Tea Party Logic

Burning CO2

Audi is experimenting with "e-diesel" made from a combination of carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and water. Very cool! I've never had the desire to own an Audi but if this makes it to market, I may just have to pick one up.

Here Come the Geoengineering Hucksters

Why do business people always fall for hucksters? Think of all the wealthy investors who were suckered by guys like Bernie Madoff. Were the suckers he took for a very expensive ride greedy, or were they just wishful thinkers?

Now Joe Nocera has fallen for the "geoengineering" scam that the fossil fuel industry is pushing to avoid having to do something real about climate change (or climate disruption, as some now want to call it).

Geoengineering is a gimmick that treats the symptoms of climate change (increased temperatures) instead of addressing the cause (too much CO2).

Nocera likes to call geoengineering "chemo for the planet." He thinks that because we're so greedy and short-sighted, trying to reduce the amount of fossil fuels we use by switching to clean sources will never work. So instead of solving the real problem, we should just take a pill and put a Star Wars band aid on it.

This is like morbidly obese people refusing to cut back on the amount of food they eat, and instead they take some magical supplement that the hucksters say will "burn the fat right off."

Just like the morbidly obese, Nocera has fallen for the magical supplement:

A second [method] is called solar radiation management, which uses techniques like shooting sulfate particles into the stratosphere in order to reflect or divert solar radiation back into space. This very effect was illustrated after the volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. Spewing 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide in the air, the volcano caused global temperatures to fall, temporarily, by about 0.5 degrees Celsius, according to Wagner and Weitzman.

Yes, according to this brilliant business journalist, the answer to carbon dioxide pollution is sulfate pollution!

But it's worse than that. Has Nocera been sleeping blissfully ignorant for the last 50 years? You see, Joe, for decades we had this problem called acid rain. The sulfur in the smoke from coal-fired power plants came back down to earth in the form of sulfuric acid. As you might recall had you taken chemistry, sulfuric acid is bad.

Acid rain kills fish. It prevents fish eggs from hatching. It kills shellfish and coral in the ocean. It kills trees and plants. It toxifies soil, making it unsuitable for farming. Acid rain eats away metal bridges, stone buildings, gravestones, concrete highways, and so on. Sulfur particles in the air cause health problems in humans, including bronchitis and asthma.

In short, acid rain causes lots of death and destruction and costs lots of money.

Because if we shoot sulfur particles into the stratosphere they will come raining back down. To make matters worse, we have to constantly shoot sulfur particles into the air, for as long as the concentration of CO2 is elevated. Which will be centuries, especially if we drill and burn oil until it's all gone. If we stop injecting crap into the atmosphere, the planet will start heating up drastically.

This makes Nocera's solution no solution at all, because it depends on us actively spending money to prevent something bad happening. Which is the basis of Nocera's entire argument for why we can't make ourselves stop burning fossil fuels in the first place.

Now, acid rain is one of the big success stories on the environment over the last 50 years. We have mostly eliminated the problem by making coal-fired power plants clean up their act. Now Nocera wants to intentionally put this crap in the air?

And the problem isn't just sulfuric acid falling from the skies. As we pump more CO2 into the atmosphere, some of it enters the ocean and forms carbonic acid. This makes the ocean more acidic, as described on an excellent episode of NOVA (sponsored in part by the Koch brothers!). Ocean acidification prevents sea creatures from incorporating carbonate into their shells. This is already killing coral and oysters. Worse, it's killing the tiny shelled pteropods and krill that form the basis of the ocean's entire ecosystem. All higher forms of oceanic life ultimately depend on those creatures for food.

And then there's the sheer hypocrisy of the entire climate denial camp. A big part of their argument is that human beings are simply too small to have any effect on global climate. But, they argue, if climate change were happening, all we'd have to do is inject sulfate into the atmosphere to change climate globally! Huh?!

Then there's international politics. What if Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Japan don't think that causing acid rain worldwide and killing off the oceans is such a good idea? Do the countries fouling the air with CO2 have the right to trash the environment of other countries with even more pollution? Would those countries be within their rights to bomb atmospheric sulfate injectors in countries like the United States, Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia? Are we willing to go to war with all of Western Civilization in order to keep profits rolling in for the most despotic regimes on the planet?

Nocera also hypes another "solution:" carbon capture. This, he says, "sucks up carbon from the air." The only problem is what to do with it once you've sucked it. The brilliant plan? Pump it into the ground! The oil and gas industry are already causing earthquakes across the country by pumping fracking waste into the ground. Now Nocera wants to compound the problem by pumping the crap we just burned back into the ground, but somewhere else.

Joe, you may not know it, but there already exists a technology that sucks up carbon from the air. They're called "trees." But humans have been steadily cutting down and burning trees for centuries to make way for cities and farms and oil fields, and often just for heat. Deforestation is a sizable part of the CO2 problem.

Fact is, fossil fuels are constantly declining in efficiency. We have to expend a lot more energy to extract fossil fuels from the ground as we resort to more esoteric techniques like hydraulic fracturing. Gone are the days where you just drilled a hole and oil came squirting out in a gusher. We have to expend energy to ship the crude around the world. We have to expend energy to refine the crude. We have to expend energy to ship the refined fuel to the destination. We have to expend energy to clean up the emissions. And now Nocera wants us to expend energy to sequester the pollution in the ground, blithely assuming that nothing bad will ever happen if we pump billions of tons of crap into the ground where it will potentially pollute aquifers (creating carbonic acid) and cause earthquakes.

Solar and wind power are already cheaper than fossil fuels in some parts of the world. The downside is that they're not as convenient. If we maximize use of renewables where it makes economic sense, wider adoption will drive down the price even further. That will spur future technological developments, eventually allowing us to power transportation with renewables.

We don't need to stop all fossil fuel use immediately. We just need to reduce our emissions so that we don't exceed the earth's capacity to absorb it.

The IMF estimates that the world spends $5 trillion to subsidize fossil fuel use. Shouldn't the businesses that are costing us all that money bear the financial responsibility for it?

Even worse, why can't a business journalist understand that?

Literally Dying Off

There have been plenty of posts and comments on this blog by both Nikto and me about how the GOP base is literally dying off. Daniel McGraw over at Politico has finally put some numbers to it and the prognosis isn't good.

By combining presidential election exit polls with mortality rates per age group from the U.S. Census Bureau, I calculated that, of the 61 million who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, about 2.75 million will be dead by the 2016 election. President Barack Obama’s voters, of course, will have died too—about 2.3 million of the 66 million who voted for the president won’t make it to 2016 either. That leaves a big gap in between, a difference of roughly 453,000 in favor of the Democrats. 

How did he do this?

Here is the methodology, using one age group as an example: According to exit polls, 5,488,091 voters aged 60 to 64 years old supported Romney in 2012. The mortality rate for that age group is 1,047.3 deaths per 100,000, which means that 57,475 of those voters died by the end of 2013. Multiply that number by four, and you get 229,900 Romney voters aged 60-to-64 who will be deceased by Election Day 2016. Doing the same calculation across the range of demographic slices pulled from exit polls and census numbers allows one to calculate the total voter deaths. It’s a rough calculation, to be sure, and there are perhaps ways to move the numbers a few thousand this way or that, but by and large, this methodology at least establishes the rough scale of the problem for the Republicans—a problem measured in the mid-hundreds of thousands of lost voters by November 2016. To the best of my knowledge, no one has calculated or published better voter death data before.

