MY ADVICE: DRINK WINE WHILE SITTING IN THE SUN. Mediterranean diet’s benefits confirmed. “The Mediterranean diet has long been touted as healthy. Now a study released Monday of the effects of a diet rich in olive oil, nuts, vegetables, fruits and fish confirms that. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that the diet can reduce the risk of stroke and other cardiovascular diseases by 30 percent.” You can have some hummus with the wine.
Archive for February, 2013
February 28, 2013
21stCENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Boomer divorce: A costly retirement roadblock. “Baby Boomers are divorcing at a surprising rate, and that will have huge implications for their lives in retirement. . . . That pool of money that was going to fund retirement for a couple will now be split in half, and must now fund retirement for two people living separately. That costs a lot more. And that means people must either temper those retirement lifestyle expectations or delay retirement altogether.”
AMERICAN SENIORS SLAM DAVID PLOUFFE FOR AGEISM. Hey, if Woodward’s too old to report, then Hillary will be too old to be President in 2016.
READER BOOK PLUG: Rebuilt: Awakening The Faithful.
IT’S HARD TO FIND HELP, if you’re a man with anorexia.
FUEL SAVINGS WITH SHARK SKIN PLANES. “We’re used to thinking of aerodynamics as a matter of sleekness, but a shark’s skin suggests that the right kind of roughness is actually better. Sharks may be all clean lines and curves from afar, but their skin is composed of jagged scales covered with longitudinal ridges. Those tiny ridges are a big part of why sharks can so easily slice through the water.”
NEW YORK TIMES: American Women Are Fat Because They Don’t Vacuum Enough. “Women, they found, once had been quite physically active around the house, spending, in 1965, an average of 25.7 hours a week cleaning, cooking and doing laundry. Those activities, whatever their social freight, required the expenditure of considerable energy. . . . Forty-five years later, in 2010, things had changed dramatically. By then, the time-use diaries showed, women were spending an average of 13.3 hours per week on housework. More striking, the diary entries showed, women at home were now spending far more hours sitting in front of a screen. In 1965, women typically had spent about eight hours a week sitting and watching television. (Home computers weren’t invented yet.) By 2010, those hours had more than doubled, to 16.5 hours per week. In essence, women had exchanged time spent in active pursuits, like vacuuming, for time spent being sedentary.”
This’ll be well-received. But hey, it’s science. You can’t argue with science.
UPDATE: Reader Tim Johnson: “What’s happened to the divorce rate over this period of time?” You can probably blame increased TV-watching for that, too.
RON FOURNIER: Why Bob Woodward’s Fight With The White House Matters to You. “As editor-in-chief of National Journal, I received several e-mails and telephone calls from this White House official filled with vulgarity, abusive language, and virtually the same phrase that Woodward called a veiled threat. . . . I changed the rules of our relationship, first, because it was a waste of my time (and the official’s government-funded salary) to engage in abusive conversations. Second, I didn’t want to condone behavior that might intimidate less-experienced reporters, a reaction I personally witnessed in journalists covering the Obama administration.”
I have to say, though, that Fournier’s “this can’t be what Obama wants” take, like Woodward’s similar line, has a sort of if the Tsar only knew flavor to it. Me, I think that political organizations, like most other organizations, get their flavor from the top.
UPDATE: Flashback: Obama Campaign’s “bellicose” treatment of critical reporters in 2008.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Tom Elia writes:
Am I the only one who sees the absurd irony in the veiled threats to reporters and writers like Woodward, Fournier, Attkisson, Davis, etc., by these faux White House ‘tough guys’ — using the force of government granted them by the voters, by the way — in this instance (and certainly others) defending the Administration’s story about non-cut ‘cuts’ in government spending and the ‘damage’ they will do.
Fake ‘tough guys’ defending non-cut ‘cuts.’ It’s all a show. And it’s really quite sad.
Welcome to the era of Hope And Change.
COMET MAY HIT MARS IN 2014: “It would be an extinction-level impact, were there any life on Mars.”
Science fiction idea: An alt-history story about this where Mars has been colonized for a couple of decades. Kind of a Martian Lucifer’s Hammer.
UPDATE: Charlie Martin emails to suggest that a comet strike on Mars could jumpstart terraforming efforts by delivering a big load of volatiles (water, methane, CO2 and so on), plus a lot of heat energy that could release water and other volatiles from the martian soil. That’s right, though planets are huge by comparison to comets: In his Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments, Martyn Fogg calculates how many comet impacts it would take to give Mars a useful atmosphere and it’s quite a lot. You don’t gain by making the comets really big, either, as beyond a certain size the impact becomes so energetic that you start losing atmosphere to space.
Another reader, in an allusion to The World According To Garp, thinks that a cometary strike on Mars would make it an attractive destination because of presumed safety — how likely is it that something like that would happen again any time soon? Hmm.
IN THE MAIL: A Dream of Daring.
RADLEY BALKO is encouraging prosecutorial accountability.
CHANGE! Renewable Energy: Bringing Blackouts Back to California?
The epidemic of power outages and “rolling blackouts” which nearly shut down California in the early 2000s may be returning. Back then, the culprits were unscrupulous energy providers like Enron and a poorly-thought out process of deregulation. This time, renewable energy would be to blame, as the state has pushed to increase the use of solar and wind energy without ensuring that there is enough traditional power generation to keep the grid stable on cloudy, windless days.
