Stupid Compact Florescent Bulbs!

Another comment from FB turned into a blog entry....

@Donna, we would just need to be more responsible "adults" than we are now. We'd have to actually take those pesky dead CFL's back to the store, and the stores should have a box for them to be taken for recycling. I know that's such a tremendous bother, to have to put a light bulb in a bag, and haul the insufferable thing all the way back to Wal-Mart and drop it in a box by the door. And I can't imagine all the hassle it would cause for Wal-Mart to have an employee move the box to the back of the store at the end of the day. And the Garbage Corporations, bless their poor souls, they would actually have to BUY A TRUCK and HIRE some moron who was only smart enough to drive a truck and pick up garbage, not a worthy, college educated person. And they'd have then find some way to get that truck full of light bulbs to a DANG RECYCLING PLANT, those immense wastes of private corporation time! And they'd have to do the unthinkable, dole out some more precious money to some more igorant morons who just aren't smart enough to do anything better than change broken light bulbs back into working light bulbs... That would be such an immeasureable waste of our time.

Instead we should keep using incandescent bulbs. I mean, let's just use some math and illustrate how stupid this whole thing is. A 100watt light bulb is used for on average 10hours a day let's say.

100 watts time ten hours works out to 100w times 10 hours times 365 days.... that's (calculator helps) but it's kinda no brainer if you write it out 100x10x365 and realize that "converting to kilowatts from watts is just dividing by 1000. We get a measly 365 kilowatts a year. That's all! at a national average of about twelve cents 365 kilowatts only costs around 45 dollars a year. So what!

How much could a stupid CFL that costs like $5 compete with a bulb that only costs 50 cents? That's a no brainer too right? I mean, how long does a CFL last anyway, on average like 8,000 hours, and a regular incandescent bulb lasts 2,000. So one CFL only lasts as long as 4 quality regular bulbs! that's .50 x 4 = $2

so if a CFL is twice as expensive as the same light Incandescent when we take life of the bulb into account!

That means that the CFL would have to use $22.5 electricity just to break even!

so let's do the math for the stupid, environment polluting CFL! the old technolgy is totally going to KICK BUTT. GO Edison! WOOOO yeah babay.

let's see, to get a light equivilent for a 100w bulb we need at 23watt CFL.... well, i see some easy math. that's 23%. So 23% of 45 is $11. So the CFL Actually saves money. Well dang, they're so inconvenient that it's worth the $11 not to have to make a bunch of jobs or be troubled with not just tossing them in the trash!

Not to mention that mercury in the CFL when you chunk it in the trash! I mean what are the leading causes of mercury in America after all. A 23w CFL has a whopping 2 milligrams EACH. And there is no way I'm going to be inconvenienced with all the trouble of taking it BACK to Wal Mart. And I don't see any reason to create a bunch of jobs handling all the stupid bulbs that would be work that was beneath Americans anyway, we'd wind up having to hire a bunch of economic refugees from the Depression in Mexico so we wouldn't have to give the ignorant Americans who couldn't go to college those low jobs. If we hire Americans, they'd have to give them HEALTH INSURANCE... Jesus! What's next, poor people don't need that stuff, they're just a step above a friggin Mexican right?

I mean how much mercury does an incandescent bulb have, ZERO!!! Am I right?

And how much mercury is in the coal we use to make the electricity? Approximately 0.0234 mg of mercury—plus carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide—releases into the air per 1 kwh of electricity that a coal-fired power plant generates. That's all. So that hundred watt bulb using coal for energy only causes .0234mg times 365kw for a year, which is..... calculator

uh oh.....

that works out to 8.5mg of mercury in the environment!!! That's crazy talk, I better check the math again.

