Let-It-Burn Won’t Work With Obamacare

Posted on 30-Sep-2013 by Highvoltage

obamacare-logo_full

I’m definitely in the Let-It-Burn camp with most current political/fiscal issues and feel that we’ve reached the point where Low Information Voters and Leftists have to learn the lesson the hard way that their policies only lead to ruin but with Obamacare I fear this tactic will not work.

It is quite tempting to hope that allowing the full force of Obamacare to kick in and eliminating sweet heart waivers will show people how ridiculous this law is and will lead them to reject Obamacare and Liberal philosophy en mass.

But hope is not a strategy and the regulations for Obamacare are so huge that I fear every day we allow this law to exist in its current form will make it more difficult to undo.

Every step we take down this Obamacare version of the Bataan Death March will move us closer to the UK’s National Health System (NHS) and just look at how well that is working.

The Medical Device Tax is already hurting businesses, causing layoffs and stifling innovation and thiis will only get worse.  Innovation is not something you can turn back on quickly and every year we de-incentivize companies to take risk in developing medical devices means many more years before we can restart that new product pipeline.

And once Obamacare’s failure is known to all do we really think the State Run Media will put the blame on Obama and Liberals?  Of course not.  They’ll make up some narrative about how it’s failing due to Republican propaganda or lack of increased requests for more funding.

I can appreciate the logic with the Let-It-Burn strategy but I don’t think this will work with Obamacare.  We need to kill it any way we can and right now the only approach is death by 1,000 cuts.  Kill this law a little at a time until the funding is gone and we starve the beast.

Posted in healthcare | 6 Comments

Liberalism Must Be Defeated (Part 1)

Posted on 29-Sep-2013 by Highvoltage

Here we sit on the brink of a Federal Government shutdown and once again the battle lines are drawn but unfortunately few understand the true enemy.  My hope with this two part post is to identify the true enemy of Freedom and American Exceptionalism and formulate a strategy how we can defeat them.

Who the Left says the enemy is

If you get your news from NPR, then you are sure that the enemy is the obstructionist Tea Party members of the House.  Their headline says it all:

npr headlineOf course NPR forgets to tell you that the House already passed a bill last week to keep the Federal Government running but Senate Democrats (and many Republicans) chose shutting down the government over defunding Obamacare.  And never mind that the House passed a compromise bill yesterday to keep the government open but delayed Obamacare implementation and removed the business killing Medical Device Tax.  Harry Reid won’t allow that but again, it’s the evil Republicans who are shutting the government down.

Who I say the enemy is

In case you missed it, the US is in a serious fiscal emergency and if it takes a government shutdown to address the real problems of the US then so be it (a little pain now will be worth it if we can save this country).  I’ve been very honest over the past year that my strategy of “Let It Burn” is really the only way to get people to wake up but I hope I’m wrong and we can still correct these problems before the whole country collapses.

Just read this Heritage post to get a feel for our hopeless Fiscal situation.  Here are some of the lowlights:

Washington will spend nearly $3.5 trillion in 2013 while collecting $2.8 trillion in revenues, resulting in a deficit of $642 billion.

Over the past 20 years, federal spending grew 63 percent faster than inflation.

Mandatory spending, including Social Security and means-tested entitlements, doubled after adjusting for inflation. Discretionary spending grew by 49 percent.

Despite publicly held debt surging to three-fourths the size of the economy (as measured by GDP), net interest costs have fallen as interest rates have dropped to historic lows.

In 1963, defense spending was 9 percent of GDP and mandatory spending on entitlement programs was 6.1 percent of GDP, one-third lower.

In 2013, spending on defense is at about 4 percent of GDP and falling, while mandatory spending (including net interest) is reaching 14.5 percent of GDP and growing.

31 cents of every dollar Washington spent in 2012 was borrowed, resulting in a $1.1 trillion deficit.

45 percent, or almost half of all spending ,went toward paying for Social Security and health care entitlements (primarily Medicare and Medicaid). In 2002, that was only 25 percent. Without reform of these massive and growing programs, Washington will have to borrow increasing amounts of money, piling debt onto younger generations and putting the nation on a dangerous economic course.

Social Security is the largest federal spending program and has held this position since surpassing defense in 1993.

Medicare is one of the largest and fastest-growing programs in the entire federal budget.

Obamacare will add $1.8 trillion to federal health care spending by 2023. By 2015, health care spending will overtake Social Security as the largest budget item, including Obamacare’s coverage expansion provisions: a massive expansion of Medicaid and subsidies for the new health insurance exchanges.

heritage 1heritage 2

It is clear to me that right now, the true enemy to the US is not Al Qaeda or another country; the enemy is Liberalism.   Left leaning Democrats and complacent Republicans got us in this mess by shackling us with skyrocketing debt, crony capitalism, over regulation, unsustainable entitlement programs and shifting the US culture away from American Exceptionalism.

Later this week I’ll provide another post on how we can defeat liberalism and this idea came to me from a book by William F. Buckley called Flying High.  If you haven’t read it, I highly suggest it!

UPDATE – Part 2 of this blog post can be found here.

 

Posted in Entitlement Programs, politics | 5 Comments

All Weather Is Caused By Global Warming

Posted on 25-Sep-2013 by Highvoltage

I listened to an NPR story this morning about wild weather tied to unusual jet stream activity and I waited patiently for the eventual tie in to Global Warming.  I knew it would happen and I was not disappointed.

