John T. Reed’s news blog

I saw some news segment today where the announcer asked some experts if the store shelves in the US could go bare—they were in a store with relatively empty shelves because of coronavirus hoarding. The expert essentially said no..Excuse me. In a free market like we have now, runs on the store can temporarily empty the shelves. During our PG&E-induced power outages last Fall, there were runs on generators. I had already bought ours in 2016. And there were runs on batteries and rechargeable power-outage night lights. You could buy stuff on line or drive to the next town or...

Here is a Facebook comment I recently received when I expressed some routine skepticism about the sea level rising multiple feet because of Republicans burning fossil fuels. The commenter is Larry Best, a West Point graduate. We both “majored” in Russian, although after reading his comment I suspect he had a different reason. The numbers refer to my list of intellectually-dishonest debate tactics  https://www.johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-news-blog/60887299-intellectually-honest-and-intellectually-dishonest-debate-tactics?_pos=2&_sid=26b2609db&_ss=r   Larry Best said John T. Reed response I suspect, John T. Reed, that you will come to regret sending me a friend request. Let the readers decide. Harbor facilities are by definition at sea level. #20 Straw man refutes an...

More on the nonexistent hot hand and the people too ignorant to understand that. . LeBron James is a high school graduate who does not understand that he has never had a hot hand and never will. A hot hand is a time period where your probability of making a basketball shot is elevated above your normal probability of doing that because of a beneficial psychological effect of making shots early in that time period. . This is a common misconception because the average moron makes the post hoc ergo propter hoc logic fallacy. That is Latin for “after which...

I do not care if Roe v. Wade lives or dies. The decision invalidated a TX law that outlawed abortion. There is no mention of abortion in the Constitution. The 1973 court said the right to an abortion comes from the Constitutional right of privacy. I don’t see the word privacy in the Constitution either. . It is not there. Wikipedia says "The Right to Privacy" (4 Harvard L.R. 193 (Dec. 15, 1890)) is a law review article written by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, and published in the 1890 Harvard Law Review. It is "one of the most influential...

We are having what I call “good sleeping weather” today. Overcast, rainy, chilly, damp cold. . Here in Northern California, it has not rained since January. Weather has been very nice—a drought actually. Satellite photos of northern CA show almost no white on top of the Sierra Nevada mountains. That white is where we get our summer water. . I often take a 20-minute or so nap each afternoon. Today, I think I have already taken three, totally zonked, prolonged naps and it is not yet when I have my normal one. Maybe some sort of sleep deficit from dry...