... nope, it's right. But we have to take into account the CFL's mercury from the coal... don't want to be unfair! 23% of 365 times .0234mg mercury... that's 1.964 grams of Mercury, plus the two in the bulb! So that's ... well dang. CFL wins again! I'm starting to feel stupid.

so not only does the CFL save $11 a year, it puts half the mercury in the ecosystem, and it would put a quarter as much if I could just be bothered with returning the bulbs where i bought them so they could be gathered up.

I'm not just being facetious here. I went through this mental exercise about 6 years ago, when I switched every bulb in my house to CFLs. Since then I've only had 7 bulbs burn out, and they're all sitting in a box, waiting for me to responsibly dispose of them.

They actually last far longer than 8,000 hours, and most incandescent bulbs last far less than 2,500 hours, so my math in this example is heavily skewed IN FAVOR of incandescent bulbs.

That said, LED's are the true solution to the problem. No mercury in them, and they use only 1/10th what an incandescent uses! They cost 30+ dollars at the moment, which won't be so bad when they iron out all the bugs and get the to last the 50,000 hours they're shooting for. At 50,000 hours life, compared to an average 2000 for an incandescent bulb, and using 1/10th the electricity, they could literally cost $70 each and we would break even.

Changing our ways is never easy. We as a species are resistant to change, it's one of the things that has helped us survive, but it's also been one of the things that has caused a lot of problems. Neither the Jews or the Romans wanted to listen to Christ, and we all know what problems that caused, because people didn't want to change.

We have to responsibly think about these things and take the whole picture into account. Making judgments about things as trivial as light bulbs based on emotion and not reason can not only be detrimental to our bank accounts, but our environment as well.

I guarantee you the electric companies, and the coal companies want you to keep using incandescent bulbs!

The Birds and the Bees (and the bats too)

There is also a big problem with the bats in America. I'm sure most people could care less about bats, but there are entire regions of the country that are loosing one of the largest consumers of mosquitos in the food chain, brown bats. They're dying from a fungal disease that migrated to America on the dirty boots of caving tourists from Europe.

A whole chink in the food chain is about to come loose. The food chain isn't like a bicycle chain, where each link only has one connection to the rest of the chain. Think of it more as a pile of cheap gold necklaces that have been stirred up, until there are all kinds of knots, big with many connections (mosquitos) and places where a link may only have two or three connections (ebola, it's so lethal most links that touch it die out within hours!)

Bats and birds play a huge role in the control of mosquitoes. HUGE. One bat will eat up to 1000 mosquitoes a night in places where there are lots of the little blood suckers.

These tens of thousands of birds that are dying. This is a very bad thing for us, as humans. Let's just take for example these blackbirds that have died in Arkansas. 5000 red winged blackbirds weigh 625 lbs in a bug-rich environment. Red Winged blackbirds eat mostly insects. So let's just say that red winged blackbirds are responsible for the consumption of 1 ounce of insects per day.... times 5,000 birds divided by 16 ounces give us 312 pounds of bugs, per day, that will not be consumed by these fallen 5000 birds.

312 pounds per day y'all. That's a LOT of bugs. Many of these bugs are herbivores, you know, the ones we keep spraying with POISONS because they get in our lawns, and on our shrubberies and gardens. These poisons kill the bugs, but often times, not before the bird eats the bug!

This time of year, birds are eating a LOT of insects. Hibernating ones they find, dead ones they find. Lots of those dead ones died from poisoning, or were dosed with poisons but not high enough to kill them... until spring maybe, when their metabolisms kick back in.

So here's the double whammy. 5000 Dead birds in winter and early spring adds up to a measly 312 pounds of bugs per day... for the next 90 days or so before these hibernating bugs wake up and start their life cycle!

