Observe, overreact, destroy, apologize. – Weerd Beerd

I’ve had a hard time with the way the Tucson shooting is being used in the media, both conservative and liberal, to wave the bloody shirt at the other side.  The shooter seems to have been an equal opportunity whack job.

Tam does a good job dressing down those who immediately assume that the perpetrator is someone from the opposite side of any issue.

Deebow over at Blackfive does excellent work in arguing that political speech didn’t make the troglodyte who shot a Congresswoman in the head and then spray a crowd.

As for me, I want to see the wounded healed, the dead buried and mourned, the families comforted, and the monster who did this prosecuted.  If there was a larger conspiracy, I want it tracked down and obliterated.  But I refuse to blame anyone other than the man who pulled the trigger for the death and suffering he caused.

Part of the responsibility entailed in adulthood is taking responsibility for your actions, and holding others responsible for theirs.  Nowhere in there does it say you get to blame a third party in order to score political points.

Dear Intellectually Dishonest Jackhole,

I would like to thank you for the last decade of self doubt and recrimination.

My oldest son was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in 2001.  Like parents everywhere who are faced with an autistic child, even one who is as high functioning as Junior Bear, his mother and I looked for a cause of the issue, partly to try to prevent it from happening to the other children, but also to examine our own actions.  I have walked around for the better part of a decade blaming myself for insisting that Junior get each and every inoculation that is recommended for children.  When he was born in 1992, I followed the directions of our pediatrician, and let her give him four and six shots in one day in order to keep current with all of his vaccinations.

When Junior was diagnosed with an Autism Spectrum Disorder his mother, my ex-wife, immediately deflected all blame onto me, and I accepted it.  I put up with a lot of behavior from Junior that may or not be related to Asperger’s at least in part because I blamed myself.  If vaccinations were to blame for at least some cases of autism, then I had to take that hit.

When my other children needed vaccinations, I spaced them out, and limited them to those shots that are required by law.  While we were never behind on vaccinations, this spacing out put gaps in the protection that vaccinations were designed to give.  This added a small risk of preventable disease to our children.  I was not wholly convinced that vaccines would cause autism, but I was being cautious to a fault in order to minimize any risk of autism.  Luckily, my children were not afflicted by the preventable childhood diseases, but thousands of other children were not so lucky.

A couple of years ago, your theory about the link between vaccinations and autism was called into question, but it was more of a methods and conclusion quibble.  I was still careful due to my fear of making the same mistake twice and possibly condemning another child to autism of any kind.

Now I find that it wasn’t your methods and conclusions that were faulty.  Your entire endeavor was a fraud from the beginning.  You started your research with a conclusion and constructed ‘evidence’ to support that that conclusion, even if you had to fabricate it out of whole cloth.

Thanks to you, an entire generation of parents and their children have been tempted to either delay or totally skip out on vaccinations under cover of ‘science’.  Illnesses such as measles, whooping cough, and mumps, which were extremely rare when I was growing up, are back with a vengeance.  Some have been so convinced by your snake-oil that they still tilt at windmills to keep children from getting the vaccinations that they need to prevent horrible diseases.

You are a fraud, and a cheat.  Your ‘research’ has led directly to suffering and death for children, and for that I condemn you.  I hope that for the rest of your life, you reflect on the suffering you have caused to families across the globe.  I hope that some day you wake up from your self-centered stupor and realize just how much damage you have done.

Since our “dusting” turned into almost two inches of drifted snow this morning, we set the dogs and kids loose in the back yard to play for a while.  Irish Woman took some really great pics and here are my favorites:

Boo and Girlie Bear sweep snow off the deck of the slide.  Notice the cunning hats.

Boo realizes he should have put on chains before taking the car out of the garage this morning

From left to right, Girlie Bear, Shadow, Bluegrass, and Little Bear

Boo feeds Shadow one of many handfuls of snow

Congresswoman Gifford from Tucson, along with other victims, has been shot by what appears to be a lone loony. Our thoughts and prayers to those who were shot and their families.

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Ford is coming out with a new electric Focus, which they claim will be competitive with the Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf in both range and cost.  So we’re looking at $32k+ for a compact car that can go 50 to 100 miles before requiring charging.  Add to that the $1500 cost of having a 240 volt charging station at your home, and we’re looking at about $34k for what most people consider a starter or commuter car.

There are places and people for whom I can see that this technology will work.  These are primarily young people or couples without kids, as long as they don’t live in an apartment where there isn’t a place to put the charging station.  Having raised a kid with a small car, I can tell you that putting a backwards facing car seat in a car as small as a Focus is less than fun.   My expectation is that small families will not tend to buy small electric Focuses, and that demographic is a huge portion of the American auto market.

In addition, paying almost twice the price of a conventional Focus for an electric model doesn’t make economic sense.  The cost of the vehicle is not made up by savings on fuel. Let’s assume that the owner will drive the car enough that it requires at least some recharging every day.  Let’s say that it costs $2 a day on average to charge the car.  That’s $14 a week, or about $580 a year for electricity.  Let’s assume $200 a year in maintenance after the first year, which is a complete SWAG for that cost.  I have no real idea how much it will cost to maintain and repair this new battery technology at a dealership.  If a consumer drives the car for 5 years, that comes to $2900 for electricity, and $800 for maintenance.  So, in 5 years, the driver of an electric Focus will spend  $3700 above and beyond the initial cost of $34000 for his Focus, for a grand total of about $38000 for the privilege of driving an electric starter car.