It’s not clear whether global warming contributed to the recent extreme weather in Colorado, but it is possible, Francis says. That’s because the Arctic is warming up much faster than other areas, which “must have an effect on the jet stream,” Francis says.

Never mind that Arctic sea ice increased this year.  And don’t look at the data showing Arctic sea ice at the same level we were at in 2005.  And by all means, don’t look at the data that show the Arctic sea ice is now ‘normal’ when compared to the average since 1981.

arctic sea iceBut those sorts of inconvenient truths will never stop the AGW cult scientists.

“It could be drought. It could be heat waves. It could be flooding due to prolonged rainfall,” she says. “All of those kinds of patterns should be becoming more likely.”

Drought, flood, heat wave, you name it – Global Warming caused it.

The science is settled.

Posted in Climate Change, npr | 15 Comments

Liberal Problem Solving

Posted on 18-Sep-2013 by Highvoltage

If I had to describe Liberals in a concise manner it would go something like this – Liberals are a group of people who like to generate solutions in search of a problem.

The Liberal solutions are geared to furthering their agenda (creating a bigger government, soaking the wealthy, limiting freedom and moving us closer to Socialism) but any thinking person quickly realizes these solutions are geared to solve manufactured problems.

Obamacare will help people who can’t get insurance and lower the costs of insurance.  You know, so we can be more like Europe.

We had to pass the $787 billion stimulus in 2009 to keep the Unemployment Rate below 8%.

Ignoring the 2nd Amendment and limiting gun ownership will reduce gun violence.

Raising taxes on the wealthy will end the class warfare and lower our deficit.

Increasing Welfare spending will reduce the poverty rate.

It goes on and on and on and on.  Solutions in search of a problem.

And now we have another.

On September 20, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is scheduled to release its new regulations for constructing coal (and natural gas-fired) power plants. The buzz is that these regulations are more lenient than those EPA proposed earlier. Regardless, either version will deny U.S. citizens the right to have new generating facilities built using coal, the most abundant fossil fuel resource in the United States. The lower 48 states have several hundred years of coal available to supply our needs at current usage rates without tapping into even larger coal resources in Alaska.

And why is the EPA doing this?  Because they think the Earth is overheating and temperatures are rising solely because of the increased atmospheric CO2 concentrations (caused by humans).  <Sigh>.

It’s true, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been increasing at a steady rate.

co2But let’s look at some graphs from 2 different sources of the Earth’s global temperatures (HADCRUT3 and UAH).

cru tempsuah tempsThese graphs show the Earth’s global temperatures have been flat for the past 15+ years.

Now let’s look at the relation between atmospheric CO2 and these same temperature sets.

cru vs co2uah vs co2See that flat line?  That means as atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased the global temperatures have been flat.  For 15+ years.

Solutions in search of a problem – That’s what Liberals do.

Posted in Climate Change, politics | 14 Comments

Government Handouts Are Not Income

Posted on 16-Sep-2013 by Highvoltage

Leftists are getting to the end of ideas so they are attempting to redefine a very inconvenient truth – Decades of Liberal entitlements in an attempt to win the war on poverty have failed.

Exhibit A – The Poverty rate has remained unchanged for decades.

poverty rateExhibit B – US Welfare spending has skyrocketed for decades.

welfare spendingCase closed, right?

Heck no, NPR has figured out a way to dodge this haymaker of truth – Redefine the incomes of those living on Government assistance.

Here are the pertinent quotes from the story and if click the link on the NPR site to listen to the full story, there is a section that isn’t in the text where Ms. Valdez makes the comment that she and her son are in perfect health so thankfully they don’t have a lot of medical bills.  Keep that in mind, Ms. Valdez is in perfect health.

Here’s the quote with emphasis mine:

Consider the case of Ann Valdez. She’s a 47-year-old single mom who lives in an apartment in Brooklyn with her teenage son. She doesn’t have a job. She gets a cash payment of about $130 every two weeks from the government. That’s all that’s counted for her income in the government’s poverty measure.

But Valdez also gets $367 a month in food stamps. The government pays $283 a month for her apartment, which she says would rent for $1,100 or so on the open market. And the government pays for her health care, through Medicaid.

Still, if you include the value of her benefits, Valdez’s income is far higher than the official poverty numbers suggest. This raises a question: If you count all her benefits, is Valdez still living in poverty?

Yes, that is the new Liberal tactic.  Let’s include the dollar values of welfare assistance, food stamps, subsidized housed, Medicaid, etc. and then their income is above the poverty level.  Problem solved!

And they say this with a straight face.

No!  Providing enough Government assistance to bring peoples’ income out of the poverty level was not the goal of Welfare and they know it.  Government assistance was supposed to be a ‘helping hand’ to those who needed some time to get back on their feet, get a job and earn a living.  Paying perfectly healthy people to stay home and collect checks from the Government shouldn’t be the goal unless we are trying to move the US to Socialism.

Ms. Valdez had a very poignant quote in the NPR story:

“Poverty is like being trapped in a room you can’t get out of, with straps restraining you, tight enough that you feel sometimes you can’t breathe.”

No Ms. Valdez, what you just described is how people feel under Socialism which is exactly where we are heading under current Leftist leadership.

