I Hope You're Happy

I’m not one for 9/11 milking. It was a terrible thing. Lots of people died who shouldn’t have, and we haven’t done right to right the wrongs. Honor those that passed and let’s realize that we created an enemy by exploiting people, and the only way to unmake the enemy is to remove those who would do violence while at the same time changing our behavior to allow those in the third world to live better, more prosperous lives. Then we can feel safe.

Funny how that is an analogy for my own situation. We moved into a low rent apartment that felt fairly safe. Couldn’t afford more due to circumstances some of you know about. Things have become progressively worse, and now we’re moving in fear of our lives. I wonder how much better this place would be if everyone in the complex earned a living wage.

But let’s move on.

A double shot of Republican hypocrisy. This is so common, I think their party slogan is “I hate hypocrisy, even when I’m doing it.”

Sarah Palin complains of a lack of civility after Obama Debunks her “Death Panels”

Yeah, the one who made up the lie of death panels and destroyed many people’s hopes of affordable healthcare is crying about manners because Obama told the truth.

Texan Critic Of Obama’s ‘Indoctrination’ Speech Backs Actual Indoctrination In Textbooks

Only he wants to do it with Newt, Reagan and conservatism. Yes, it’s Texas State Board of Education time again, this time, David Bradley, a significant conservative.

So let’s see how this works 1) we make a fake controversy over something that doesn’t really have any merit 2) hide and hope nobody finds us out and 3) run the whole nation in circles

These political games are sick shams. When will conservatives give up the outright bullshit and return to America? What do you do with a party when all they can offer is opposition without merit? When did we grant so much political power to the loony bin?

Bachmann pulls more statistics out of her arse

Bachman criticizes a tax rate than can reach 50% (who the hell pays that?) by pining for 1950, when the top tax rate was a decidedly socialist 84% (or in her own head 5%).

Rep. Jean Schmidt joins ranks of birthers with the least sneaky whisper ever

Funny thing is, Obama’s been the best thing for the firearm industry since gunpowder

Seems between paranoid morons and the stimulus money going to police agencies, business is booming.

Science proves you do remember the name of the girl you slept with last night

Those memories are still there, what’s blocking you?

Ghost hunting proves fatal

Isn’t it embarrassing when you’re looking for the departed and find you have just become one?

Birthers Must be Stopped by Bill Maher

Maher shows why he’s among the best on this editorial for the LA Times.

And there’s nothing anyone can do to convince these folks. You could hand them, in person, the original birth certificate and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background … and they still wouldn’t believe it.

Which raises the question: Why, in this country, is it always the religious right that won’t take anything on faith?

So far, the reaction from Democrats is to laugh this off, and I understand why. If you seriously believe that President Obama is an African sleeper spy, get out of your chat room and have your house tested for lead.

But we live in America, and in America, if you don’t immediately kill arrant nonsense, no matter how ridiculous, it can grow and thrive and eventually take over, like crab grass or reality shows about fat people.

Speaking of Birthers, they seem to congregate in the south

I wonder what this statistical deviation indicates?

And here’s the best part about it

There was no deviation among minorities, meaning the concentration of whites who aren’t sure of Obama’s citizenship is even more skewed than the graph showed.

What? Glenn Beck lies to support his own paranoid political agenda? Say it ain’t so.

Gets called out on his accusations of Obama’s science guy John Holdren talking about forced abortions and sterilants in the water supply. Seems the only one who is obsessed with forced abortions and sterilization is Glenn Beck. He’s also really good at taking things out of context.

The guy who got the drinking age raised to 21 regrets it

Just looking at common sense talking, though if you read the article, I’m not sure his solution would make things any better. I can just say that keeping something away from people, like drinking, drugs, or sex, only makes them more attractive, and in my eyes, juvenile about how they handle it when they can get their hands on it.

The way our society addresses this problem has been about as effective as a parachute that opens on the second bounce. Clearly, state laws mandating a minimum drinking age of 21 haven’t eliminated drinking by young adults—they’ve simply driven it underground, where life and health are at greater risk. Merely adjusting the legal age up or down doesn’t work—we’ve tried that already and failed. But federal law has stifled the ability to conceive of more creative solutions in the only place where the Constitution says such debate should happen—in the state house—because any state that sets its drinking age lower than 21 forfeits 10 percent of its federal highway funds. This is called an “incentive.”

Global warming releases more CO2 from permafrost

The thing about climate change deniers I can’t believe is how they can boil the most complex of all the systems any living human will likely ever have to deal with to a simple “Oh, we can’t be doing all that. We’re having a cool summer, see? Not true.”

