Gee, Think.

New Jersey powered by Mountaintop Removal!

Gare — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 16:28:19 +0000

I have heard a lot about the practice of mountaintop removal for coal mining. Apparently this is the preferred method for extracting coal from the Appalachian mountain range. It is an ongoing issue in West Virginia, with many people from the affected communities speaking out against the environmental devastation that it causes. This video from Yale documents the positions of community members, scientists, coal industry executives, and even the West Virginia DEP.

Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining

This video is shocking. You’ll see just how much earth is exploded in a single blast. You’ll also see the flat plateaus created at mountain top removal sites. You’ll also hear the coal industry and DEP deny allegations of the environmental impacts and consequences. I have to marvel at the greed and ignorance of this ‘industry’. What could be more costly for future generations? What could be less sustainable? Will there be a point at which these people will finally admit the impact of their pollution?

So after watching this disturbing video, I thought to myself, what can I do about it? It turns out that there are several sites that come up on a “mountaintop removal action” google search. ”I love moutains” was one of the sites I visited today. They really put the issue together nicely so that individuals can understand if they are some how tied into this issue. You can check your power source by zip code, and see if your electricity is coming from a company that buys coal from mountaintop removal companies. Our utility company happens to be PSE & G. We also select their ‘green’ energy initiatives to support wind, solar, and bio-mass energy sources. PSE&G offers a way of supporting those energy sources by paying an additional usage fee. We’ve elected to use one of those options, but I digress. The point is that the tool at ilovemountains.org told me that Jersey Central Power & Light buys coal from moutaintop removal companies. They had attributed electricity in my zip code, 07063, as coming from Jersey Central Power & Light. Here was the message:

“You are connected to mountaintop removal. Your electricity provider, Jersey Central Power Lt Co, buys coal from companies engaged in mountaintop removal”

You know, I guess that West Virginia really isn’t that far from here, but I’m still surprised that my power could be coming from West Virginia coal. Perhaps I just have zero understanding of the coal & energy industry. So I decided to check up on this power company:

Jersey Central Power & Light / First Energy

Judging by their coverage map, they do provide power in my area. So am I not directly ‘guilty’ since my power comes from PSE&G? Or does PSE&G also buy coal from mountaintop removal companies? I’m sure that this question could be answered with a little digging.

Afghanistan message to the President

Gare — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:39:45 +0000

Mr. Obama,

Please end the way in Afghanistan without adding more troops. You still have time to listen to your heart and do what you know is right. We the people who elected you demand that you show a difference in policy from your predecessor Mr. Bush. We elected you because we believed that a change was coming. If you do not end the war, how can we continue to support you? You have started the health care reform process. You have fostered the debate. But that is not enough. We need military leadership from you that focuses on peace. Afghanistan has become our Vietnam. Please show the courage that we know you have within you. Please show that you are our real President of change.

Sincerely and with all due respect,

Garrett Wilkin

Vaccine Research: First study read and reviewed!

Gare — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:28:56 +0000

As people close to me will know, I recently dove into the task of researching vaccines. This is in honor of the upcoming birth of my first child! I feel that the possibility of vaccine injury is real. Based on that feeling, it is my duty to do my due diligence to understand any and all documentation of risks. I have already met much resistance from friends and family on this topic. Why is it that questioning the safety and efficacy of vaccines draws such an emotional response in nearly every case? I will save that topic for another post. For now, I am focusing my intention on two objectives. First, I want to find the best information to use in making my decision on when and how to vaccinate our daughter. Second, I want to share any information which I find in hopes that it will be a positive resource to other parents going through the same process.

Today, after posting a vaccine related link on facebook, a friend replied with a link to a study on the MMR vaccine. From what I understand, this is the vaccine surrounded by the most controversy. After reading the study’s abstract I felt compelled to purchase and digest the full text. For the price of two books, I received 4 pages documenting this scientific endeavor. The title of the study is:

“Autism and measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine: no epidemiological evidence for a causal association”

I found the title to be a little misleading. In this study, it appears to me that they have endeavored to statistically compare medical records of children in a particular region of England. They gathered up a number of children diagnosed with Core Autism, Atypical Austism, and Asperger’s Syndrome and analyzed the cases on a couple of metrics:

1. Overall number of occurrences of the three conditions
2. Temporal relation of three dates: vaccination, parental concern, diagnoses

On the first point, they find no statistical change in the fitted curve that they applied to the sampled data. They graphed the occurrences of each disorder for children born from 1979 to 1992. I believe the objective here was to prove that the introduction of the MMR vaccine in the UK in 1987 was not significant enough to change the rate of disorder incidence. However, since the number of subjects in their study was less than 500, and most of them were born after 1987, I’m not sure it would have been possible to see a large difference in the rates of these disorders in their data.

