Our official propaganda says that we can buy whatever we want. Also we hear something about Supply and Demand, which claims that if we do buy something, capitalist institutions will continue to make it. Neither of these claims is true.

Here are things that I want to buy but cannot find:

Actual tall, waterproof poncho.

Good luck finding any rain gear that reaches below the knees.

Wide shoes.

I found out about this from talking to people with wide feet.

Shoes with flat heels.

E.g., Footprints Rockford hiking boots. There is some reason why these are sold in Germany, for example. Apparently old Mr Birkenstock split is company among his five daughters. That was disasterous for Birkenstock lovers like me.

Shoes with negative heels

Kalso no longer makes men’s Earth® shoes. Michael Vetstein sent me email saying, “Currently, we’re not producing any Men’s styles. But never say never! With enough market demand, we may consider bringing them back.”

And exactly how will there be “market demand” if you don’t sell any?

Anti government blindness

My sister’s best friend in Oregon likes to send out anti-government email. She used to put the addresses in the to field until I started using reply all to answer her! That royally pissed-off some of her friends, who couldn’t deal with any actual facts.

Anyway, she just sent out the following email:

On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 8:53 PM, Firstname Lastname <fn@clearwire.net> wrote:

I personally don't go out of my way to buy Organic
produce, however I do buy local when ever
possible.  I am so tired the "Big Brother"
mentality of our Govt.  It seems like I'm taking a
stand on something every day.

----- Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2013 8:27 AM Subject: please
read and pass on

Government against small farmers

http://www.anh-usa.org/government-against-farmers/

Here’s a clickable link to the article

I answered her

People like you just amaze me.  You send out an
article about how large agri-business is using
gov't to hurt small farmers and then you blame ...
wait for it ... government!  You apparently don't
even see the corporations that are the real danger
to small farmers.  The people who commented at the
end of the article have it figured out a lot
better than you do: they know who to really fear:
large corporations.  Tester and Hagen are members
of our government who are trying to help small
farmers, but that part of government gets no
credit from you at all.

You are simply blinded by your biases and
incapable of seeing where the real danger lies.

-- ge

She immediatly answered me, having understood nothing

The danger lies with our Govt....Wake up George...

A Song for Heidi, Rob, Jason and all bicycle lovers

The song Jour du Velo from the album Pataphysical Grafitti by Les Sans Culottes.

• Song
• Words

verse

Bienvenue, salut, hello
C'est le jour de ton vélo
Avec le vent sur ta peau
Chaque rue un petit cadeau
Les cheveux dans l'air
Tu peux le faire - c'est pas cher
Assis sur un vélo libre
On trouve la ton joie de vivre

chorus

Ca c'est le jour de ton vélo 
Ou l'on trouve des trucs nouveaux
Des jolies idées dans mon cerveau
Sur les pédales on fait une danse
On trouve l'amour avec de la chance
Le quotidien est en vacances

verse

Un jour superfantastique
La realité un peu élastique 
Le rêve est la verité
Le jour de vélo toute l'année

Enveloppée par glamour
Les trottoirs et jolies fleurs 
Bushwick et Belleville me font rire
ils me donnent un petit sourire 

chorus

Ca c'est le jour de ton vélo 
Ou l'on trouve des trucs nouveaux
Des jolies idées dans mon cerveau
Sur les pédales on fait une danse
On trouve l'amour avec de la chance
Le quotidien est en vacances

verse

La lumière nue sauf ses bijoux
La ville s'endort dans le crépuscule
Tout est cool - sur ton cul 
Sur ton vélo libre - tu trouves ton équilibre

chorus

Ca c'est le jour de ton vélo 
Ou l'on trouve des trucs nouveaux
Des jolies idées dans mon cerveau
Sur les pédales on fait une danse
On trouve l'amour avec de la chance
Le quotidien est en vacances

verse

Dans le fleuve de ta vie
Quand la route est une surprise
Les jolies filles traversent le pont
et les vélos suivent le courant
La belle ville s'evéille 
Et il roule une autre journée
Chaque moment de l'espérance
Sur les boulevards si élégants
 

chorus

Ca c'est le jour de ton vélo 
Ou l'on trouve des trucs nouveaux
Des jolies idées dans mon cerveau
Sur les pédales on fait une danse
On trouve l'amour avec de la chance
Le quotidien est en vacances

half chorus

Ca c'est le jour de ton vélo 
Ou l'on trouve des trucs nouveaux
Des jolies idées dans mon cerveau

