Random Thoughts for a busy news day

Today has so many things going on, and I have little time to research them all. So, I am going to comment briefly on a bunch of issues that I most likely will come back to.

Jobs report

The monthly jobs report is out and the numbers are dismal. The question I have is that if the unemployment is at 16 percent for young adults then what are all these young people doing? How are they surviving? Otherwise, why are they not rioting because they are starving? I am not talking about the Occupy folks. They are a bunch of overeducated romantics looking back for a Summer of Love. I am talking about the others. What are they doing? Revolutions start with less.

Venezuela seizes American ship captain

What are Hugo Chavez’s minions thinking? They are upset that their port authorities found three “assault” rifles in the locker for the ship’s anti-piracy squad … weapons that allegedly were declared when the ship arrived in Maracaibo. Now, they apparently arrested the captain on weapons smuggling charges and seem to be holding the crew. This is not only silly but it verges on being ridiculous the more that comes out.

Haqqani network squeaks

The Haggani network in Afghanistan and Pakistan says things will go badly for the American hostage they are holding if the U.S. government lists them as a terrorist group. Sounds like the shoe fits. Unfortunately for the American, he is about to become a casualty in the Global War on Terrorists.

Obit for the Arab Spring

It seems that analysts are saying that the great hopes for freedom, liberty and democracy in the Arab world are dying. Ah, were you surprised? You shouldn’t have been. It would have been nice, but the Arab countries are reverting to their traditional tribal styles. That will have to change before the other things happen.

So much for thoughts now. Thunder outside. Need to take precautions.

Expert opinions

Organics and nutrition

Weathermen make long term prediction

I would like to discuss human hubris. Well, not really, but it sounds good. What I really want to say is that I find humor in the propensity of people in this era of modern scientific research to place so much faith in the statistical approach.

Now, I am not saying it is bad to rely on statistics, I just rarely think that statistics actually definitively prove your point. You see, often times, people are comparing apples and oranges … or tomatoes or potatoes … and not really realizing it.

For example, it seems, according to the latest scientific study of statistical studies of case histories of a host of individuals that eating organic food does not necessarily do a lot of good, at least in a nutritional sense. Hello, does that come as a surprise to anyone? It really shouldn’t.

The body needs certain nutrients, vitamins, minerals, etc. in certain quantities to be healthy. It needs to come in certain forms, however, but how those forms are grown, per se, really doesn’t matter. Of course the food has to be from a healthy plant/animal for it to be beneficial but how that plant is made healthy really doesn’t matter in determining its nutritional value.

Now, I will agree that some foods have less trace chemicals if they are grown certain ways, and those trace chemicals, if in significant enough quantities, can have a detrimental effect on human health. Unfortunately, growing things organically does not always mean that those trace elements won’t be found in food. The point being that paying significantly higher prices for food labeled “organic” may not be the wisest use of your resources.

However, having said that, I suppose a few years from now, some other scientist will come along and “prove” that eating “organic” is the next best thing to home-made sliced bread.

The same holds for the latest position paper by the American Meteorological Society (i.e.: Mainly those guys who bring you your nightly forecasts for the weather on TV). It seems that they are certain of two things:

One: the global climate is getting warmer.

Two: it is the result of anthropomorphic causes.

Oopsie. Statistically it might seem true, but then again it might be apples and oranges, with the apples being the climate is warming and the oranges being that is caused anthropomorphically.

I will not argue that the climate may be getting warmer but I would advise you to check back in two or three centuries, or even two or three millennia, to make sure. Despite what the doomsayers tell us, we really don’t have enough data to make sweeping statements about the climate and what it is doing. As best we can tell, humans have been sentient for about 15,000 years, give or take 15,000 or 30,000 years. You take that slice of time and see what portion it makes of the overall space of geological time, or even the time that life has been on the planet, and you realize that we are talking about an extraordinary teeny tiny bit of that experience.

So, first and foremost, before you say the sky is falling, make sure it isn’t a rain drop.

So, I am not sure that we are facing a deluge here, folks, and definitely the jury is still out on whether or not we can blame it all on human activities. It might be, and I am not going to say that it can’t be, but I am saying that when you look at the scope of changes over the course of the earth’s history it is entirely possible that these little tiny creatures running around, modifying their environment (as almost every species does to one extent or another), aren’t really the cause of the massive geologic climatological changes that our best and brightest are seeing.

Please, people, remember that we really have only about 30 years of good, solid, hard data on which we are making these sweeping predictions. All the rest of the data maybe good, but it is mostly based on assumptions, suppositions and interpretations of information that we really don’t know if it is valid or not.

And the models? Well, they are models. They are mathematical formulations that we hope mimic reality. But if any weatherman/meteorologist tells you that he or she really can tell you what the weather, or climate, is going to be like at any one point at any given time on the globe more than relatively few hours from now (which on the geological scale would be totally insignificant) with 100 percent accuracy, then they know they have just trashed their own credibility, because it is impossible. There just are too many variables out there, and too many of them that we mere humans don’t even begin to understand, for such predictions to be taken as gospel.

Heck, we don’t even, for the most part it seems, take the gospel as gospel any more.