Posted in economics, Entitlement Programs, politics | 3 Comments

Conflicting Theories

Posted on 13-Sep-2013 by Highvoltage

Sometimes two separate theories can, when analyzed individually, make perfect sense but when you try and reconcile these two theories with each other a contradiction occurs.  When that happens scientists must perform more analysis to show that either one theory was false or come up with a third theory that can explain the inconsistency.

There was a story on NPR today that showcased that phenomenon perfectly.

The story was about how rivers in the US used to be acidic (pH < 7.0) but now a majority of them are alkaline (pH > 7.0).  As you’ll see, both theories make sense when analyzed separately but they don’t make sense when you combine them.

Why were our rivers more acidic decades ago?

The story started back in 1963 in a New Hampshire forest. A young scientist named Gene Likens found a stream there that was as acidic as tomato juice.

Likens eventually found the culprit: acid rain. Industrial air pollution was acidifying water that rained down from the sky, killing trees and the ecosystems of streams in the East.

OK, that sounds plausible.  Acid rain was a big problem 50 years ago and this theory passes the smell test.  All things being equal, acidic precipitation falling into a body of water would lower the pH.

But now?

Now — 50 years later — there’s less acid rain. But rivers aren’t neutral, they’re alkaline, and that seems to be the trend in lots of places. “The real shocker to me,” Likens says, “was [that] we found it from New Hampshire to Florida, and in rivers and streams that drained agricultural land, forest land and urban land.”

Two-thirds of the 97 streams and rivers his team studied in the East have been growing more alkaline — from the mighty Susquehanna to small urban streams, like Gwynns Falls in downtown Baltimore.

Why are our rivers more alkaline now?

Acid rain is largely behind the phenomenon, the scientists say. It’s been eating away chunks of rock, especially limestone rock, and the runoff produces carbonates that flow into rivers. “We’re basically dissolving the surface of the Earth,” says Kaushal. “It’s ending up in our water. It’s like rivers on Rolaids. There’s a natural antacid in these watersheds.”

Again, this theory by itself makes sense but surely you are asking the same question that I asked after hearing this story (and which NPR didn’t ask).

Why didn’t the limestone rock, eroded by acid rain, flow into the rivers 50 years ago and offset the acid rain falling into the rivers?

If there is still enough acid rain to erode limestone rock then there should be enough to fall into the rivers and lower the pH.

I would have to assume that acid rain falling into rivers has a greater impact on the river’s pH than waiting for that same acid rain to erode rocks and have that limestone run into the river.  Acid rain falling into the water has an immediate effect and it takes much more acidic rain to erode rock and then carry that rock into the river.  Why is a smaller amount of acid rain eroding enough rock now to swamp out the falling acid rain in the rivers but it didn’t do that 50 years ago?

Is there another theory that the heavier acid rain decades ago weakened the limestone only to have the rocks fall off now?  That would be the 3rd theory that reconciles the other two.

Just one more reason why I love science!  It’s rarely ‘settled’ and new theories always generate new questions.

Posted in general science | 4 Comments

Obama’s Algae Fail

Posted on 11-Sep-2013 by Highvoltage

It’s hard to keep track of all the Obama failures over the past 4+ years and with a new failure coming almost weekly, it’s easy to lose sight of failed promises from even a year ago.  But I was reminded of Obama’s failed attempts at promoting algae as an alternate fuel source when I read the following article in PM Network.  (Note – PM Network is the monthly magazine of the Project Management Institute and you can’t read the article without a membership but I’ll provide you the money quotes).

Before I get to the PM Network article, first let’s remember what The One said in early 2012:

Faced with the highest oil prices in nine months, President Barack Obama is backing pond scum as a path to energy independence, pitting the nascent algae-based biofuels industry against critics of his energy plan.

The administration yesterday announced as much as $14.3 million to support the development of biofuels from algae, as crude oil for April delivery rose to $107.83 on the New York Mercantile Exchange, its highest settlement price since May.

“We could replace up to 17 percent of the oil we import for transportation with this fuel that we can grow right here in the United States,” Obama said in Miami during a speech on energy policy.

Now let’s see what the PM Network article has to say about the progress of algae as a biofuel (emphasis mine):

When Oil prices skyrocketed to a record-breaking US$100 per barrel in 2008, researchers and government agencies responded with a new breed of algae biofuel projects.  Fast forward to 2013, and many of these pilot projects, which showed promise on a small scale, are struggling to scale up to levels required for industrial production.

But in May 2013, Exxon announced it was refocusing the project on genetic modification, because existing algae strains did not produce enough oil to reach scalability targets.  Exxon Mobile chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson told Bloomberg the venture was at least 25 years away from creating an algae-based motor fuel.

“The hurdle seems to exist at the basic science level, which means it’s even more difficult to solve,” he said.

But that won’t stop the science deniers in the Obama administration!  In August of this year, the US Department of Energy announced a new round of algae research funding to the tune of $16.5 million.

Remember stories like this the next time a budget debate comes up and we’re looking for government pork to cut.  This sort of thing gets lost in the weeds when Democrats start talking about the rich paying their fair share and they start priming the pump of the class warfare meme.  $16.5 million is not much when compared to the $3.5 trillion we will spend in 2013 but this can’t be the only wasteful spending in our entire Federal Government.

Please, someone, make it stop!

Posted in politics | 2 Comments

Don’t Stop Now Obama

Posted on 10-Sep-2013 by Highvoltage

According to Team Obama, the fact that Syria and Russia are considering a proposal to surrender all WMD’s was because of the real threat of air strikes that Obama has been pimping for weeks.