My first letter about Silent Sam this year

Published June 22nd

Understanding Sam

The effort to increase awareness of the historical
meaning of Silent Sam elicited four interesting
letters in last Sunday’s CHN.

Ariana Mangum believes that “Silent Sam should
stay,” apparently unaware that the Real Silent Sam
organization agrees with her!

Yelena Francis remembers how communist dictators
tore down statues of Russian czars and seems to
think that the Real Silent Sam movement wants to
tear down the statue of Silent Sam. (She’s
mistaken.) I wonder if she worried about
“rewriting history” when the statues of communist
leaders were torn down? OK, I don’t really wonder.

Sybil Austin Skakle wants us to understand exactly
what Silent Sam “was meant to be.” She seems to
believe that the statue was erected purely to
commemorate UNC’s war dead, paying no attention to
the fact that it was erected over 40 years after
the war. If she’s interested in knowing why it was
build at that time, I urge her to read the
commemorative speech by James Carr, who raised the
money to build the monument: his words will reveal
some of the “real” motives behind the statue.
Those poor kids who were used to fight the war
were being used once again when that statue was
built.

Give credit to James Ward for at least realizing
that the Real Silent Sam movement wants to add a
plaque to the statue, not remove it. He heard
someone say the word “evil” and concludes that
there are plans to write that on the plaque. I
don’t know what the wording will be on the plaque
any more than he does, but I’m pretty sure that a
plaque will improve our understanding of our
history.

George Entenman

I’m attacked in a long guest column

Here’s the column:

By Sven Sonnenberg

I was sorry to see that in Mr. Entenman’s letter
that he did not understand Ms. Francis’s message
or did not reflect on it sufficiently.

In her letter, Ms. Francis gives an example of the
results when political correct zealots get to work
suppressing or falsifying/modifying the past, and
she is concerned that this does not happen to
America − “the improving of our understanding of
history.” Improve the schools and teach real
history, not politically correct pap so that the
grownups and graduates of universities do not have
to bend over and get their knowledge from plaques.

In further answering Mr. Entenman (CHN, June 23,
bit.ly/18GCbU3), I would say, “let’s be
ridiculous” and, following this “logic,” let’s be
consistent in our effort to be ridiculously
politically correct. God forbid insulting one or
another group of population, so let’s place a
plaque wherever we can.

Let’s start from the Jefferson Memorial and place
a plaque there with some inscription like “We
respect this man in spite of him being from the
family of rich plantation owners. His relatively
luxurious life was all provided by the cruel
exploitation of the slaves. And on top of
everything, according to the rumors, one of them
was the mother of his children in his later years,
so, it might be sexual exploitation involved,
too.” For political correct balance there should
be a plaque erected on the wall of the Thomas
Jefferson memorial.

Let’s be further consistent. Let’s then go to the
George Washington monument. There should be a
plaque on it saying he was one of the richest men
in Virginia and the owner of plantations, and
numerous people were working for free on his land.
Probably we should write about Washington’s bad
relations with the Indians and different ideas he
had about the territories, which historically
belonged to the indigenous population. Let’s be
politically correct and place those plaques all
over the country – who knows, who and how can be
offended with what and because of which reason?

