For those of my readers that don’t really know me, I’ll just be real blunt here.
I consider myself to be a blanking (fill in your own curse word) Rocket Scientist compared to most of the so called “experts” that form our national policy, write our laws, and whose opinions are thrown at the public through main stream news stories on a daily basis.
I wasn’t always the most dedicated student, but I did manage to get a degree in Mechanical Engineering Technology after a stint at Georgia Tech and a number of years of night school at Southern Tech after I made the mistake of getting married and buying a house—thereby having to actually work for a living prior to finishing my degree.
I can fix almost anything you got that breaks and the things I don’t actually fix I can do research and understand how they work—I just choose to not spend the time learning the intricate details of things like magneto hydrodynamics and plasma field generation because at the ripe old age of 45 the economic cost versus benefit curve is not to my liking
The Centers For Disease Control (CDC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are both egregious examples of how government and politics can emasculate an organization’s ability to actually accomplish anything involving any real science. Both organizations have been systematically invaded by hoards of over-educated, panty waist, bed wetting, leftist, liberal morons, many of them outright communists, whom use the organizations to attack America in general and our system of capitalism specifically.
If you ask the CDC, no American should ever be allowed to own a gun. What a bunch of idiot doctors and so-called scientists. But the CDC’s ineptness isn’t really my point this afternoon.
My head is spinning around about this Associated Press story about the EPA, aptly filed under the title of politics, not science.
EPA Cancels Controversial Pesticide Study
“The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday canceled a controversial study using children to measure the effect of pesticides after Democrats said they would block Senate confirmation of the agency's new head.
Stephen Johnson, as EPA's acting administrator, ordered an end to the planned study, a reversal from the agency's position just a day earlier when it said it would await the advice of outside scientific experts.
The aim of the study, Johnson said, was to fill data gaps on children's exposure to household pesticides and chemicals. He suspended it last November after ethical questions were raised by scientists within EPA and by environmentalists.
Over the study's two years, EPA had planned to give $970 plus a camcorder and children's clothes to each of the families of 60 children in Duval County, Fla., in what critics of the study noted was a low-income minority neighborhood….
(The) EPA also had agreed to accept $2 million for the $9 million "Children's Health Environmental Exposure Research Study" from the American Chemistry Council, a trade group that represents chemical makers.
"I have concluded that the study cannot go forward, regardless of the outcome of the independent review. EPA must conduct quality, credible research in an atmosphere absent of gross misrepresentation and controversy," Johnson said Friday. "I am committed to ensuring that EPA's research is based on sound science with the highest ethical standards."
Sen. Barbara Boxer (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., had joined with Sen. Bill Nelson (news, bio, voting record), D-Fla., in demanding the study's cancellation as a condition for confirming Johnson's nomination by President Bush.
Now think about this with me for just a minute. In spite of what the title says, do you really believe that the EPA and the American Chemical Council were planning on running down to south Florida and injecting black and Mexican children with DDT and Chlordane? Were they going to replace the parents table salt with Amdro Fire ant poison and sit back to see what happened?
Not no, but HELL NO….THEY WEREN’T GOING TO DO ANY SUCH THING.
The EPA was simply going to spend two years looking at the household chemicals already being used by these teenaged and other underprivileged minority parents in their homes in an effort to determine what effects, if any, they had on the kids.
It seems that Barbra Boxer and Bill Nelson are playing their normal partisan, bullshit games with confirmation of President Bush’s nominees, and they’re tossing in a liberal (excuse the pun) dose of political correctness for good measure.
What kills me is that the AP idiot reporters don’t have the guts or the ability to actually tell you what I just told you—that the EPA wasn’t going to poison kids. If the EPA was going to test mainly white kids on Sea Island, GA or in Beverly Hills, CA I suppose that the CHEERS study would have been OK, but studying minority children that already are disproportionately injured by home environmental risks is a no-no?
And here is the final thing that really got my blood boiling in this story:
Johnson, an EPA employee for a quarter-century and the first person with a science background to be nominated to lead the agency, has been acting administrator since Mike Leavitt left the agency in January to become secretary of the Health and Human Services Department. He was nominated in March.
You with me here?
STEPHEN JOHNSON IS THE FIRST PERSON WITH A SCIENCE BACKGROUND TO BE NOMINATED TO LEAD THE EPA……EVER.
Does that make any sense whatsoever?
What I want to know is--who the hell has been running the EPA the past 25 years, pastry chefs and wallpaper hangers? AHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhh GOD help us all…
I’ve got to go to the pool now and cool off..
Saturday, April 09, 2005
Pooped of Public Pomposity
Between the "zoot suits" worn by the Swiss Royal guards at the Pope's funeral and the funky hats on all of the royal muckity mucks at Prince Charles and Lady Homewrecker...er..Camilla Parker Boyles wedding, I've about had it with displays of Public Pomposity this week.
