The Sturbridge Villager published my letter to the editor. See page 10 at the previous link.

To the Editor:

Thank you for printing the valuable letter by James P. Ehrhard.

What Ehrhard does not seem to realize is that people he describes out here for whom “guns are a central part of the lives of these citizens” are the ones that scare the living daylights out of me.

The fright comes exactly because I have some of these people in my own family. That is how I know that there are life-long hunters who are unaware that you are not allowed to hunt on Sunday.

I wouldn’t dare walk very deeply into the woods in any part of Sturbridge because I know these people are out there. I can hear their guns from my house.

I am glad that Ehrhard made it perfectly clear what type of a person he is before I go to the voting booth in November.

Steven
Greenberg
Fiskdale

Not all of us out here have a lot of faith that there isn’t at least one gun nut among all the sane gun owners. Maybe that’s why we favor a school resource officer in our schools. See my previous post Armed School Resource Officers May Have Prevented a Mass Shooting at Oregon High School.

The Daily Kos has the story Study links autism to pesticides, I’d like to know if Monsanto funds the antivaxxers now.

The Daily Kos bases a lot of their story on the report from The Fresno Bee UC Davis study links autism to pesticides.

A new study released today suggests pregnant women who live near agricultural fields where pesticides are sprayed are at increased risk of having a child with autism.

The UC Davis MIND Institute published the article UC Davis MIND Institute study finds association between maternal exposure to agricultural pesticides, autism in offspring.

The Daily Kos article adds some information about organophosphate from the Office of Medical and Scientific Justice, whatever that is, from the article What Are Organophosphates? (And Why Are They So Deadly?).

Organophosphates kill because they interfere with the nervous system of both insects and humans. They inhibit an enzyme called acetylcholinesterase. Under normal conditions, acetylcholinesterase sends chemical signals to halt nerve impulses at appropriate times. When the acetylcholinesterase enzyme is disturbed, neurological overstimulation occurs, leading to nervous system dysfunction, causing seizures and death.

Acute exposure can be observed through symptoms of nausea, twitching, headaches and trembling. Most people die because of an inability to breathe. The diaphragm goes into paralysis, convulsions overtake and death ensues.

Long term exposure to these insecticides produces developmental effects including behavioral problems and receding cognitive function, most notably attention deficit.

Not only do organophosphates disrupt the neurons in the body, but they also wreak havoc on the endocrine system. In time, exposure to these chemicals reduces testosterone levels, eliciting femininity in males. Male fertility may be destroyed altogether.

People who have read some of my posts before may start shouting, “Correlation does not mean causation.” Ture, but this is how a scientific study may try to get a handle on that problem.

The risk of autism decreased the farther the pregnant women lived from where pesticides were sprayed, the report said.

If you read the various articles at the links above, there is discussion of the limits to the research and the need for further study. However, I see evidence of enough scientific rigor here to believe that these people are doing a serious scientific study. They seem to be really trying to understand the causes. They don’t seem to be merely pursuing a political agenda. Since I do not know the source of funding for this research, there is always the chance that I will be proven wrong about the impartiality of the research.

The Daily Kos has the article Bill Maher on how we cannot change Iraq.

Quoting Bill Maher, they have:

And finally, New Rule: Now that Iraq is falling apart again, someone needs to drill it into the American psyche that broken nations are a lot like broken people — you can’t fix them.

You can skip the first 3½ minutes of this almost 8 minute video, but that last part is worth its weight in gold.

The Daily Kos has the article Chris Matthews schooled by Elizabeth Warren on politics and the Democratic message.

This video seems to start a little before the video in my previous post. See Thoughts On Handling A Bully On TV. However, this video has been edited to cut out a lot of the Matthews blather and give more time to Elizabeth Warren’s response.

As I suspected even when I posted that previous post, there may be more to the story than what I saw. Neither video alone is an accurate picture of what happened in the interview. I guess one of the answers to handling a bully is to have your own video editor. Since I haven’t wasted my time watching the whole interview, I don’t know how Elizabeth Warren ever got Matthews to shut up for a moment so she could talk.

The Rachel Maddow Show blog has the article Cheney doesn’t want to talk about ‘what happened 11 or 12 years ago’.

In “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” there’s a scene in which John Cleese’s Sir Lancelot, certain he’s doing the right thing in behalf of a damsel in distress, storms into a castle during a wedding party, indiscriminately slaughtering most of the guests with his sword. The castle owner, eager to curry favor with Lancelot, urges the survivors to let bygones be bygones.

I thought that seeing the scene would have to be better than reading about it.