And what about Theodore Roosevelt with his famous
“Speak softy and carry a big stick, and you will
go far”? I bet everyone remembers his
participation in the infamous safari in 1909 when
hundreds of rare species of animals were killed
under false pretence to supply the national
museums with exhibits (and how many were consumed
by the participants of that shameful expedition,
nobody knows: it looks like there was not a single
vegetarian there.)

By the way, when running around the country
installing plaques explaining past sins of the
people the historical monuments were dedicated to,
we should not forget Mount Rushmore. Let’s go
there straight to install a big joint plaque to
all those guys together in toto. Would it not be
cheaper, Mr. Entenman?

Letter to the editor, submitted July 25, 2013

It’s 1913, in the middle of the night, and a group of UNC workers have just brought a heavy load to McCorkle Place in a rented Mule-Haul. It’s the statue of a Confederate soldier. Quietly they place it on a pedestal, facing North, his rifle ready. The workers steal off into the night, leaving Silent Sam to greet the rising sun.

When the citizenry woke up, they found the new statue and knew that it simply represented the students who had fought for the Confederacy.

This of course is not what happened. In the UNC library you can find a 20-page speech by James Carr, the man who raised funds for the statue. He read these words when he dedicated Silent Sam.

Unlike the writers of the impassioned letters and recent op-ed in the CHN, James Carr knew that the statue did not simply honor students who had served during the war. Yet some people are aghast at a recent proposal to put a new plaque on the statue, a plaque which would “thoroughly explain the context in which the monument was erected.” This plaque would discuss race.

People opposed to the plaque claim that the statue has nothing to do with race. History, they believe, shows that the statue simply honors war veterans.

Why don’t we let James Carr himself settle the matter? He raised the money for the statue. He dedicated it. Who better than Carr to explain the history behind Silent Sam?

I propose that the plaque have the following sentences from pp 9-B and 9-C of James Carr’s dedication speech:

The present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely
takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant
to the welfare of the Anglo Saxon race during the
four years immediately succeeding the war, when
the facts are, their courage and steadfastness
saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the
South — when the 'bottom rail was on top' all over
the Southern states — and to-day, as a
consequence, the purist strain of the Anglo Saxon
is to be found in the 13 Southern States — Praise
God.

I trust that I may be pardoned for one allusion,
howbeit it is rather personal.  One hundred yards
from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps
after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a
negro wench, until her skirts hung in shreds,
because upon the streets of this quiet village she
had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern
lady, and then rushed for protection to these
University buildings where was stationed 100
Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in
the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and
for thirty nights afterwards slept with
double-barreled shotgun under my head.


Of course Silent Sam was intended to honor
Confederate soldiers.  But that's not all it was
meant to do.  The words "succeeding the war" refer
to Reconstruction, not the war itself.  The words
"Anglo Saxon race" are self-explanatory.

Sincerely,

References

• My letter about Silent Sam, published June 23, 2013
• Guest column attacking my letter, published July 9, 2013
• The CHN published my letter as a Guest Column on July 31, 2013
• My Google+ post about the Guest Column
• I posted James Carr’s speech on Google+
• Web page of The Real Silent Sam Coalition

My letter was published as a Guest Column on July 30, 2013.

Another stupid reply from Yelena Francis

Published August 2, 2013

Sinners and Sam

After reading Mr. Entenman’s column (CHN, July 31,
bit.ly/16exnRb) I was impressed by his passion for research
aimed at heating up divisions in the community.  Funny – the
main reason for deep disgust toward Silent Sam is the
character of the man who initiated its erection, as if the
statue honors not veterans, but the horrible personality of
the racist who raised the money.

Isn’t it ridiculous to dig in the past to judge historical
monuments? Take the Statue of Liberty. Do you know that the
author of “Give me your tired …,” E. Lazarus, was a daughter
of a rich businessman connected to Louisiana sugar cane
plantations? Did you hear that while participating in the
project, G. Eiffel took bribes from the Panama Canal Co. and
was sentenced to two years in prison? And President Cleveland,
who gave a speech at the unveiling, was not a good man: He
paid $150 to someone to replace him in the Army during the
Civil War, and he personally performed executions while being
a sheriff in Erie County. And who collected money for the
statue restoration? Yes, you guessed right – Mr. Lee Iacocca,
responsible for a Ford Pinto gas tank design that resulted in
burning to death a few people.

