The latest from Red State Update:
Link: https://youtu.be/B-hJsajwvj4
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From SNL last March, a trailer for an alleged forthcoming live-action remake of a Disney animated classic. (Some slightly indelicate bleeped language.)
Link: https://youtu.be/uFJz2IMUeDE
by These two recent commentaries by pediatrician and researcher Aaron Carroll MD are quite interesting. The gist is that in a number of studies it appears that basic emergency life support — CPR and automatic defibrillators, for example — does such a good job of saving lives that more advanced treatment from a highly trained paramedic may not only be no better, but can actually be slightly worse.
There are a number of possible explanations for that surprising result. One is that advanced life support takes longer and it may be better to rush the patient to the hospital. Another is that the some of the treatments themselves, such as inserting an airway or administering drugs to raise blood pressure, may traumatize the patient. That second suggestion is my own amateur guess, not something Dr Carroll says. I have another amateur guess: It may be that advanced life support is very helpful, even vital, only for some patients and should not be avoided all the time but used only when it’s really needed.
The first video conveys the basic points. The second adds additional information and responds to objections.
Link: https://youtu.be/Hkel6XApBn8
Link: https://youtu.be/pHtXpdiCjlw
One more thing: CPR training isn’t hard to get and gives you a real chance to save a life. Also, more and more public places have AEDs — automated external defibrillators — that can restart a heart and can be used by almost anybody, and I suspect many CPR courses now include an introduction to using an AED. (It can be used even by an untrained person, but training helps.) Take a course!
by This is funnier than you’d think, and at four minutes it’s admirably concise.
Link: https://youtu.be/d9WzC2baIW4
The Mexican chop suey sounds like it shouldn’t be as awful as they say, but then again I haven’t tried it myself…
by As I’ve mentioned before (link), Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has said some seriously absurd and misinformed things about global warming.
Here’s another brief example from a Senate hearing in which Cruz questions David Titley, a retired rear admiral whose duties included serving as Chief Oceanographer of the United States Navy and later Chief Operating Officer of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He’s now a professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University and founding director of its Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk. Dr. Titley had been a climate change skeptic but changed his mind in the face of the overwhelming evidence. This clip runs under four minutes:
Link: https://youtu.be/RUHnylmsgQ4
If you’re not familiar with the subject matter, some of this may seem a bit cryptic, but in brief, Cruz is fond of recycling some cherry-picked interpretations of satellite data that allegedly show no warming in the last 18 years.
Unlike thermometers, satellites can’t measure temperature data directly but instead detect microwave and infrared light. From that, given the right assumptions and analysis, temperatures can be inferred. Scientists John Christy and Roy Spencer, two of the few working scientists who dispute the existence of global warming, have published interpretations of the satellite readings they originally contended showed cooling of the lower atmosphere in recent years. However, (as they themselves later admitted), they made a whole series of mistakes in their analysis.
Moreover, their results were contradicted by direct measurements of atmospheric and oceanic temperatures using actual thermometers at ground level and in weather balloons, and also by numerous other sources such as annual melting and freezing data for everything from ponds to polar sea ice, changing ranges and behavior of plants and animals, earlier blooming of flowers in the spring, sea level rise from thermal expansion of the oceans, and many other independent indicators, almost all of which also cover a much longer history than Christy and Spencer’s temperature series derived from their faulty interpretation of the satellite data. Finally, other scientists analyzing the same raw satellite data get results that closely match the other temperature series.
I rather suspect that Cruz et al embrace the no-warming interpretation of Christy and Spencer to the exclusion of pretty much everything else simply because it seems to give the results they want.
Admiral Titley does an excellent job of correcting Cruz’s misconceptions, even though Cruz persists in refusing to acknowledge the facts.
For more on their encounter, see the short Associated Press fact-check article here.
(Revised 2016 February 16 and 25 to correct my bad typing and to clarify a few points.)
by The free market is a wonderful thing. It’s remarkably good at supplying the goods and services people want and need, and the alternative of top-down planning has been shown pretty conclusively not to work.
(I should admit my bias here: I’m a capitalist in every sense of the word. The older I get, the bigger the share of my income I derive from savings and investments, which means I’m not earning it by my own talent and hard work but by exploiting that of the proletariat. Hee hee hee.)
This isn’t just my opinion; it’s widely accepted in economics, even among former Marxists. There’s an introductory on-line economics course on YouTube, Crash Course Economics, with some good episodes about this. In particular, see the episodes on “Markets, Efficiency, and Price Signals” and “Price Controls, Subsidies, and the Risks of Good Intentions.”
Good as it is, though, the free market isn’t God (though some self-styled Libertarians and enthusiasts of Ayn Rand do seem to rate it pretty close). As mentioned in a previous post (link), even John Locke and Adam Smith, who laid the foundations of capitalism and free-market thinking, acknowledged that markets don’t get everything right.
