P. Kirby > Recent Status Updates

Rereading so I can continue on with the next two volumes...

Thus far, this had maintained a good balance of doling out bits of exposition, while not doing to much reader hand holding.

I is mildly entertained. This has a Holly Black light, circa Tithe kind of vibe.

So far, pretty good steampunk world building.

This one has mixed reviews, but I'm a sucker for stories set in the world of theater.

Oh, ick! Amalia and Marcello are goo-goo-eyeing each other again. Their romance is sooo blah that I'm-a gonna have to clear out the memory by reading something smutty next.

There was more I needed to tell her. "Another thing, Zaira. Dominic likes you. A great deal." Oh, for fucks sake, what are you? Twelve?

"Zaira grunted."I'm not sorry for anything I said to you. I meant every word of it." Good for you, Zaira. Don't take shit from a spoiled, entitled princess who couldn't find her spine if it leapt from her back and introduced itself.

So far the world building is solid, and I'm a sucker for any kind of geologic magic (geomancers).

Almost DNFed this. It's not horrible. It's just so...bland, like iceberg lettuce but minus the satisfying crunch. But I'm this far now; may as well finish.

Is this supposed to be adult fantasy? It feels more like YA, and the world building is thin.

Free market fundamentalists can perhaps hold to their views because often they have very little direct experience in commerce or industry. The men in our story all made their careers in programs and institutions that were either directly created by the federal government or largely funded by it. Honestly? This give these people too much credit. Mostly, they are/were selfish gits.

The basic tenet of laissez-faire, that "free" and competitive markets bring supply and demand into equilibrium and thereby ensure the best allocation of resources," is an axiom that turns out not to be true. Prices can be displaced from their "equilibrium ideal" for long periods of time, as any American impacted by the ongoing housing market collapse can attest.

"Balance" had become a form of bias, whereby the media coverage was biased in favor of minority--in some cases extreme minority--views. More like crackpot views.

A third of all Americans thinks that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks on September 11. Nearly a quarter still think that there's no solid evidence that smoking kills. And as recently as 2007, 40 percent of Americans believe that scientific experts were still arguing about the reality of global warming. They're not, but the media would have you believe there is a big controversy.

Lately science has shown us that contemporary industrial civilization is not sustainable. Maintaining our standard of living will require finding new ways to produce our energy and less ecologically damaging ways to produce our food. Science has shown us that Rachel Carson was not wrong.

...for if science is about studying the world as it actually is--rather than as we wish it to be--then science will always have the potential to unsettle the status quo.

Sri Lanka didn't stop using DDT because of what the United States did, or for any other reason. DDT stopped working, but they kept using it anyway. We can surmise why: since DDt had appeared to work at first, officials were reluctant to give it up, even as malaria became resurgent. It took a long time for people to admit defeat--to accept that tiny mosquitoes were in their own way stronger than us.

By the 1930s mosquito control districts throughout the nation had largely brought malaria under control by drainage, removal of breeding sites, and pesticides other than DDT. Malaria infection in Florida, for example, declined every year after 1935, even though DDT was yet to be introduced.

This fascinating, but depressing. Same old pattern over and over. Science provides irrefutable evidence that an industry is making people sick or destroying the planet, and Republicans and their big money interests immediately dominate the narrative with lies and distortion, aided and abetted by the idiot media.

As for migration, "does the Committee really believer that the United States or Western Europe or Canada would accept the huge influx of refugees from poor countries that have suffered a drastic shift in rainfall pattern?" Weinberg demanded. Exactly. Look at how many so-called compassionate conservatives are shitting in the Depends undergarments and taking up arms against Central American refugees.

Some climatic effects--like serious sea level rise--might make some areas of the world uninhabitable, but this could be addressed through migration. Nierenberg stressed that people had often migrated in the past, and when they did, they often had to adapt to new climates. Holy shit, these climate change deniers are assholes. Basically their solution to the problem is: "People can move."

Marxists were often criticized for believing that the ends justified the means, yet these old Cold Warriors were now the ones using ends to justify means--attacking science in the name of freedom. Suppressing evidence. Misrepresenting what their colleagues had done and said. Taking quotes out of context.

Russell Seitz and the defenders of tobacco invoked liberty, too. But as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin sagely pointed out, liberty for wolves means death to lambs.

Seitz was proposing that the government should spend taxpayer money figuring out how to safely deliver nicotine--and addictive and toxic substance--to the American people.

Their defense of freedom was a defense against Soviet Communism. But somehow, somewhere, defending America against the Soviet threat had transmogrified into defending the tobacco industry against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Peer review is a topic that is impossible to make sexy, but it's crucial to understand, because it is what makes science science--and not just a form of opinion.

Officially the mission of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution is to promote democracy; in 1993 the Institution decided to promote democracy by defending secondhand smoke.

It didn't matter who had done the work--the EPA, the World Health Organization, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, or distinguished scientist at private universities. If the results challenge the safety of a commercial product, Milloy attacked them.