Can you compare one sinner behind Silent Sam with the crowd of
above-mentioned rascals?

Mr. Entenman’s column is a well-calculated political
provocation. I wish that instead of activists’ gatherings
around Silent Sam calling for removal of the “shameful
monument to old Southern racism,” the students could use their
time studying history.

Yelena Francis

Chapel Hill

She’s really incapable of reading that the Real Silent Sam coalition does not want to tear down the statue.

The problem with the letter is the big lie: just repeat a lie long enough and people will believe it. But I’m tired of answering her.

I commented on Francis’ letter

The comments may not have been approved.

Both Yelena Francis and Sven Sonnenberg think
they're providing arguments against understanding
the history of Silent Sam.  What are these
arguments?  That there are lots of terrible
historical facts about the Statue of Liberty,
George Washington, etc.  How in the world does
this argue against knowing the history of Silent
Sam?

Ms Francis actually says, "Isn’t it ridiculous to
dig in the past to judge historical monuments?"

No, it is not.

The main danger of Francis' letter is that
repeating a lie often enough makes people think
that the lie is the truth.  She says that
unspecified "activists" are calling for the
removal of Silent Sam.

If you want to know what they are calling for, go
to the website (http://realsilentsam.tumblr.com/)
of the Real Silent Sam coalition, where you will
read: "Our intent is not to remove monuments or
revise history..."

I'm tired of stating this simple fact in letters
to the CHN, but Francis' willful refusal to
understand simple English compels me to write this
comment at least.

Using Markdown to post to postach.io

Postach.io

postach.io is a blogging service that enables you to create and store blog content in Evernote while displaying it a publicly-readable website.

You can find a good overview of how to set up a blog on postach.io’s account page. Unfortunately their documentation is still a bit sparse.

This is an attempt to document what I have learned about using Markdown to create my posts.

Let me emphasize that I couldn’t have figured this out without excellent help from postach.io support.

My goal

My goal is to create posts in Evernote, using markdown syntax, and post it to my postach.io website. I want to use markdown because, in my opinion, Evernote’s own WYSIWYG interface simply hides too much stuff from me, especially in saved web pages.

So let’s get started…

Notebook and Tags

To publish an Evernote note on postach.io, you have to do two things:

• You have to tell postach.io which notebook to use for your blog.
• You have to tag Evernote notes that you want postach.io to use. Use the tag published.

When you sync your Evernote note, postach.io will then look at each item in your designated notebook for items that are tagged published and post them to your blog.

Posting to your blog is as simple and elegant as that.

The Title of the Post

A new note in Evernote has the words “Untitled Note” in its title field, which is followed by a light grey horizontal line. Do not use markdown for the Evernote title because postach.io will not pass it through a markdown engine. Simply write the title in this field. It will become the title of the blog post.

Getting Evernote to use markdown.

In order to use markdown syntax, you have to tell Evernote that your note is in plain text. To do this in the Macintosh app, simply click in the body of the note and then select the menu item Format > Make Plain Text and the whole area will turn to plain text. If you have defined any URLs, they will go from being blue - the standard link color - to plain text.

Note: you may have to do this multiple times. Whenever you type in a new URL, Evernote will try to make it active. You will see it displayed in blue when it does.

Hyperlinks

Standard markdown syntax for hyperlinks will now work.