The math is pretty straight forward and so is the message.

“The [GOP] does rely too much on older and white voters, and especially in rural areas, deaths from this group can be significant,” Frey says. “But millennials (born 1981 to 1997) now are larger in numbers than baby boomers ([born] 1946 to 1964), and how they vote will make the big difference. And the data says that if Republicans focus on economic issues and stay away from social ones like gay marriage, they can make serious inroads with millennials.”

So far, the current crop of GOP candidates doesn't appear willing to do that. Look at what happens.

But what if Republicans aren’t able to win over a larger share of the youth vote? In 2012, there were about 13 million in the 15-to-17 year-old demo who will be eligible to vote in 2016. The previous few presidential election cycles indicate that about 45 percent of these youngsters will actually vote, meaning that there will about 6 million new voters total. Exit polling indicates that age bracket has split about 65-35 in favor of the Dems in the past two elections. If that split holds true in 2016, Democrats will have picked up a two million vote advantage among first-time voters. These numbers combined with the voter death data puts Republicans at an almost 2.5 million voter disadvantage going into 2016.  

Yep.

Even Ted Cruz Is Saying It

So, now that Ted Cruz has said it, will those last, little stragglers final admit that Saddam didn't have WMDs? Or will cognitive dissonance continue to rule the day?

The United States Of America: 2015

When you foam at the mouth about infringement, so much so that you allow people like this to own guns, this is exactly what you get.

And YOU are responsible.

No One Wants Remmington

It looks like no one wants to buy Remington Outdoor. Gee, I wonder why. Could it be that they are the company that made the weapon used by Adam Lanza to slaughter innocent children at Sandy Hook?

What's also interesting to note from the article is this:

The tide has turned against Cerberus and the gun industry, at least for now. Gun sales began slowing last year. Remington reported a nearly 28 percent drop in sales from 2013, to $939.3 million. And it swung to a $68.2 million loss from a $57.7 million profit. (The company also cited a recall of millions of triggers for its Remington Model 700, which has been reported to fire without the trigger’s being pulled, as weighing on its results.) 

A chief rival, Smith & Wesson, said that its sales for the 12 months ended Jan. 31 fell about 15 percent, to $541.6 million. Over all, the number of background checks processed by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, a rough indicator of interest in gun sales, declined slightly in 2014, to just under 21 million.

Wait...what? The Gun Cult has assured me many, many times that guns sales are always high, because guns are awesome and stuff, forever and ever, AMEN!!! It could possibly be that there is a glut in the amount of guns out there, can it?

Sales of firearms surged in 2013 in the face of fears of tougher ownership laws. The worst of those fears have since subsided, but that stockpiling has led to a glut of guns in the United States.

My oh my!

Perhaps the solution to permanently turning off America from guns is twofold. First, have so many around that no one really gives a shit anymore. After all, it's human nature that when something is easily available, no one gives a shit about it. The cassette tape analogy still applies here. You can't even give those fucking things away.

Second, and more importantly, make the companies that make guns very unappealing to own and, thus, drive down the value in the private capital market. This could hit them where they really hurt. If it costs too much to make guns and no one is making any money on them, well...:)

Take The Climate Change Quiz!

Think you know the odd effects of global climate change? Take our quiz.

Growing Economies Without Growing Emissions

The world economy grew last year without carbon emissions.

Still, evidence of cleaner economic growth is exciting for those who work on a challenge as immense and protracted as global climate change. The news is well timed, too: Nations are developing their climate plans ahead of international negotiations in Paris this December. Progress on emissions – however slight – shows world leaders that “this is a doable thing that the world can work on together,” says Jennifer Morgan, global director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute, a climate research organization based in Washington. “This should give them confidence that they can meet their emissions targets and still grow their economies,” Ms. Morgan says.

This is most welcome news considering that naysayers on all sides said it wasn't possible. The people who continue to deny that man made climate change is real and that the renewable energy market isn't feasible look pretty silly right now. Equally as silly are those who think that we aren't doing enough. Stories like this:

Georgetown Goes All In on Renewable Energy

make them look even more silly. We can add Georgetown, Texas to Burlington, Vermont as cities that have gone 100 percent renewable.

By the mid part of this century, the manufactured debate about climate change will be moot.

A Primary Source on Benghazi

The CIA is talking about Benghazi and it's very, very interesting. Given that Morrell is a primary source, his words should obviously be given a good deal of weight although I have no doubt that it will bounce directly off the right wing bubble.

We all know their faith will not be shaken:)

The GOP Clown Car

I've become very amused at imagining exactly how the Republican Party is going to handle primary debates with 15-20 candidates. How can they NOT look like the fucking clown car just dropped them off?

This recent piece from the Times presents a few of the conundrums.

But by trying to impose order through party-sanctioned debates and limiting the number of forums, the party may have begotten an equally messy problem: who to include on stage for a 90-minute debate from a field of nearly 20 potential candidates.

Right. Who are they are going to say isn't a "serious" candidate? What are the metrics? Polls?

It is not entirely clear who will be in charge of devising or enforcing the debate criteria — that is, if there are criteria. One member of the national committee panel charged with overseeing the debates said its members had discussed ceding the decision entirely to Fox News.

Wow. At least they are admitted something the rest of the country already knew.

The party has little appetite for a forum so thick with candidates that it allows for not much more than an extended “lightning round” of questions. One Republican involved in the process said a 90-minute forum with 10 candidates would offer each candidate only four to five minutes, after subtracting commercials and moderator time.

How on earth will they handle 20?

Of course, this piece doesn't even get into the issue of how it's going to look to the rest of the country gets to see a mob of conservatives who all want to be president falling all over themselves to show much they hate science, the gays, immigrants, and women. What a chorus that will be!

The ad pretty much writes itself:)

The (Still) Facts of the Electorate

It looks like I'm not the only one pointing out electoral vote reality regarding the election next year. Byers points out a few key points that folks seem to be missing.

Here's the problem with Silver's piece: It's 1,500 words long, and not one of those words is "economy."

Silver's article also didn't include the words "Ross Perot." While Perot took votes from both Bush and Clinton, he likely delivered additional anti-Bush voters to Clinton after he dropped out of the race. No, Perot didn't cost Bush the election, but he did shake up the popular vote.

It's odd that Silver is going against his own models. Look for him to instantly put that 247 on the board right when the general starts next year.

Neither Byers or Silver note that all of the states in the 247 base have gone Democrat in the last six elections. The only exception was New Hampshire in 2000 went for Bush but New Mexico went for Gore so it was more or less a wash. Add in that the Republicans are bound and determined to nominate a "real" conservative this time around and even Bernie Sanders might have a shot at getting to 270. Now if they decided to nominate a moderate like Jon Huntsman, things would obviously change.

So, the next time you are engaging someone who think Republicans have a chance at winning in 2016, have them explain to you how a Marco Rubio or a Scott Walker wins California, Illinois and New York.

Because that's 104 electoral votes right there.

A Big Thank You!

I wanted to send out a big thank you to readers new and old for somehow managing to double our site traffic in the last couple of weeks. Wow! A big part of this has been my co-blogger Nikto's last few pieces which have been truly stellar but I also know, via emails, that some of you have been promoting it so thanks!! It's also been nice to see some new (and returning) commenters back. I know that we've picked up a few Quorans which is cool.