On the second point, the researchers say that there is essentially no statistically significant relationship between the three dates of vaccination, parental concern, and diagnosis. They do mention that around 5 or 6 months there was a lot of parental concern showing up. However they attribute that to the fact that peak vaccinations occurred at 13 months and the peak parental concern occurred at 18 months. However, this correlation appears to be dismissed by the researchers. Why it is dismissed, I am not sure.

My own conclusions after reading the study

This study appears to have been conducted in order to refute the controversial claims made by ‘Wakefield and colleagues’. I have not read the Wakefield paper on MMR and so cannot comment on it. This study by Taylor and others does not, in my mind, refute the idea that the MMR vaccine could cause injury to a child and that this injury could later lead to autism. They state in their findings that the time between vaccination, parental concern, and diagnosis does not show a reliable relationship. I’m not sure that injury due to a vaccine would have to be predictably occurring at a certain number of months after administration. I think that it is completely possible that the impact of vaccination in children who are injured by it could be sub-clinical for some time and that this time could be different for each child.

About the expectation of a large increase in the rate of these disorders (core autism, atypical autism, and aspergers syndrome) at the introduction of the MMR vaccine, I think that the amount of increase in rate would have to be vary large to be detected by this study. Statisticians out there, please correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m thinking that if the rate of autism is 1 in 1,000 (which would be higher than the rate cited in this study from 1999) you would have to have many thousands of subjects in your study to detect a doubling in the rate from 1 in 1,000 to 2 in 1,000. Unless I missed it, this study does not cite how many individuals were analyzed in the study. In any statistical analysis, wouldn’t they clearly state the number of individuals that they had to examine in order to find this number of cases? Or perhaps they were unable to determine the total number of births in the geological region of the study? I would think it should be easy to tabulate the number of births and simply say how many were included per year overall. In fact that brings up a good point that I had not considered until now. They graph the number of cases found each year, but not the rate of cases. They are graphing the raw number of children with these conditions, but not the relation of the number of children with the condition to the number of healthy children. I wonder why they made that choice. It seems like a significant difference to me. If we are examining the number of cases diagnosed over a certain period, shouldn’t we also account for population size and growth?

Another limitation of the study that I think is worth mentioning is that they do not include any other parameters such as the other vaccinations that a child was given. Since we’re analyzing vaccine affects here, I think that a complete analysis should include some comment on the other vaccinations received by the children.

I hope that anyone reading this article will find my discussion to be interesting and informative. I am practicing my ability to critically read these studies in order to more fully understand the science around vaccine safety.

Truth In Media: IWF Health Insurance Message Rebuttal

Gare — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:31:25 +0000

I want to see truth in our media. I fully support free speech, but I do not support the spread of deception and propaganda. To the contrary, I will stand up and speak against it whenever I see it. I will not stand by while my friends, family, and community members are deceived. We need a greater standard of truth in this country. We have let the media run amok, promoting thinly defensible ‘facts’ as truth. I say no more! It is time to demand better!

This is the story of what finally motivated me to speak up and take action:

Saturday night, while watching TV with my parents, I saw an ad that was placed by the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF.org). Everything about the ad seemed wrong. So wrong that it inspired me to do some online research into both the organization and into the ‘facts’ that they listed. What I found was more shocking that I had anticipated.

Who is IWF?

It turns out that IWF is a group that, according to legal momentum, is anti-feminist. Oddly, its chiefly staffed by women. You can read legal momentum’s view on the IWF here:

http://www.legalmomentum.org/our-work/sfr/independent-womens-forum.html

Legal Momentum has close association to the National Organization for Women (NOW).

What was their deception?

In the ad, they focus on the issue of breast cancer treatment and survival rates and the main fraud is that they infer their own statistic and attribute it to the American Cancer Society. FactCheck.org reports that the American Cancer Society has disavowed that claim:

http://factcheck.org/2009/09/a-false-appeal-to-womens-fears/

You’ll notice that the article posted at FactCheck.org is cited with actual comments from staff at the American Cancer Society. I wonder if IWF ever thought to contact those individuals before making their claims? Then there is the use of the breast cancer survival rate of England as a metric for determing the quality of future post-reform cancer care in the US. The flaws in that logic are descibed fully (with citations) in an article from the Seminal Blog at FiredogLake.com:

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/7278

Lastly, the ad cites the now infamous Lewin Group as “experts” in health insurance. The Lewin Group is well known as an organization that is owned by one of the largest health insurers in the country, UnitedHealth Group. Why would we trust statistics on the outcome of health insurance reform to be provided by ‘experts’ that are working for a health insurance company? I think that the conflicts of interest there are too great in order to make their findings realiable or objective.