I never thought I'd say this, but give me a good dose of some old fashoned Bush and Kerry bashing and a few swift boat veterans thrown in for good measure, please. If I see one more big purple hat or dude running around in elf shoes--I'm gonna puke.
I never thought I'd say this, but give me a good dose of some old fashoned Bush and Kerry bashing and a few swift boat veterans thrown in for good measure, please. If I see one more big purple hat or dude running around in elf shoes--I'm gonna puke.
Friday, April 08, 2005
Free Blogging
Blogger.com is driving me crazy. Apparently their server was down last night for a while because I had trouble publishing the Pork Post and I must have rewritten it three times before I finally gave up and went to bed.
Almost half the time I write a posting in the Blogger software I have trouble. I should know better and always use MS Word instead. I just can't justify paying Typepad or someone to host to the tune of $10.00 a month when I get MOST of what I need for free.
Almost half the time I write a posting in the Blogger software I have trouble. I should know better and always use MS Word instead. I just can't justify paying Typepad or someone to host to the tune of $10.00 a month when I get MOST of what I need for free.
Have You Got Your Fair Share?
Of what you might ask?
You know…GOVERNMENT PORK!
The Citizens Against Government Waste have just released their new 2005 Congressional Pig Book. Are you and your fellow state citizens getting your fair share?
Here is a listing of Federal spending by state. I’m proud to say that Georgia is number 49 out of 51. At first glance one might be inclined to say that Georgians should be angry at Senators Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson and that Glynn County should be voting Representative Jack Kingston out of office.
I’m proud that Georgia didn’t consume more of this indigestible “pork” than we did. While the national average for “pork spending” is $33.03, all of us rednecks in Georgia only gobbled up an average of $14.83 each.
I notice a couple of strange things about the basis of the survey. Why is it that the states with low populations like Alaska ($645,502,000), the District of Columbia ($257,171,000), and Hawaii ($573,926,000) were numbers 1, 2 and 3, while big states like California ($237,593,250) and Texas ($65,301,250) are numbers 50 and 51?
Perhaps the most telling statistic is that lowly West Virginia, land of Robert KKK “pretty pretty” Byrd, was the number four benefactor on the list, obtaining $398,622,250 of US tax dollars for its 1.8 million population. That works out to a little over $219 for every man, woman, and child in the coal mine state.
I remember that Byrd once funded the construction of a new FBI lab building in West Virginia (bearing his own name) and had to wait over a year to legislate funding to be able to actually afford to hire some people to work in the new facility. What a farce.
I’m not going to be as simplistic in thought as to suggest that such a method is possible, but if our Congress could keep federal spending on a per capita basis to that of Texas ($2.90) this year, the budget would be reduced by $8.85 trillion dollars from the current $9.7 trillion dollar level.
And by the way, isn’t it interesting that beleaguered House Speaker Tom Delay’s Texas is at the bottom of the list?
Can you say Democratic retaliation?
Just wondering…
You know…GOVERNMENT PORK!
The Citizens Against Government Waste have just released their new 2005 Congressional Pig Book. Are you and your fellow state citizens getting your fair share?
Here is a listing of Federal spending by state. I’m proud to say that Georgia is number 49 out of 51. At first glance one might be inclined to say that Georgians should be angry at Senators Saxby Chambliss and Johnny Isakson and that Glynn County should be voting Representative Jack Kingston out of office.
I’m proud that Georgia didn’t consume more of this indigestible “pork” than we did. While the national average for “pork spending” is $33.03, all of us rednecks in Georgia only gobbled up an average of $14.83 each.
I notice a couple of strange things about the basis of the survey. Why is it that the states with low populations like Alaska ($645,502,000), the District of Columbia ($257,171,000), and Hawaii ($573,926,000) were numbers 1, 2 and 3, while big states like California ($237,593,250) and Texas ($65,301,250) are numbers 50 and 51?
Perhaps the most telling statistic is that lowly West Virginia, land of Robert KKK “pretty pretty” Byrd, was the number four benefactor on the list, obtaining $398,622,250 of US tax dollars for its 1.8 million population. That works out to a little over $219 for every man, woman, and child in the coal mine state.
I remember that Byrd once funded the construction of a new FBI lab building in West Virginia (bearing his own name) and had to wait over a year to legislate funding to be able to actually afford to hire some people to work in the new facility. What a farce.
I’m not going to be as simplistic in thought as to suggest that such a method is possible, but if our Congress could keep federal spending on a per capita basis to that of Texas ($2.90) this year, the budget would be reduced by $8.85 trillion dollars from the current $9.7 trillion dollar level.
And by the way, isn’t it interesting that beleaguered House Speaker Tom Delay’s Texas is at the bottom of the list?
Can you say Democratic retaliation?
Just wondering…
Thursday, April 07, 2005
Four Years Ago
I thought about posting about this for a while this week and I have been undecided. I've been sorta bummed out about it and thus the dearth of writing, but any way...here goes.
I grew up around fire. My family had a fireplace in our basement that we used regularly for heat and to provide "atmosphere" to our evening socializing. We had central heat and ultimately added a central air conditioning unit in the late 1960's, but the fireplace was a major feature of our home as I grew up.
