Wasting Time With Alex

Science & Technology

Friday, May 02, 2008

The lies about what went on at Tuskegee need to be addressed

With the whole furor in the news these days about Obama’s loony preacher Wright and his crazy beliefs, the subject of the Tuskegee experiments on syphilitic black males and the ridiculous lies about how it was done on purpose have popped up again. Primarily by idiot libs that want to justify the ridiculous assertions by Rev. Wright’s about how AIDS was a US government manufactured disease to kill blacks. I was going to write about this whole ridiculous lie, but Jonah Goldberg beat me to it and did a much better job about it too..

He basically debunks this whole stupid lie that the US government purposefully infected black males with syphilis to conduct a study. That is a lie. Nobody infected people on purpose. Infected males where chosen and then studied for 40 years to understand the spread of syphilis. Nobody can deny that government power was basically misused. But who was government and why did they have no qualms doing this kind of thing? Jonah gets it right:

But why blacks remain the most reliable voters for the party of ever-expanding government power is something of a mystery. Indeed, it’s worth noting that the Tuskegee study, launched during the pre-dawn of the New Deal-era, was symptomatic of arrogant liberal government. The study “emerged out of a liberal progressive public health movement concerned about the health and well-being of the African-American population,” writes University of Chicago professor Richard Schweder. He adds: “The study was done with the full knowledge, endorsement and participation of African-American medical professionals, hospitals and research institutes.”

As you can see, the evil here is not what the lie about Tuskegee proposes however. The evil is that people that where sick where just observed rather than cured by a “progressive government”. Jonah points out something very important. The left has masterfully, yet again, put blame for something they did on someone else:

Liberals like to invoke Tuskegee as if it’s solely an indictment of what other people did, proof that we need more progressive government. But Tuskegee was in fact the poisoned fruit of progressive government.

In the end the question begs to be answered about why it seems that this stuff is never understood by hucksters like Wright. Or do they understand this just fine? After all, they are preaching hatred because it pays well. The facts be damned.

Thursday, May 01, 2008

And the spinning begins..

The MMGW alarmist cult has run into some really nasty problems recently. Most of it is related to the real data and unmanipulated facts showing that the world is cooling off, and that their predictions of global catastrophe within the next decade is as likely as my chances to win the lottery when I buy no tickets. Of course that will not dissuade them from continuing to predict that the sky is falling and that only they have the answer - global socialist government to address social injustices - to this woe. But too many people are seeing that the emperor is wearing no clothes, and abandoning the cause because it is even too hard for all but the most fanatical to keep believing the lies. So how do you keep the momentum going? Well you make up shit about why we have only been given a temporary reprieve from a horrible fate.

April 30 (Bloomberg)—Parts of North America and Europe may cool naturally over the next decade, as shifting ocean currents temporarily blunt the global-warming effect caused by mankind, Germany’s Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences said.

Average temperatures in areas such as California and France may drop over the next 10 years, influenced by colder flows in the North Atlantic, said a report today by the institution based in Kiel, Germany. Temperatures worldwide may stabilize in the period.

The study was based on sea-surface temperatures of currents that move heat around the world, and vary from decade to decade. This regional cooling effect may temporarily neutralize the long- term warming phenomenon caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases building up around the earth, said Richard Wood, a research scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, a U.K. provider of environmental and weather-related services.

Does this stuff not sound exactly like the shit some cult leader would tell the idiots that are left waiting for the promise that the passing comet would suck them up and take them on a space ride while the rest of mankind perished 30 minutes after the predicted catastrophe did not happen or what. I did not lie to you! I just got the timing a bit wrong! The world is still ending just not when I told you so, so keep doing what I tell you no matter how crazy and destructive please. Pass the kool-aid!

The world will become at least 2.5 degrees Celsius warmer by 2100, compared with the pre-industrial period, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in March.

