Good news from the cardio front

After suffering a major heart attack over the holidays, getting a stent put in during January, losing almost twenty pounds since then on top of the nearly forty I had lost before (Well, there’s overlap, I’ve gone from my all time super obese high of 210 pounds to about just above 160 now), quitting smoking, stopping bad food and consuming nearly zero cholesterol, and enduring all kinds of panicky neurosis for the last few weeks — much of it made worse by my terrible day job pay and low disability payments based on that pay — my cardiologist gave me a clean bill of health today. I still have some anxiety issues, but for the most part I feel so good it can flirt with feeling high or a little bit manic at times.

He said using only the data gathered this week, detailed EKGs, blood work, and direct examination, he would never be able to tell I had ever suffered a heart issue of any kind, let alone a massive MI. In another three months I’ll get the full echo-sono-stress test work up to compare cardiac function with past tests which he suspects will yield the best prognosis possible. I just wanted to pass that on and thank those of you who provided all kinds of support through this ordeal, up to and including sharing your own personal stories and encouragement with me via email and coughing up heard earned dough when I was in dire need.

Dear hellbound Godless atheists

That’s not what Michael Gerson started out with in his latest opinion piece, and, well, I’m not even sure if that’s what he’s going for, it’s quite a word salad. He starts out by recognizing the ranks of the non religious have swollen, takes a back-handed swipe at Dawkins, basically states the polls are skewed and a big chunk of the twenty percent reporting as “nones” are really religious — including presumably a Godly number of you lying atheists and agnostics. Then finishes up with this head scratcher: [Read more…]

One hopes the North Koreans haven’t completely lost their minds

We can only hope the North Koreans haven’t completely lost their minds and are angling for something tangible. On first glance that seems like a safe bet — they surely know any aggression toward the US would be suicidal — but then again history is full of idiots who drank their own koolaide and condemned themselves, their regime, and their innocent population to endless horror: [Read more…]

Dying Iraq War vet unloads on Bush and Cheney

This was posted and marked as compiled from an Iraq War vet who was paralyzed in an ambush in Sadr City in 2004. He is now reportedly under end of life hospice care for complications from that wound. Regardless of his condition and prognosis, the points made are painfully dead on balls accurate. There are still dozens and dozens of imbeciles in Congress, Republicans and Democrats alike, who proudly voted to piss away trillions of dollars and countless lives on non-existent WMDs. Some have genuinely repented, but there are many who say they would vote to ‘liberate the people of Iraq’ again, some made the talk show circuit this weekend because it was the tenth anniversary of the worst, bloody foreign policy fuck up since Vietnam. Many of those same lying apologists suddenly get the vapors when anyone suggests spending a tiny sliver of that titanic sum helping ordinary Americans, including wounded vets and evicted former home owners, better endure the dire consequences of their many, many catastrophic policy blunders: [Read more…]

Of global temperatures and tropical cyclones

 

Most people understand that a hurricane is a vast, natural heat engine fueled by warm surface sea water. It follows then that, all other things being equal, warmer sea surface temps mean more intense tropical storms and hurricanes. But all things are decidedly not equal. windshear, loop currents, upswells, wave height and depth, and watery downdrafts all vary and complicate the already fiendishly intricate variables at play in storm meteorology and climate change. A new study on tropical cyclogenesis seeks to isolate the effect of greenhouse forcing from that bevy of variables and the results are no surprise to anyone:

ArsTechnica — The resulting data was compared to possible contributing factors, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, average global temperature, local temperature around the Earth, and sea surface temperature in the tropical Atlantic. Since hurricanes are fueled by warm surface water, the data correlated most strongly with global temperature and sea surface temperatures in the area where hurricanes form.

The researchers used these relationships to create statistical models of hurricane behavior. Based on the last 90 years, those models calculated that a 1°C warming of the globe increases the probability of a hurricane storm surge the size of Hurricane Katrina’s by two to seven times—a startling rise.

That’s larger than previous estimates, which relied on climate model simulations. If accurate, the study tells us that putting hurricanes on climate steroids will have costly consequences. But it also tells us that the warming of the 20th century is already affecting us in a significant way. The paper concludes that “we have probably crossed the threshold where Katrina magnitude hurricane surges are more likely caused by global warming than not.” In other words, storm surges of that size are now at least twice as common as they were a century ago.

Crowdsourcing request

Folks I need some pointers on independent publishing. This is not an idle query for an intern or someone who once read a book about it and wants to dabble. I need to talk to a veteran professional who can hit the ground running with a serious project back by serious capital in the unlikely event this turns into more than an info gathering lark.

Another conservative switches teams on marriage equality

It’s funny how knowing someone affected by your laws and traditions, and your bigoted prejudicial medieval mindset, makes all the difference eh? Sen. Rob Portmam (R-OH) found out recently he had a son that was affected. And boy howdy did the Senator’s former ‘heartfelt moral principles’ fall faster in the face of that familial reality than the walls at Jericho cleaved and tumbled — we are told — when blown by the mighty horn of God-eh: [Read more…]