My mother's father's house had three fireplaces, the house being built in the 1930's by hand from lumber cut and sawn off of his farm. As a child I remember the cold nights and the primary fireplace in his family room being a source of heat and community gathering when the family was there together.
I went camping with the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts and a friend of mine was the designated "troupe arson" because Mickey could light a fire better than anyone we knew. Fire is your friend when you are a kid and you're camping out and you need to get warm or cook dinner or need something to goof around with--within certain limitations.
I had a fireplace in my first two houses. I also had a chainsaw and I cut wood and stoked those fireplaces full and loved every minute of it until 1994. That was the year that I gave my ex-wife my second house and the fireplace. She could have cared less about my fireplace--but I loved it.
I have lived without my own fireplace ever since. I had a house since then, but I didn't have a fireplace...and I had a fire, and that caused a big problem. You see, I bought my third house in the summer of 1997 and happily lived there after my divorce until April 5, 2001 when I came home from work and my house had burned up.
If you have never experienced a house fire on an up close and personal basis, I hope you never have to because there is no way for you to understand what happens to your life. There was a police tape wrapped around it and there was water running down the driveway and almost everything I owned except my Snapper mower and my Webber Charcoal grill and my Nissan Maxima and the Chevy Suburban that I happened to be driving that day was toast.
Worst of all, the police want to talk to you and treat you like some kind of criminal because YOU are the number one suspect when your house burns down. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the cause of my fire was obvious--a crappy, cheep, surge suppressor/power strip on my fancy smancy 110 watt per channel Bose surround sound TV system.
Never again.
Go in your home office, go in your bedrooms, go in your living rooms, and look at what you have plugged into the surge protectors and wall outlets. Do you have an "octopus" of electrical wires? DO YOU WANT TO COME HOME AND FIND YOUR FRONT DOOR CHOPPED IN AND POLICE TAPE ACROSS YOUR FRONT PORCH? Do you want to see everything you've worked for, possibly your plants and your pets, cooked into ashes?
No?
Then think about what you are connecting to the electrical circuits in your house and get some help if you have any doubts and don't end up like me that day, moving into a motel room, dragging along what few of your possessions you can scrounge out of the rubble, smelling of smoke and dripping soot and water, stinking up your car parked out in the parking lot.
It really sucks......don't let it happen to you...
OK?
I grew up around fire. My family had a fireplace in our basement that we used regularly for heat and to provide "atmosphere" to our evening socializing. We had central heat and ultimately added a central air conditioning unit in the late 1960's, but the fireplace was a major feature of our home as I grew up.
My mother's father's house had three fireplaces, the house being built in the 1930's by hand from lumber cut and sawn off of his farm. As a child I remember the cold nights and the primary fireplace in his family room being a source of heat and community gathering when the family was there together.
I went camping with the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts and a friend of mine was the designated "troupe arson" because Mickey could light a fire better than anyone we knew. Fire is your friend when you are a kid and you're camping out and you need to get warm or cook dinner or need something to goof around with--within certain limitations.
I had a fireplace in my first two houses. I also had a chainsaw and I cut wood and stoked those fireplaces full and loved every minute of it until 1994. That was the year that I gave my ex-wife my second house and the fireplace. She could have cared less about my fireplace--but I loved it.
I have lived without my own fireplace ever since. I had a house since then, but I didn't have a fireplace...and I had a fire, and that caused a big problem. You see, I bought my third house in the summer of 1997 and happily lived there after my divorce until April 5, 2001 when I came home from work and my house had burned up.
If you have never experienced a house fire on an up close and personal basis, I hope you never have to because there is no way for you to understand what happens to your life. There was a police tape wrapped around it and there was water running down the driveway and almost everything I owned except my Snapper mower and my Webber Charcoal grill and my Nissan Maxima and the Chevy Suburban that I happened to be driving that day was toast.
Worst of all, the police want to talk to you and treat you like some kind of criminal because YOU are the number one suspect when your house burns down. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the cause of my fire was obvious--a crappy, cheep, surge suppressor/power strip on my fancy smancy 110 watt per channel Bose surround sound TV system.
Never again.
Go in your home office, go in your bedrooms, go in your living rooms, and look at what you have plugged into the surge protectors and wall outlets. Do you have an "octopus" of electrical wires? DO YOU WANT TO COME HOME AND FIND YOUR FRONT DOOR CHOPPED IN AND POLICE TAPE ACROSS YOUR FRONT PORCH? Do you want to see everything you've worked for, possibly your plants and your pets, cooked into ashes?
No?
Then think about what you are connecting to the electrical circuits in your house and get some help if you have any doubts and don't end up like me that day, moving into a motel room, dragging along what few of your possessions you can scrounge out of the rubble, smelling of smoke and dripping soot and water, stinking up your car parked out in the parking lot.
It really sucks......don't let it happen to you...
OK?