Whatever killed these birds, has ensured the survival of 312lbs of insects, per day for 90 days. That piles up to a whopping 28,000 pounds of hungry bugs. First half of the double whammy hits our lawns, gardens, shrubberies, orchards.... corn farms....... soybean fields..... and starts eating them. How do we solve this problem, more poison!

the other half of the whammy is that up to half of these 28,000 pounds of bugs are egg layers.... some bugs lay hundreds and thousands of eggs each.... 14,000 pounds more egg laying females will be in the ecosystem because of these birds dying off. That could mean millions of pounds of more bugs to contend with. And that's just the 5,000 blackbirds in Arkansas.... they're dying off all over.... From what I've seen we've lost over 20,000 lbs in the 48 continental states in the last week. That's hypothetically BILLIONS of pounds of more bugs by later summer.

Simple math, complex problem really. It's not that cut and dry, other critters will take up lots of slack. Some of the critters that will pick up the slack for the birds will be INSECTS. Wasps are direct competitors to most everything a black bird eats... so expect lots more wasps... and spiders.... and more POISON to take care of them.

All those factors counted in I think it's impossible to account for everything and even put an accurate number, certainly not at my level of education and data set. But let's take a small number. Let's say that these lost 20,000 pounds of birds only accounts for tens of thousands of bugs that won't get eaten this year, not the hypothetical billions. I predict this to be the worst year ever in the history of the Bugs V. Humans war. It's because some how, we talking apes have managed to kill off a bunch of our allies in this ware. Killed by collateral damage of our Luxurious Lives of Excess!

Our low opinion of birds, bugs and bats. Our wholesale disregard for how really MESSY we are as an animal. We think of animals that crap on the ground as "beasts" but instead of finding a realistic way to handle our own crap, we hide it from ourselves by depositing our urine and feces in good drinking water, and flushing it away wholesale in volumes great enough to solve the worlds bad drinking water problems... and thereby poisoning our own groundwater and rivers.... where we get the drinking water and purify it.... because we're "better" than "beasts".

A composting toilet turns crap and pee into good, viable gardening soil. And when you take into account the cost of the water, they're cheaper than the old kind. But then, who wants to actually have to take a bucket full of crap out to the composter, that's gross. Very realistic and responsible, but oh so very "gross", so that's just out of the question... I'm too good to mess with my crap!

Expect more bugs until we learn to accept responsibility for our own silly behavior. Birds killed by God knows what at this point according to the "news". Bats killed by lazy tourists. A tourist being someone who earns enough money to have LONG vacations and apparently little thought for the impact of their recreational exploits. We're going to have to import European bats to fix the bat problem.

Everyone has heard about bee colonies "collapsing". The latest, upstart notion is that maybe these poisons that "aren't poisonous to bees" at the daily off the flower doses, are getting concentrated into the honey! And pesticide and herbicide use having reached all time highs, is beginning to EXCEED the bee's tolerance dose for these poisons that aren't poisonous to bees. That's just the latest wacky theory though, it hasn't gained the spotlight over just keeping it as an unexplained mystery. Yet.

The birds and the bees are dying off because of our addiction to the notion that we can put poison into the environment and there are no repercussions. Without the birds and the bees...

Well, we all know about the story of the Birds and the Bees... without the birds and the bees doing their thing, there are no babies.

My views on the New World Order Conspiracy

I wouldn't go so far as to say the NWO is completely false. I think the Truth on the NWO shadow government scenario IS there, but it's not a Secret Society. It's just a bunch of Greedy, Egocentric, Messed up Apes with more cash money than God.

Take for example what has happened in Mexico. The drug cartels have become so immensely wealthy, that they own the government and the police, for he most part. Mexico is melting into a 3rd world nation at our back door, and we're worried about their refugees stealing out minimum wage jobs?

So scale that up, on a global scale, and swap the Cartel Lords for Multinational CEO's, World and State Bankers and swap the Various National Governments out for the Mexican Government.

It's not a cohesive, sinister plot formed by a secret cabal of super wealthy fiends. It's just a bunch of wealthy, spiritually void, inhumane bastards out to get all they can and piss on anything Noble, Honest or Just. It's taken 40yrs of the War on Drugs to bring about the disruption of normal society we're seeing in Mexico today.... These Multinationals and Big Banks have been at it for over 100 years, and they've make sure their activities are legal....