Letter to Prince William County Virginia Police Department

Gare — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 09:43:27 +0000

Thanks to a story at Alternet.org I found out about a story of excessive police force. I listened for the name of the police department and found their website:

http://www.pwcgov.org/Default.aspx?topic=04007400094

as well as a general email address:

policedept@pwcgov.org

If the story below speaks to you, I would also encourage you to speak out. Here’s my letter to the department.

Hello Officers of the Prince William County Police Department,

I’ve just recently seen the report on Fox News of the Baptism party at which a pregnant mother was tasered.

http://twurl.cc/1khb

From the news story, it seems that the officers used excessive force to attempt to resolve a minor issue of noise disturbance. I also heard that there is an internal investigation ongoing to determine why such force was used. I kindly ask you to take all necessary actions in order to at least prevent the use of tasers on pregnant women. My wife is pregnant with our first child and so I can now personally relate to this story.

Tax Fairness — Do The Rich pay 15% while the poor pay 35%?

Gare — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:40:58 +0000

Hello Accountants and Tax Attorneys of America! I call on you to help me find the answer to my question:

Do the rich pay a tax rate of 15% while the rate for the poor is 35%?

I recently heard this mentioned with the following simple, straightforward justification:

Income for the rich is primarily returns on investments, also known as “capital gains”.
Income for the poor is primarily wages, either hourly or salary
Capital gains are taxed at 15%
Wages are taxed at 35%

So if these four basic premises are true, it means that we are taxing the people who have the most money the least amount. Then we take the people who have the least and demand a larger fraction of their income. Is this an ethical way to write a tax code?

I have heard people in stock trading and investment circles say that its important to have capital gains tax as low as 15% because the lower rate offers a better chances for working individuals to pull themselves up into a better more secure lifestyle through profitable investing. I’ve also heard that its necessary in order to encourage investment in our markets. I’ve decided that those two statements, while they may be partially true, are in fact baloney!* I think that the main reason capital gains tax is lower is because rich people typically hold more investments than the average worker. A lower capital gains tax rate is more beneficial to the rich citizens of our country, and they coincidentally have more influence over our law makers.

I just did a little reading over at wikipedia to try and check my facts on these tax rates. At first glance, the tax code is not so straight forward. So that it why I’m appealing to tax attorneys and accountants of America. Am I completely off base here? If so, where have I gone wrong? Are my percentages simply a little off while the underlying theme (rich people pay less taxes than workers) is correct? Let’s have an honest debate.

*Baloney, of course, may have at one time been composed of genuine ingredients, but has been so diluted and processed that the end product is unhealthy and promotes cancer.

Return from Vacation in Addison, Maine

Gare — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:03:35 +0000

I’ve just returned from a vacation with my family in Addison, Maine. What a refreshing privilege to spend so much time with them, relaxing and enjoying nature all the while. We stayed in a very small town community during our week there. Everyone in the area waved as we drove by. I felt so welcomed when I experienced this. It has been so long since I’ve lived in Maine, that I’ve forgotten how endearing the people of Maine can be. I wish that my own community in Plainfield, NJ shared the same outlook and attitude. The simple wave between people is a shared positive experience. On a spiritual level, something as simple as a wave and a smile can convey that you are acknowledged, that you are not an anonymous passer by. I think this dispels the sense of suspicion and separation that creeps so easily into suburban living.

Perhaps this attitude of welcoming developed between the closely knit citizens, and is simply extended to visitors out of habit. Maybe these people are more relaxed because they are in closer touch with nature. Who can say what the cause is? Regardless of the reason, the presence of this welcoming attitude in Addison, Maine has spurred a personal reflection on my own attitude and habits toward my neighbors. How much have I adapted as a result of the different communities in which I have lived over the last 10 years away from Maine? Can I bring this welcoming attitude to Plainfield in my own small way?