Many of the new hits are coming from different places around the US and seem to be returning to read so that makes us here at Markadelphia very happy indeed!

Declining American Religiosity and Politics

A Pew Survey indicates that the Christian share of the United States population fell from 78.4% in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014.

All major Christian denominations declined, some more than others, and in some states more than others. For example, the percentage of Minnesotans identifying themselves as Catholic declined from 28% to 22%, or a drop of one-fifth in the total number of Catholics.

Non-Christian religions increased their share of the population by 1.2%.

But the largest increase was in the number of unaffiliated -- people who belong to no religion, a group which increased by 6.7%. Interestingly, the increase in unaffiliated Americans increased in all age brackets, not just the young.

Being unaffiliated doesn't mean they don't believe in a god -- though the number of atheists and agnostics went up 3.1% -- it just means that they claim no membership in an organized religion.

The question is, why?

Religiosity declines in wealthy, modern societies. People turn to religion because they need moral and spiritual support; inequality, poverty and desperation drive religious belief. This survey backs that up: the number of black Protestants remained stable. In fact, in the United States the most religious people are black women, who as a group are probably the worst off in this country.

A cynic might say that this is the real reason conservatives don't want government to help people: they don't want to lose control over the general populace that religion gives them. The more miserable people are, the more they turn to religion for solace, and the more power they give the conservatives. Of course, some branches of Islam are far more conservative than the most conservative American religions, but American conservatives hate it because it's a competitor. Basically, for political reasons.

Another factor is the betrayal and hypocrisy among the clergy. For example, in Minnesota, like many states, the Catholic Church has been mired in scandal after scandal with pedophile priests, archbishops turning a blind eye, paying them off, not calling the cops and covering it all up. Across the country numerous evangelical preachers have been caught having affairs with women, engaging in homosexual trysts and doing drugs.

Another factor is social change. Young Americans are turned off by the generally intolerant and specifically anti-gay agenda of conservative religions. They think the churches' stances against birth control and sex education are foolish and counterproductive.

Related to this is politics. Some believe that the right-wing political stances that some churches espouse are turning off young people.

“Traditionally, we thought religion was the mover and politics were the consequence," Michael Hout, a sociologist and demographer at New York University, told the Religion News Service. The opposite appears the case today, he said, as some have left evangelical denominations and the Catholic faith because “they saw them align with a conservative political agenda and they don't want to be identified with that.” Last year, Mr. Hout cowrote the paper “Explaining Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Political Backlash and Generational Succession, 1987-2012,” which studied the trend.

Some might contest this, saying that conservative evangelicals have declined less than more moderate religious groups (the share of evangelicals declined by 0.9% and Catholics and mainline Protestants declined by 3.1% and 3.4% respectively). But since we can't see exactly who is moving where in these broad statistics, it's completely possible that conservative Catholics and Protestants are changing their religions to align with their politics, joining evangelical churches where their Republican buddies hang out.

For example, except for women's issues (the position of women in the clergy, abortion and birth control), the Catholic Church is quite moderate and reasoned. The Church opposes the death penalty, endorses gun control, favors social policies that help the poor, and stopping climate change. Other churches favor these stands, allowing birth control and limited abortion, and some even allow women and gay priests.

How many Catholic, Lutheran and Episcopalian Republicans and have abandoned their more moderate churches for conservative evangelical denominations that favor their own political stances?

Mr. Hout is being naive when he says religion is the mover and politics are the consequence. Because politics has always been the mover. Organized religion is politics.

The first organized religions were state-sponsored, monarchies where the pharaoh or king was a self-declared god. Judaism started as a tribal religion with Moses as the king. Christianity was a fringe sect until Constantine made it the official state religion. Christianity formed the basis of the feudal system in Europe, whose kings ruled by divine right. The Church in the Middle Ages was essentially its own country and the pope a king. The Anglican Church was formed when Henry VIII couldn't get what he wanted from the pope. The Reformation was all about internal Church politics, money, land and power. Mohammed was a warlord who spent the last 10 years of his life fighting battle after battle. Communist China and the Soviet Union embraced atheism to strip political power from religious leaders; Marx knew how much political power religions held. Scientology was formed because L. Ron Hubbard didn't want to pay taxes, and he needed foot soldiers to create the illusion of a religion.

The purpose of religion is to control behavior by promising spiritual rewards if you obey their laws, and if you disobey, death and eternal torment -- at least according to the conservative religions.

The purpose of politics is also to control behavior, but by establishing laws.

This country was founded on the principle that politics and religion should be separate, to avoid repeating the innumerable wars in Europe and the abuses of power that resulted from the marriage of politics and religion. In the eyes of the Founders, religion should be a moral philosophy, not a prescription for running a country.

That separation of church and state was perhaps the most revolutionary idea the Founders had. And it was for that reason they wrote a Constitution that mentions god nowhere, and starts with:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

America: 2015

Jeb Declares Himself Unfit to Be President

Despite sounding somewhat reasonable on a number of issues, Jeb Bush has now made it abundantly clear that he is not fit to be president:

After telling a group of fundraisers behind closed doors that former President George W. Bush was one of his advisers on the Middle East, the likely 2016 GOP hopeful followed that up telling Fox News' Megyn Kelly that he would have authorized the Iraq War — even knowing what we know now.

Yes, Jeb would repeat perhaps the biggest blunder in American foreign policy history: invading Iraq (a close second was Johnson's invasion of Vietnam, so I'm not being partisan here).

Why was invading Iraq so spectacularly stupid? Let us count the ways:

• The war was based on two lies: that Saddam was developing WMDs and was involved in 9/11.
• Bush was either duped into going to war by the Iranian spy Ahmed Chalabi and "Curveball," or else he knowingly repeated their lies.
• The war drastically increased the strength of Iran's hand, toppling the Iraqi bulwark against Iran, and turning Iran's greatest enemy into Iran's puppet.
• The war created thousands of Islamic terrorists when it became obvious the war was based on a lie.
• The Iraq war turned the focus away from the war in Afghanistan, preventing a quick resolution and withdrawal there, and getting us mired in the longest war the American military has ever fought.
• The Iraq war turned Muslim opinion against the United States when the torture at Abu Ghraib was revealed, creating more terrorists.
• The wars inflamed Muslim opinion in the United States, leading to terrorist attacks at Fort Hood, the Boston Marathon, etc.
• The war created ISIS when Paul Bremer threw all the Sunnis in the Iraqi army to the wolves of Shia-led government.
• The war wasted a trillion dollars of American taxpayer money, some of it in cash sent to Iraq by the planeload where it was doled out to Iraqi warlords and stolen by mercenaries.
• The war was never put on the budget, creating the huge debt that Republicans are always complaining about.
• The war killed 5,000 American military service members, killed thousands more "contractors," and injured and maimed 32,000 service members.
• IEDs used in the war inflicted traumatic brain injuries and PTSD on hundreds of thousands of American vets.
• Thousands of vets sustained injuries that will require medical treatment for the rest of the lives, which will cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars over the next several decades ($1.3 trillion for both Iraq and Afghanistan).
• Extended deployments destroyed tens of thousands of marriages of American service members.
• The war convinced North Korea that it had to build nuclear weapons to ensure their survival, which the DPRK first tested in 2006. Of course, since he was totally wrapped up with two other wars, Bush could do absolutely nothing to deal with North Korea.
• The war convinced Iran that it too needed nukes.
• The war led to instability in other countries around the Middle East, including Syria, Libya, Egypt, etc.
• Oh, and the war killed hundreds of thousands totally innocent Iraqi civilians.