Of course that isn’t true and Putin and Syria are using the off-script statement by Secretary of State Kerry to play with us a little longer and make us look like the fools we are in the international community.  But let’s assume that Axelrod is correct.

If that’s the case then Obama should ask Harry Reid to continue with a vote in the Democrat controlled Senate on a resolution authorizing an air strike.  If you want to continue with this faux plan that was supposedly developed weeks ago then continue to apply pressure to Syria and increase the likelihood of a US airstrike.

Go ahead, I dare you.

Posted in politics | 5 Comments

A New Foreign Policy For The US

Posted on 09-Sep-2013 by Highvoltage

If there is any current event that has signaled a tectonic shift in the American citizens’ philosophy with regard to foreign policy this Syrian debacle is it.

Exhibit A – After weeks of lobbying by Obama it appears the American people aren’t buying it.

Democrats Continue to Oppose Airstrikes

The percent of people who favored US airstrikes against Syria stayed about the same (29% to 28) but those opposed increased significantly (48% to 63%).  This increase in opposition didn’t come from people switching from ‘favor’ to ‘oppose’ but instead came from the ‘don’t know’ camp.  A week ago 23% of Americans were undecided but this week that percentage shrank to 9% so most all of them moved to the ‘oppose’ opinion.

Even registered Democrats increased their opposition from 48% to 53% so it does appear that Obama has lost his bid to start a new war in Syria.

I still have no idea why we are even considering lobbing missiles at Syria and think this drawing of a red line was another in a long line of bumbles by our POTUS who is still, 4+ years into the job, struggling to fill those shoes.

A Shift In Thinking

My opinion of US foreign policy changed many years ago as I watched our young men and women die in Iraq and I wondered why we were really over there.  I now have a very libertarian view of military intervention in foreign countries and think we should only be involved if there is a clear threat to US interests.

It is terrible how innocent people, especially children, are killed in numbers of civil wars or terrorist actions all across the globe but we must come to the realization that the US is no longer the World’s Police.  What is the criterion for getting involved now?  If children die?  If chemical weapons are used?  If Christians are beheaded?  Has this been documented or explained?

We have enough problems at home (skyrocketing debt, Obamacare, unsustainable entitlements, etc.) and are still licking our wounds from 10+ years in Iraq and Afghanistan with little to show for it other than a dead Osama Bin Laden.  And don’t get me wrong, I still supported our invasion of Afghanistan to hit back at those who killed 2,000+ Americans on US soil and I’m glad that many of them are dead now.

But that is not what we have in Syria.  We have rival groups killing each other in a bloody civil war that doesn’t, in any way, threaten the US.  Sad to say, but let ‘em fight it out and figure it out on their own.  We don’t need to get involved.

Most of the World hates us anyway so let’s oblige them with their desire to have us butt out of other countries’ struggles.  Pull all our military boots off foreign soil and bring them home – that includes Europe.  If we need to set up patrols/bases, then station our military on the border of Mexico and help limit the flow of illegal immigrants into our country.

We live in a world where our far superior military can mobilize and strike back at any country in a few days.  Our Navy can continue to patrol the oceans and hit viable threats to our national security from the safety of a carrier group hundreds of miles off shore.  Drones can hit targets while the pilots sit in an air conditioned control room in the US.

Times have changed and our foreign policy should change with them.

Posted in politics | 2 Comments

Obama’s Other Red Line

Posted on 06-Sep-2013 by Highvoltage

Back in 2009 Team Obama told us we needed the $787 billion stimulus to prevent the US Unemployment Rate from going over 8%.  Here was their chart and I put a red dot where August’s unemployment rate clocked in today.

stimulus chartIt appears Obama is very fond of drawing red lines that come back to haunt him but later  denying that he drew them.

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Reversing Type 2 Diabetes

Posted on 03-Sep-2013 by Highvoltage

Is it possible to reverse Type 2 Diabetes and have normal blood sugar levels without medication?  Yes!

I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes in March of this year and as I described before, it was a wakeup call for me to return to my regime of diet and exercise and lose half of the 20 pounds I had put on during the past 2 years.  After 4 months of using diet, exercise and medication things were looking good and as my Endocrinologist described it, I had successfully controlled my diabetes with diet, exercise and medication.

But I wasn’t satisfied and wanted to control my diabetes with just diet and exercise and eliminate the medication.  It’s not that I’m anti-medication or some tin foil hat conspiracy theorist that thinks pharmaceutical companies are poisoning us (Claritin was a miracle drug for me and I still take one of those tiny pills almost daily).  It’s just that I don’t like taking medicine when there is another alternative and being a scientist at heart who likes to perform experiments and follow the data, I wanted to give it a go and see if I could control my Diabetes with a more intense diet/exercise regime.

But unfortunately I was told by my doctor that this would be impossible due to my genetics (type 2 Diabetes runs in my family) and that I should be happy with the fact that I could continue to control my blood sugar with the aid of these two pills a day.  Sorry Doc, no offense, but I don’t operate like this.  I’m stubborn in that regard and need to come to that conclusion on my own.

I was impressed with a medical study from Newcastle University that I discovered from a comment in an earlier blog and after much research on my own I started this diet (explained here) on 26-AUG-13.  The diet is not easy and consists of 3 shakes a day and 3 snacks of just the approved vegetables.  No dairy, fruits, bread, alcohol, root vegetables, meat, sweets, etc.