Here is a link to Evernote.com created with standard markdown syntax:

 [link to Evernote.com](http://evernote.com)

Images

Markdown syntax to insert inline images seems to work just fine. If I write:

 ![Iris](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/lm1thexag0ymbnq/2013_06_28_dinner_at_kipos.jpg)

postach.io will insert Iris’ photo, and it does:

You can also use HTML syntax: Entering:

 <img alt="Iris" src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/lm1thexag0ymbnq/2013_06_28_dinner_at_kipos.jpg" />

produces:

Aside: linking files from Dropbox.com

You may have noticed that I’ve linked a photo from Dropbox.com. If you’ve followed any of the impassioned discussions concerning Dropbox public sharing (example), you will know that it is not always easy to share Dropbox files.

Here is how I found the URL to a photo on Dropbox:

I selected the image I wanted to link to and selected Share link and then clicked the Get link button to copy the link to the clipboard. Here’s the URL I got:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lm1thexag0ymbnq/2013_06_28_dinner_at_kipos.jpg

I pasted that link into my browser’s URL address field and hit enter to see the “photo”: you will see that it actually links to an HTML frame containing the photo (here’s the link to save your typing).

While I was looking at the HTML version of the photo, I changed the www to dl in the URL address bar and hit enter to get a link to the image. When I did that, Dropbox rewrote the URL, changing the domain name:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/lm1thexag0ymbnq/2013_06_28_dinner_at_kipos.jpg

That’s the URL I used in my markdown links in Evernote. Postach.io does a great job with these URLs.

Themes

Postach.io support recommends that we use the Default postach.io theme.

Global Warming

Ed Jackem gave me a paper by John R Christy, PhD, Univ of Alabama, Huntsville. The paper was apparently prepared for some Senate committee. It can be found here.

Extreme weather does not indicate climate change

Christy spends pp. 2-12 making the point “… that extreme events are poor metrics to use for detecting climate change.”

Christy argues against the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which seems to believe that global warming has been causing increasingly extreme weather. His basic argument seems to be that records of temperature and precipitation show great variability and much greater extremes in the 1930s (in the US).

In the case of extreme weather, he argues that the IPCC has made a “non-falsifiable hypothesis”, clearly a non-scientific thing to do:

I am not using these statistics to prove the weather in the US is
becoming less extreme and/or colder. My point is that extreme events
are poor metrics to use for detecting climate change. Indeed, because
of their rarity (by definition) using extreme events to bolster a
claim about any type of climate change (warming or cooling) runs the
risk of setting up the classic “non-falsifiable hypothesis.” For
example, we were told by the IPCC that “milder winter temperatures
will decrease heavy snowstorms” (TAR WG2, 15.2.4.1.2.4). After the
winters of 2009-10 and 2010-11, we are told the opposite by advocates
of the IPCC position, “Climate Change Makes Major Snowstorms More
Likely” (http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/climate-change-makes-snowstorms-more-likely-0506.html).

What I see here without reading any of the IPCC materials, are multiple hypotheses. Christy argues that both hypotheses about snowfall are wrong because snowfall, he believes, have not become more extreme. That may be, but clearly he is dealing with two hypotheses, not one, and each is clearly falsifiable.

I believe he is being disingenuous when he writes:

In the example above if winters become milder or they become
snowier, the non-falsifiable hypothesis stands. This is not science.

And his use of the singular hypothesis is not science either.

Climate models

Christy draws a graph displaying “…the results from 34 of the latest climate model simulations of global temperature that will be used in the upcoming IPCC AR5 assessment on climate change (KNMI Climate Explorer). All of the data are given a reference of 1979-1983, i.e. the same starting line. Along with these individual model runs I show their average (thick black line) and the results from observations (symbols). The two satellite-based results (circles, UAH and RSS) have been proportionally adjusted so they represent surface variations for an apples-to-apples comparison. The evidence indicates the models on average are over-warming the planet by quite a bit, implying there should be little confidence that the models can answer the question asked by policymakers.”

Christy does the same thing with precipitation models, lumping them all together to show almost no change. This despite the fact that there are 34 models.

Christy concludes:

Basing policy on the circles (i.e. real data) seems more
prudent than basing policy on the thick line of model output.