And what did we get out of the Iraq war?

• We killed a toothless dictator who was too proud to admit that he was no longer a threat to anyone.

The after-the-invasion goal Bush cooked up after his lies about WMDs and 9/11 were exposed -- bringing democracy to Iraq -- hasn't worked out very well at all, considering how the ayatollahs in Iran now run Iraq.

It's clear that Bush's family issues and his inability to acknowledge obvious truths disqualify him from being president. He would make exactly the same mistakes W did, and would never admit it.

Of course, that disqualifies just about every other Republican candidate as well, save perhaps Rand Paul. But he has other fantasies that disqualify him.

Zimmerman Dodges a Bullet

George Zimmerman is in the news again:

George Zimmerman, the former neighborhood watch volunteer who fatally shot Trayvon Martin in 2012, was injured on Monday during a confrontation in Central Florida with a man who had previously accused him of making threats and stalking, according to local authorities.

The shooter claimed Zimmerman pulled a gun on him, so he took his best shot.

Mr. Apperson was questioned at the Lake Mary Police Station, where he was released without charges. After his release, he appeared with his attorney, Mark E. NeJame, who said his client holds a concealed-carry permit, perceived a threat and acted in self-defense.

The police in Lake Mary told reporters that Mr. Apperson called 911 and that Mr. Zimmerman was not the shooter.

This guy put a bullet hole in Zimmerman's car window, damaging Zimmerman's property, and injured Zimmerman when flying glass cut his face. Apperson endangered other drivers by firing a pistol on a public street. He freely admits he committed assault with a deadly weapon. Yet no charges were filed?

Of course, they couldn't file charges based on what Zimmerman got away with.

This incident just goes to show how idiotic the gun laws in Florida are. Why is no one held responsible for cowardly and irresponsible acts of gun play that endanger the public at large?

It must be hell being George Zimmerman. Since everyone knows that he's a child-murdering, speeding, road-raging, gun-toting, wife- and father-in-law beating hot-head, no prosecutor will ever be able to bring charges against anyone who shoots him.

Sadly, one day I expect that someone will justify killing a bearded Hispanic-looking man by saying, "I thought he was George Zimmerman!" And they'll get off.

I don't think things are going to end well for George Zimmerman. He gives the phrase "Dead Man Walking" a whole new meaning.

Our Demand Is Simple: Stop Killing Us

Welcome to the 21st century of the civil rights movement...

More Reasons to Get Vaccinated

There's a good article in the Daily Beast about vaccinations. It contains part of a public service announcement from 1986 written by children's book author Road Dahl:

Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old [in 1962]. As the illness took its usual course, I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything.

“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.

“I feel all sleepy,” she said.

In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead.

Another article unveils a mystery that had been baffling scientists for years:

Back in the 1960s, the U.S. started vaccinating kids for measles. As expected, children stopped getting measles.

But something else happened.

Childhood deaths from all infectious diseases plummeted. Even deaths from diseases like pneumonia and diarrhea were cut by half.

What caused this?

[Measles] erases immune protection to other diseases, [study coauthor Michael] Mina says.

So what does that mean? Well, say you get the chicken pox when you're 4 years old. Your immune system figures out how to fight it. So you don't get it again. But if you get measles when you're 5 years old, it could wipe out the memory of how to beat back the chicken pox. It's like the immune system has amnesia, Mina says.

"The immune system kind of comes back. The only problem is that it has forgotten what it once knew," he says.

So after an infection, a child's immune system has to almost start over, rebuilding its immune protection against diseases it has already seen before.

If the results of this study are verified, it will mean getting vaccinated for measles will protect you from a whole host of other diseases you already had.

Murca

A Puzzling Conundrum For Christian Conservatives

Most religious conservatives have a disdain for the federal government that, these days, blows up into outright pathological hatred. They really do seem to have a problem with authority, don't they? Of course, I've always noted that conservatives in general (and especially libertarians) are actually closet authoritarians and when they're in power, then absolute rule is just dandy.

This ties in to their belief in the higher power of God who, of course, is the ultimate authority on all things here, above, and beyond. What both amazes and puzzles me is their willingness to submit to such an authority given their problems of inadequacy and jealousy with authority here on Earth. Aren't they the least bit concerned that their ever lasting soul will be under the yoke of a supreme ruler? I mean...if they hate Obama so much for helping them out with a few earthly endeavors, imagine what they could potentially feel when God helps them out! Think of having to do so many things without question until the end of time!!

'Tis very puzzling indeed...

Religious Freedom Coming to Cuba?

Conservatives have offered nothing but withering criticism for President Obama's opening of relations with Cuba. However, the overtures to Cuba may already be paying off.

Raul Castro just concluded a visit to the Vatican, where he met with the pope. The meeting had an unexpected result:

"I will resume praying and turn to the Church again if the Pope continues in this vein," Castro, the 83-year-old younger brother of Fidel, told reporters, adding "I mean what I say."

"The pontiff is a Jesuit, and I, in some way, am too. I studied at Jesuit schools," he said.

The Catholic Church's activities were suppressed after the revolution. If the thaw in relations between Washington and Havana means greater religious freedom for the Cuban people, it would be a significant step forward.

However, just because a former Communist government endorses religion doesn't mean it will become any more enlightened. Since the fall of the Soviet Union the Russian Orthodox Church has become the de-facto state religion.

Gays and lesbians are harassed by the government and church officials alike, and as the Orthodox Church has lined up behind Putin on every issue, political assassinations of reporters and opposition figures such as Boris Nemtsov have become almost commonplace.

Cuba may be different, though: the Russian Orthodox Church is a nationalistic religion and Putin has the Russian patriarch under his thumb. The Vatican is independent of all nations and draws its leadership from across the world.

If allowed to flower in Cuba, where Pope Francis will visit this September, the Catholic Church under his leadership should be a force for good.

Again with the False Equivalence

In an attempt to sound moderate and reasonable, Mark has once again fallen for the false equivalence that -- because some Democrats don't like nuclear power, vaccines and genetically modified organisms -- it means that they are just as anti-science as Republicans.

That's a load of crap.

Huge segments of the Republican base deny the very science of evolution (the basis of all biology) and large numbers of them deny the basic science of climate change. Their know-nothing bona fides are well-established.

Democrats don't oppose nuclear power because they don't believe in nuclear physics, but because they believe we don't have a handle on the technology.

The Democrats who oppose nuclear power do so not because they don't believe that fissioning atoms produces energy, but because they believe it's an inappropriate use of a technology that has a large number of extremely dangerous problems.

First, nuclear power plants have already had numerous accidents that have released serious amounts of radiation (Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island), plus a number of other incidents that the American and Soviet military won't own up to publicly.

On-site accidents, earthquakes, tsunamis and terrorist attacks could breach the reactor's core or break open the dry casks, releasing large quantities of radiation. The Fukushima reactors are still leaking radiation into the sea; the only way they have to slow this down is to build a giant freezer around the whole reactor and turn the leaking radioactive water to ice. And still radioactive water is getting to the Pacific.