Before I get to the results of my experiment, I need to get a few things out of the way for those who aren’t familiar with Diabetes.  If you aren’t familiar with the differences between Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes then Google it first and then come back.  Once you’ve done that you know that a normal person without Diabetes will maintain tight blood sugar levels between 80 and 90 (mg/dL) but a “Normal” blood sugar range is generally considered to be between 70 and 100.  After a meal even a non-diabetic will see their blood sugars rise for a couple of hours to no more than 130 but then it’ll come back down to a regulated range.

My Endocrinologist said that for a Type 2 diabetic he likes to see blood sugar controlled to a maximum of 150 after a meal and below 120 when fasting (a measurement taken first thing in the morning).  So my determining criteria for this diet successfully controlling my Diabetes without medicine would be keeping my blood sugar measurements below 120 fasting and below 150 after a meal.  But the Newcastle study made claims of reversing Type 2 diabetes (eliminating the fat around the pancreas that allowed it to produce insulin) so if I wanted to successfully reverse my Diabetes with this diet then my fasting blood sugar needed to be in the 70 – 100 range and not spike above 130 after a meal.

Results

I stopped taking my Diabetes medication (Janumet) the day before I started my diet to get it out of my system and put this diet to a true test.  I stuck to the diet very religiously but on occasion I went slightly above the 800 calories per day but those calories were from the allowed vegetables and I still drank the 3 shakes every day.  The Optifast shakes mentioned in the diet couldn’t be found where I live so I downloaded the nutritional information and found that the Atkins Advantage shakes matched the Optifast shakes almost identically so that is what I used.

The first few days were tough and although I dropped a quick 5 pounds I still had fasting blood sugar readings at or above 120 which were no better than my measurements when I was on my medication.  This was somewhat good news but there was no way I could live on 800 calories for the rest of my life.  But on the 4th day something magical happened and my fasting blood sugar measurements entered the range of a non-diabetic.  I find it best to describe this with a graph below (the green bars show the normal range for non-diabetics).

pre breakfast blood sugar measurementMy fasting blood sugar measurements were now in the range of a person without Diabetes and this is the first time that has happened even when I was on the medication!

This diet worked so well that on 01-SEP-13 (after only a week on the diet) I started adding more calories from meat and eggs and my blood sugar still remained in the range typical of people without Diabetes!  During this diet experiment I took my blood sugar measurement 4 times per day – before breakfast, before lunch, before dinner and after dinner – and the following graph shows all of these measurements.

all blood sugar measurementsNote that the one data point above 100 was taken an hour after eating a grilled chicken salad with Raspberry Vinaigrette dressing and that caused it to spike above 100 but still within the range of a non-diabetic.

I have to say that I was skeptical of this diet and thought, at best, I’d discover that only through an extremely low calorie/low carb diet did I have any hope of keeping my Diabetes in control similar to what I had with my medication (blood sugar measurements between 120 and 150) but now I am convinced that I can have blood sugar measurements equivalent to a non-diabetic while eating a modest and fulfilling diet.

Now I begin the next phase of this experiment by slowly adding more foods to my diet and then measuring my blood sugar to find out what my body can and can’t tolerate.  Exercise must continue to be a major part of my lifestyle and now that I’m taking in more calories I resumed my running/biking regime and will continue to do that as well as add weights to build muscle and continue to lower my body fat percentage.

For those who haven’t read my previous blog entries – When I was diagnosed in March 2013 with Type 2 Diabetes my blood sugar measurements were in the mid 300’s and my A1c was 11.5 and for those not familiar, those numbers are literally suicidal.  My doctor was astounded when I had brought my A1c down to 5.7 at my 4 month checkup so I can’t wait to see his reaction to my measurements at my next appointment!

These results will not cause me to go back to my unhealthy ways of a year ago where I ate bread and carbs with every meal, stopped exercising and gained weight but this experiment has shown me that I can control my type 2 Diabetes without medication.

I am still early on this journey and expect many more blog posts along these lines as I learn more but I feel better now than I have in 2 years and feel confident I can control my Diabetes without medication and the troublesome side effects that came along with those pills I took every day.

Oh, one more thing.  Over the past few months I also took medicine to control acid reflux and high blood pressure (both symptoms arrived the same time as the Diabetes symptoms) and I’ve stopped taking those medicines as well!  I have not had any acid reflux issues and I take my blood pressure daily and that measurement is also in the normal range.

ADDENDUM – For those interested in more of the data I took during this diet experiment and a log of what I ate you can look at this spreadsheet–> diabetes reversal.

Posted in Diabetes | 28 Comments

Taking A Break

Posted on 26-Aug-2013 by Highvoltage

I need to take a break from blogging for a few weeks.

For those of you who follow this blog you know that in March of this year I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes and that was, to say the least, a life changing moment.  Through the help of my endocrinologist and maintaining a strict adherence to diet, exercise and medication I was able to bring my Diabetes under control and was very thankful for that major accomplishment that happened in just 3 months.

The doctor told me that I could keep taking two pills a day, watching my diet and continue with my exercise for the rest of my life and I’d die from something unrelated to Diabetes and that was my main goal.  But I have a stretch goal of controlling my diabetes without medication (and the side effects that come along with it) and thanks to the counsel of Blaine in this blog comment I have decided to give it a go.

Research at Newcastle University has uncovered a way that some people who have recently been diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes can reverse this condition through a brief period of intense dieting.

