.enefield.eu), about 150 further units are being installed in several European countries. In addition, Vaillant started the production of a small-scale series in early 2014. Parallel to the practical test, the two partners are already working on new models. „Now, it’s all about decreasing production costs and increasing the lifetime of the equipment,“ says Jahn.

Read it.

Ferran Adrià and Nathan Myhrvold are an odd couple. Adrià, the Catalan chef, is compact and handsome in an Antonio Banderas-meets-Leonard Cohen sort of way. When he tastes something he likes, he closes his eyes and says, “Fantástico.” Myhrvold, the Microsoft multimillionaire and inventor turned cookbook writer, is a gentler presence. Redheaded, he resembles a cartoon chipmunk, the kind that laughs when you poke its tummy. When he tastes something good, his cheeks glow as if his heart’s pilot light has been ignited.

The pair, both in their early 50s, are at the top of the culinary movement that’s become known as modernist cuisine, one that’s pushed chefs and intrepid home cooks to master a new batterie de cuisine (sous-vide vacuum sealers, ultrasonic homogenizers, centrifuges) and to fill their pantries with staples like xanthan gum and liquid lecithin. Cheerful rule-breakers, they are self-consciously in league with narrative-fracturing modernists in other disciplines — James Joyce in fiction, the Bauhaus school in architecture, Martha Graham in dance. They talk about food the way other people talk about novels or paintings, using terms like “whimsy,” “satire,” “nostalgia” and “trompe l’oeil” as often as “crispy,” “fat,” “salty” or “al dente,” usually without sounding obnoxious.

Read it.

The new aluminum air battery would recharge by filling it up with water.

Sarah Hoyt finds that her bullshit detector has gone off.

So instead I decided to follow right up on what Kate was saying yesterday and jump onto “Diversity is our Strength.”

Has anyone ever proven that? I mean in the terms that PC understands diversity that is.

Well, no. The supposed benefits of ‘diversity’ over any other kind of car is asserted but no attempt is ever made to demonstrated it. Like ‘we’re all immigrants’, it’s one of those platitudes that those who see it as self-evident see as self-evident, and everybody else is evil or stupid or both, probably both.

First, it assumes people are widgets. No, seriously. What would the idea that “diversity is having a black person on the team” mean, unless you think the contents of every black person’s head are exactly alike.

And once you realize this is what is at the basis of it, you’ll have trouble not laughing like crazy. Yep. Thomas Sowell, or the black guy next door? Totally the same thing, even though the guy next door is twenty and studying English. He could totally teach economics at any second. Because he’s black, and that’s all that matters.

Read it.

Counterintuitive though it may sound, the greater peacefulness of the world may make the attainment of higher rates of economic growth less urgent and thus less likely. This view does not claim that fighting wars improves economies, as of course the actual conflict brings death and destruction. The claim is also distinct from the Keynesian argument that preparing for war lifts government spending and puts people to work. Rather, the very possibility of war focuses the attention of governments on getting some basic decisions right — whether investing in science or simply liberalizing the economy. Such focus ends up improving a nation’s longer-run prospects.

The Voice of the Crust has spoken.

Read it.

Why bother stepping on your own dick when government is there to do it for you?

Read it.

But here are two things you need to know about life after an arm amputation: First, your center of gravity changes dramatically when you are suddenly eight pounds lighter on one side of your body. Second, while my arm may be missing physically, it is there, just as it always has been, in my mind’s eye. I can feel every digit. I can even feel the watch that was always strapped to my left wrist. When I tripped, I reached reflexively to break my very real fall with my completely imaginary left hand. My fall was instead broken by my nose, and my nose was broken by my fall.

Mark Steyn does what he does best.

My boys wanted to see X-Men 12 or whatever it is, so we tootled along and climbed into the old 3D specs. The film has a novel addition to Kennedy conspiracy theory, and Nixon stages the world’s most disastrous photo-op. But other than that it doesn’t intersect with anything real. Indeed, it felt kind of weird to be watching a movie where the good guys have to figure out how to save America from the most advanced, evolved, giant-sized, invincible supervillains ever devised, and then leave the theater and return to a world where, in Afghanistan, America is losing to goatherds and, in Iraq, to jihadist bandits whose greatest strategic insight is that you wait for the Great Satan to give the Iraqi Army state-of-the-art tanks and guns and then you stroll into town and steal them all. You can see why moviegoers might prefer the comfort of enemies who are all-powerful beings. I’ve been a little queasy about this cinematic trend for a few years now.

Read it.

Because of horrific conditions in Latin America coupled with President Obama’s decision to stop deportations of young illegal immigrants, 47,017 unaccompanied children were apprehended on the border from October through May, an increase of 92 percent from just one year ago, the National Catholic Register reports.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Coming soon to a major Reality Show near you….

