Delightful News From the Middle Coast

At 1451ft, Chicago's Willis Tower (née Sears) is the tallest building in the Western World

Our associates in Chicago informed us recently that some of the news out there in this cold, dark world these days is good and we felt we should share:

The Sears Tower, lately unceremoniously renamed the Willis tower, is about to pioneer a kind of crazy-innovative window, one that produces power without obstructing the view or letting in appreciably less sunlight.

At first the Willis tower will only replace windows on the south side of the 56th floor; eventually, the whole south face of the building could be slathered in glorious high tech energy generating windows, enough to generate 2 MW of power. The windows have the added benefit of keeping out the excess heat energy that plagues glass buildings.

As incredible as these windows sound, they're only a small part of a larger, $350 million initiative to reduce electricity consumption of the entire Willis tower by 80 percent.

(courtesy grist.org)

So please, Internet, I implore you to take a moment to block out the horrific situations in Japan, Libya, Egypt, Gaza, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf of Mexico, Wall Street, Detroit, Wisconsin, America, Mexico...etcetera, draw in a few good deep breaths, loosen the muscles in your neck, and soak-up a little ray of sunshine before you head back into the courtroom of public opinion and perjure yourself by saying the whole world has gone to shit because it hasn't.

Only most of it has.

_

Et tu, Brute?

How do you know when a straw is your last?

Just when I thought all the straws were long gone, this uber-depressing news comes via Huffington Post:

A central figure behind the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) claims disputing the link between vaccines and autism and other neurological disorders has disappeared after officials discovered massive fraud involving the theft of millions in taxpayer dollars. Danish police are investigating Dr. Poul Thorsen, who has vanished along with almost $2 million that he had supposedly spent on research.
Thorsen was a leading member of a Danish research group that wrote several key studies supporting CDC's claims that the MMR vaccine and mercury-laden vaccines were safe for children.

His study has long been criticized as fraudulent since it failed to disclose that the increase was an artifact of new mandates requiring, for the first time, that autism cases be reported on the national registry.

Mainstream media, particularly the New York Times, has relied on this study as the basis for its public assurances that it is safe to inject young children with mercury -- a potent neurotoxin -- at concentrations hundreds of times over the U.S. safety limits.
The discovery of Thorsen's fraud came as the result of an investigation by Aarhus University and CDC which discovered that Thorsen had falsified documents and, in violation of university rules, was accepting salaries from both the Danish university and Emory University in Atlanta -- near CDC headquarters -- where he led research efforts to defend the role of vaccines in causing autism and other brain disorders. Thorsen's center has received $14.6 million from CDC since 2002.

Leading independent scientists have accused CDC of concealing the clear link between the dramatic increases in mercury-laced child vaccinations beginning in 1989 and the epidemic of autism, neurological disorders and other illnesses affecting every generation of American children since. Questions about Thorsens's scientific integrity may finally force CDC to rethink the vaccine protocols since most of the other key pro vaccine studies cited by CDC rely on the findings of Thorsen's research group.

You know, when you can't even count on doctors and scientists funded by the CDC to be honest about their research into the effects of drugs on children, I think you need to doubt just about everybody out there, no matter what they do.

So, the next time your doctor says you'll feel much better with a new horse-pill down your gullet once a day, the next time your banker says you should take advantage of a great new opportunity, the next time your mechanic says you need a new thingermajigger, tackle him to the ground, stick the tip of a knife into his throat, and ask him again, when his life depends on it.

It sucks that things have come to this, but these days, you need to be sure.


By the way, since I haven't had a chance to mention it before, I had the great fortune of hearing Robert Kennedy, Jr. give a speech once, and it was not only eye-opening, but downright inspiring. I thought to myself that, if it weren't for the speech impediment and the Conservative bent of the deluded common folk, he would be president right now, could be president right now.

He was speaking at the 2008 Border Governors Conference in Universal City, CA, and damn if he didn't--off the top of his head--spend fifteen passionate minutes telling the whole auditorium, in great-yet-completely-accessible detail, how to greenly solve the energy crisis--at a profit--in a mere ten-year span.

It involves updating the nation's admittedly archaic energy grid--at great initial expense, but easily recouped over time--to allow for energy to be soaked up (via solar panels, wind turbines, etc) where fewer people use energy (deserts, the Great Plains, etc) and sent back into the grid to supply those areas where more energy is used but less is generated, which is something that is impossible right now.

It is a simple solution to our problems that the oil companies--and those invested-in/owned-by them--don't like. Meanwhile, Israel--among other small nations--are in the process of converting their energy grid to do this (RFKJ's company is helping them do it) because it makes sense, damnit.

Did the U.S. and Mexican Governors at the conference listen?

Well, let's put it this way--despite the fact that it was a conference focused mainly on better stewardship of the environment (per The Governator), most of the governors weren't even pretending to listen and the Governor of Texas walked out after two minutes.

Maybe RFKJ should have chased him down, tackled him, put a knife to his throat, and...

_

The Sun Never Rises Inside a Casino

Now, I'm not saying I would advocate a wind farm in Nantucket Sound--I haven't done enough research to make an intelligent decision in the matter--but I find it interesting that the biggest enemy of the project was Senator Ted Kennedy because the wind farm would be an eyesore visible from his family's compound. A compound that was built using money his father made while bootlegging during Prohibition, let's not forget.

Let us also remember here that not only is he the son of a criminal, but Teddy himself once killed a woman and fled the scene of the crime. Somehow, he got off with only a suspended sentence. People tend to forget that sort of thing when the fella later becomes 'the lion of the senate,' but I think it's an important fact to remember.

With that in mind, it is safe to say that while the dishonorable senator from Massachusetts clearly had no idea how to push health care reform through the Senate, he did know a thing or two about graft.


Don't believe me? The dirt still fresh atop his over-sized coffin, I believe what we are seeing here today is the result of many years of his hard work:

BOSTON — In a new setback for a controversial wind farm proposed off Cape Cod, the National Park Service announced Monday that Nantucket Sound was eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, guaranteeing further delays for the project.

Known as Cape Wind, the project is the nation’s first planned offshore wind farm and would cover 24 square miles in the sound, an area roughly the size of Manhattan. The park service decision came in response to a request from two Massachusetts Indian tribes, who said the 130 proposed wind turbines would thwart their spiritual ritual of greeting the sunrise, which requires unobstructed views across the sound, and disturb ancestral burial grounds.

(courtesy nytimes.com)

Nantucket Sound is a National Historic Place? It's the fucking ocean! There must be something else going on here...

The park service decision comes at a time when Mr. Cromwell’s tribe, which won federal recognition in 2007, is hoping to build a casino.

Supporters of Cape Wind have pointed out that the Aquinnah Wampanoag’s land is on the western side of Martha’s Vineyard, which does not face Nantucket Sound.

Okay, now I get it. Teddy got some local Native Americans together, had them form a tribe, and promised them a casino if they promised to fight the Wind Farm. Brilliant move, right? I mean, who would ever win a legal fight against Native Americans? Aside from railroads, mining corporations, land speculators, and oil companies, of course...

Meanwhile, we all know once the Native American tribe gets their casino, they'll all be too drunk, broke, and spiritually disillusioned to ever make it to the other side of the island to see the sun rise anyway.

But that doesn't matter because you're forgetting the point of all this bullshit--all the Kennedys who aren't dead will have a fucking killer view from their house.

_