As you might have noticed, I haven't posted here in a while, and what with various things going on, I don't expect to be posting again for a while. Everything that's here now will stay, but I won't be adding any new posts for an indefinite period. I hope you've enjoyed what I've posted here, and thanks for reading!

Courtesy of Watts Up With That, I came across a blog post by Kate Marvel, a climate scientist who says she is "so bored with the hiatus". The WUWT article makes some good criticisms, though in fairness to Marvel, it appears to take her post's title a bit too literally--she isn't bored with the fact of the hiatus, but with all the media attention it gets, which is not quite the same thing. But here I want to focus on another aspect of Marvel's post: it's another good illustration of something I've blogged about before, namely, why the public finds it hard to trust what scientists say.

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Peter Thiel, in a recent article, says that (as the article's subhead puts it)

If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly

Of course this works out well for the monopolist; but how about the rest of us?

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The latest round of the Netflix-Verizon tiff that I recently blogged about has now appeared in a post by Verizon and a response from Level 3.

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In an entirely predictable development, at least if you've been keeping up with my previous posts on net neutrality, Netflix is now having a tiff with Verizon over slow delivery of Netflix content to customers.

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If you've read my previous post and are still wondering, even after the Postscript, whether I was really being fair, you may be interested in this from Level 3, another major Internet transit provider like Cogent, which I mentioned in my last post. It should come as no surprise that they are also having problems with major broadband providers.

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In the wake of the Federal Court ruling in January that struck down key portions of the FCC's Net Neutrality regulations, it looks like the agency is now considering allowing ISPs to have a "fast lane" for preferred traffic, which means traffic that content providers are willing to pay the ISP extra for carrying. Needless to say, the content providers, such as Netflix, are not in favor of this. And also needless to say, ISPs like Comcast are hastening to assure us that these aren't the droids we're looking for. (Notice that the Netflix article is full of technical details, while the Comcast post is just corporate doublespeak--not to mention that the boilerplate disclaimers are more than twice the length of the actual post.)

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Some time back I made a proposal for campaign finance reform. Now I find that Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a constitutional amendment that is identical to my proposal. I don't know if Sanders reads this blog, but however he got the idea, I'm for it.

The Daily Telegraph reports that, based on the latest draft of the IPCC AR5,

The United Nations will officially warn that growing crops to make "green" biofuel harms the environment and drives up food prices

(hat tip: Watts Up With That ). At first glance, this looks promising, an actual outbreak of sanity for the IPCC, something like admitting that climate model forecasts are inaccurate. But just as with that previous item, you shouldn't get your hopes up too much; as you can see even from the brief quote above, the obvious reason for not using food crops to make biofuels (the one that's in the title of this post) is not the primary reason the IPCC gives for their about-face on this issue.

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Some time back I noted that what was then a common sentiment (I found it in an op-ed in the New York Times, which is proof of it being a common sentiment if anything is) about the Constitution seemed backwards to me. The claim was that we were getting into trouble about the "fiscal cliff" because we were too obsessed with following the Constitution; but as I showed in that post, the real problem was that we weren't following it enough.

Now I've come across a lecture given by Michael Karman at Johns Hopkins University on Constitution Day, 2010, entitled "A Skeptical View of Constitution Worship", which goes even further than the NYT op-ed did. My basic response is the same: the problem is not that we "worship" the Constitution, it's that we ignore it.

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