A Fukushima-like meltdown at the Prairie Island nuclear plant in Minnesota could poison the Mississippi for centuries.

Second, and this is the real problem, we have nowhere to store the nuclear waste. Currently nuclear power plants across the country are just storing the waste in their reactors, or in dry casks on site, often on the banks of rivers that serve as water supplies for large metropolitan areas downstream. This is extremely dangerous. As we saw at Fukushima, storing the waste in the reactor is idiotic, because if the waste is exposed to air it will melt down and potentially cause a catastrophic explosion.

In the USA no state will allow a nuclear waste repository on their land because they don't want to be stuck with everyone else's waste. Furthermore, even if some state did allow storing it there, transporting all that waste to one location allows terrorists to know where it is and attack it anywhere along the route. Given how frequently oil trains keep derailing and exploding, how smart is it, really, to ship tons of radioactive waste around the country?

It would be a mistake to build new nuclear plants without any plan for dealing with the waste.

Now, I'm not in favor of shutting down every nuclear power plant at once. But it's clearly a dangerous technology that we don't really have a handle on, because we have no solution for disposing of the waste. Waste that will be dangerous for centuries. It would be a mistake to compound our problems and build new nuclear plants without any plan for dealing with the waste.

That's the difference between Republicans and Democrats: Democrats don't deny the science of nuclear power, they just don't trust that big businesses focused exclusively on jacking up profits can be trusted to guarantee our safety with an extremely dangerous waste product that will be around long after they have declared bankruptcy. It's basically the same reason environmentalists don't like coal and oil or Republicans don't like big government: they don't like the waste.

GMO foods are much the same. Democrats don't deny that we can insert certain genes into plants to alter their biology. The question is whether using that technology is wise.

The most common GMO crops are "Round Up-ready" corn and soybeans. These plants can be soaked in herbicides (glyphosate) that kill weeds. The problem is that herbicides and pesticides are poisons. Scientific research has shown links between these toxins and Parkinson's, birth defects, autism, and other developmental effects in fetuses. They also cause deformities in amphibians and play a role in Colony Collapse Disorder among bees.

GMO crops encourage overuse of toxic chemicals, create monocultures and make farmers completely dependent on big agro.

Then there's the economics: GMO crops are a bad deal for farmers. In the olden days, farmers could save some of the seed from their harvest to plant their next crop. The agro giants have sued farmers to prevent this practice with GMO seeds. Farmers can be sued even if they replant seed from their own plants, which accidentally bred with GMO plants from neighboring farmers fields.

The problem with agriculture being dependent on herbicides and pesticides is that weeds and pests develop immunities to these poisons, making them ineffective (due to that pesky evolution). These superweeds require farmers to use ever more toxic herbicides, poisons that the companies say are completely safe, but they never have to prove their safety. These products can only be forced off the market if someone else proves they are harmful, and that can take decades.

Finally, use of GMO crops promotes monocultures. Across the country there are only a few different kinds of corn and soybeans. If some new pest or rust shows up that these crops aren't protected from, we could lose the entire year's crop

Scientifically speaking, it is safer in the long term for the food supply to have more genetic diversity, and to use farming techniques that reduce the amount of pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer and irrigation required. Arguments to the contrary are not based in science, but in business, finance and population control.

Nuclear power and GMO organisms are not "science," they are just technologies. They are tools we use to produce energy and food.

As for vaccines, I have heard just as many conservative nut jobs who believe vaccines and fluoridated water are communist conspiracies as liberals who think that they cause autism. At one time there was a valid concern about vaccines: they contained the preservative thimerosal, an organic mercury compound that causes neurological damage. Thimerosal has since been removed from childhood vaccines, but is still present in some adult vaccines and other products like contact lens solution. But since we know mercury causes neurological damage (see: mad as a hatter), why are we still using it?

Furthermore, even if you ignore the whole autism scare, the science says that some small number of people will have negative reactions to vaccinations (even including death), and it is possible (though unlikely) to contract a disease from a live-virus vaccine.

Any medical procedure poses a risk of injury or death, including vaccination.

The fact is, any time you have any medical procedure there's a chance something bad will happen. You run the risk of getting any number of diseases just going to the doctor to get vaccinated if some sick person coughs on you.

Statistically speaking, however, we are safer as a society and as individuals if everyone is vaccinated. But it's also true that some small number of kids will get sick and some will die as a result of a vaccination. That number is much smaller than the number of kids who will get sick and die from the measles, but it's still a risk that scientists have to acknowledge.

But that argument is hard to make to a mother whose child is screaming bloody murder because he got poked by that scary needle. Individual moms don't care about statistics and herd immunity, they only care about their kids. Yes, it's foolish, but can you blame them?

Questioning whether a technology should be used is not a statement against science.

Questioning whether a technology should be used is not a statement against science. The question is whether the benefits of the technology outweigh the risks. The answer is based on statistical analysis, and how much personal risk we want to take in order to benefit all society.

For vaccines it's clear that personal risks are worth the benefit to society. But for nuclear power and GMO crops in particular, all of society is being made to take potentially large risks so that a very small number of corporations can generate vast profits with their proprietary products.

The Democratic Brain

As I've been reading Chris Mooney's The Republican Brain, I've taken note of how Democrats can sometimes fall into the same trap with their cognition. The last section of his book promises an examination of this particular form of dissonance concerning things like nuclear power, GMOs, and vaccines.  In looking at current events, we can see yet another example.

I live in Minneapolis and many of my friends are extremely liberal. Any mention of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and mouths begin to foam just as they do with Monsanto. It's completely ridiculous and, as the president notes above, they are just plain wrong. Not only does this agreement fix some of the issues with our domestic labor vis a vis NAFTA but it expands opportunity for our workers. We can't return to protectionist trade practices in this age of globalization. That's what causes world wars.

Why don't my fellow Democrats understand this?

Snake Poking

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Iowa class teaches how to carry both weapon and baby

Absolute Lunacy

In looking at this video below, I have concluded that we should just let these paranoid fuck faces secede and let them fend for their own. What a bunch of lunatics!!

Joss Whedon Stops Wasting Time...

The trolls have chased Joss Whedon off Twitter. The director of Avengers: Age of Ultron deleted his Twitter account after rabid feminists called the portrayal of Black Widow as sexist and rabid comic book fans whined about the movie's plot.

Granted, it wasn't the greatest movie ever, but it's ridiculous to portray Joss Whedon as sexist. Whedon has been one of the greatest advocates for strong women characters in action adventure entertainment over the last 20 years.

First, Joss Whedon wrote the script for the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer,  the hilarious stereotype-shattering take on the whole damsel-in-distress horror movie genre.

Then Whedon wrote the script for Alien: Resurrection, which starred Sigourney Weaver and Winona Ryder, who were not weak female characters.

Then in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series, Whedon's strongest characters were female, nerds, or female nerds. They were the stars of the show, not just one-dimensional targets of derision that the male characters used for sexual or comic relief.

He continued this vein in the short-lived Firefly. Half the crew of the spacecraft in this western-themed space opera were women, including the nerdy engineer.

Then Whedon did Dollhouse, which had its flaws, but weak female characters were not among them.

Currently in production is the Marvel series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. It, again, is packed with strong female characters, who have driven most of the action in the current season.