“Our work has shown that type 2 diabetes is not inevitably progressive and life-long. We have demonstrated that in people who have had type 2 diabetes for 4 years or less, major weight loss returns insulin secretion to normal.”

“It has been possible to work out the basic mechanisms which lead to type 2 diabetes. Too much fat within liver and pancreas prevents normal insulin action and prevents normal insulin secretion. Both defects are reversible by substantial weight loss.”

“A crucial point is that individuals have different levels of tolerance of fat within liver and pancreas. Only when a person has more fat than they can cope with does type 2 diabetes develop. In other words, once a person crosses their personal fat threshold, type 2 diabetes develops. Once they successfully lose weight and go below their personal fat threshold, diabetes will disappear.”

“Some people can tolerate a BMI of 40 or more without getting diabetes. Others cannot tolerate a BMI of 22 without diabetes appearing, as their bodies are set to function normally at a BMI of, say 19. This is especially so in people of South Asian ethnicity.”

The diet is not easy and basically amounts to living on 800 calories a day for up to 8 weeks and I started it today.  Suffice it to say I’m hungry all the time and don’t have much energy in the evening (when I do my blogging) so I’ll need to limit (if not eliminate entirely) my time on the computer in the evenings during the duration of this diet.  I don’t think it’ll take me 8 weeks to determine if this diet works because my BMI is already ‘normal’ at 24.5 but I’ll stick with this at least 3-4 weeks to see if this works for me.

For those who follow this blog, you know I am a slave to data and love analyzing it to draw conclusions.  So rest assured I’m taking good notes and logging my intake, weight and blood sugar along the way to chart my progress.  There will be a nice long post once this is over!

Because I stopped my Diabetes medication a couple of days ago and I’m drastically altering my diet, I’m taking more frequent blood sugar measurements and I’m happy to say that day 1 has been encouraging because all the measurements today have been between 100 and 110.  Still a long way to go and the data will tell the tale along the way.

Until then, I’ll still read blogs and tweet periodically but won’t have the time or energy at night for writing posts.  Maybe I can catch up on my reading backlog instead of hammering away on the computer.

See you in a few weeks!

Posted in Diabetes | 7 Comments

The Magic Ocean

Posted on 24-Aug-2013 by Highvoltage

The last 15 years have been very hard for Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) cult priests like Kevin Trenberth.

And for good reason…..

cru temp

He’s upset because Team AGW can’t explain the ‘pause’ in rising global temperatures over that period and he’s been trying to find an explanation.

Well stop the presses because in a recent interview with NPR we discover the answer!

“Trenberth says, in fact, the planet has continued to warm during this time — but the heat has been flowing into the oceans, which have a vast capacity to absorb it.”

“The oceans can at times soak up a lot of heat. Some goes into the deep oceans where it can stay for centuries. But heat absorbed closer to the surface can easily flow back into the air. That happened in 1998, which made it one of the hottest years on record.”

“Trenberth says since then, the ocean has mostly been back in one of its soaking-up modes.”

“They probably can’t go on much for much longer than maybe 20 years, and what happens at the end of these hiatus periods, is suddenly there’s a big jump [in temperature] up to a whole new level and you never go back to that previous level again,” he says.”

So something magically happened 15 years ago that caused hot water to sink to the bottom of the ocean and in about 5 years more magic will happen that will cause the hot water deep in the ocean to rise to the surface.

Never mind that satellites can’t find this mysterious ocean heat but that has never stopped a good lie from the AGW cult.

Did NPR ask if this magical ocean heat has been located? No.

Did NPR ask why the oceans decided to start storing heat 15 years ago? No.

Did NPR ask why the laws of physics have stopped working and hot water now sinks below colder water? No.

No need to do any real homework here, just print the lies of the AGW cult. After all, it’s in NPR’s interest to keep this AGW lie going.

Posted in Climate Change | 9 Comments

Australian Rains Fall Mainly In The Brains of AGW Scientists

Posted on 20-Aug-2013 by Highvoltage

The Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) cult has another beauty of an explanation as to why their calamitous predictions have not come true.

According to an this NPR story, the constant sea level rise stopped in 2010 and the sea level measurements actually went DOWN for a couple of years before resuming their upward climb.

“Global sea level has been rising as a result of global warming, but in 2010 and 2011, sea level actually fell by about a quarter of an inch.”

Well that is an inconvenient truth!  CO2 levels continue to march upward and onward but just like global temperatures have done for the past 15 years, it appears sea levels ignored the AGW cult predictions in 2010 and 2011.

So what did the kids at Team AGW Cult say caused this sea level drop?

“Some years, rainfall pools up in the middle of the continent (Australia) and creates a temporary freshwater sea called Lake Eyre.”

“He and his colleagues are publishing a paper in Geophysical Research Letters that concludes that the reappearance of that inland sea — and similar features elsewhere — are enough to explain the drop in global sea level.”

“During that time, sea level dropped by a quarter of an inch, though normally it rises by an eighth of an inch per year.”

There you have it!  Excessive rains in Australia in 2010 caused the sea level to drop 5/8” – Remember the normal 1/8” yearly increase was negated and the measurements actually dropped ¼” which leads to the 5/8” total delta.

I’m not even going to get into the long term trend of Sea Ice measurements but instead I’m going to take everything in the NPR story as fact and perform a back of the envelope calculation to see if the AGW cult scientist theory holds water – pun intended.