See? This is not over! We are still going to die unless you let us make that global socialist government to address social injustices and stop MMGW you heathens! What a bunch of retards these people must take people to be. Guess by the amount of idiots that still buy into these lies no matter how much proof emerges that they are just plain falsehoods, they are not totally wrong. Resistance is futile! Dissent will not be tolerated! Bow to Gaia’s pop the Goracle and accept the blessings of socialism or perish! Talk about your freak show.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Any doubt that there is an agenda?

One of the main things the MMGW crowd claims is that they have science on their side. Of course we all know that is pure bullshit. Consensus science is not science. There is a lot of money involved and the socialists know nothing sells mass socialism as great as a super crisis. But it does not end there. As more and more people start questioning their claims, they have decided since the facts are not on their side they will just silence the voices of dissent. Case in point the hurricane institution in Fort Collins, Colorado and the case of William Gray:

By pioneering the science of seasonal hurricane forecasting and teaching 70 graduate students who now populate the National Hurricane Center and other research outposts, William Gray turned a city far from the stormy seas into a hurricane research mecca.

But now the institution in Fort Collins, Colo., where he has worked for nearly half a century, has told Gray it may end its support of his seasonal forecasting.

As he enters his 25th year of predicting hurricane season activity, Colorado State University officials say handling media inquiries related to Gray’s forecasting requires too much time and detracts from efforts to promote other professors’ work.

But Gray, a highly visible and sometimes acerbic skeptic of climate change, says that’s a “flimsy excuse” for the real motivation — a desire to push him aside because of his global warming criticism.

I have no doubt that Gray is right about their motivations. This is the SOP for these socialists. Of course they will all tell you that they are pure because they do not take money from a special interest when their entire movement is a special interest to begin with. You are only a “scientist” or in the know about science, forget the fact that you cann not produce facts to back any of the stupid MMGW claims you make unless you fabricate them or manipulate the data and make it junk, if you back their agenda. This is a cult and nothing else. A pox on humanity.

Another Lib idea gone wrong…

Friday, April 25, 2008

Blame Unfufu and her SUV?

It seems that man had a close brush with extinction some 70K years ago due to weather. For real. Of course at the time according to this article man’s population dropped to some 2000 people, so they must have been driving some major SUVs and burning fossil fuels non stop to create that global warming. We now have 6.6 billion people on the planet, and a bunch of assholes that want to drag us all back to a socialist stone age blame people for climate change. I wonder how mother Gaia made all these drastic weather changes before man and the SUV came along? Think the MSM nut jobs would pick this up and report that maybe they have been wrong about the whole MMGW crap? Not holding my breath.

Reality Check

The news that Brazil has found one of the world’s largest oil fields off their coast might just usher in some major geopolitical changes for the Americas. If these oil fields are as large as the Brazilians claim, and they can bring them up to speed by the 2020 date the article mentions, we will have zero need of oil from the Middle East anymore. And as the article mentioned that carries some major league consequences to our global strategy. Suddenly having a stable Middle East is of no consequence at all for the US. I guess the Euroweenies and the Chinese and Indians will still need oil from that part of the world, but that means they would now have to provide security for it’s flow. I am sure the Euroweenies would end up paralyzed and even more beholden to the nut jobs that would certainly rise up and take over in the vacuum of an American presence - the Euros have no way to provide even a fraction of the security the US is providing and will not do so even if they increase their military spending 10 fold because of their personal politics and the sheeple they now have that has forgotten the value of power projection - and they will pay for that. But does anyone doubt that China would not simply destroy Iran if they got in the way of their oil needs? Of course Iran might just go along with the Chinese and Indians and stick it to the Euros. In either case the Euros are the ones that will get hit hard by this. And any idiot claiming alternative fuels will come to the rescue will have to eat bitter words. This stuff is just pipe dreams.