This seems to make sense (and the data from observations seem to show warming over time).

My only question - unaddresses as far as I can see - is who proposes to use the average of the models to make policy? Is that the IPCC position?

It seems to me that the scientific thing to do would be to adjust the models until they match reality better, as a few of the lines Christy draws already seem to do.

Christy recommends that we plan for extremes of temperature and precipition without being particularly certain on whether we will see increases or decreases. Offhand, I see nothing wrong with this suggestion.

We are measuring the wrong things

Christy says that

In general, the issue of global warming is dominated by considering
the near-surface air temperature (Tsfc) as if it were a standard by
which one might measure the climate impact of the extra warming due to
increases in greenhouse gases. Fundamentally, the proper variable to
measure is heat content, or the amount of heat energy (measured in
joules) in the climate system, mainly in the oceans and atmosphere.
Thus the basic measurement for detecting greenhouse warming is how
many more joules of energy are accumulating in the climate system over
that which would have occurred naturally. This is a truly “wicked”
problem (see House Testimony, Dr. Judith Curry, 17 Nov 2010) because
we do not know how much accumulation can occur naturally.

I fail to see how the level of “natural” accumulation matters. Wouldn’t changes in accumulation matter just as much? I agree that this is probably a hard thing to measure, but that’s a different argument.

This section makes some excellent-appearing points about surface temperature. He seems to agree that that nighttime surface temperatures “show significant warming”, but I guess this doesn’t matter politically because it is the result of human disturbances to the Earth’s surface, not the atmosphere.

Consensus Science

Christy argues that science is not consensus, and I agree. In the face of disagreement - while we wait for all scientists to agree on the correct falsifiable hypothesis regarding science - we feel the need to know what climate change is taking place. We feel the need to act to prevent global warming if it is occuring, and we feel the need to prepare for extremes of weather, especially if they are increasingly violent.

I don’t see any better course of action than consensus at this point. We have to rely on consensus in lots of areas of life; medicine, for example;

Christy proposes “that five to ten percent of [climate research] funds be allocated to a group of well-credentialed scientists to produce an assessment that expresses legitimate, alternative hypotheses that have been (in their view) marginalized, misrepresented or ignored in previous IPCC reports (and thus EPA and National Climate Assessments).”

While it feels funny to me to fund research based on the results we expect, I like the idea that scientists be free to pursue their hypotheses. However there’s a lot that I don’t know about the funding system. Since it involves money and large human organizations, it can’t be perfect, but I don’t know if this is the way to fix it.

Emission Control measures won’t have much effect on climate

Christy states, “the evidence above suggests that climate models overestimate the response of temperature to greenhouse gas increases.”

Perhaps this is just a way of saying that the temperature models seem to err on the high side. I’ve discussed my problems with this section above.

He makes the interesting - and believable - claim that these models show that any conceivable change to the rate of increase in carbon emissions will have only a small effect on climate. I’m not in a position to run the models with different assumptions, but it strikes me that many “consensus” climate scientists are saying the same thing when they say that it’s too late to stop global warming.

This paper appears to be the source of the idea that increasing levels of CO2 will help humanity by increasing crop yields. The only support he gives for this idea is the “simple fact that CO2 is plant food and the world around us evolved when levels of CO2 were five to ten times what they are today.” I hope he’s right.

He paints a kind of polyannish picture of a world where forests are saved by burning petroleum, coal and natural gas instead of wood. Again, I hope he’s right.

Aren’t there other ways to measure temperature and precipition?

It puzzles me that Christy doesn’t even mention ocean temperature. It seems to me that measuring water temperature might be more accurate than measuring surface air temperatures. I also wonder about the changes in our plant zones. Certainly in North Carolina, plants and animals have moved from South to North.

Summary

Christy raises interesting points, but I find some of his arguments confusing and even wrong. For now, I think I’ll go with consensus.