Female actors from Whedon's various series have gone on to have strong roles in other shows, such as Person of Interest, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, The 100, etc.

Given this long history, no one can reasonably argue that Joss Whedon is sexist. When he has full creative control, his female characters are all over the board, from professional courtesans, to nurturing mother figures, to unstoppable martial artists and vampire slayers, to powerful witches and super-powered women with alien DNA, to vengeful soulless creatures.

Yes, the makeup of the Avengers team in the latest film is a sausage fest, with only two female characters. But that's not on Joss Whedon. That's on the Marvel Universe, and that's on the bigwigs at Marvel who have the final say on what's in and what's out in their movies: Marvel is renowned for maintaining tight control over a franchise that spans decades and includes dozens of films.

From where I sit, Whedon did what he could to improve the lot of female characters in the Marvel universe: he doubled the number of female Avengers in this latest movie. Previous Avengers cartoon series and comic books typically only have one or two women at a time. The Avengers can only have so many members, and in this movie it must include Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man, Hawkeye and Thor. Story-telling constraints limit how many female characters can be on the team at one time.

The real problem with the Black Widow character isn't that she's female, it's that she has no super powers. She's basically just a spy, a vanilla mortal, who has to shoot the bad guys with pistols. Hawkeye is a normal too, but he at least gets exploding arrows.

The issue with feminists, it seems, is that the Black Widow character actually cares about other people. She isn't concerned solely with her own egotistical goals and blowing stuff up.

Anyway, good riddance to Twitter. I know the Twittersphere doesn't want to hear this, but it's a complete waste of time for a guy like Joss Whedon to pay any attention to what the Twittersphere has to say.

Actually, it's a waste of anyone's time...

Okay, Ted. Which way do you want it?

On Saturday Rafael Edward ("Ted") Cruz joined a long list of loonies who are afraid that the U.S. military is going to invade Texas, using the Jade Helm 15 military exercises to impose martial law and force Obamacare down Texans' throats!

A couple days later Cruz faulted President Obama for not stopping an attack on right-wing loonies hosting a Mohammed-insulting event specifically tailored to incite the exact same sort of attack that occurred in Paris against Charlie Hebdo.

Look, Rafael -- um, Ted. The purpose of Jade Helm is to fight the terrorists you're so afraid of!

Jade Helm is being staged in the American Southwest because its terrain resembles ISIS-controlled territory. We're training in the United States because every time we establish bases in the Middle East and train there it pisses off locals like Osama bin Laden and makes them think we're going to invade and occupy their countries. Which incites them to attack us here at home.

So we're using Jade Helm to train in the United States to train our troops to fight ISIS, while avoiding foreign entanglements. Got it, Rafael -- oops -- Ted?

Now, about the Mohammed-insulting event. Cruz blames Obama for the Texas attack, and the attacks in Boston and Fort Hood by the Tsarnaevs and Nidal Hassan. It's a load of crap. If this is true, then Bush was responsible for 9/11. Bush had a hell of lot more warning about bin Laden's elaborate plans involving dozens of conspirators in a dozen countries to crash jets into four buildings at once than Obama ever had.

The isolated attacks Cruz is pinning on Obama were cooked up by one or two people living in the United States. There are no dots to connect to ISIS, because the perpetrators executed these attacks on their own initiative, egged on by people like Ted Cruz and Pam Geller.

Domestic terrorist attacks are motivated by killing of Muslims and occupation of Muslim countries.

However, the dots that connect these terrorist attacks can be seen every day on television and the web as we watch American jets bomb Muslim countries, American drones kill innocent bystanders and Americans still occupying Muslim countries for more than a decade.

The domestic terrorists that make Cruz and Lindsey Graham wet their pants are motivated by American interventions in the Middle East that kill Muslims. Tsarnaev cited the the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as his motivation, and Nidal Hasan claims to have killed American soldiers to prevent them from killing the Taliban.

The recent attack in Texas was clearly incited by Pam Geller, who intentionally staged the event in order to elicit the attack. When you have 40 armed guards and a SWAT team on-site it's clear you're setting a trap. Ha ha, Pam, you really fooled those stupid Muslims!

These home-grown terrorists are outraged by what they see as injustice against Muslims. These terrorists are dead wrong about most Americans, who don't give a damn about Syria or Afghanistan or Iraq. But not all Americans are so benignly indifferent.

The American Right has created far more Muslim terrorists than ISIS ever has.

Every time Pam Geller or Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham and the other conservative whack jobs open their yaps and repeat that we need to wage a new Crusade against Islam, more American Muslims start believing that ISIS is right. The American Right and their bumbling wars and interventions and hateful rhetoric have created far more Muslim terrorists than ISIS ever has.

You can't win the hearts and minds of American Muslims by calling them traitors and un-American, and then indiscriminately killing their relatives and co-religionists in foreign countries.

Geller and Cruz and Graham know this. They don't care. They are intentionally inflaming Muslim opinion against the United States. They want war and death. They think it's to their advantage to scare people because they think scared people vote Republican.

If we want Muslims to stop attacking us, we have to stop attacking them. Both verbally and militarily.

People Riot When...

Are the Baltimore Riots Today's Boston Tea Party?

All Fox News can do is caterwaul about the violence in Baltimore, but what about these incidents that occurred in just the last week?

• A drunk Staten Island cop pulled her service weapon and opened fire, hitting the car of the wife of the man she was dating.
• A drunk off-duty New York cop opened fire on a man in a car, hitting him several times, apparently for no reason whatsoever.
• A drunk NYPD detective shot his partner by accident, and then drove the hospital drunk.
• Thirteen current and former North Carolina cops were arrested by the FBI for drug trafficking.
• A Georgia sheriff who compares himself to Batman shot a real estate agent in a model home "in a tragic accident" while "practicing police tactics."

Clearly, being a cop says nothing about your character. Or competence.

All conservatives can do is complain about "thugs" and "animals" running riot in our cities. But why are they rioting? Because the cops who are supposed to be protecting us are acting like thugs and animals.

Six cops arrested Freddie Gray for the abominable crime of running away from them in fear. They beat him up, injured him, bounced him around in the back of a van while he was cuffed and shackled, ignored his cries for help, delayed seeking treatment for him when he was clearly in distress, then lied about the whole thing. At some point in the affair they broke his spine, which killed him a week later.

Some people think these attacks on African Americans are all about race, and that's part of it. Some of the cops charged in the death of Freddie Gray were black. Some of the cops involved in other shootings and the subsequent coverups are also black.

The bigger problem is that way too many cops think they should hold a privileged position in this country, and their unions think they should be above the law. And they just lose it when people disobey or disrespect them. When people like Freddie Gray in Baltimore or Walter Scott in South Carolina run from police, the cops' reflexive action seems to be to run them down and arrest or shoot them. Even if there's zero evidence that they are guilty of any crime.

Freddie Gray, it turned out, had done nothing wrong. He had a knife whose legality the various camps are bickering about. Conservatives point to this as evidence of some evil intent. I'm curious: if Gray had had a concealed pistol, which conservatives seem to think is a panacea for making the world a safer place, would they now be touting him as hero for defending second amendment rights?

In short, the very act of disobedience is a crime punishable by death in the eyes of these cops.

There is clearly a strain of lawlessness, arrogance and violence in American law enforcement. They run roughshod over the civil rights of Americans, rarely being called to account for their crimes.

