It is well known that Stephen Lynch voted against Obamacare when he had the chance. Up until this point I could imagine some explanations why he might have done that, but I had not actually looked for an explanation. The video below gives you his explanation.

This explanation is one of the reasonable ones I could have imagined. I am still working for Ed Markey, but at least I now know that Stephen Lynch is not as bad as I could have imagined him to be.

The video below shows that Lindsey Garahm hasn’t quite got it when he tries to steal a page from the Elizabeth Warren playbook.

When an attorney asks the witness an embarrassing question, the point is that it is supposed to embarrass the witness, not the attorney. Perhaps they didn’t teach that where Graham earned his law degree.

If enough people watch this video, maybe the word will spread as to what a wind bag Lindsey Graham really is.

I was wondering if it were actually illegal to have a background check and fail it. this PolitiFact article provides some insight into the issue.

Jennifer Karberg of the St. Louis research organization that did the report told us that if a person trying to buy a gun indicates on the application form that, for example, he is a felon, the application will simply be denied. On the other hand, if a felon lied on the form about his conviction, that’s a crime that could be prosecuted, she said.

The Huffington Post has the article Elizabeth Warren: Banks Get Wrist Slaps While Drug Dealers Get Jail.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren unloaded on bank regulators Thursday about the fact that British bank HSBC is still doing business in the U.S., with no criminal charges filed against it, despite confessing to what one regulator called “egregious” money laundering violations.

Her comments came just a day after the attorney general of the United States confessed that some banks are so big and important that they are essentially above the law. His Justice Department’s failure to bring any criminal charges against HSBC or its employees is Exhibit A of that problem.

After this video, there is the one with Ben Bernanke, and another one after that. In the one with Ben Bernanke, apparently the idea never occurred to him no matter what Warren said that he could charge the banks a fee for getting $83 billion in insurance.

Thanks to CarolG for bringing this article to my attention.

Real Clear Politics has the article After Dinner Diplomacy, What’s Next for Obama and GOP?

Wisconsin’s Sen. Ron Johnson, a former accountant and Tea Party favorite, told reporters the conversation was lively when the subject turned to Medicare. Obama, he said, conceded aloud what his own budget blueprints lay out – that Medicare, the government’s health coverage for the elderly, is projected to bleed red ink in the future because of rising health care costs and an aging population.

Johnson quoted the president as telling the dozen senators at the Jefferson Hotel that “the American people, most of them, just don’t understand it. They think with Medicare, that’s their money. And to a certain extent it is: one dollar they put in, and get 3 dollars back in benefits.”

Listening to Obama lament Americans’ confusion about whether Medicare beneficiaries tap their own or other people’s money, Johnson said he urged him to spread some light and not just heat.

“You have a unique position,” the senator recalled telling Obama. “If you are going to solve these problems, the American people are going to have to understand it. You can go out and educate people to prepare them for the reforms that are absolutely necessary.”

This has got to be the scariest article I have ever read.  One can only hope that Sen. Johnson is a complete loon and misheard what President Obama said.

The Nation Of Change has the Robert Reich article Why There’s a Bull Market for Stocks and Bear Market for Workers. He does give answers to the question the headline poses, but you’ll have to use the previous link to read the answers yourself.

I am going to concentrate on two things he said so that I can make some point or other.

Corporate profits are claiming a larger share of national income than at any time in 60 years, while the portion of total income going to employees is near its lowest since 1966.
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Rarely before in American history have public policies so blatantly helped the most fortunate among us, so cruelly harmed the least fortunate, and exposed so many average working Americans to such widespread insecurity.

Of course I’d like to change the policies that afflict the afflicted and help the helped.  However, about 30 years ago I realized what I had to do to protect myself while waiting for the change.

I knew I wouldn’t become independent being just a wage slave – pretty good wages though they were.  I knew that the money was in being an owner, not a worker.  So I have steadily been learning and practicing buying companies through stock purchases.  In other words, I invested a lot of the wages I earned so that I could grow out of being a wage earner.  I am now retired, so I think I have succeeded, so far.  Of course the only real test of whether or not I succeeded will be if my wife and I can live a comfortable retirement until we are both gone.  Which ever one of us goes last might be able to spike the ball at the one yard line and claim victory.  That’s the closest we will come to knowing success while we can still know anything.

The only point of this is to show that I am not fighting for progressive causes because I will be a loser without them.  I am fighting for progressive causes in order for the world to work better for future generations.  My generation of this immediate family will be OK (I hope) whether or not I get my political wishes.  I wish I could say the same for future generations.  If I were sure about the future generations, maybe I could live without caring what the politicians let the extremely wealthy do to this country and the rest of the world.

I bet you have been wondering why the interface to PDF files in Firefox suddenly went to pot.

CNet has the article Mozilla puts native PDF viewer in Firefox 19.

I finally found the solution to bring the real Adobe Reader back to Firefox.