Let’s find out what volume of water is represented in a 5/8” decrease in sea level.  The surface area of Earth’s oceans is 335,258,000 square kilometers or 129,443,784 square miles.  Converting that number to square inches and then multiplying by 5/8” gives a volume of 1.94869 x 10^17 cubic inches.

So the oceans lost 1.95 x 10^17 cubic inches of water in 2010 and according to the new paper mentioned in the NPR article, all that water fell on Australia and wasn’t allowed to travel back to the ocean.

How many inches extra rain must Australia have received in 2010 to equal 1.95 x 10^17 cubic inches?  That’s easy to figure out and for this calculation let’s assume that 100% of the rain that fell in Australia during 2010 was captured inside the continent and never returned to the sea.   We know this isn’t true but this assumption will be biased toward the AGW scientists’ position here so we’re erring in their favor.

Australia’s surface area is 7,692,024 square kilometers or 2,969,905 square miles and converting to square inches gives us 1.19227 x 10^16 square inches.  Dividing 1.95 x 10^17 cubic inches (the volume of water that disappeared from the oceans in 2010) by 1.19227 x 10^16 (the surface area of Australia) gives us 16.34 inches.  So Australia would need over 16 EXTRA inches of water (when compared to their long term average) to account for the sea level drop in 2010.

Australia averages about 19 inches of water a year and they received 27.7 inches in 2010 so that meant the extra rainfall Australia really measured in 2010 was only about 8 inches above normal.  Remember from the calculation above they’d need at least 16 inches to account for the sea level drop.

Missed it by a factor of two!  And in reality it’s even worse because we know that some of the water that fell on Australia in 2010 ran back to the ocean.

Are the AGW cult scientists really that shut off from reality?  Do they not think these crazy theories through or do they assume we’re too stupid to check their work using simple math?

Posted in Climate Change | 5 Comments

Have We Reached The End Game For The US?

Posted on 15-Aug-2013 by Highvoltage

We have able body Americans who could work but choose to live a life of leisure while getting handouts from the US Government.

This has to be the point of no return.

We have roughly 47 million people in the US signed up for Food Stamps and around 4 million of them have no dependents and are fully capable of working.

Welfare is unsustainable but the people who get the free handouts now represent a significant amount of the voting public so we are now at the point where the takers can outvote the makers.

I think I finally have to admit that Liberals have won the fight over the education of American citizens.  Conservatives have lost.  The dumbing down of the American electorate is almost complete.

It’s useless to provide charts and graphs showing how Federal Spending as a percent of GDP is on an upward trajectory that leads to Greece.  There’s no need to show how the US Poverty Rate has remained basically unchanged for 50 years even though Welfare spending has skyrocketed.  Most people won’t understand how Obamacare is incentivizing business to cut hours which will put more people into the part-time category or worse, force them to join the millions out of work and signing up for Government assistance.

Too many people now believe the Federal Government exists to provide for their everyday needs.  Individual accountability is a foreign concept to much of the electorate and the idea of entrepreneurship is outdated and discouraged in this high tax/high regulatory environment.

There is no hope to turn this around outside of a revolution.  We are now just managing the decline and waiting for the inevitable collapse.

Enjoy the ride folks.

h/t Heritage

Posted in Entitlement Programs, Over Regulation, politics | 6 Comments

Swinging CO2 Levels

Posted on 12-Aug-2013 by Highvoltage

We all know that atmospheric CO2 levels have increased over the past 50 years and this graph (from the Mauna Loa Observatory) shows that.

co2You’ll notice that there is an oscillation pattern imbedded on the linear increase and this is due to the Earth’s seasons – During Northern Hemisphere winter CO2 is released from dying plants and during the Northern Hemisphere Summer the atmospheric CO2 drops as the plants use the CO2 for food.  This is commonly referred to the collective ‘breathing’ of plants.

From this NPR story, there is a new study that claims this breathing has become stronger:

“Scientists at Scripps and elsewhere are publishing a new study that looks at that global breathing pattern in detail. The new data include air samples taken from an airplane that flew repeatedly over the Pacific Ocean, from one pole to the other, to look for small differences in carbon dioxide.”

“The group reports in Science magazine that the teeth in that saw-tooth pattern have grown bigger over the past 50 years.”

“The vegetation is taking deeper breaths, if you will,” Graven says.

To verify this claim, I’ll perform this same calculation but first some details.  Keep in mind my results won’t be an exact apples-to-apples comparison with the report mentioned in the NPR story.  The atmospheric CO2 data I’ll be using come from Mauna Loa and are obtained at the observatory located at 3.397 km and if you’re interested in graphing it yourself, you can find it here.  The report mentioned above used airplanes flying over the north Pacific and Arctic oceans at 3-6 km altitude to measure the atmospheric CO2.  So I’d expect some difference in the actual results but the order of magnitude of our calculations should be the same.

For the record, the report compared CO2 amplitudes (the difference between the highs and lows of the oscillation) between current and 1958-1961 and found increases in amplitude of 25 – 50%.  Keep that number in mind because you’ll see below that the calculations I performed on the Mauna Loa data show increases much less than this.