It has just gotten out of hand.

The only way for us to resolve the problem is to no longer give them our money. We must become Scrooges with our cash where Big Business is concerned. All of the corruption in the world is based on cash. If the good, working people simply restrict our spending we could control the worlds governments with the economic sword of the people.

For example, If the Consumers declared Economic War on BP and simply quit buying their stuff, how long would they remain an active corporation in America? They would have to sell out and move on. And if the people who bought them didn't make the changes we want with their organization, or clean up their mess... Declare War on them too.

The Healing Power of Prayer

One of the things I have often wondered about was the Healing Power of Prayer.

I've "done some research" on the web and I've read articles where actual scientific studies ere performed and no evidence was found that prayer helped much at all. However, there is no denying that sometimes, when people KNOW other people are praying for them, sometimes miracles happen, and this does have actual statistical proof.

So what does this tell us? That there is no God? Or that God is just very fickle, and if you're lucky he'll roll a 6 when he comes up to your prayer?

My notions on the issue are that the Healing Power of Prayer may just be: when you feel like enough people actually, for real, CARE.... that you SHOULD get better, because there are people out there that NEED you still. This would be a very useful evolutionary adaptation, speeding up the departure of the wicked and preserving the good.

Given the miraculous medical recoveries I have seen, and been. Given the actual numerical facts about how prayer affects recovery no better than no prayer. I know there are no host of angels waiting our commands. It's our natural behavior pattern to forget the failures and be awed by the massive "miracle" of the success when the odds are high enough. Even if we have to believe in Magic to make it seem "plausible". This is a basic survival mechanism built into all creatures with a brain. It's a foundational principle of Natural Selection.

Even the lowest of the lowly low animals, the flatworm knows to GO TO THE LIGHT!!! because when something is swimming over you, it might eat you, best to avoid moving shadows! Because, rather "miraculously" those flatworms that swam to the darkness found a mouth waiting to eat them, and they didn't have many offspring.

In all likely-hood, sometimes people's own healing systems are able to be activated if you secrete just the right balance of hormones and other bio-chemical stuff. Science is already discovering that there are ways to cause this to happen though stem cell research and the Human Genome Project.

There is a way to cause the genetic mechanisms that changed us from children to adults in our prime, run again! That means that when they unlock this Pandora's Box, death will become something very different than how we see it now. The science for this is happening now, in labs around the world. We need more money to more scientists. Not more church buildings or warships.

Or we could keep invoking spirits and appealing to Higher Powers, I suppose.

Crucified...

I have an Anarchist friend on FB. He's a Free Thinking Patriot who posts more than his share of those thought provoking, educational links, and more importantly, he often OPINES in the descriptions. He's been trying to explain to me now No Government would work. I always come back to, well who'll run the Jails? or How will they take care of the Elderly without Medicare... etc.

For the most part, I have led a blameless life. The number of people who could lie down in an fMRI and have their complaints about me proven genuine is a number around 5. But none of these things would carry a fine or jail time if they were adjudicated on in a court of law. I've allowed some bad things to happen that I could have acted differently to have caused a better outlook, and collateral damaged here and there but it wasn't criminal in any way.

But how can this be, as I don't Believe in a Higher power. I just Believe in the Golden Rule. I don't know how else to explain it.

Imagine if we all lived our lives AS IF we there as an All Powerful Being who lived among us, and spoke to us, and could help us. Imagine if he SAW Him Her It (HHI) with our own eyes every day! Imagine if we behaved as if HHI would was going to throw us into a flaming/frozen pit for all eternity if we disobeyed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If we would just live like that, and have our rule be something WACKY like. "Love thy neighbor as thyself" or "Do unto others that which you would not like them to do unto you".

It could be just like Heaven....

man, where have I heard this theory before? I can almost remember, I know I read it somewhere....