Of course there is always the possiblity that now that Europe is threathened by this scenario that our left will realize a stable Middle East is important. After all, once we do not need their oil and have no national security interests in the ME, then wasting valuable US resources becomes quite OK with the moonbats. I would reman delighted to see those socialist house of cards in Europe collapse as soon as possible. I still think once they fail misserably people here will give up following in their doomed path. Of course the nut jobs that think oil will soon cease to be the major lubricator of the modern world are going to eat crow as this major oil find just makes it more likely that oil & the combustion engine remain the catalysts to progress for many decades to come. Especially when their MMGW hoax fals flat after the earth cools in the enxt decade. But keep living on fantasies you deranged moonbats. And it looks like the Brazilians with their new discovery will join Canada with the shale oil in getting very rich indeed.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Wilkipedia run by leftist zealots? No way!!!1!

Why should anyone be surprised that Wilkepedia has people that monitor and edit any content that is in disagreement with liberal orthodoxy? Just have a look at how MMGW is handled. I use Wilkepedia, but I am also smart and capable enough (maybe old enough too) to know when I see bullshit. It is evident in any and all these orthodoxy items that form the socialist’s collective. So freaking sad. Silence dissent!

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Say it ain’t so!

There are real consequences to “feel good” liberal policies? SAY IT AIN’T SO! We really meant well and wanted to help out poor Gaia. It looks as more and more facts come out about how counterproductive the entire green bio-fuels push has been, some of the real consequences of these policies are starting to finally become indisputable. Who could have thunk that if we took corn, rice, and other food staples off the market to make dubious bio-fuels, which tend to take more energy to produce than they can deliver anyway and thus simply defeat the entire purpose of why they where mandated (not two guys going out) in the first place, that somehow these crops would not be available for people to eat? But, but but! The libs ment well! This is what liberal government mandated policies tend to always be: nothing but feel good empty promises that cost a bundle and result in greater harm than any potential good they ever where intended to do. If you Gaia worshipping nut jobs really want to do us all a favor demand more nuclear energy and clean burning liquefied coal power production. Leave food for people to eat. Or is it that the Gaia worshippers have snowed us all and come up with a way to reduce world population through starvation and the wars that such starvation is sure to cause??

Friday, April 11, 2008

Congress demands energy companies do something!

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Why who is in the WH matters.

Many of my fellow conservatives have taken the stance that since McCain is no worse than your average democrat when it comes to his social beliefs, showing your dissatisfaction with him by helping a democrat win the WH and then get the blame for the damage the supposed socialist policies both they and McCain would enact will help the conservative cause. I think these people are crazy because they are hoping that a shift to the right in Congress would somehow check a donkey in the WH. i am not sure why they feel so assured Congress will go right in the next election. But that is an argument for a different time. What I am writing about is the presidential power to appoint judges to the SCOTUS. It is a given IMO that the next president will appoint at least 2 judges. All you need to do is read this article about the effects of the Medellin v. Texas SACOTUS decision and this other one about how that decision translates to the US ratifying the Kyoto protocol or some other such international treaty would have played out if the left had been the majority on the SCOTUS and abdicated our Constitutional rights to some international body like the ICJ. Read them both.

I call Bullshit!

OK, let me start off by saying that I am a hard core believer in the freedom of the market and that government has overburdened ours with costly and ridiculous regulations that do more harm than good, but when I read what the CEO of AT&T had to say about getting skilled workers, I just had to call bullshit. Walk through this exercise with me for a second, and you will see why.

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - The head of the top U.S. phone company AT&T Inc (T.N) said on Wednesday it was having trouble finding enough skilled workers to fill all the 5,000 customer service jobs it promised to return to the United States from India.

“We’re having trouble finding the numbers that we need with the skills that are required to do these jobs,” AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson told a business group in San Antonio, where the company’s headquarters is located.

So far, only around 1,400 jobs have been returned to the United States of 5,000, a target it set in 2006, the company said, adding that it maintains the target.