Read it.

They don’t want ‘green’ power. They don’t want any power. They want to cancel the Industrial Revolution.

Read it.

Do not presume that, when a company installs an expensive device in your home, it is necessarily for your benefit.

Dusk Activated Half Acre Mosquito Trap

SmartJars.

Read it.

The notion of nomination by category is offensive on the face of it. MLK’s dream that people be judged by the content of their character and not the color (or shape) of their skin has turned into its opposite. Now pigment and plumbing are everything. If, in the wretched past, 1/16th black “blood” made one black, it is now a point not only of pride but of privilege. Heck, you don’t even need to prove your racial bona fides. Just FEELING that your cheekbones are high and that makes you a Cherokee is enough to land a coveted teaching position and be mentioned as a possible First-Runnerup Substitute Woman should the Low Information Voters be persuaded that a Benghazi is not a fancy sports car.

Can you imagine that it won’t even take until 2020 for the Perpetually Furious Grievance Crowd (PFGC) to demand a Gay President? A Hispanic Vice President? And why just a regular old boring gay person? That’s offensive to the Transgendered – the gay president should be a former man, now a woman, who is a lesbian. And why should the Hispanic Vice President be a citizen? How unfair to the undocumented! (assuming by then there are any undocumented left who haven’t been made voting citizens).

Read it.

Birther? Think Obama a secret Muslim? Hah! Amateurs!

Read it.

And don’t think that President Hillary wouldn’t bear that in mind.

Read it.

Odeh is a Palestinian woman charged with naturalization fraud. At issue are her answers on immigration forms to straightforward questions asked of all immigrants seeking visas and naturalization: Were you ever arrested? Convicted? Jailed?

Odeh answered no to these and other relevant questions when she sought a visa in 1994, her indictment says. The same answers were given in 2004, when she applied for naturalization as an American citizen.

She never told immigration officials about her 1969 arrest, conviction and subsequent 10 years spent in an Israeli prison for her role in bombing a Jerusalem supermarket where two men died. She was sentenced to life, but was released in a 1979 prisoner exchange.

That seems like the kind of information that an immigration official might want to consider in evaluating an applicant. Reubner asserts that Odeh “was brutally tortured into confessing a crime she did not commit.” Odeh’s word is the only basis for the torture claim. And not only is there no basis to say she didn’t do it, there’s video evidence placing her in the bombing conspiracy.

Tyler Cowan sees deeper than most.

Stross is a smart guy and I am an admirer of his writing. But my view remains pretty straightforward: when dislike of the policy choices of the electorate leads to a serious movement for secession, something has gone deeply wrong with the preconditions for democratic attachment.

Stross is a smart guy, but, like many ‘smart guys’ (especially those who make their living from ‘the arts’), he’s pretty much clueless when it comes to political (and, in these degenerate modern times, that includes economic) questions. The impression I get is that the reason Scots want their independence is that they don’t think that the current England-dominated regime in London is socialist enough; I’d be in favor of giving them independence and then seeing how long it takes them to wake up when there isn’t a robust English economy propping up their dream welfare state.

The fact that Stross sees ‘dark forces of reaction cropping up across Europe’ is precisely because of the policies that he, politically, favors — an all-encompassing welfare state, confiscatory levels of taxation in the pursuit of ‘equality’, and an open-door policy toward immigration that is greasing the skids for Britain to become Just Another Failed Muslim State. When decrying ‘reaction’, it is always a good idea to think ‘reaction against what?’ and consider that perhaps said ‘reaction’ might be justified. This ‘reaction’ isn’t coming from the ruling class — they’re doing very well off of socialist-state cronyism, as did people like Putin back in the day — but rather people who are expected to pay for all of this idealistic clap-trap. Look at who is supporting the BNP and UKIP; it isn’t David Cameron and his Old Etonians, nor the red-diaper babies like the Millibands. John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, has been vox clamantis in deserto for years on behalf of these squeezees, to little effect.

Read it.

And why not? Mohammed himself (the ‘perfect man’) was a robber and mass murderer; why should his followers be any different?

Read it.

A new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York seeks to inject more data into the discussion — and its findings suggest that the revolving door may be driven by an entirely different force. Instead of “regulatory capture,” the paper provides evidence consistent with “regulatory schooling” – the idea that people take regulatory jobs to become experts on complex regulations before cashing in with a private sector job. Instead of having an incentive to go easy on banks, the “regulatory schooling” hypothesis suggests regulators have an incentive to make rules more complex.

Free government training! Just like the military — except that it pays more, and you probably won’t get shot at! What’s not to like?

Read it.

