James Wimberley

While you are twiddling your trackball thumbs waiting for the DACA explosion. something slightly useful. I finally bought Edward Tufte’s classic of graphical design The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It’s so good it has no competitors, like the Department of Water Engineering at the Technical University of Delft. Struggling to find a niggle against […]

The CW on Obama’s climate deal with China has it about right: it is (a) a huge diplomatic breakthrough, removing the main roadblock to an agreement in Paris to cut carbon emissions and get the world on a path to sustainability in a livable climate; (b) completely inadequate, as the actual emissions targets for 2030 […]

President Obama’s political situation after the mid-term election defeat of the Democrats is the same as it was before. Kevin Drum, as so often, gets this one right. (Get well, Kevin, even slowly). Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds, but gridlock, gridlock. Obama’s positive agenda lies entirely within his executive prerogative. He can take action in […]

Yet another blue-ribbon report on the high costs of delaying action on climate disruption, this one from the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers. It won’t change closed minds. I suppose the drip-drip effect may bring round a few waverers, or shift some real journalists away from false balance. What it should do is prompt […]

Supreme Court of the United States SYLVIA BURWELL, SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, ET AL v. HOBBY LOBBY STORES, INC., ET AL Justice Wimberley, dissenting I fully concur with the powerful dissent of my colleague Justice Ginsburg. The claim of the plaintiffs also fails on separate grounds that her dissent does not go into […]

On June 6 I gave you an anniversary snark against Ezra Klein’s black take  on the prospects for our climate. The BrE phrase attributed to Norman Tebbit in the blog headline is just another snark. (Photo credit Freefoto.com.) It’s only fair to back them with an actual argument. Joe Romm did a good point-by-point rejoinder […]

British lefty pundit George Monbiot, in a gloomy tirade against the cult of economic growth: Ignore if you must climate change, biodiversity collapse, the depletion of water, soil, minerals, oil; even if all these issues were miraculously to vanish, the mathematics of compound growth make continuity impossible …. The trajectory of compound growth shows that […]

Another portrait in the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid, not as good as Ghirlandaio’s exquisite memorial to Giovanna Tornabuoni but of greater historical interest to American readers. Smartphone photo by me, you get what you pay for here. The subject is George Washington’s cook; the painter Gilbert Stuart, who also made the iconic (but actually inferior) […]

The Mayo Clinic: In a proof of principle clinical trial, Mayo Clinic researchers have demonstrated that virotherapy – destroying cancer with a virus that infects and kills cancer cells but spares normal tissues – can be effective against the deadly cancer multiple myeloma. ….. Two patients in the study received a single intravenous dose of […]

The US campus movement for university divestment from fossil fuels has claimed its first big scalp. From Climate Progress: Stanford University announced Tuesday it would divest from the coal industry, making it the first major university to do so. .. “Stanford has a responsibility as a global citizen to promote sustainability for our planet, and […]