The jobs in question are customer service jobs. Basically the person that gets the job answers phone calls by customers with issues, complaints, or requests for new business. Now this guy wants us to believe that a job that ranked so low on priority that AT&T figured it could drastically cut the cost of these customer services by outsourcing it to people that didn’t even have English as their primary language suddenly has a problem being filled here in the US? Think about that. The reason these jobs went overseas was simply because AT&T figured that it was not a priority with them and that as long as they could get someone cheap, they where fulfilling their obligations to the customers.

Now I am not trying to cast aspersions on the people that got these jobs. They are often very capable and hard working people. The problem was that most Americans had trouble talking to someone that they had a hard time understanding and that got turned off from companies that implemented this practice. AT&T is bringing these jobs back, not because it feels it is a good financial choice, unless you look at the fact that it directly affects their bottom line when customers walk because of their outsourcing practices, or even because it thinks these workers have not done a good job - frankly I think, and I speak from my own personal experience in IT, that the higher ups making these decisions often do not care about this quality as long as they can finagle it to show that they cut costs - but because they are losing business. now stay with me.

Stephenson said he is especially distressed that in some U.S. communities and among certain groups, the high school dropout rate is as high as 50 percent. “If I had a business that half the product we turned out was defective or you couldn’t put into the marketplace, I would shut that business down,” he said. Gone are the days when AT&T and other U.S. companies had to hire locally, he said.

I will be the first to admit that our high schools, especially in the urban communities which tend to be very liberal, in general have abysmal results, often because the people involved do not care about getting an education. Too many people have been told that there is nothing they can do to make the American dream happen for them because the system is rigged against them. The result is that most of them simply do not take advantage of the most important thing anyone hoping to get ahead in life needs: a good education. Couple that with schools that also do not care and peer pressure against those that do try to get an education, and you get the picture. No doubt about the fact that no company in the world other than the government or unionized teachers could get away with this kind of results. But even with that fact in mind, I can not help but call Bullshit! on this assessment. What kind of skills other than some basic reading, the ability to talk, and some good manners & people skills are necessary to do customer service? In fact the most important thing to do a customer service job is the ability to communicate with people effectively, and no school will teach you that in my opinion.

I am not sure he slipped up when he pointed out that no company had to hire locally anymore, but nobody should miss that. Our global world has made it possible for people in another company to do a job much cheaper than people here in the US. That is why these jobs went offshore. It was a conscious choice by AT&T driven not by their desire to provide better customer service, but by financials. This CEO is pissed because the people that pay for his product showed their displeasure at his company’s decision to use outsourcing to provide customer service used their ability to make a choice as well by taking their business somewhere else. Guess he doesn’t like others exercising their ability to choose either.

Stephenson said neither he nor most Americans liked the situation, and the solution was a stronger U.S. focus on education and keeping jobs. Business needed to help, such as AT&T’s repatriation of service positions and education grants, he added.

Now, I am all for America’s businesses to start forcing the current educational system to change and produce more capable people. The education system could use a healthy dose of the real world. Co-opted by the left with an agenda to create better collectivist drones at the cost of a real education, our students remain woefully unprepared for the job market of today where high tech demands skills. But please do not try to bullshit us about that being the case for customer service jobs. How freaking hard is it to answer a phone or work a computer? Maybe the issue is that AT&T also outsourced their IT work and now the quality of that is so lacking that they need much more skilled people to do the job of dealing with the constant issues?

Nah, do not get fooled. Their decision to outsource was based on money only. They thought they where going to save a big amount of cash by paying Amit 20 cents an hour over paying Tom $8 or more dollars an hour. When the AT&T customers showed their displeasure in a way that hit their pocket books, they had to rethink this cost cutting effort. The only problem is that they do not like having to pay people here that much for that kind of low skilled job. And that is why they are having a hard time moving the jobs back here. Not because of lack of capable people. It is because of lack of capable people that will do the jobs for peanuts. This guy Stephenson is not really helping us address the issue of how our schools are failing us as a society by trying to bamboozle us into thinking customer service jobs are high skill. In fact he is outright hurting it by trying to hide the fact AT&T would prefer to keep these jobs where it is cheap for financial reasons but is forced to change that because their customers do not want it.

