BUMMER: A launch delay for SpaceX.

BUT REMEMBER: WITHOUT REGULATORS, WE’D ALL BE EATING POISONED MEAT. The Failure of the FDA: Why We’re Still Using Antibiotics on Livestock. “For more than 35 years, the FDA has recognized that giving antibiotics to farm animals poses a risk to human health, yet the agency has done almost nothing to stop it. Indeed, it has mastered the art of making inaction look like action.”

UPDATE: Ric Locke emails: “The FDA fulfills its intended purpose marvelously well. That is, it keeps riffraff competitors from bothering the Big Important Food And Drug Companies, and provides a near-unending set of opportunities to cross a politician’s palm with silver.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Researcher William Eichinger thinks this is misleading:

With regards to your comments on the FDA. Let’s be real for just a moment. We use a great deal of animal products, that is the reality. For example, we use roughly 700 million eggs a day in the US. Can you imagine supplying that many eggs each and every day without massive use of automation? The use of automation pretty much precludes “free range” egg layers. So we end up with buildings in which 5000 or so hens are laying. The reality is that if one of those hens gets sick, all of them do (think of preschoolers, the same effect. One of them is sick and the whole class is sick). Entry into these buildings is highly controlled and contrary to the article, the operations are quite hygienic. People who enter wear clothing that limits contact. These farmers use the drugs to keep them healthy. Ascribing nefarious motivations is not productive and is insulting to what these people are trying to do. We haven’t even talked about the health issues associated with the alternative, “free range” eggs; eggs that are laid pretty much everywhere and are decidedly not hygienic. Not to mention issues related to finding, collecting, and processing these eggs at anything like reasonable prices.

Similar arguments for hogs and cattle. I don’t like the situation either. But it is unreasonable to expect farmers to produce the amount of animal products that we use every day without “factory” type farming. These farmers are doing the best they can (and while I am no fan of the FDA, just banning the use of these drugs is not going to be helpful).

Bill

Just for the record, part of my research concerns the airborne emissions from these facilities. So I have met and worked with quite a few of these people. They try to do the “right thing”, but just what that is is not always clear.

Noted.

SEASIDE SOPRANOS: Boardwalk Empire Comes To DVD.

THE KEETON CASE: An Abuse of Academic Power?

DOUBLE STANDARDS ON FOR-PROFIT EDUCATION? “The Illinois attorney general is planning to sue Westwood College, a for-profit institution with four campuses in the Chicago area, saying that it has misled students about its criminal justice program in ways that have left the students facing serious debts without employment prospects.”

I wonder what the Chicago City Colleges, with their 7% graduation rate are telling incoming students?

FOUR THINGS TO KNOW about maritime disasters.

NO, I’M NOT GOING DARK TODAY: But you can tell your Congressmember about how you feel about SOPA. And you should. (Bumped).

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Glenn, no name please. I work for Congressman Tim Johnson. Just to let you know, we’re getting about a hundred emails an hour opposing SOPA. We were already opposed, but this certainly makes us feel that much better about our opposition.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Web Protests Piracy Bill And Senators Change Course. “Members of Congress, many of whom are grappling with the issues posed by the explosion in new media and social Web sites, appeared caught off guard by the enmity toward what had been a relatively obscure piece of legislation to many of them.”

MORE: A reader emails:

From the NYT Article:

“The problem for the content industry is they just don’t know how to mobilize people,” said John P. Feehery, a former Republican leadership aide and executive at the motion picture lobby. “They have a small group of content makers, a few unions, whereas the Internet world, the social media world especially, has a tremendous reach. They can reach people in ways we never dreamed of before.”

That’s not their problem at all. The problem for the content industry is that they have no people to mobilize. All they have is Hollywood cash and insider access. The number of flesh-and-blood, voting people they can bring to the table in support of SOPA and PIPA is trivial. The media companies, the ones that actually provide the services that people use on a daily basis… they’re the ones who have the people and the votes, and they didn’t need cash or insider access to make an impact today.

Cash and insider access do not get members of Congress re-elected. Votes do. Let this be an object lesson to Dodd, Feehery, and the whole corrupt, rent-seeking crowd at the MPAA.

(As an aside: …and to the “campaign finance reform” crowd who believes that cash = votes).

Indeed. Related: Hollywood Moguls Stopping Obama Donations Because Of President’s Piracy Stand: ‘Not Give A Dime Anymore.’

U.S. VS. SINGAPORE: How The U.S. Government Destroys Business.

Then there’s that whole Keystone Pipeline disaster. . .

CONGRATULATIONS TO MARK LEVIN, who’s now up to #1 on Amazon.

IF IT DOESN’T, THEN WHAT’S THE NINTH AMENDMENT FOR? Does The Constitution Protect The Unenumerated Right To Economic Liberty?