“Support the Consumer Financial Protection Agency” – A letter to my representative

Gare — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 03:59:44 +0000

I’ve sent the following letter to my representative Frank Pallone Jr. via email:

The people of the United States need an agency that is going to hold financial institutions accountable. We need protections to prevent companies from exploiting their customers through high interest rates and fees. We need strong protections to ensure that the ‘rules of the game’ are clear and simple for plain folks to understand. We also need to ensure that companies do not market products to people who cannot afford them.

For example, an credit card balance transfer offer should not be given if the 0% introductory rate changes to a very high rate at the first late payment. That is nothing but a trick. When the first payment is late, its only more likely that the next one will also be late. This is especially true if the next payment is required to be higher in amount because of the interest rate increase. This is but one example of why consumers need to be protected from the games that financial institutions have been allowed to play.

Please consider that the American people have cause to desire this kind of protection and that the financial institutions have demonstrated that their practices need to be formally and legally restricted.

Food Safety Advisor Post Given to Industry Rather Than Public Advocate

Gare — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:19:21 +0000

I just read in my latest Maine Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association (MOFGA) newsletter that there has been a troubling appointment to the government post of Food Safety Advisor. This post has been given to Michael Taylor, former Vice President of Public Policy at Monsanto, Deputy Commissioner of Policy at the FDA, and lawyer. I wrote the following to the white house through their email form:

“To Whom It May Concern:

I am deeply concerned about the recent appointment of Michael Taylor as a food safety advisor. An appointee without a background and association to industry would be best since we could expect an advocate for the public rather than a voice for the corporate interests.

I have done a little reading this morning, and see that Mr. Taylor has been associated with Monsanto indirectly and directly for some time. This is concerning because what we actually need in our country’s food supply is more small scale local farming. I do not see Monsanto as supporting this approach. We need to have more individual producers so that contamination does not occur on a large scale. Organic farming practices should be encouraged because food without added chemicals is clearly more safe than food with additional unnatural chemicals.

Will Taylor work to promote these principles and bring true safety to our country’s food supply?

I believe that there are questions to be raised about Taylor’s association to, and possible preferential treatment of Monsanto. He served at the FDA as Deputy Commissioner of Policy from 1991 to 1994. It was during his policy-oversight at the FDA that the approval of recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) was given. Monsanto was the manufacturer of rBGH at the time. Other countries in Europe and even our neighbor Canada have refused to approve rBGH due to health risks such as increased incidence of cancer (not to mention the ill effects that it has on the cattle).”

Feirce Vegan — Vegan Under Fire

Gare — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:05:14 +0000

Never before my life have I attracted so much criticism and attention! Yes, I’m a vegan. No I don’t eat meat. I don’t drink the milk from cow’s teats. Believe it or not, I actually don’t feel the need to ingest the solidified mammary excretions of other species! Yes! It’s true! Now, what of it?

I am sick and tired of hearing story after story from person after person about the friend of their mother’s cousin’s brother’s coworker who was vegan and then:

Quit after a month, week, year
Got sick and decided to stop
Became bitter and unhappy
Lost their friends

Who asked you anyway? Are you trying to discourage me? Do you want me to know that others have tried and failed? Are you expressing your disapproval? Or are you compassionately concerned for my health? Is this comment for your benefit or mine? Perhaps your subconscious is attempting to validate your own poor health choices?

Why do people feel the need to comment on my dietary choices? I do my best to keep it to myself, but somehow people like to draw attention to it! Then, I get the privilege of fending off remarks such as “I heard that this study showed that vegans .” I am ready to smash all stereotypes and prove everyone wrong. I’ve had enough of it! The worst is hearing these criticisms coming from people who very clearly have no interest in maintaining their own health. They can be overweight, eating junk food, not exercising, not de-stressing and some how feel qualified to make comments on how I live my life. Well you know what, I’m learning more about nutrition every single day. I’m studying it. I’m going to earn a degree in vegan-ology from the school of informal debate.

I really don’t want to impress my own opinions and views on others. Other people’s choices don’t bother me. This seems to surprise many people, but its true. I think that everyone has a right to make their own choices and be free from my opinions. Of course, if I am asked directly, I will gladly discuss my views on nutrition with anyone that is truly interested. Heck, I’ll even discuss it with people who completely disagree with me. I am always trying to learn more, but I’m not interested in arguing with people who have already made their mind up. I’m not trying to convince anyone else that they should eat a vegan diet. That’s their choice. The key difference here is that I don’t go around making disparaging comments every time someone eats a hamburger or cuts the cheese.

I do, however, want to serve as an example of good health to other people who may wish to improve their own. For this reason, I have become the fierce vegan. Let’s go. I’m ready. Talk anti-vegan to me.