Those of us who "get it" live this way already. Laws and Religion are just there for those people who have not stepped up to the next level and Live Right, just Because. I don't need Law or Religion to make me behave. And you know, in Jerusalem, in 33AD..... notions like this would get you Crucified....

Conspiracy Theories

This, like most of my posts here, started out as a FB discussion, turned into an editorial, and wound up here ... :)

Conspiracy theories serve a useful purpose, they draw in those suspicious of their "rulers", yet gullible enough to religiously swallow enough fabrications with the truth, to appear as crackpots, and dismissed in the eyes of the greater Public.

They let out enough truth to satiate those intelligent enough to filter out the BS from the probable, because they get to look down on the "idiots" who fall for the BS. They get to despise those whom they view to be the "evil" ones. They get enough of an ego boost and anger "fix" to keep them effectively neutralized.

They provide the Public with people to suspect and mistrust, when they should suspect and mistrust their "rulers".

They divide the People so that the Few can rule. I'm not a conspiracy buff, though I was raised neck deep in them. However, any clear thinking person knows that when you combine individual wealth surpassing that of most nations with a human being who has no compassion for those who are economically disadvantaged, one has a defacto conspiracy of sorts. These mega wealthy will manipulate government in subtle ways, campaign donations, world conferences, hobnobbery, bribes.... murder.

It's not an "Illuminati" or the "Bilderbergers" but just plain human nature combined with unlimited wealth and greed. Make no mistake, it's happening, and denying it won' t make it go away.

The four "Wars" we are involved in now are a clear example.

There were no WMD, yet we still find ourselves embroiled in an occupation and empire building endeavor in Iraq, for the primary goal of securing an oil field. There are side effects both good and bad that will come from it, hundreds of thousands of casualties, civilian, military and insurgents. A democracy may spring up where there once was dictatorship. Afghanistan is turning out to be about natural resources in my opinion. They've "discovered" massive mineral deposits of gold, gemstones and perhaps most important of all, Lithium, in Afghanistan. We went there looking for Osama Bin Laden, an ex? CIA operative during the Jihad against Russian occupation, almost ten years ago. He should have been found by now if America were really looking for him with earnest.

The War on Terrorism, which claims fewer Americans annually than botched domestic police actions is being carried out simply to maintain a high level of domestic stress. Stressed out people vote, spend and behave more predictably than happy, secure feeling people. If the TSA were to attempt what it's doing now in the 50's, virtually every woman in the line would have slapped the agents patting them down, and every man would punch them in the face.

The War on Drugs and the War on Terror are our modern day witch hunts. Every dark age has one. Potheads pose no danger to society, yet they are subject to unconstitutional search and seizure, wrongful imprisonment, and occasionally summary execution when the "bust" goes bad. The War on Drugs is the longest running war in American History, and it's being waged on Americans at their own expense. Even staying away from drugs is no guarantee of protection, bad cops will frame you if they like your car, or want to get into your safe. SWAT teams sometimes kick down the wrong door and shoot little old ladies in their beds, or 7yr old girls watching TV on the couch, and later find no drugs. Bad police work is more dangerous than terrorism. Annual deaths of Americans, averaged since the first cases in the 70's account for less than 20 deaths per year. Bad police work accounts for 350 deaths annually. (appx numbers of course)

All these things make the very rich richer, keep Democrats and Republicans in office, and keep the Public divided and living in fear.

It's not a "conspiracy". It's just the many, peace loving people being ruled by the few, selfish, immoral bastards. Business as usual for "civilized man".

The only way to change it short of a revolution is for the peace loving people to give up Consumerism, and vote with their dollars as well as in the voting booth. We have to stop voting for plastic junk made in China, with our dollars; and we have to stop voting party line tickets, and vote for individuals on individual merits rather than party affiliations. These two things are the great evils of our age, they have caused all our current political and economic troubles.

In my somewhat humble, nearly redneck, hillbilly opinion. I could be wrong on every count.