Hi Dr. West,

I've been following the latest news. And I thought you could use a bit of moral support.

It probably sounds crazy for a certified welding inspector and ironworker to retire and pursue impact research full-time. Especially since I'm pretty much a nobody. But like many others, I'm looking to identify the planetary scarring and blast-affected materials of the impact storms of the Early Holocene. A little military training in battle damage assessment from aerial photography and a copy of Google Earth goes a long way here.

And being a nobody makes me especially sensitive to ad hominem attacks. I am prepared to debate the science I propose with the big kids. But as an autodidact, an outsider and a complete nobody, I have no defense if the attacks are personally about me, and not the science. So whenever I'm reading along and one side or another, in any given debate, sinks to ad hominem, I have a policy of looking past it at the science that's being ignored or smoke-screened. I tend to mentally disqualify any debater who sinks to such small-minded tactics, and ignore further comments from them in the future. And from what I see of it, the science of yours I see smoke-screened by all the ad hominem crap in the popular press lately is, nevertheless, as good as it gets.

Like you and the others of Firestone et al, what I've been able to find pretty much flies in the face of the kind of Uniformitarian/Gradualist assumptive reasoning that's been the foundation postulate of the Earth Sciences since Sir Charles Lyell published Principles of Geology back in 1830. And regarding the events of the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, I'm ready to make the case that the foundation geologic principle in the Earth sciences, expressed in the slogan, "The present is the key to the past", is almost as naïve as flat-world theory.

Tell Congress to Kill COICA 2.0, the Internet Censorship Bill

UPDATE: Great news. We don't always see eye-to-eye with Google, but we're on the same team this time. Google CEO Eric Schmidt just came out swinging against PROTECT IP, saying, "I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [implementing] simple solutions to complex problems." And then he went even further. From the LA Times:

"If there is a law that requires DNSs, to do X and it's passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it," he said, according to the report. "If it's a request the answer is we wouldn't do it, if it's a discussion we wouldn't do it."

Big content is irate. The Motion Picture Association of America released a statement saying, "We've heard this 'but the law doesn't apply to me' argument before - but usually, it comes from content thieves, not a Fortune 500 company. Google should know better."

Sarkozy, Obama, and the other leaders at the G8 should be evaluating the policies that have brought them to the brink of financial ruin. Unfortunately, their attention will be elsewhere: on Internet regulation, for one thing.

President Obama will join other G8 leaders today at the posh, French seaside resort of Deauville. On the agenda: proposed global regulations for the Internet, post-tsunami Japan, and military escapades in North Africa. Bizarrely absent from the top priorities listed by hosting head of state Nicolas Sarkozy is the most urgent issue of all: the need to rein in massive government over-spending and debt.

One needn't travel to France to get a clear view of this problem. Here in the US, for example, federal revenues will top $2 trillion this year, but federal spending will approach double that amount. Such reckless spending has set the stage for a battle royal between Democrats and Republicans over raising the national-debt ceiling.

House Speaker John Boehner (R) of Ohio has correctly warned that increasing the debt ceiling without a firm commitment to slash spending would signal to investors that America still is not serious about kicking its spending addiction.

Of all the dangerous ideas that health officials could have embraced while trying to understand why we get fat, they would have been hard-pressed to find one ultimately more damaging than calories-in/calories-out. That it reinforces what appears to be so obvious - obesity as the penalty for gluttony and sloth - is what makes it so alluring. But it's misleading and misconceived on so many levels that it's hard to imagine how it survived unscathed and virtually unchallenged for the last fifty years.

It has done incalculable harm. Not only is this thinking at least partly responsible for the ever-growing numbers of obese and overweight in the world - while directing attention away from the real reasons we get fat - but it has served to reinforce the perception that those who are fat have no one to blame but themselves. That eating less invariably fails as a cure for obesity is rarely perceived as the single most important reason to make us question our assumptions, as Hilde Bruch suggested half a century ago. Rather, it is taken as still more evidence that the overweight and obese are incapable of following a diet and eating in moderation. And it puts the blame for their physical condition squarely on their behavior, which couldn't be further from the truth.

Gary Taubes from Why We Get Fat

Truth was an early victim in the battle against tobacco. The big lie, repeated ad nauseam in anti-tobacco circles, is that smoking causes more than 400,000 premature deaths each year in the United States. That mantra is the principal justification for all manner of tobacco regulations and legislation, not to mention lawsuits by dozens of states for Medicaid recovery, class actions by seventy-five to eighty union health funds, similar litigation by thirty-five Blue Cross plans, twenty-four class suits by smokers who are not yet ill, sixty class actions by allegedly ill smokers, five hundred suits for damages from secondhand smoke, and health-related litigation by twelve cities and counties - an explosion of adjudication never before experienced in this country or elsewhere.