Belief in God claims another victim

Dale Neumann told the jury he didn’t seek medical help for his [child's diabetes] because “I can’t do that because Biblically, I cannot find that is the way people are healed.”

He added: “If I go to the doctor, I am putting the doctor before God. I am not believing what he said he would do.”

So let me get this straight, since the only way people are healed in the Bible is by miracle, and even though people are cured every day by medicine, you chose prayer? Brilliant. Poor kid’s probably going to come back as an atheist in her next life.

Sarah Palin has never been accused of being a scholar, and neither have many in her political party. No, scholars learn from history, look at the world objectively, and make decisions based on the facts they have observed.

When Sarah Palin stepped down as Governor of Alaska, it fueled a circus of speculation matched only by the lingering doubts that Michael Jackson actually is Latoya. Did she have a skeleton in the closet that was about to come out? What are these other objectives she talked about? I think a couple things are obvious, she wants to do her version of “good” and couldn’t in her position as a lame duck in office (think George W. Bush after the Democrats re-took control of Congress). Also, she saw what end of the Republican party she represented, the Religious conservative value voter. She suffered quite a backlash from the Libertarian side of the party, whom John McCain had largely sewn up. This cognitive dissonance didn’t last for the ticket, and they eventually imploded on their own bullshit. We’ll come to that in a minute.

What is becoming clear is Palin’s decision was based on a notion that she could create a new political movement based on those conservative religious value voters who came to her in the general election. Of course, she hasn’t looked to history to see what could happen when she makes this decision.

The Bull Moose Party was a nickname given to a short lived political split between (you guessed it) Republicans with irreconcilable differences. The reasons for the divide isn’t very important, but it is worth noting that this splinter faction of the Republican Party of the day was center-left and officially known as the “Progressive Party”. The Party was formed when Teddy Roosevelt lost the Republican Nomination to William Howard Taft. In the next General election, Roosevelt had his own party, which split the vote, and the Democrats walked away with a quick win.
If Palin forms this party, this is precisely what will happen. The “Big Tent” will split into two sideshows, and the Democrats will increase their gains significantly.

This won’t be the only reason for the victory, though.

Republicans are remarkably stupid. I mean, box of rocks stupid. I mean, Ernest Scared Stupid stupid. The reason for this is their goddamned adherence to a philosophical position which doesn’t work. You want an example, well, let’s look at the square peg of economic policy.

The current meltdown was caused in many ways by years of deregulation and tax cuts particularly for the wealthy which did nothing to benefit the rest of the nation. Let’s face it, without the subprime debacle, things weren’t looking too great. People were losing jobs to overseas while being forced into lower paying less worthy jobs. This is not a recipe for success. Health care costs and higher education costs were escalating several times faster than inflation and no one was looking out for the problems these caused. We were going to melt down sooner or later. Bush tried several times with his bogus tax rebates and advances, but those didn’t do much, the hole was already too great. That’s the round hole of reality. And when the clusterfuck happened, what did the Republicans preach? Less regulation and deeper tax cuts, even when the economists they cited were telling them that wasn’t the right path to recovery. To this day they continue to whine that their way is better while the recovery and stimulus spending is helping us recover far faster than their plan would have.

Palin splitting the party between the libertarian branch and the religious conservative branch, be it by way of a faction within the tent or by splitting the tent down the middle would be the best thing that could happen for Democrats, provided they don’t muck it up like the Republicans did.

Of course, I’d be much happier if the Republicans as a whole decided to objectively look at the world, come up with a set of policies based on sound facts as interpreted through their own principles to provide a cogent counter-argument and realistic dialog for the nation’s future.

I don’t think the Democrats are perfect by any means, but debating the Republicans right now is too much like debating Salvador Dali or Groucho Marx, there’s so much nonsense and non-sequitor to their arguments that it’s not even worth showing up to work. This is hardly the best thing for America. We should have point and counterpoint to hammer out a bill, and with a Republican party that has as little grasp on the reality of the world as the current one does allows Democrats to have the unchecked majority they now enjoy. In short, all that whining that Republicans are doing now that they’re on the downside of the schwartz is because they didn’t show up to the sandlot ready to play.

Sarah Palin and the Republicans will continue to lose ground in the mainstream until they look at their policies objectively, one might say skeptically, stop and stop assuming the world conforms to their ideas, rather they need to start making their policies and ideas fit the world as it is. We, as Americans, need to teach them the scientific method, as it were. I know that Liberals don’t want to hear this, but having weak opposition really does do us a disservice, as not everything the Democrats are coming up with are the right resolution to the issues we face.

Here’s one for the skeptics: The Doctor whose limited 12 person study on Vaccines and Autism has caused all of this trouble with people not getting vaccinated was found to have falsified his data. Andrew Wakefield reportedly ignored known facts and fabricated data in his study. The article doesn’t metion motive, but I suspect it was to be a big asshole.