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Movies & TV.

JAMES TARANTO JOINS THOSE FACT-CHECKING POLITIFACT TENNESSEE:

Halogen bulbs are fine; we have several of them in fixtures in our apartment. We even have a few of the dreaded compact fluorescents, but only in the kitchen and one desk lamp. But we like traditional incandescents and have stockpiled enough of them to last the rest of our life.

The choice to purchase them is now gone, or will be, as even PolitiFact acknowledges, when “supplies run out.” By PolitiFact’s logic, people who think abortion should be outlawed are pro-choice because they would allow other choices (childbirth, adoption, avoiding pregnancy via abstinence or contraception).

Like PolitiFact, abortion opponents favor laws taking away choices they don’t think are worth having. You can agree or not, but that’s a matter of opinion, not fact.

Well said. And it’s not (quite) too late to stock up — until supplies run out.

CRUISE SHIP SEARCH SUSPENDED after ship moves. I’ve done a little bit of wreck diving, but I can only imagine what searching for bodies in such an immense ship must be like. A few years ago on Cayman I was talking in a bar with a local diver who did bottom inspections for cruise ships sometimes. He said that the bottom is so immense that when you’re under it — even with the 100-150 foot visibility common there — you can’t see the edge and it’s easy to become completely disoriented. They have to use guide ropes. And that’s on the outside of the ship. Inside, with all those corridors in the dark, it’s got to be nightmarishly complex.

HMM: Polar growth at the bacterial scale reveals potential new targets for antibiotic therapy. “An international team of microbiologists led by Indiana University researchers has identified a new bacterial growth process — one that occurs at a single end or pole of the cell instead of uniform, dispersed growth along the long axis of the cell — that could have implications in the development of new antibacterial strategies.” We certainly need those.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Dating Disaster: My Date With A (Former) Suicide Girl.

HMM: Ultra Short Telomeres With Osteoarthritis. “Every time most cells divide their telomere chromosome caps get shorter. When the telomere caps get very short cellular division is inhibited. Cells that can’t divide can not repair damaged tissue. It is not a coincidence that cells around damaged arthritic joints have short telomeres. . . . Lots of researchers investigate a large assortment of diseases of old age. But many of these diseases have a common cause: loss of ability of the body to do repairs. So while the diseases manifest in different ways with different symptoms they could be reversed with a common strategy: restore the body’s ability to do repairs on itself. Cell therapies to deliver youthful cells are a key part of a larger strategy to reverse the aging process and repair aged tissues.” Faster, please.

GOOD: SOPA Blackout Leads Co-Sponsors To Defect.

BRIAN DOHERTY: Space On Earth: A visit to a wooden hangar where the future is being born. Part of Reason’s awesomely good February issue on space and space policy.

SCIENCE: Who’s that knocking at ORNL’s front door? Yep, it’s China (again and again). “Oak Ridge National Laboratory received thousands of foreign visitors in 2011, with the total up by about 800 over the previous year. There were 114 different countries represented, but China again topped the list in a big way. More than a fifth of the lab’s total foreign visitors were from China. It’s at least the fourth year in a role that China has headed the roster at the U.S. Department of Energy’s largest science lab, having more than twice as many visitors as the next country (India).”

OBVIOUSLY, THEY WANTED SOMEONE WITH A BACKGROUND IN JOB-CREATION FOR A CHANGE: Obama’s New OMB Director Worked At Bain.

FINALLY: A Camper-Conversion Kit — for a Prius.

FALKLANDS UPDATE: David Cameron accuses Argentina of ‘colonialism’ over Falklands Islands.

JAMES PETHOKOUKIS: Actually, Mitt Romney’s Tax Rate Is Too High.

Funny, back when the dems were running Kerry and Edwards it was good to be rich. And check out the Kerrys’ curiously timed stock trades during the ObamaCare debate.

JAMES HUFFMAN: The Commerce Clause Mandate: Obamacare will test the Supreme Court’s devotion to individual liberty.

WHO NEEDS JOBS AND OIL, ANYWAY? Report: State Department Plans to Block the Keystone Pipeline.

UPDATE: Reader Paul Strasser has a question for the State Department:

So let me get this right. The Canadian Oil is supposedly worse for the environment, so stopping this pipeline will help the planet.

So instead of moving the oil in a safe way and be processed in US refineries operating under EPA regulations, the oil will now be transported across the Canadian Rockies where it will be loaded onto giant tankers and shipped across the Pacific where it will be refined in Chinese operations that have far fewer, if any, regulations in place.

Please let me know how the Chinese alternative is better for the Earth. Because no matter what, this Canadian oil is going to be sold.

More cynically, several readers suggest that the Saudis’ investment in the State Department is paying off. But while such investments are real, I think this is too high-level for that. This is Obama himself choosing to placate the greens.