Author Archives: Jean-Paul

Map Of The Year

Slate took data from NOAA and plotted every tornado that killed a person in the United States since 1950.  My only complaint about it is they morbidly focus only on tornadoes that killed people.  That, in itself, tells us nothing about tornadoes.  Still, though, you get a good feel for where tornadoes usually hit and where they don’t.

Notice how many of the tornadoes travel northeast.  There’s a reason for that.  Some of the best tornado forming weather occurs when the jet stream buckles and sends a pool of cold air south over the plains.  This allows warm, moist gulf air to build on the eastern side of the jet stream buckle.  Warm air meets cold air and boom!  Quick rising storm clouds form causing dangerous thunderstorms and sometimes tornadoes.  Those storms generally travel northeast because that’s where the jet stream is heading.  The answer, my friend, actually is blowing in the wind in this case!

Ta-Nehisi Coates Pokes The Obamas With A Stick

I think I have figured out my man-crush on Ta-Nehisi Coates.  He reminds me of Amy Gardner from “The West Wing”.  There is this scene where Josh is complaining to Amy that she’s supposed to be on their side and she responds: “First of all, I’m crazy about the President, Josh. I’ve been crazy about him for longer than you’ve known who he was. And I’ll keep poking him with a stick. That’s how I show my love.” That’s exactly what Coates is doing here where he’s talking about the Obamas and race:

I think the stature of the Obama family — the most visible black family in American history — is a great blow in the war against racism. I am filled with pride whenever I see them: there is simply no other way to say that. I think Barack Obama, specifically, is a remarkable human being — wise, self-aware, genuinely curious and patient. It takes a man of particular vision to know, as Obama did, that the country really was ready to send an African American to the White House.

But I also think that some day historians will pore over his many speeches to black audiences. They will see a president who sought to hold black people accountable for their communities, but was disdainful of those who looked at him and sought the same. They will match his rhetoric of individual responsibility, with the aggression the administration showed to bail out the banks, and the timidity they showed  in addressing a foreclosure crisis which devastated black America (again.)They wil weigh the rhetoric against an administration whose efforts against housing segregation have been run of the mill. And they will match the talk of the importance of black fathers with the paradox of a president who smoked marijuana in his youth but continued a drug-war which daily wrecks the lives of black men and their families. In all of this, those historians will see a discomfiting pattern of convenient race-talk.

I think the president owes black people more than this. In the 2012 election, the black community voted at a higher rate than any other ethnic community in the country. Their vote went almost entirely to Barack Obama. They did this despite of an effort to keep them from voting, and they deserve more than a sermon. Perhaps they cannot  practically receive targeted policy. But surely they have earned something more than targeted scorn.

Read the whole thing.  It’s a wonderful poking of of the stick at someone Ta-Nehisi Coates loves.

The Air Conditioner Story

Healthcare is weird.  The focus is almost entirely on treatment and not at all on prevention.  Billions of dollars would likely be saved if we switch that focus.  And that leads us to the air conditioner story.  The air conditioner story is a story that Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber loves to tell.  It’s pithy and gets to the heart of the U.S. healthcare problem.  Here is the air conditioner story:  There’s this 90 year old woman with a well managed congestive heart condition and she lives in an apartment with no air conditioner.

That’s it.  That’s the story.  The point being that high temperatures are not good for a 90 year old woman with a congestive heart condition.  On a 100 degree day, healthcare will pay tens of thousands of dollars for the ambulance and the emergency room visit and any followups that are required when that woman has a heart event but it won’t pay $200 to get her a window air conditioning unit that would likely have prevented the event.

Pretty awesome story, huh?  Watch Oregon.  Great things are happening to change healthcare for the better.

Virginia’s Terrible Triumverate

Virginia only has three statewide elected offices; Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General.  I’ve already covered the Republican candidate for Governor, Ken Cuccinelli, and the Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor, E. W. Jackson, but I have neglected to cover the Republican candidate for Attorney General.

I present to you current state Senator Mark Obenshain.  As Senator, he sponsored a law that would require women who have miscarriages to report the miscarriage to the police or be guilty of a class one misdemeanor which carries up to a year in jail and up to a $2,500 fine.

Yeesh.  Nothing like treating a woman who just lost her baby like a presumed criminal.  And nothing like a party that decries governmental intrusion and yet somehow manages to nominate these three.  Oh, that’s right, they only care about governmental intrusion that affects them.

Wielding A +5 Sword Of Stupid

(h/t Scott Lemieux)

The Virginia Republican party sure has a knack for trying to appeal to the least common denominator.  First, they nominate Ken “The Cooch” Cuccinelli as their candidate for Governor.  This kind of makes sense given the direction the Republican party has been going.  Cuccinelli is a Tea Partier’s Tea Partier.  He spouts a whole bunch of nonsense and, unlike most politicians, he seems to believe the nonsense he spouts.  Maybe he’s just a good actor, though.

Now, Virginia Republicans have put chosen their Lieutenant Governor nominee to be on the ticket with Ken Cuccinelli and who is it?  A man named E. W. Jackson.  From the article, here are some of E. W. Jackson’s greatest hits:

He has said gays and lesbians are “very sick people, psychologically and emotionally” whose minds are perverted. He has also said homosexuality “poisons culture, it destroys families, it destroys societies”
He called alleged Democratic Party ties to Planned Parenthood “more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was” and thinks blacks who join the Democratic Party are voluntarily selling themselves into slavery.
He has equated Islam with anti-semitism, and criticized President Obama forhaving “Muslim sensibilities,”
He led an “Exodus Now!” movement encouraging African Americans to leave the Democratic party because opposition to same-sex marriage and government endorsement of religion means “Democrats are engaged in a concerted effort to do away with all symbols of our Judeo-Christian culture.”
He rallied against hate crimes legislation as a “virulent strain of Anti-Christian bigotry and hatred.”