Check it out.

Here’s a new one: Wind Turbine Syndrome. Seems that people living near wind turbines are reporting symptoms of “sleep disturbance, headache, dizziness, vertigo, nausea and panic episodes “associated with sensations of internal pulsation or quivering which arise while awake or asleep,” according to Dr. Nina Pierpont. She has written a book about it called “Wind Turbine Syndrome” and subtitled “A Natural Experiment”. I’m not sure what makes an experiment natural or not. You can see its claims at windturbinesyndrome.com.

This just sounds fishy from the start, one of the usual new-technology-will-eat-your-children kinds of things, like microwave ovens, cell phones, and numerous others. On the other hand, it does seem in some ways plausible to me. The constant low hum is said to mess with the inner ear, and the inner ear is related to balance and disorders there can induce vertigo. The latter two claims are fairly well established in medicine, the former, not so much, so far as I know. I can’t say for sure. I know far more about sound than I do about the medical aspects of hearing. The visual aspects of huge wind turbines can cause some effects as well, if the shadows of the blades are constantly in your field of vision. Imagine the scene in the horror movie in the dark barn where the guy with the machete is about to jump from behind something. Isn’t it always lit solely by sunlight passing through the blades of a slow-moving fan? It’s used because it is very disorienting.

My understanding of the inner ear is that it is filled with fluid sort of like a carpenter’s level. When we change the angle of our head, the bubble moves to a different spot, and we perceive this as movement. When we spin, we get this fluid all in a tizzy, and this is the sensation of dizziness. Our visual senses also play into this, and tricking them can produce a similar experience, a fact exploited by those amusement park rides that have a big screen but don’t really go anywhere.

Sound is the action of air pressure changes as perceived by the ear. It comes in waves, what we sound engineers would consider pushes and pulls on a speaker. Think of the shape of a speaker. It is basically a bowl that collects the air in front of it, and pushes it outwards. It must then pull back before repeating the push. In the push air is actually more dense, and in the pull, less so. Humans hear roughly down to 20 hertz, or twenty of these cycles per second, though the ear drum is certainly pushed by lower. Volume is essentially a measure of the air pressure of the wave front. You’ve seen the Mythbusters where the candle gets blown out by the speaker, and they had to get a very low note to pull it off. The reason for this is that the front of the air movement blows the candle, and the less dense air behind the push isn’t enough to keep the candle lit.

Now imagine if you had a low rumble, ten hz or less, and you got a phasing issue, where when one ear is getting a push, and the other a pull. Disorienting. But also notice that the sound of mysterious hums often is reported as having similar effects on people as those claimed in this book. Many of these hums have been unprovable, but some have been tracked down satisfactorily to a particular source, some giant industrial fans in one town. When these were dealt with, the sounds went away and everybody lived happily ever after.

One other characteristic of low frequency noise is that it travels very far. Whales use low frequency to map out vast areas of ocean, as does Navy sonars.

So let’s right now call this plausible, but needing further study. The hypothesis is sound, if you pardon the pun. I also think these studies will eventually happen if the movement that follows this book is vocal enough.

The problem with this book is that it skipped this step and went directly to publication. I think it is obvious that with the recent focus on green power, the technologies are in the news. If you want to make a quick buck, sensationalizing the next big thing is a great way to go.

I’m not one to attack a doctor’s cred or anything like that. I’ll assume that Dr. Pierpont has more meaningful degrees and schooling in the subject than I, and I will leave the background check to other authorities. She has four peer reviews on the site by people that I will regard in the same way, credible until proven otherwise. The problem is on the website, the peer reviews are more like blurbs on a bestseller. They don’t convince me of the veracity of the book’s claims, only in its intent to make money.

In the end the real problem with the book, which I don’t have in my hands, and I admit am criticizing from afar, is that Dr. Pierpont has rushed to publish this in a book to peddle to the masses rather than seek funding and undertake the study herself. I’m sure it would be available. I’d start asking the manufacturers for study funds, after all, they would be liable if their product caused illness. The government could probably put some money to this as well, after all, wind power is certainly part of our future. Once this study is done, publish it in a peer-reviewed journal, not in your own book where you get to pick your own peers. If you survive this, then you publish the book and go on Oprah and all of that.

The rush to publish this book is problematic in that it isn’t just premature, it will give  never ending fuel to the fire of conspiracy theorists and whackadoos that insist that the wind turbine is ruining their lives, electromagnetic broadcasts are giving them brain cancer, and microwaves poison their food. This sort of alarmist writing is just bad science that will inevitably hinder the growth of clean power for no good reason.