The left loves to cite corporate America when lambasting the greed of the mega-wealthy 1 percent. But what about public universities, where top administrators make millions of dollars while students flounder in debt?

Hey, some animals are just more equal than other.

Read it.

The self-proclaimed leaders of the so-called people’s republic of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine are taking some tips from the U.S., but in a way that most people will not find palatable: They adopted a modified version of the Confederate Flag. It holds no meaning in Eastern Europe, so to whom are these Russian-backed fighters trying to appeal?

Perhaps they’re trying to qualify for the Southern Poverty Law Center to designate them as a hate group.

Watch it.

Major Stephen Coughlin takes a look at the exchange of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five terrorists, focusing on the tenets of classical Islamic law.

The Other McCain is on the case.

The #YesAllWomen hashtag has been going crazy all day because of a Washington Post column by Brad Wilcox and Robin Wilson which demonstrates — as a matter of social science — what all social scientists already know: Marriage is highly correlated with good outcomes for women and children. This isn’t really controversial, if you have paid attention to the research, but feminists don’t give a damn about research if the facts contradict their theories, and feminist theory has been implacably hostile to marriage for more than 40 years.

…

Being pro-marriage is now “Neanderthal,” no matter how much research data you produce in support of your argument.

Feminist theory is utterly impervious to evidence. If there is anything feminists hate more than they hate men, it’s facts and logic.

Read it.

And you can sometimes make a good guess at her race, as well.

Eugene Volokh examines one of the dirty little secrets of Identity Politics.

Apparently, if you’re a successful minority, then you’re really ‘white’ for victimology purposes.

Read it.

When you buy groceries from Instacart, the company summons a green-shirted “personal shopper” through the firm’s smartphone app. The shopper receives your list, scurries through a grocery store to pick up your items and then heads across town in his own car to deliver your stuff.

…

Despite its low-cost business model, Instacart isn’t cheap. The service charges a delivery fee of $3.99 for most orders, and it also makes money by marking up store prices. The amounts vary depending on the item, but I noticed Instacart’s prices coming in at about 20 percent more than I could find at my local store.

George Will says what everybody knows and will not admit.

In 1964, 76 percent of Americans trusted government to do the right thing “just about always or most of the time”; today, 19 percent do. The former number is one reason Johnson did so much; the latter is one consequence of his doing so.

Read it.

WE no longer have news. We have springboards for commentary. We have cues for Tweets.

Something happens, and before the facts are even settled, the morals are deduced and the lessons drawn. The story is absorbed into agendas. Everyone has a preferred take on it, a particular use for it. And as one person after another posits its real significance, the discussion travels so far from what set it in motion that the truth — the knowable, verifiable truth — is left in the dust.

The most amusing thing about it is that the venue in which he writes, the New York Times, is one of the lead dogs in this particular pack. This is like somebody writing in Soviet Pravda that there are too many oppressive totalitarian dictatorships in the world.

Read it.

A California judge ruled Tuesday that teacher tenure laws deprive students of their right to an education under the state Constitution. The decision hands teachers’ unions a major defeat in a landmark case, one that could radically alter how California teachers are hired and fired and prompt challenges to tenure laws in other states.

“Substantial evidence presented makes it clear to this court that the challenged statutes disproportionately affect poor and/or minority students,” Judge Rolf M. Treu of Los Angeles Superior Court wrote in the ruling. “The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.”

Read it.

The bad news is that we’re paying for them to come back as well.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is spending tens of millions on its Antarctic “Artists and Writers” program, which includes taxpayer-funded trips for poets to visit the Southern Hemisphere.

The NSF has sent nearly 100 poets, writers, painters, and musicians to Antarctica over the past three decades, providing round trip economy air tickets from the United States as well as “in-kind” support such as food, shelter, and cold-weather clothing, which is returned by the artist at the completion of their trip.

Sarah Hoyt has some thoughts.

The world has always been too hard for some percentage of humans. The mind has always been unable to face reality naked. What I mean is, for those of us who believe in something more, it’s easy to say “He won’t give me more than I can handle,” but what about the others? What about those who’ve convinced themselves that there’s nothing but humans, nothing but the naked human mind and the uncaring universe. I don’t mean the ones who have some measure of doubt. All of us, even the most faith-filled have some measure of doubt, and the measure changes through the days and years – I mean the ones who were brought up to believe that anything religious is crazy talk. The ones who try to be “sane” in a peculiar way no human has ever quite managed.

…

Our ancestors held on to crazy beliefs because it made it easier to live in a world where most of what they thought they knew was wrong and more often than not bit them in the ass.