Although the blackouts haven’t happened yet, some are warning that they could begin to strike in the next couple of years. . . .
The problem of intermittency of renewable energy is a well known one. Other states, including Texas, are facing similar troubles. California’s energy planners are aware of the problem, too, and they are looking to settle on plans to deal with it later this year. Nonetheless these projections of electricity problems are disturbing for a state with a long history of them, and the fact that there isn’t already a plan to deal with it makes us wonder whether we’re not about to witness another case of green policy failure. We’ll wait and see how this shakes out, but California will need to plan carefully to avoid serious problems down the road.
Don’t count on it.
THE COLD STOICISM of advice columns for men. To be fair, it would be nice to see a touch of that in advice columns for women.
JIM TREACHER: The Bob Woodward story isn’t important. That’s why liberals and the media (PTR) are losing their minds over it.
UPDATE: Pattern and practice: Lanny Davis: Obama White House Threatened Washington Times Over My Column.
Well, thuggishness is their style. Nice to see it getting reported, at least.
MORE: All The President’s Thugs.
Plus: David Freddoso: If you don’t want to be badmouthed, stop saying things unhelpful to our president.
MORE STILL: Politico has the emails.
John Podhoretz comments: “It would take a great semiologist to unpack the false professions of friendship and anger and source protection here.”
STILL MORE: Deep Threats: “Who thinks this will end well? The White House’s escalating war with Bob Woodward has major ramifications for all involved — not least the president whom Woodward believes wouldn’t approve of his own aides’ tactics. President Obama has chosen to make two major points in the sequester stand-off: That the pain is going to be awful, and that it’s all Republicans’ fault. Woodward calls the latter into question, with the reporting he’s decided to aggressively and publicly defend. As for the former, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg giving a rhetorical eye-roll to the White House, and Education Secretary Arne Duncan on record exaggerating about teacher pink slips that haven’t been issued, let’s just say credulity is being strained.”
USA Today: “All we can say is: We know more than a few reporters have received similar e-mails from White House officials. Yelling has also been known to happen.”
MICHAEL WALSH ON THE SEQUESTER: Apocalypse Not.
LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Cuomo Announces Plans To Modify Gun Control Law To Exempt Film Industry.
THE NRA IS Getting It Right On Twitter.
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Is Obama Losing His Media Allies Over The Sequester?
CONN CARROLL: California’s green jobs bust.
It was supposed to be the next big thing.
California built decades of broad-based prosperity from the Gold Rush, then Hollywood, then aerospace, and later Silicon Valley. At the turn of the century, “green jobs” were supposed to be the wave of the future.
“This is not just a challenge, it’s an opportunity,” then-candidate Barack Obama said during a 2008 presidential debate. “Because if we create a new energy economy, we can create 5 million new jobs, easily, here in the United States.” . . .
Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that California will once again face rolling blackouts starting in 2015, thanks to the loss of conventional plants and unreliability of wind and solar energy due to weather fluctuations.
But all these new green energy programs must at least be creating thousands of new green jobs, right? Wrong. According to the best numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than 2,500 green jobs have been created in California since 2010. Compare that with the more than 556,000 jobs that California has added in total since the recession ended in June 2009.
Meanwhile, Texas, which is actively removing obstacles to private-sector development of its fossil fuel resources, has actually lost 928 green jobs since 2010. But the state has also added 612,000 total jobs since the recession ended, including more than 26,000 new jobs in oil and gas extraction alone. That total does not include a slew of other fossil-fuel-related jobs such as oil refining and natural gas distribution, nor does it include jobs that the fossil fuel industries support indirectly.
Read the whole thing.
JAMES TARANTO ON THE DEMOCRATS’ ATTACKS ON MITCH MCCONNELL’S “CHINESE WIFE:” Liberal Racists Warn of Chaos: Only the left has a problem with an interracial political marriage. “McConnell and Chao have been married since 1993, and in all that time we don’t remember a conservative or a Republican making an issue of her race or national origin. Since the wedding, McConnell has won re-election three times, suggesting that neither Republicans nor general-election voters in Kentucky–a state where slavery wasn’t abolished until 1865–are bothered that their senator is in an interracial marriage. Other than conspiracy nuts, the only people who seem bothered by it are the liberals at Progress Kentucky.”
I WISH OBAMA WOULD DO SOME COST-CUTTING LIKE THIS: CODEL Cutbacks: Boehner Tells Members They Have to Fly Commercial. “House Speaker John A. Boehner announced on Wednesday that members will no longer be allowed to travel by military aircraft on Congressional delegation trips. The Ohio Republican told members that because of the spending cuts mandated by sequestration, he will cut the costs of the taxpayer funded trips by suspending the standard military aircraft and making members fly commercial.”
I’m liking this sequester-thing more and more . . .
BACKPEDALING: White House says it didn’t approve release of illegal immigrants. “The White House on Wednesday said it did not approve the release this week of hundreds of illegal immigrants being held in detention centers, as Republicans turned up the heat on the budget-cutting move ahead of the sequester. White House spokesman Jay Carney and a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said the decision by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was not signed off on by the administration, but was made by career officials.”
MICHAEL GRAHAM: Greg Sargent And Me. “I admit that I’ve got an innate naivete when it comes to journalists. Despite years of evidence to the contrary, I can’t shake my belief that news people are trying to tell the truth.” Nowadays, there are a lot more apparatchiks than “news people” in the “journalism” business.