The war on smoking started with a kernel of truth - that cigarettes are a high risk factor for lung cancer - but has grown into a monster of deceit and greed, eroding the credibility of government and subverting the rule of law. Junk science has replaced honest science and propaganda parades as fact. Our legislators and judges, in need of dispassionate analysis, are instead smothered by an avalanche of statistics - tendentious, inadequately documented, and unchecked by even rudimentary notions of objectivity. Meanwhile, Americans are indoctrinated by health "professionals" bent on imposing their lifestyle choices on the rest of us and brainwashed by politicians eager to tap the deep pockets of a pariah industry.

The aim of this paper is to dissect the granddaddy of all tobacco lies - that smoking causes 400,000 deaths each year. To set the stage, let's look at two of the many exaggerations, misstatements, and outright fabrications that have dominated the tobacco debate from the outset.

Willie Walsh, chief executive of International Airlines Group, said BA had conducted a 45-minute test flight at different altitudes over the north of England, Newcastle, Glasgow and Edinburgh, where the ash cloud was meant to be at its densest, on Tuesday.

Disclosing the results of tests carried out on the aircraft after the test run, he told the BBC's Today program: "The simple answer is we found nothing."

Pledging to make a case to the Civil Aviation Authority that the test proves it is safe to fly through the cloud, he added: "I think we need to understand the levels of concentration that we are talking about...the levels are absolutely tiny."

His remarks came after Michael O'Leary, the outspoken head of Ryanair, described the ash cloud as "mythical" after the airline operated a similar test flight across air space with the highest ash densities.

Rounding on the Civil Aviation Authority, he said its officials should "take their finger out of their incompetent bureaucratic backsides and allow the aircraft back into the skies over Scotland".

New research has weakened the perceived link between saturated fat and heart disease. Today, many experts agree that refined carbs pose a much greater danger.

Is it possible - even imaginable - that nearly everyone has been wrong about saturated fat and its connection to heart disease? Brace yourself. Based on a wave of new research, all the dietary admonitions about saturated fat could end up being little more than a huge mistake.

"The question is whether saturated fat is harmful or is just a bystander," says Ronald M. Krauss, MD, a lipid specialist and the director of atherosclerosis research at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute. "Saturated fat may have an effect on cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk, but the effect is so small that we just can't detect it. We shouldn't be demonizing saturated fat."

Krauss can back up his opinion with hard science. He and his colleagues recently analyzed 21 published studies involving almost 350,000 people who were tracked from five to 23 years. Their conclusion: People who consumed the most saturated fat did not have a higher risk of heart disease, stroke or any other form of CVD. They published their findings last year in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

You may think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden says it's worse than you've heard.

Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself - entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a "dragnet" for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.

"We're getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says," Wyden tells Danger Room in an interview in his Senate office. "When you've got that kind of a gap, you're going to have a problem on your hands."

What exactly does Wyden mean by that? As a member of the intelligence committee, he laments that he can't precisely explain without disclosing classified information. But one component of the Patriot Act in particular gives him immense pause: the so-called "business records provision," which empowers the FBI to get businesses, medical offices, banks and other organizations to turn over any "tangible things" it deems relevant to a security investigation.

"It is fair to say that the business records provision is a part of the Patriot Act that I am extremely interested in reforming," Wyden says. "I know a fair amount about how it's interpreted, and I am going to keep pushing, as I have, to get more information about how the Patriot Act is being interpreted declassified. I think the public has a right to public debate about it."

A bill that would criminalize TSA agents who conduct airport patdown searches was scuttled last night after the federal government threatened to ground all flights out of Texas.

The proposed law would have levied misdemeanor charges against security agents who "intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly [touch] the anus, sexual organ, buttocks, or breast of the other person, including touching through clothing, or touching the other person in a manner that would be offensive to a reasonable person."

An earlier version of House Bill 1937 would have made such action a felony.

"If [the legislation] passes, the federal government would likely seek an emergency stay of the statute," a letter from the Department of Justice explained (PDF). "Unless or until a such a stay were granted, TSA would likely be required to cancel any flight or series of flights for which it could not ensure the safety of passengers and crew."

The threat of a catastrophic release of radioactive materials from a spent fuel pool at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant is dwarfed by the risk posed by such pools in the United States, which are typically filled with far more radioactive material, according to a study released on Tuesday by a nonprofit institute.

The report, from the Institute for Policy Studies, recommends that the United States transfer most of the nation's spent nuclear fuel from pools filled with cooling water to dry sealed steel casks to limit the risk of an accident resulting from an earthquake, terrorism or other event.

"The largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet will remain in storage at U.S. reactor sites for the indefinite future," the report's author, Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the institute, wrote. "In protecting America from nuclear catastrophe, safely securing the spent fuel by eliminating highly radioactive, crowded pools should be a public safety priority of the highest degree."