A Harmless Gas??

I ordinarily avoid swimming, while blogging, in the shark filled waters of politics, but Michelle Bachman's, Representative of Minnesota's sixth Congressional District, speech before Congress on Earth Day forced me into the water.

Rep. Bachman stated that not a single study has shown carbon dioxide to be a harmful gas. She said, “it is not a harmful gas, it is a harmless gas.” She bases her argument on its being "a natural product of nature." Has she heard about climate change and greenhouse gases, like CO2? It's been on the news, I think.

To say I was stunned by her speech is an understatement. Just when you think politicians of a certain persuasion can't be any more insulting to the electorate's intelligence, they prove you wrong.

I am sure we can all think of many 'products of nature' that are dangerous, arsenic comes to mind. I wonder why?

Giddyapp

A lot of time travel stories have people from the past struggling with 'modern gadgets', sometimes frying themselves with some high tech device they don't understand.

Well, how about our time travelling, modern high tech hero? Wonder how well he/she would do riding a horse or driving a stagecoach or trimming a kerosene lamp?

Ever been in an antique shop and found stuff that puzzled you?

It seems every time has its own tech. It doesn't matter if you go backward or forward, there are still problems with gadgets that can baffle you or kill you.

Foreign Uranium

There's been a lot of talk about nuclear power lately and I got to thinking about where the Uranium for these plants would come from. After all, we'd not be much better off if we had the same problem with foreign Uranium as we do with foreign oil.

According to the World Nuclear Association, half of the world's Uranium production is from just three countries, Australia, Canada and Kazakhstan. The remainder comes from 15 or so countries including the United States which only produces about 5 percent of world production. Currently we import a whopping 95 percent of our Uranium.

According to the CIA Fact Book the USA imports 58 percent of its petroleum.

I guess what I'm wondering, if we go nuclear, are we going to be dangerously dependent on foreign mines?

And we still haven't figured out what to do with the thousands of tons of nuclear waste these plants would produce.

I got to thinking about how fast we can send and receive information.

Today if you want to transmit information, you have a number of ways to do it at around the speed of light, which means almost instantly or at most a few seconds, to anyone equipped to receive it nearly anywhere on earth. But, it wasn’t always like that.

At the time of the American Revolution the fastest way detailed information could be delivered was governed by how fast a horse you had. No detailed info could be transmitted faster. I say detailed because the Romans army used fires and flags to relay simple messages and of course there was the lantern in the Old North Church---one if by land, two if by sea---to send an ‘instant message’ to Paul Revere. But detailed instructions had to be written down and dispatched by a runner or a person on horseback or by horse drawn coach.

A famous example is the legend of a message run from the town of Marathon to Athens bringing the results of the battle of Marathon. The runner, Pheidippides, is said to have run the 26 plus miles collapsing and dying after delivering the message, “We have won.”

Of course, the type of information tended to have a higher level of importance because it was so difficult and expensive to send. Today we are awash in a Tsunami of information. Most of us get more news in a day than our ancestors did in a lifetime.

Ahhhhh, Chooooo

Many folks take herbal medications because they truly believe they work and are safer than pharmaceuticals.

Now I know some of you out there are completely unconvinced by scientific double blind studies, where neither the researcher nor the subject know what the test subject is getting-- the herb or a placebo. These studies consistently show many herbal remedies don’t work any better than a sugar pill.

I don’t know if it’s a mistrust of science or what, but I do know that people who use these herbs really believe they work. However, without a carefully run clinical trial, say where a person is given an herb ‘known’ to prevent colds and/or reduce their severity, and their nose swabbed with a cold virus, you don’t know if what you thought you were catching was really a cold or an allergy attack or whatever. Several times a year I feel as though I'm coming down with a cold only to find myself symptom free the next day without taking anything.

Here’s a true life adventure to help make my point. When I was seven I was convinced I had a cold, sore throat, runny nose, the works. I had a box of Luden’s Cherry cough drops and ate the whole box while sitting on a fence in the sun. The next day the ‘cold’ was gone. I was convinced the cough drops cured me. The next time I caught a cold I ate the same kind of cough drops while sitting in the sun in the same place. This time it didn’t work.

So, if scientific studies tell me an herbal remedy doesn’t work, I personally am more apt to believe that than my neighbor who swears by the stuff. But, that’s just me.

Oh, by the way, if you are going to take an herbal, please do a little research of your own. Some of these herbs can be toxic all by themselves or when taken along with a prescription medication.

What Problem?

One would really have to not be paying attention to be unaware that the planet was in the midst of an energy crisis. But, that’s OK, we had people we were paying to pay attention, right?

Problem was maybe their jobs depended on their not paying attention. I know that’s pretty cynical, but where are we? We’re hustling to make up for many years of negligence. This did not happen overnight, it’s been coming for a long time, and it’s no big secret we need at least three planets to sustain our growing consumption of not just energy, but all natural resources.

And THEY are still trying to tell us everything is Ok, no climate change; plenty of oil, water’s fine and besides a free market will adjust and find new technology to cope. That’s the biggest lie of all. It is really risky and expensive to develop new technologies and if there is one thing private enterprise doesn’t like it is an expensive risk. Some things take government. To quote NYU’s Martin Hoffit, “Most of the modern technology that has been driving the U.S. economy did not come spontaneously from market forces,” giving as examples jet planes, satellite communications, integrated circuits, and computers. He goes on to say, “The internet was supported for 20 years by the military and for 10 more years by the National Science Foundation before Wall Street found it.”

‘Free market forces will handle it,’ is one of those things that sound good only if you say it really fast. We don’t have the luxury of entertaining fast talk from people who are paid by or make a profit from the exploitation of resources we can no longer afford to waste or events like climate change they try to turn into a shell game.