Monday, March 24, 2008

More proof of why socialism sucks

Well, when I first heard about the effort to provide free wireless internet to everybody - read that to be people that can’t really pay for the service at the expense of those that work hard - I knew it would end up like this. Took government 3 years to get here, but then again, this socialist stuff never works as promised. Of course the usual class warfare gurus will point out that it was the greedy companies that pulled out of the deal once they realized how massive the losses they would be made to take, for the good of the people of course, that sunk the magic project. None of them ever points out that when the prohibitive losses sink these companies suffering the financial hit, the people that got the “free service”, those quote marks are the to point out there is no such thing a free lunch, are going to be left off far worse for having been given the taste and then having the plate yanked from under them. Not to mention that the company going under affects everyone else, including those that have paid out of their own pocket or have invested their money in the company for pensions, 401Ks, or some other savings, as well.

Look people. The lesson is simple. When government does it, if you are lucky it will only cost 2 or 3 times as much as if it was done by the private sector, and it is likely to be doomed from the start because these people to often live in La-La land. There are no “free” lunches either. It is a historical fact that nobody does anything if they can not become better off from that action. It’s human nature. Socialism sucks precisely because it demotivates and discourages anyone from doing anything more than the bare minimum to avoid getting in trouble. Need is a powerful motivator. When you need something it will make you get up and do something about it. How motivated do you think people would be to go work and get the money to pay for something if they can get it for free? Reality again sinks the pie-in-the-sky dreamer’s plan to hand out a free lunch for votes.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Talk about exagerations…

Alarmists are at it again. What is the big problem this time?

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

Holy crap! This is some scary news. The consequences would be devastating on these poor people’s health and could have repercussions that would doom the same people for generations to come. Except…

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

At the risk of completely removing any seriousness from this argument - and that is exactly what should happen as this is plain and simple silly people hyping up a non-issue - let me point out that panicking about these below trace amount levels of contaminants is like panicking because you discover that there are minute traces of fart gas, at levels so small that you can’t even smell them, in the air we breath. Now, one could make the argument that farts are not toxic, but that’s a question of degrees. Farts are nothing but a nuisance precisely because the concentration of the chemicals is sow low that the worst it does when we get enough dosage is smell nasty and gross you out. But in a close room where the concentration gets increased the gas can become dangerous. The issue is that level of concentration needed to make it dangerous is enormous.

And that’s why this entire story is nothing but bull. Parts per billion or trillion? How many millions of gallons of this contaminated water would you have to chug in record time to even get enough of a level where these contaminants suddenly step up from “negligible” to “trace amounts”? I bet you will likely die from a water overdose - yes you can get too much H2O into your system and die from that - as your body chemistry goes bonkers dealing with the amount of water it needs to process as you try to drink enough water to make these contaminants an issue. Or even more obvious, you would drown long before you have ingested enough of these chemicals to make a difference. Coming back to the farts, I guarantee you that you would have a bigger & better chance of some adverse effect if you rode the elevator once with someone farting in it than if you drank a lifetime of this contaminated and supposedly dangerous water.

There is a real simple reason why nobody mentions what would be considered the minimum medical dose, or even what would be concidered the treshhold for a risky dosage. But I bet the people that led with this idiotic story will have everyone panicking over this crap and their names mentioned everywhere for their civic duty. Now that would not be too bad because stupid people deserve to be made fun of, but I am certain some politician will suddenly see a chance to score some cheap points, and we will all be made to pay with some legal idiocy that does absolutely nothing but cost the tax payer a fortune while expanding the death grip of big government. Talk about a bad smell…

Saturday, February 09, 2008

DOH!