Maybe here is a case where a picture is not worth a thousand words.

Here is a really silly exchange that explains why I don’t watch MSNBC.

I was thinking of ways that Elizabeth Warren could have handled this. My first thought was that she could have sat still until he finished his rant and then said “There, there, do you feel better now? Can we proceed to having a discussion?”

My second thought is that she should have come prepared with a book that she could have visibly held up while starting to read to herself from it, until he stopped. The title of the book could have been “How To Handle A Bully”.

What do you think would be an effective way to handle situations like this? If guests come prepared, perhaps we can put a stop to this behavior. It might work with O’Reilley.

The idea of privatizing as many government services as possible has turned out to be a very bad idea with consequences unanticipated when most of us first heard the idea. Reversing this trend by starting at the Post Office, is a very good idea.

What we may not have realized is that after the unions were decimated by concerted actions of the oligarchs, government employment was one of the last things that kept up employment standards from a race to the bottom. Naturally, this last bastion would be a prime target of the oligarchs trying to gain complete control of the terms of employment for workers. Anybody who has been around for a number of years but has not had the good fortune to retire like I did in 2006, knows how much working conditions in this country have deteriorated.

It is time to put 2 and 2 together to see how this deterioration has come from a concerted attack by the forces who would gain advantages from the situation. Instead of some workers trying to reduce the benefits of other workers like their own benefits have been reduced, we should be striving to re-elevate all worker benefits.

The Daily Show has an interview with former Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations Hamid Al-Bayati describes the political crisis emerging in Iraq.

The interview is in three parts which The Daily Show makes very difficult to find. I have finally found the three parts and embed them all below.

There are some interesting threads of discussion started in this interview. Unfortunately, Jon Stewart keeps interrupting the threads just as they get interesting. It would be nice to know if Hamid Al-Bayati has a coherent plan or even ideas to resolve this problem. He hinted at it, but as I have pointed out a number of times on this blog, it is much easier to analyze the causes of a problem than it is to suggest solutions. It is worthwhile to hear the analysis, but we should learn to overcome our disappointment at not hearing solutions. It will take some truly exceptional people to be able to figure out how to solve the problem. These people don’t pop up every day.

We need another Nelson Mandella to come along. Although we have to realize that it took over 30 years before Mandella was able to actually bring the problem in South Africa to a really new beginning.

WBUR conducted a debate among the three remaining Democratic candidates for Governor of Massachusetts. The article on the web site is Democrats Seek To Distinguish Themselves In WBUR Debate.

 Four days after the state Democratic party trimmed the group of candidates for Massachusetts governor down to three, the remaining Democrats — who’ve often echoed one another on policy — are beginning to sound unique.

This is a very well conducted debate, with good questions, a pretty even handed moderator, and candidates willing to discuss important issues in an intelligent way.

The only glitch of note is that the video cuts off in the middle of Don Berwick’s closing remarks.

If we could have more debates like this one, then I think voters would get as fair a chance as possible to choose the candidate that they think can do the job best.

Truth Out has the story WikiLeaks Reveals Global Trade Deal Kept More Secret Than the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“This agreement is all about making it easier for corporations to make profits and operate with impunity across borders,” said PSI General Secretary Rosa Pavanelli in response to the leak. “The aim of public services should not be to make profits for large multinational corporations. Ensuring that failed privatizations can never be reversed is free-market ideology gone mad.”
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The secrecy of the TISA negotiations “exceeds even the controversial Trans-Pacific Partner Agreement (TPPA) and runs counter to moves in the WTO towards greater openness,” wrote Jane Kelsey, a law professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand who analyzed the leaked documents on behalf of Wikileaks, which leaked portions of the TPPA in the past.
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Kelsey’s analysis also confirms the concerns of trade unions like PSI that the TISA agreement would lock governments into and extend their current levels of deregulation and trade liberalization, thus preventing governments from returning public services into public hands when privatizations fail and establishing greater regulations to protect the environment and workers safety.

It is the antithesis of free markets to write rules that lock you into one way to provide a service even if the provider is a failure.  If people can get together to provide a service more cheaply and/or with better quality than another group of people, why should we have a treaty to prevent the first group from competing?  That first group of people might be in the form of a government entity.  Why are people trying to foist their ideology on us that all work must be done in the private sector?  Because they make money when they can trick us that way, obviously.

If people were really committed to actual “free markets” they wouldn’t be biased toward organizing those “free markets” in one particular way as opposed to another.  Why not chose the method of organization for what works best in each individual case?  Or at least let people freely choose to try any method they want.