(And while sports fans may rail against officials, everybody acknowledges that fair competition requires rules and people to enforced them.)
So I was glad to see that the folks at Crash Course Economics have just released a new episode explaining various ways in which markets do indeed fail and why the government sometimes has to step in and regulate things or even take over. (Even libertarians tend to agree that the government should have a monopoly on fighting wars, if wars get fought at all.) In fact, sometimes the best approach to regulation uses the market itself to achieve the desired goal (essentially by correcting pricing errors when the market doesn’t incorporate all the real costs). Here it is:
Link: https://youtu.be/13JOGWzY8kE
by An artist named Dirk Loechel has gone to the trouble of creating a massive chart showing dozens of spaceships from print, television, and motion picture science fiction, all pictured at the same scale. In a box at the top, barely visible because it’s relatively so small, is the real world’s International Space Station, which is merely the size of a football field. The Smithsonian’s description of Loechel’s work of art can be read here, and you can view or download a larger version (together with notes on past revisions to the chart) here.
Clicking on the image below will take you directly to a larger version that will allow you to scroll around.
by Robert Gates, appointed Secretary of Defense by George W Bush in 2006, continued to serve in that office under President Obama until he retired in 2011. Gates has also served as an Air Force officer, as Director of Central Intelligence under George H.W. Bush, and as an employee of the CIA and the National Security Council as well as president of Texas A&M University. A Washington Post review of his memoirs said that he was “widely considered the best defense secretary of the post-World War II era.”
According to a piece published yesterday at Politico (link) summarizing his appearance in MSNBC’s program Morning Joe, Gates does not have a high opinion of those seeking the Republican nomination for president. “First of all they, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” he’s quoted as saying.
On Donald Trump’s threat to “bomb the shit” out of ISIL and Ted Cruz’s advocacy of “carpet bombing,” Gates said, “Carpet bombing would be completely useless. It’s totally contrary to the American way of war” because it costs huge numbers of civilian lives. “So, I mean, part of the concern that I have with the campaign, particularly when it comes to national security, is that the solutions being offered are so simplistic and so at odds with the reality of the rest of the world, with the way the world really works.”
He also suggested that those without political experience (such as Trump, Carson, and Fiorina) would not have the skills needed to be effective presidents.
In a separate interview with Bianna Golodryga reported yesterday by Yahoo News (link), Gates also criticized President Obama’s foreign policy. Concerning his experience with Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state, Gates said, “During the period I was there, I found her a good colleague: I found her tough-minded, and I found her quite realistic. The first time we really disagreed on anything was on the decision to intervene in Libya in early 2011.”
by In the United Kingdom, citizens can petition their government on line. (The same is true in the U.S.; see https://petitions.whitehouse.gov.) If 100,000 people sign on to a given request, a committee of Parliament takes it up for consideration.
The most popular such petition yet — supported by 573,971 persons as of some time Monday — asks Her Majesty’s government to ban Donald Trump from entering the U.K. A parliamentary Petitions Committee considered the matter for three hours on Monday. Members were of mixed views concerning the proposed travel ban (though they eventually came down against it), but no matter their party, they were of one mind and voice with respect to Mr Trump himself, as you can see here, courtesy of The Washington Post:
Rachel Maddow had a 4-minute segment on it Monday night that’s really worth watching. I can’t embed the clip here, but you can see it at this link. As Maddow says, the British are generally very good at this kind of discussion.
For more details see the Post‘s articles here (with a brief catalog of adjective applied the Mr Trump), and here (with details about the debate itself). See also Steve Benen’s take here.
Finally, a “wazzock” is an expression I understand was popularized by British actor and comedian Tony Capstick on his 1981 comedy record “Capstick Comes Home,” in which he addressed someone as “You great useless spawny-eyed parrot-faced wazzock!” But Capstick didn’t invent the word; it dates back at least to a recording by British writer, broadcast, and folk singer Mike Harding in 1976. Allegedly “wazzock” means a bull’s penis, but as an insult it basically means an idiot and is not considered particularly offensive.
by Last night I braved my way out into the cold for dinner at a local restaurant. As I walked in I saw a guy lounging on a bench outside and chatting with a woman who was heavily bundled up and moving around to try to stay warm. On the way past I said conversationally to him, “You must be from a cold planet.” He just looked at me, but his friend burst out laughing.
This morning is the coldest it’s been here so far this season. (Even today’s forecast high is below freezing.) The following clip isn’t from a local station but from WGN in Chicago last week. It’s noteworthy for showing a rare TV weatherperson who rebels against the insanity of being asked to do a live report in dangerous conditions.
Link: https://youtu.be/EdqfK-MrTQY
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