Clearly, not all cops are bad. Clearly, some of the rioters in Baltimore are just vandals and opportunists.

Equally as clearly, there are a lot of bad cops who dish out violence with high-handed impunity. The people of Baltimore have a right to be extremely angry about them.

If American conservatives truly believed in freedom and the threat of a tyrannical government, they would be the first ones to criticize these bad cops and demand accountability for law enforcement officials who constantly overstep their authority.

But right-wingers and Fox News keep fixating on the riots in Baltimore and Ferguson. And in doing so they are missing clear parallels with American history: they are cheering for the bad guys.

The Boston Tea Party was just one of many acts of vandalism and civil disobedience leading up to the Revolutionary War, including the burning of the Peggy Stewart.

Before the Revolutionary War, the Sons of Liberty protesters would have been called terrorists and thugs by the conservatives of the day: they burned the home of Massachusettes Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson. They stole and burned the New York governor's coach to ash. They destroyed the home of Fort George's commander, breaking windows and stealing from the wine cellar.

The Sons of Liberty used violence to protest the Stamp Act and Sugar Act, tax laws imposed by the British government on a nation that yearned for independence. The rioters in Baltimore and Ferguson are protesting the harassment, thievery and wanton murder of American citizens by corrupt and arrogant cops.

You'd think Americans who call themselves patriots would be on the right side of history, rather than siding with Tories and petty tyrants in the police department.

The Good Guy With A Gun Lie Debunked Again

In the past couple of days, there have been two violent incidents that illustrate, once again, the whole good guy with a gun myth. Recall that this lie started when Wayne LaPierre noted after Sandy Hook that "the only thing the stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Most of us living in the real world knows that this really isn't true. Remember Antoinette Tuff?  So, no, not the "only" thing.

But what about the deterrence factor element of this myth? The Gun Cult likes to lie by shoveling out the "gun full zones make criminals think twice" pile of shit every other day. Yet reality says otherwise.

Minnesota farm couple fatally shot during burglary; home torched next day

The suspected gunman lived on a neighboring piece of property to the Hivelys. He was captured after a police officer stopped an alleged accomplice and found guns stolen from the Hively home in the car’s trunk.

Wait...what? I thought if you had guns in your house, they protected you from bad guys. What happened?

Continuing on with reality...

Two shot dead after they open fire at Mohammed cartoon event in Texas.

Two men who opened fire outside a contest for Prophet Mohammed cartoons in a Dallas suburb were shot dead by police Sunday night, authorities said. The men drove up to the Culwell Event Center in North Garland, got out of their car and began shooting just as the "Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest" inside was coming to an end, Garland police spokesman Joe Harn said. An unarmed security guard was shot in the leg. He was later treated and released from a hospital. Police who were helping with security at the event fired back, killing both gunmen.

So, the cops were there with guns and they...still attacked?  Hmm...I wonder why...? And how on EARTH did they get those assault rifles so easily in Texas?

Nikto or myself might have a post coming soon about the "free speech" event that was attacked but for now I'm betting some heads are awfully 'splodey right now considering the lax gun laws of our nation basically are helping out ISIL.

What ever will the Gun Cult do now?

Four More Hats In The Ring

Since the last update on the 2016 presidential election, four more candidates have officially announced their candidacy for the presidency.

On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist from Vermont, has decided to challenge Hillary from the left. Smart move as it's going to keep her honest. He raised 1.5 million dollars and added 100,000 supporters in one day so this isn't a novelty run. There are many Americans out there who support his vision for America in what is an ever growing progressive base. I look for Hillary to continue to move to the left with Sanders in the mix.

On the Republican side we have Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, and Mike Huckabee. I don't expect much traction for these three as they polling pretty low behind the clear top tier candidates...Bush, Rubio, Walker and Paul. Bush and Walker haven't officially announced yet, btw, and I have to wonder what the fuck they are waiting for. Of all of these, Huckabee has a shot of winning enough southern states (and maybe Iowa) to stay in the mix but he seems all news to me.

So, we have 2 on the Democratic side and 6 on the GOP side. Anyone else out there looking forward to the first GOP debates?:)

ROTFLMFAO!!!

Nebraska woman files suit in federal court against all homosexuals

The Republican Brain Part Three: A Dream Ever Failing

In the prelude to the first section of his book, The Republican Brain, Chris Mooney laments a lost dream.

The dream was that the power of human reason would eventually stamp out lies, prejudices, and falsehoods, delivering a truly enlightened society. It would be a society in which ideologically driven misinformation would gradually decline or disappear, vanquished and chased from the public sphere by rational arguments (like mine). It would be a society in which everybody could agree on the core facts about the world, especially those that matter to public policy and the future.

Truly, a fantasy world today given how fiercely conservatives avoid core facts and rational arguments. In fact, their rallying principle is to fight against them with their own version of reality and far too many people follow along. Worse, they "turn the tables" and say that it's the Democrats who aren't rational, truly killing this dream or a rational world.

But this dead dream didn't just recently die. It has been dying all along human history. Mooney cites the example of Marquis de Condorcet as an excellent illustration of this idealism. Condorcet was a passionate philosopher during the Age of Enlightenment. He hung out with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Like all the great thinkers of this time, he championed the science of society and a society of social mathematics. He predicted a world that where reason and facts win out. He saw the villains of this world as dictators and priests and the heroes were the scientists and the innovators.

As Mooney notes...

...free inquiry and critical thinking-"that spirit of doubt which submits facts and proofs to severe rational scrutiny"-must prove unstoppable. It's virtually a law of nature. In the long run, our better faculties will enable not only the expression of human reason, but the creation of political system based upon universal human rights, social contracts, majority rule, and so on-precisely the sort of constitution Condorcet tried to establish in France as the terror descended. 

The terror, of course, being the French Revolution. As Condorcet vainly tried to instill this philosophy in the new constitution, angry and hateful men (the Jacobins) rebelled against this rationality. Of course, Condorcet believed that if he got the word out about his type of society, through widespread dissemination via the printing press, rationality would "stamp out" wacky, ideological nonsense. Imagine what Condorcet would have thought about the internet and social media!

What he didn't realize was that the wider nets of communication allowed many other messages to mix in with the rational ones. Further, he neglected to understand that the human mind, in capturing these irrational messages, might be affected by them. The human mind had indeed progressed but, at its base, it was still primitive. So, the question is...how does this happen?

More importantly, what are the facts regarding why we deny facts? Science doesn't always persuade us let alone mere facts. Education doesn't really help either. Even having more information means that there are many more instances to twist reality and skew the facts. Why? What is the science about why we deny science?

This is what Mooney will be exploring in the next section of the book and the topic of my next post in this series.

How To Train Your Wife

Another Small Step Preparing for the Giant Leap?

Preliminary tests indicate that NASA Eagleworks may be a the verge of creating a "reactionless drive" that could get a spacecraft to the moon in four hours. A proposed trip to Mars would take less than eight months -- 70 days out, 90 days there and 70 days back.

The recent tests, performed in vacuum, indicated that the EM Drive produced thrust without any emitting any propellant. This defies the basic laws of classical physics put forth by Newton centuries ago -- the whole "for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction" thing.

Rockets work by ejecting propellant, pushing the vehicle forward. In the weightless vacuum of space, there's nothing to "grab hold" of, like the ground for cars, the water for boats or the air for planes.