Now let’s look at someone one who purchases a conventional Focus.  The MSRP for such a vehicle is between $16,600 and $19,600, so we’ll split the difference and say our consumer spends $18,100 for his brand spanking new 2011 Ford Focus.  The Ford Focus has a 13 gallon gas tank, which for the sake of the argument we’ll say the owner runs almost dry before filling once per week.  If gas averages $3 a gallon for regular gas, that’s $39 a week for fuel, or $2028 a year for fuel.  Over the course of our 5 year ownership, that comes to $10,140 for fuel.  We’ll average $200 a year for maintenance on our vehicle, for an additional $1000 in costs over the life of the vehicle.  We include it in the first year because the consumer is going to have to change oil and filters and such during the first year, while I expect that the electric model won’t require much maintenance in the first year.  So we pay $18,1000 for the car to begin with, $10,140 for fuel, and $1000 for upkeep, for a grand total of $29,240 for a conventional Focus.

The difference in our back of the hand calculations, which don’t take into account licensing and depreciation, is $8760.  It costs almost $9000 dollars above and beyond the cost of a conventional Focus to drive an electric Focus.

What our electric Focus driving consumer is paying for is for being an early adaptor.  Early adaptors always pay through the nose for their designation of being ahead of the power curve.  Be it people who bought Pentiums when 486 was all the rage, had cell phones in 1993, or buy electric vehicles before the technology is mature and can be produced as cheaply as internal combustion vehicles, they’re going to pay and pay handsomely.

Eventually, when enough early adopters have bought their electric vehicles, enough manufacturers may begin cranking out electric vehicles in enough numbers that prices will begin coming down due to competition and economy of scale.  But that time is still to come, and may be a way off.  There are several competing technologies, all of which are less than a decade old at best.  There is much revolution to come in electric vehicles before the demographic of small families can afford to own one as easily as they can afford to own a conventionally powered vehicle.

As someone who would like nothing more than to cut the automotive market out of the imported petroleum equation so we can tell the 3rd world pushers who sell us our black smack to kiss off, and someone who realizes that no matter how many doodads the EPA has us bolt onto our exhaust systems, our cars are a significant creator of air pollution, I look forward to a time when electric vehicles are economically viable and are as common as internal combustion cars.  But that time is not now, and until the technology matures and becomes much cheaper, it won’t be for a while.

If you’ve got little kids, good luck getting this one out of your head:

What wine goes with Captain Crunch? – George Carlin

The FDA has as part of its mission a responsibility to promote U.S. agriculture
The FAA has a similar responsibility to  promote the U.S. aerospace industry.

Why doesn’t the ATF have a responsibility to promote the U.S. booze, tobacco, and guns industries?

There is a direct inverse relationship between the temperature and amount of ambient outdoor light and the chance of an electrical problem in my home.

Ah, the joys of living in a 65 year old house.  You never know what’s going to break, and there are so many things that can go wrong that troubleshooting can be an endless chain of trial and error.

Last night, about an hour after dark and as the temperature was headed south of freezing, most of the lights in the house flickered, died, and then came back on very dimly.  Checking and flipping circuit breakers did nothing to alleviate the situation.  Based on a hunch, I switched out each of the breakers in the box (yes, I have a lot of spares), but nothing seemed to work.  After a  while, we noticed that the house was getting chilly.  The gas fire in the furnace was coming up due to the thermocouple, but the blower motor wasn’t getting enough juice to run.

After a few hours of fruitless effort, I figured out that if I pulled several of the circuit breakers, the circuits that ran the lights in the main part of the house and the refrigerators would come up at 100%.  After that we decided to wait until morning and call an electrician.   We built a fire, made sure the kids were in their warmest pajamas, and broke out the extra blankets.  Over the night it got quite chilly but the fire kept the the house livable.   Irish Woman and I took turns staying awake as a fire watch.

This morning, a quick call to my brother-in-law to get the name of a good electrician pointed me to calling the power company.  LG&E came out and diagnosed the issue with one look at the connection to the house.  The coupling where the line from the pole attached to the house were corroded, loose, and burned black.   A quick trip up the ladder and the lineman had replaced them.  After putting the breakers back in and and flipping them back on, everything came up, including the furnace.

So we got lucky.  Hopefully our electrical service will be more reliable.  Heaven knows how long those connectors had been up there.  It’s just dumb luck that the problem was fixed before they burned through and a live wire was dancing across my roof.

But all’s well that ends well.  On a plus side, just in case LG&E or an electrician couldn’t fix it today, I spent half the morning splitting firewood, so we have enough for several days all stacked up and ready to go.

The rest of my day is going to be spent in front of a warm fire, watching Netflix movies, drinking cold beer, and watching the cats and dogs snore.