Short memories

Suggested reading:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/16/us/us-drought/index.html?hpt=hp_bn1

http://weather.blogs.foxnews.com/2012/07/16/2012-drought-one-of-the-worst-in-history/

http://video.msnbc.msn.com/nightly-news/48202640/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/16/us-drought-2012-widest-since-1956_n_1676936.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/16/midwest-drought-2012-us-worse_n_1676967.html?ref=topbar

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/ag-sec-vilsack-wishes-rain-prayer-combat-painful-191255266.html

Ok, every one, the sky IS falling. Run out, run around, jump and shout. The world obviously is coming to an end and it is all the fault of the stupid Americans and their dumb gas-guzzling car lifestyle. I mean if it wasn’t for anthropomorphic-caused climate change, the breadbasket of the America (and as well as for much of the world) wouldn’t be baking in the heat this summer.

Granted, much of the US is suffering under the worst drought in 25 years and probably in the last 56 years (but not in the last 75 years and before that, who the heck really knows).

But droughts are nothing unheard of. If one chooses, one can look back through several millennia of recorded human existence and droughts seem to be a rather routine occurrence. Some have been worse, others not so worse, but they keep on happening with astonishing frequency regardless of what us humans do or do not do. What do us people want? Do we think we can control the weather? I mean I know we can do a lot of things, but I don’t think we have mastered the climate just yet, nor do we really have all that much influence on it.

The problem, it seems, that – at least in America – we constantly living under what I call “a condition of historical amnesia.” If it didn’t happen yesterday, or if I haven’t seen it on television via CNN/FOX/NBC/ABC./CBS, then it never happened and what is happening today is unlike anything that has gone before.

What a bunch of equine fecal material. I find it sad that history seems to be such a neglected subject in American schools today; because without knowing, and having some understanding, of history, then you have no context with which to evaluate and understand anything that is happening today. You won’t know what terms really mean when people start bandying them around, oftentimes misusing or misrepresenting these terms to the point you almost have to believe the sky IS falling.

Now, I am not trying to be Pollyannaish (probably an obscure reference to anyone under the age of 40), but the sky is NOT falling. The skies, the weather, the climate, the world, people, all are doing what they have done for millennia: They are changing.

The world is not static. It is dynamic and things are always happening AND changing. Often, these things seem to run in cycles and because of the cyclical nature of our planet and its orbit around the sun, there probably is some validity to that.

This does mean that if we know what has gone before, and hopefully gain some understanding of that, then we can do something different than before with hopefully a better outcome.

Panic is not an option. It is a waste of time, energy and usually resources like money, which we have scarce enough as it is.

However, we have to realize that certain things happen when things like droughts happen.

First: the price of food WILL go up. This is so simple it hardly bears mentioning, but you will see a lot of panic stories coming on the rising price of food. Drought=Poorer Crops=Less Food in the Supply Chain. When supply goes down, price goes up – basic law of economics.

Second: The price of other things depending on those crops will go up for the same reason.

Third: Water will be valuable and be in short supply. Its price may also go up.

Fourth: Energy, especially those blended fuels with biomaterial, will be more expensive. It also will be in more demand, so what supplies we have will have to be stretched.

So, if we know a) droughts happen (and will happen, over and over again) and b) that there really isn’t anything we REALLY can do to alter the weather, then anybody proposing drastic solutions to protect the climate really is blowing smoke.

We also know that times are going to be tough and money tight. Plan for it. History tells you it is going to happen, now and again, and again, and again. It is kinda silly not to learn from the past, isn’t it.

Horse meat

Backgrounder:

http://news.yahoo.com/missouri-town-hopes-first-u-horse-slaughter-plant-225135573.html

Ok, this topic is just for fun.

I once read a book (gasp, he reads! J) back when I was in college entitled “The Impoverished Student’s Handbook of Cookery, Eatery and Housekeepery”. It was great fun. It also had some good tips on a cheap way to live in an apartment off campus and survive.

One of the discussions in the book was on meat, and what to do with it. In keeping with the book’s irreverent tone toward just about everything, it included a passage on horsemeat. You see, Americans have this thing about horses. They seemed so cute (and girls back then just fell in love with every horse in sight) that it was a travesty for a human to eat an equine. It didn’t matter that the meat’s protein was just as good as any other meat (as soldiers from eras long past will tell you as well as other people needing sustenance desperately), it just isn’t done. It is done in other parts of the world, but on this, and dogs and cats, Americans are a bit squeamish.

Now, we (except for vegetarians who forget that humans are omnivores and designed as predators – note the canine teeth and the binocular vision … they are there for a reason and it ain’t eating carrots) Americans will eat a whole lot of different species of animal life (as well as plant life, but we are not talking about that).

The way we get around the fuzzy names like cow, pig, sheep, deer, moose, bear and a host of other mammals is we give it another name. Unfortunately, for the birds, they aren’t as lucky: A chicken is a chicken; a duck is a duck; and a pheasant is a pheasant. Fish is fish, but it also can go by other names. But for the mammals primarily we have a variety of names.

Cow meat is beef, veal, steak or roasts.

Pigs are pork, bacon or ham.

Sheep is mutton.

Wild stuff is venison.

But horse … well it is horse. As are dog is dog and cat is cat.

So, this book, with its tongue firmly stuffed in its cheek, suggested that the poor horse, cat and dog needed other names. The names, it suggested probably should be four-letter words like beef, veal, pork, lamb, chops, etc., because that seemed to go over the best in English.

So, since somebody is thinking of adding horsemeat to the mix … I challenge someone to come up with that four-letter word and let’s start getting it out.