Another Big Ag/GMO fail

Another danger of GMO crops, this time engineered for resistance to a specific bug. Farmers undersprayed or stopped spraying insecticides because of that, and other bugs got worse.

Another 'surge' that's not yet real

The New York Times trumpets a "surge" in Team Obama regulatory actions. But, most of the things listed are proposals, not actualities.

Oops.

And, the article also lets Obama benefit from the "soft bigotry of low expectations," namely the comparison with his predecessor.

Hey Armstrong and Cernan, get a few clues

Stop looking at today's space program and its needs and goals for the future as though we were still in the middle of the Cold War.

1. As long as it's done in a spirt of cooperation, which has been the case so far, to the degree it's been needed, what's wrong with relying on the Russians more for transport to the space station?

2. Manned trips to the moon again is just your romanticism speaking. If we want to mine the moon for anything, that can probably be done robotically. As for a way station to Mars, the space station will work better for that if we don't do a direct shot.

3. s for a manned trip to Mars, whether directly or via the space station, on a number of grounds, we're not ready for that yet. We haven't tested astronaut psychology enough yet, we haven't determined how to do a robotic pre-human launch camp set-up, and a bunch of other stuff.

I agree that Obama is expecting too much, outside of low-earth orbit stuff, from the private sector.

Otherwise, no, you're wrong, and dated.

White House 'interviews' Elena Kagan

No, really! You can see how something like this would hack off a news media already seeing new levels of media manipulation from Team Obama.

A cross, like a river, is never the same crossed twice

OK, the American Legion says it's going to build a new cross on the putatively private postage stamp of land in the middle of the Mojave National Preserve if nobody finds the one stolen yesterday that raised a Supreme Court ruckus.

But, ff the Legion rebuilds the cross, aren't we under a new setting, i.e., even if the Legion claims that a cross was a symbol of "civic religion" at the time of the original, that cross ain't such a symbol today. This ain't WWI. And, Nino Scalia et al have been told to their collective faces that Jewish veterans' graves don't have crosses.

(Not to mention Muslim veterans' graves, nonreligious servicemembers' graves, etc.)

So, since the land swap for a private parcel postage-stamp plot is still in limbo at the federal district court level, I dare the Legion to try building a new one.

Update, June 2026: Sadly the swap went through and I saw the result when out in Mojave in March of this year. 

Crime, a short story, non-fiction pun intended

No, literally, according to some forensic scientists. They wonder if, after "controlling" for things like family and neighborhood poverty, if things like short stature or extra weight, which do, unfortunately, affect one's career growth chances, don't then, in reverse, perhaps nudge some people into crime.

It's possible, I suppose; but, how much of a "bump" is it, and how much does it vary from person to person. Is this at risk of being Evolutionary Psychology-Beauty, a subset of Pop Ev Psych?