Well it now looks like another “Green” idea, always something coming from the left, has been proven to be more damaging than good. This is the kind of crap you get when the feel good, “action now” crowd gets its way and forces changes without really having them be analyzed.

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these “green” fuels are taken into account, two studies being published Thursday have concluded. The benefits of biofuels have come under increasing attack in recent months, as scientists took a closer look at the global environmental cost of their production. These latest studies, published in the prestigious journal Science, are likely to add to the controversy.

These studies for the first time take a detailed, comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of natural land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development. The destruction of natural ecosystems — whether rain forest in the tropics or grasslands in South America — not only releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when they are burned and plowed, but also deprives the planet of natural sponges to absorb carbon emissions. Cropland also absorbs far less carbon than the rain forests or even scrubland that it replaces.

So guess what? Most of the crap the greens want us to switch to from oil based feul is worse than oil. But hey, they go action and mandated (no not to guys going on a date) that this crap be the norm before anyone knew if it was good or bad. Of course most people that were not infected by an insane level of anxiety or anger for oil, coupled with some scientific knowlegde (not the concensus kind either), predicted this was going to be the case from the start. While some doubters might say ethanol or methanol from waste biomass might prove to be better, I remain skeptical about that posibility as well.

I do however agree with anything that sticks it to OPEC. If we are smart we start drilling here in our continent for our own oil, build a ton of new nuclear facilites, process and make clean liquified coal feul that can be used in new plants designed to use this cleanly, and in general remove all use of oil for anything other than transportation (with lots of efforts to eventually do that as well). It ought to seriously drop the demand and prices, but more importantly, cut dependency on OPEC or Russia which do not good with this new found wealth & power.

Thursday, January 24, 2008

How to really use science when discussing Global Warming

As an engineer I have been constantly baffled how people didn’t understand why the predictions from the priests of the Man Made Global Warming religion have not engendered scorn and heaps of humiliation on these morons. Anyone that actually looks at the numbers & predictions can immediately see the massive flaws in the whole thing, but just do the numbers, and you find these people are full of shit. Anyway. Jerome J. Schmitt has done a bang up job looking at the numbers, and he concludes & proves in this short piece why these global warming religionists should be laughed at and ridiculed: not taken seriously.

The problem with using science is that while it deals in hard facts it fails to account for the primary motivation driving these lunatics praying at the altar of MMGW: socialism. The fact is that while there are a lot of true believers, the people leading the movement know they are lying. They justify it however because they all believe they are on a noble crusade - to save mankind from the evil of capitalism, a task only they are fit to accomplish as our leaders - to save us from the evils of capitalism (the only good capitalists are those that serve their cause). Because the failures, and the hundreds of millions of casualties, of socialism are easy to see in the history of the last century, they are forced to resort to scare tactics to get enough people to buy into their totalitarian ideas. I guess the short story here is that the only way to sell this global socialist government these people are championing is to convince enough idiots that there is a catastrophe just around the corner, and more importantly, that only they have the solution.

Of course again, anyone with even a bit of scientific knowledge can then immediately surmise that their proposed solution is political and economic, and in no way able to address or affect the real problem. That is if it was a real problem. From the money quote in this article:

Even if sufficient heat is trapped in the atmosphere to raise it the maximum value predicted by anthropogenic “global warming” alarmists (5°C) over the next 100 years, hundreds of times more heat energy must be imparted into the ice-caps to melt sufficient ice to raise sea-levels the catastrophic levels prophesied by Al Gore.

The message from science here is simple: the MMGW religionists are a bunch of alarmist liars, and their lies are told because they have an agenda that requires a panicked and emotional response to a global catastrophe that will not survive the rigors of real scientitifc inspection. If these losers peddling the “End of the world” really believed what they preached they would be clamoring for nuclear energy to solve our emissions. But they are not. In the mean time, they dismiss a real global threat: the rise of Islamic radicalism and its war to subjugate all of us to Islam. Go figure!