Our “liberal” friends are in the same pickle. And no, I don’t know how to fix it, because no, rubbing their nose in reality doesn’t help. If the reality of the mess the USSR really was didn’t fix them, if they can believe Che “I club children to death with my rifle” Guevara was a sort of sensitive idealist, if they can believe this lousy economy is “recovering”, if they can believe, against all history, that bowing and scraping to tyrants like Putin will bring peace…. We can’t reach them. What can we use that will get through?

Freeberg turns over a rock.

What we saw in the 1990?s, in comic books and elsewhere — and it has yet to lose momentum, even this late — is a cultural phobia against true heroism. This could always use more & better inspection, even if the inspection results in unflattering things being noticed about the phobia, which I think for the most part is the case. Let’s see, what are the reasons heroism might be a pain in the ass. There are some: 1) A hero who rights wrongs, might come after you if you’re the guy doing something wrong; 2) Heroes raise the standard, since it isn’t really the physical capability to do what’s right that makes the hero, it’s the resolve. So they pose a threat to the active evil-doer, and the passive bystander alike. May I suggest that our two-decades-old or so beef with yesteryear’s simpler and cleaner brand of heroism, is advocacy for the benefit of the passive and not so much for the active. It is a shadowy crusade for sake of the lazy.

It is, I think, a fulfillment of success by way of defining success downward to meet status quo. Here’s an evil thing being done, and here’s a rationale for not doing anything about it: If true heroism is nothing more than recognizing that we shouldn’t do anything about it, then we can all be heroes by continuing to sit on our asses, playing Angry Birds on our phones. And therein lies a complete inversion that didn’t take too many years to come about; since when Superman got started it wasn’t his superpowers that made him a hero, it was his recognition that something was amiss and something had to be done about it. “This looks like a job for,” remember that?

Read it.

Planners are middle-class, and while they support the idea of helping low-income and working-class families in theory, in practice they don’t really like such people. Too many of them are tea partiers, and even the ones that aren’t don’t fit into middle-class neighborhoods: they drive big trucks, eat red meat, and wouldn’t be caught dead at a Whole Foods.

Urban planning today is about rebuilding cities to look the way the upper-middle class wants them to look, and that means pretending the lower classes don’t exist or will happily adopt high-density lifestyles that minimize auto use. The idea that reducing congestion and increasing auto ownership will help people out of poverty just does not fit in to that point of view.

I once calculated that giving every carless low-income family in the Denver area a new Toyota Prius would be both cheaper and more likely to reduce poverty than building one light-rail line. When I pointed this out at a light-rail debate, the head of Denver’s transit agency responded, “We can’t give poor people cars. It would cause too much congestion.”

In short, for too many planners, reducing auto driving is more important than reducing poverty.

Read it.

Prescott’s wonderfully bare-bones Ernest A. Love Field offers commercial service to LAX courtesy of Great Lakes Airlines. OK, it’s really courtesy of American taxpayers, who underwrite the operation to the tune of $2,094,235 (PDF) per year.

I’d add the technical detail that the service is offered on 19-seat Beechcraft 1900D turboprop planes, except that when we boarded, the plane was gutted. Ten of the seats had been ripped out.

“It’s because of me,” the pilot told a fellow passenger who asked about the very interesting configuration, though he meant the company’s pilots in general. “The FAA revised pilot qualifications last year for 19 seat planes. So now we only operate them with nine seats.”

…

For what it’s worth, Snyder sees no safety issue in the scheme, since the same pilots who were safely flying 19-seat planes are now operating the nine-seaters. It’s just an end-run around red tape.

Read it.

Yet again, everything bad is good for you.

Yesterday agave was in, and today it’s out. “Natural” has little meaning for health outside of produce aisles. Eliminating sugars from a diet can’t constitute playing it safe, in that it means getting calories elsewhere—just as the advice to cut out fat in the 1980s is blamed for making people increase their consumption of sugar. Too much fat is bad, too much protein is bad, and too much starch is bad. Everything is good, and everything is bad. Even looking back, the basic tenets of the original 1980 USDA nutrition guidelines really do seem to hold up: “Eat a variety of foods; avoid too much fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol; eat foods with adequate starch and fiber; avoid too much sugar; avoid too much sodium.” And, of course, “Food alone cannot make you healthy.”

In Fed Up, Katie Couric refers to the 1992 food pyramid, which was all carbs at the bottom, but also to the popular practice of calorie balancing, which she says is based in misunderstanding. “What if the solutions weren’t really solutions at all? What if they were making things worse? What if our whole approach to this whole epidemic has been dead wrong?”

Rhetorical questions are the currency of extraordinary implications in documentaries. What if our whole approach to this epidemic has been part of an ongoing investigation into understanding the complex nature of human metabolism and nutrition, and it’s all building on itself, and there’s some validity to most of it?

Makes you wonder when they’ll get around to abandoning the ‘scientific consensus’ behind Global Warming.