I was a little worried that Ken Cuccinelli would actually have a chance at winning in Virginia.  With the addition of E. W. Jackson to the ticket, I have to wonder if the Virginia Republican party doesn’t secretly hate Ken Cuccinelli and is actively trying to sabotage his candidacy.  Or maybe they’re acting out some sort of Machiavellian play nominating a crazy person and a bat-shit-crazy person to make the crazy person not look so bad.  This would give Republicans a chance to pat themselves on the back by voting for Cuccinelli for Governor and the Democrat for Lieutenant Governor.  “Look at how bipartisan I am!”  I guess time will tell.

Quote Of The Day

“No one expects you to take a vow of poverty. But I will say it betrays a poverty of ambition if all you think about is what goods you can buy instead of what good you can do,” – Barack Obama

In Praise Of Our Atmosphere

NASA does a lot of work with a little money.  They send rovers to Mars, they launch satellites into space, they observer distant stars and galaxies and they look at the moon.  We often forget about them moon perhaps because of its ubiquitousness in the sky.  That is until NASA informs us that they have recorded the largest explosion ever recorded on the moon.  If you happened to be looking at the moon at the time of impact, you would have been able to see it with the naked eye.  No telescope required.  40 kilograms at 90,000 kilometers per hour.  KER-SPLAT!

Even a casual observer will notice that the moon gets hit a lot.  It’s surface is more cratered than a teenager’s face with acne.  With no atmosphere, the moon takes the full force of any impact from rogue meteoroids.  Any colonization that we do on the moon would almost certainly be required to be underground as a result.

Earth, on the other hand, has a nice atmosphere of various gases that not only allows us to breath and live, but also protects us from the potentially deadly flying rocks that are strewn across our  solar floating in mathematically precise orbits around the Sun just like Earth.  Any of those rocks that try hitting the Earth are met by billions of molecules joyously bouncing off of each other but mostly spread impossibly far apart.  The plunging rock changes this dynamic.  It pushes those molecules closer and closer together where they start bouncing off of each other more and more frequently.  All of this bouncing around causes pressure and temperature to rise quickly.  The higher pressure and temperature start picking away at the death spiraling rock until it breaks apart into fine dust and tiny pebbles that fall harmlessly to Earth.  Well, most of the time.

So, thank you atmosphere!  Your praises cannot be sung enough.  Ballads should be written and stories told of all of your invisible, silent, never ending works.

The News Media Is Not Liberal

You hear it a lot.  The liberal news media.  The news media won’t cover story X because it’s liberal.  The liberal news media doesn’t want you to know about Y.  It’s all a bunch of poppycock.  Stories X and Y aren’t covered because they’re either non-stories or they’re boring stories.

The news media is only liberal in the sense that society is liberal and the news media is a reflection of society.  The news media doesn’t cover conservative stories because conservative stories are boring.  “Things are exactly the same as they we’re yesterday!  News at 11!”

That isn’t to say that the news media doesn’t have an agenda.  They do.  That agenda is money.  That agenda is ratings.  If a news organization thinks a story can generate either of those two things, they will cover the story.  If not, they won’t.  End of story.

Really, “news” should be taken out of the name and they should just be called ” the media” because much of what they do cover is not news and what they do cover is so unbalanced it’s not even funny.  They take a story and offer “both sides” of the story even when there is quite obviously only one side.  “Is the sky blue?  Opinions differ.  Let’s hear both sides.”

Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done to change the current state of things short of creating a state subsidized news system.  Of course, we already have that in NPR and PBS and they do a stellar job of reporting stories in as unbiased a way as possible.  “Unbiased”, by they way, does not mean reporting both sides.  It means reporting the truth.

NPR and PBS are horribly underfunded, unfortunately.  This is mostly due to the same people who scream “media bias” at every opportunity.  They really are the only two entities who do hard news anymore and that makes them dangerous to the corporate conglomerations that run, well, everything.  CNN, NBC, FOX, MSNBC, all spin their news to appease their corporate masters.    It is a sorry state of affairs.

For all its many, many flaws there is no liberal bias in the media.  Change is just much more interesting than nothing changing so it gets covered.  I will admit that reporting on things that have worked well for a long time would have social benefit but it’s very hard to sell as a news story.  These things won’t change so it’s up to us to seek out news.  This is a very tall order in the chaos that is our lives.  The result is a criminally uninformed society.

Craft Beer Week!

This almost escaped my attention.  Craft Beer week started today!  So much for sobriety.  Revolution Brewery is taking over the Village Tap on Friday.  And Sunday!  Oh, Sunday!  Goose Island is having a block party featuring eight, count them, eight Bourbon County Stouts!  *drool*

106 Degrees In Iowa

Sioux City, Iowa hit 106 degrees yesterday.  This after getting an unprecedented snowfall earlier in the month.  Temperatures rose 77 degrees in only 56 hours.

Chicago officially hit 91 degrees after being at 36 degrees the previous morning.  That makes it the highest temperature swing ever recorded for May.

Many other 100+ degree temperatures were recorded.  The highest was 108 in Broken Bow, Iowa.

The extreme temperatures are due to an extreme jet stream.  There is a huge bow in the jet stream allowing cold air to flood in from Canada and behind that bow is a giant surge of warm air that stretches north to Canada.  The jet stream does look like this from time to time during the summer and it’s usually how the most violent summer storms come to be.  A jet stream configuration like this happening in May is extremely unusual.