The EM drive works by bouncing around microwaves inside a closed cavity, converting electricity directly to momentum. It's not a lot of thrust -- but it's constant. In a weightless vacuum you just keep going faster and faster because there's no friction or gravity to slow you down.

How does this work? They don't know for sure.

The head of NASA Eagleworks, Dr. Harold "Sonny" White, theorizes that the thrust comes from virtual particles of the Quantum Vacuum. Virtual particles are a real thing, though they seem pretty far out there -- but quantum mechanics is like that.

A 2014 test of the drive in in air was also successful, but thermal interaction with the air could have been responsible for thrust. The vacuum test eliminates that uncertainty.

This type of drive has more immediate applications closer to earth. One of the main problems for satellites is stationkeeping -- orbits decay over time to due to atmospheric drag. They need to use tiny rockets to maintain their orbits. But they have only a finite supply of propellant -- once it's gone, the satellite falls out of orbit. The lower the orbit, the more drag.

With the EM drive, no propellant would be needed -- just electricity, which is obtained from solar panels. An EM drive would drastically increase the useful lifespan of satellites. It would also allow photographic reconnaissance satellites, such as military spysats, weather satellites, low-earth orbit communications satellites, to reposition themselves without having to worry about running out of fuel. (Solving the whole, "Chloe, I need that satellite repositioned right now!" problem.)

The same Eagleworks team is looking at warping space, and has already had some preliminary successes. Those tests have yet to be validated in a vacuum.

The researchers are talking in terms of decades before EM drives will be ready for use. But I'm not so sure. These EM drives are relatively small electronic devices that depend on quantum mechanics for their operation.

That means they have more in common with semiconductor electronics -- which are tiny electronic devices that depend on quantum mechanics -- than the engines in giant rockets that have proven so difficult to master.

As evidenced by the billions of cell phones out there, if there's one thing we're really good at, it's making tiny electronic devices.

Minnesota Wall Eye and Climate Change

The warming waters of Minnesota due to man made climate change are affecting the Wall Eye population as my home state heads into fishing opener.

In other words, if they can’t survive, then other fish won’t either. But they won’t be alone. A major study published last week in the journal Science found that if greenhouse gases and average temperatures continue to rise at current rates, the world will see a major loss in diversity. One in six species around the globe could disappear because they can’t move or adapt fast enough to changing habitat.

My hope is that those fishermen who deny that climate change is man made and are now personally affected by this will help create more action. Of course, Mooney tells me otherwise:)

Yet Another Responsible Gun Owner

Man drops gun, shooting woman in both arms outside Macon elementary school gym

A woman was wounded on both arms during what deputies deem may have been an accidental shooting caused by someone dropping a gun Monday night outside an elementary school gym in Bibb County. Deputies on Tuesday were still searching for the shooter.

The woman told deputies she was standing outside the school’s gym when she heard a popping noise, Howard said. Then she looked down and realized she had blood on her hands, Howard said.

Good thing guns are allowed everywhere in Georgia.

Ground stood!!

The Republican Platform-1956

The Gay Agenda (File Under: No Shit)

The Personal Computer Revolution and Personal Energy Independence

Elon Musk, the billionaire who started Tesla Motors, SpaceX and SolarCity, announced a new battery system yesterday that will allow homes to store large amounts of electricity generated from solar power. This may herald a new era of personal energy independence.

Tesla has been testing these power systems in companies like Walmart and Cargill, and a pilot project in 300 California homes.

Most homes with rooftop solar panels feed their electricity back into the grid, and then draw power from the grid when it's dark. But with Tesla's Powerwall battery system, all that excess solar power can be stored in your garage. It can supplement your household power when the grid is overloaded, or recharge your electric car, or allow you to go off the grid completely. This could be very bad for electric utilities, especially in sunny southern climes.

For months Hawaiian Electric (HECO) had been stonewalling customers who wanted to install solar panels on their houses. HECO complained that the grid isn't up to the task, and that it just isn't economical to change it. Since HECO doesn't control the output of home solar panels, they said, they couldn't predict how much power they will produce. That makes it very hard to balance the various sources of power, which could destabilize the grid. This is a completely valid concern, but this mindset may ultimately doom utilities like HECO.

Why are Republicans propping up government-sanctioned monopolies?

A great many utility monopolies have been making the same claims. A lot of states make it very difficult to install rooftop solar.  Curiously, these states are mostly in the south, where photovoltaics could generate a lot of power. These states are generally controlled by Republican majorities, who are in turn controlled by the Koch brothers, who with their legislative arm ALEC have been fighting solar power tooth and nail. This seems contradictory to the basic Republican ideology of independence and self-reliance. Why are Republicans propping up government-sanctioned monopolies?

Though they had been delaying since last October, recently Hawaiian Electric approved all the rooftop solar applications on Maui and Hawaii, and is working to remove the backlog on Oahu. Why?

Maybe Hawaiian regulators turned up the heat after citizens who invested in solar panels complained. Maybe HECO resolved their technical issues. Or maybe HECO saw the writing on the wall, and realized that if they didn't hook these customers up, they might lose them completely.

Hawaii is really the perfect place for people to go off the grid. It's warm and sunny, but not too hot, so it doesn't need as much energy for heating and cooling as the rest of the country does. Hawaii has to import all its oil, coal and natural gas across the ocean, making it much more expensive: electric rates in Hawaii are about two and a half times higher than the US national average.  That means rooftop solar is already much cheaper in Hawaii than fossil fuel-generated power.

The technologies that made the Internet and mobile revolutions possible are doing the same for power generation.

But now the same technology that made the Internet revolution possible is starting another revolution in power generation. Solar cells are essentially the same as the computer chips that go into our computers and cell phones. Production efficiencies have now made photovoltaic cells as cheap as any other kind of chips. That has made power from rooftop solar is almost as cheap as power from coal and natural gas, and it's only getting cheaper.

Similarly, high-density lithium ion batteries developed for the mobile phones and tablets have revolutionized battery technologies, making electric cars and home power storage technologies possible.

Going off the grid isn't limited to tropical paradises. Buildings designed to the Passive House standard use almost no energy for heating and cooling. They are super-insulated and airtight and use heat exchangers in their ventilation systems to minimize energy use. The Passivhaus standard was developed in Germany -- almost all of which is further north than the Canadian border -- and is applicable anywhere in the United States. Germany also generates almost 7% of its electricity from solar, producing power even when it's cloudy. About the same amount of power is generated by wind turbines.

The fossil fuel industry likes to paint wind and solar as being "unpredictable" and "unreliable" sources of energy. But as we've seen in the past, oil prices are extremely unpredictable and supplies are unreliable, subject to wild swings. The availability and price of oil and gas fluctuate based on turmoil in the Middle East, closures of refineries, ports and rail lines (due to strikes, maintenance and explosions), or the whims of terrorists and tyrants in Libya, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran.

Instead of fighting wind and solar, power utilities like HECO should be working closely with companies like Tesla and SolarCity to free themselves from the vagaries and manipulations of the international energy markets. They should be working with homes and businesses to install rooftop solar so that they can integrate those systems into the grid more reliably.

Because, although they have no idea what the price of fossil fuel will be in two weeks or two months or two years, they know exactly what time the sun is going to rise, every day.

OOOH FIRE!!