In Firefox go to “Tools->options->Applications”, and change the setting for “Portable Document Format (PDF)” to “Use Adobe Acrobat (in Firefox)”

If you haven’t found the trick to linking to pdf files on your local computer and have them come up in an imbedded Adobe Reader in Firefox, you just need to add the type parameter to your HTML anchor

<a type="application/pdf" href="localFile.pdf">

WWLP carried the story Markey, Lynch submit signatures for U.S. Senate.

Markey supporters delivered more than 52,000 certified signatures to the state’s Elections Division to get his name on the ballot. This Wednesday is the deadline to submit at least 10,000 certified signatures to qualify for the U.S. Senate special election.

This is a definite sign that the campaign is starting off strongly.  I handed in 23 signatures from Sturbridge collected by me and by Jackie Wells.

You are not going to believe this, but The Boston Herald has the piece Warren critics, take note by columnist Margery Eagan.

Those who like to deride her as the “fake Indian” should know: Freshman U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has done more for your wallet in the past two weeks than Scott Brown did in two years and most of Congress has managed in their entire careers.

If you don’t believe that the above words could be printed by this newspaper, click on the link I have provided to verify that I did not get this from some alternative world.  You gotta love the subheadline “Rookie senator on warpath in clash over banking regs”

I would love it if many of the people who fought against us over the election of Elizabeth Warren came to realize that Elizabeth Warren is a good Senator for them as well.

Thanks to reader DonF for forwarding this article to me.

Oh, by the way, you ought to read the comments on this article on The Boston Herald. The trouble that these news media, The Boston Herald and Faux Noise, that once you convince your readership of the lie, you have no hope of convincing them of the truth.

I like to think that the difference between The Boston Herald and The Boston Globe is that on the ladder of intelligence it goes from the bottom to the top like this, The Boston Herald readers, The Boston Herald writers, The Boston Globe writers, The Boston Globe readers.  (I am only joking on the square when I question the intelligence of some people.)

The TG Daily has the article Schrödinger’s Cat could be visible after all.

Researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Ottawa have used a comparatively new technique to directly measure for the first time the polarization states of light. Their work has implications for the weird Uncertainty Principle, which states that certain properties of a quantum system can be known only poorly if other related properties are known precisely.

It is hard to figure out what is really going on here in an article written in the popular press, but it is an intriguing possibility that big changes are coming in the field of quantum physics.

According to WikiPedia

Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935.

That’s how I figured that the cat had last been seen 78 years ago.

Maybe the article Canadian researchers take a sneak peek at Schrödinger’s Cat and a step toward a quantum computer in the Canadian National Post will add a bit more to understanding this.

“I can’t say that we’re getting around the Uncertainty limit, because within quantum mechanics there is no getting around it,” said Mr. Salvail.He cautioned that explaining such things in words risks “losing the subtleties that are captured in the mathematical expression” of the theory.

“We’ve kind of gone back and exploited the subtleties in the Uncertainty Principle,” he said. “It’s strange, but so fascinating.”

I have read the above WikiPedia link more thoroughly now.  Even though I had previously read a book (twice) about  Schrödinger’s Cat, I don’t remember reading the explanations of why it wasn’t a problem at all.   It seems so obvious now that a Geiger counter is the very measurement that collapses the wave function and eliminates the uncertainty.  I can’t understand why Einstein and Schrödinger would have such a long discussion about this thought experiment.  If there is no conceivable way to measure whether or not the event happened in order to trigger a macroscopic event, then there is no paradox.

I have to keep in mind the quote above,  ‘explaining such things in words risks “losing the subtleties that are captured in the mathematical expression”’.  There must be some subtleties that I am missing here that kept Einstein and Schrödinger occupied for so long with this seeming paradox.

Thomas Creamer, Chairman of the Sturbridge Board of Selectmen, has put together an excellent edited video of the presentation of the Petition to Keep the Moratorium on Municipal Incinerators in Massachusetts.  He has edited in a lot of material to back up what the participants discussed at the presentation. (The deadline for signing the petition has passed.)

I’d like to comment on Mary Redetzke’s remarks about the ideal incinerator producing nothing but carbon dioxide and water from simple hydrocarbons. Reaching this ideal behavior is far more difficult than you might think if you don’t think very deeply about this.

Simple hydrocarbons contain no other elements than hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. There is no real-life waste stream that contains only simple hydrocarbons. To capture all other elements but these three from a waste stream is close to impossible. The other elements in the waste stream are not convertible into carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen by any chemical reaction. Converting one element into another involves nuclear reactions which would release so much energy, that they would blow up the incinerator and the surrounding area for miles around if such nuclear reactions could be achieved, which they cannot.

If some genius did somehow come up with such a process, then it could be explained and it could be demonstrated on a small scale in a laboratory. Until that explanation and demonstration is possible, no life-sized incinerator should be built to use an imaginary technology that probably cannot ever exist.

Not until the politicians and appointed officials can make such demonstrations and explanations publicly available and widely known should there be any change to the moratorium.