Now let’s look at the Mauna Loa data.  The following two graphs show atmospheric CO2 levels from 1958 to 1963 and from 2008 to 2013.  Both graphs cover 15 years and they are spread 50 years apart – just like the recent report.

co2-1co2-2You’ll notice that both have similar frequencies of oscillation (4 lower points and 6 upper points) but it’s hard to tell if the magnitude of the oscillations (the ‘breathing’) is the same.  I performed this calculation and the magnitude of the peaks are plotted in the following graph.

co2 amplitudeThe average magnitude of the CO2 oscillation 50 years ago was 6.09 ppm and the magnitude of CO2 oscillation today is 6.50 ppm.   So we’re talking about an increase in the plant breathing of about 0.41 ppm or an increase of 6.7% over 50 years.  That’s a big difference between 25-50% claimed in the recent report!

I’ll wait to read the details of this new report to find reasons for the huge discrepancy in results but even if there is a way to reconcile the data, I don’t really know what this report is supposed to tell us.

There is no doubt atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing and we know that plant growth will increase because of this so you’d expect some increase in the amplitude swings as more plants are doing this ‘breathing’ of CO2.

I don’t really have a point here, just interested in performing the calculation and practicing a little math in public!

Posted in Climate Change | 1 Comment

Youth Are Losing Their Freedom – Willingly

Posted on 09-Aug-2013 by Highvoltage

It doesn’t take a law passed by Congress or a DOJ investigation to remove Freedom from an individual. Sometimes there are subtle ways to convince the individual that they don’t need a particular aspect of their Freedom.

It appears this is happening with Teenagers in the US right now.

NPR has a new series it started today where it looks at the changing car culture in the US and the first article focused on Teens and cars.

“When you’re a teenager, there are many things you desperately want to find: friends, fun, a future, freedom.”

“In American Graffiti, the iconic movie about teenagers set in 1962, the kids find all of that just by getting in their cars. The teenagers spend a whole lot of time tooling around in their cars — looking, cruising.”

Amen to that! I couldn’t wait to turn 16 so I could get a job, earn a paycheck and more importantly buy a car so I could go where I wanted when I wanted. I loved my parents when I was in High School but there were times where I just had to get out of the house and I’m sure they were glad to see me go more than a few of those times.

But now?

“Celene Murrillo and her friends were among the many teens getting dropped off at the movie. Murrillo is 19, and she doesn’t have a driver’s license.”

“If there was something that was out there forcing me to get out there and actually get my license I probably would,” she says. “But there’s, like, your parents, so you have something to depend on — and so maybe that’s why.”

“She says her parents don’t mind dropping her off around town — and she doesn’t mind it either.”

“Blanca Correa, 16, doesn’t have a driver’s license, and she has no immediate plans to get one. “I’ve never actually thought it was that important,” she says.”

Pitiful! It appears the Liberal attempt at instilling the Nanny State into our Youth has worked.

Never actually thought it was that important?!?!?!? I’m in my 40’s but I still remember VIVIDLY how important it was to get my driver’s license. We stressed over the test and anxiously awaited each of our friends to report as they returned back from the driver’s exam. The more drivers we had then the more places we could go. We wouldn’t need our parents to take us camping, concerts, football games, the mall….you name it! Why would teens now be content with letting their parents shuttle them around?

Unbelievable!

To be fair, there was at least one person in the NPR story who got it – Megan Kurtz who was 20 years old:

“I better always have a car cause how else would you get places? I better have a car,” Kurtz says.”

But that was the only bright spot in the whole NPR piece. And it gets worse:

“Gilles says cruising just to cruise — even in Modesto — is a thing of the past. The young adults say wandering around your town has given way to documenting your life — on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Gilles says young people in Modesto definitely drive, but it’s with a different purpose.

“They’re not likely to just aimlessly go,” Gilles says.

“It has to be Instagram-worthy,” Clubb adds.

“It has to be worth their popularity,” Gilles says. “They have to cross an event off their list.”

Really? Teens have no desire just to take a road trip for no particular reason? It has to be Instagram-worthy or they don’t get in a car? I’d say half the things I did as a teen that would have been called “Instagram-worthy” involved driving a car somewhere and we had no plan where we were going or how it was going to end up.

Is getting a part time job, learning skills and preparing for adult life not worth doing because they aren’t Instagram-worthy? Apparently not.

I fear we may have already lost our youth and with them the country.

Posted in politics | 2 Comments

How An AGW Climate Scientist Acts

Posted on 08-Aug-2013 by Highvoltage

Michael Mann (one of the fabricators of the Hockey Stick graph) sent this tweet out yesterday:

Yes, the AGW cult has resorted to sophmore style humor and calling members of Congress “Koch Heads” – and yes, we get the double meaning.

In a saner world Michael Mann would be teaching a 6th grade Intro to Science course and who knows, once everyone sees the fraud that Mann et. al. are responsible for, maybe he’ll be lucky enough to get one of those jobs.

I don’t know, maybe Mann is still miffed about this:

Posted in Climate Change | 7 Comments

Why The AGW Lie Persists

Posted on 06-Aug-2013 by Highvoltage

gw-al-gore-fireFor years I’ve struggled with the fact that supposedly well educated scientists continue to believe the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) lie and the State Run Media (SRM) continues to publish these lies without challenging the facts of the story.

There is ample evidence that show:

1 – The temperature data has been tampered with – see here and here.

2 – The mythical hotspot that would be the signature of the enhanced Greenhouse Effect due to increased levels of CO2 hasn’t been found – see here and here.

3 – The Global Climate Models that are revered as holy by the AGW cult haven’t predicted or explained the lack of warming we’ve experienced for the past 15 years – see here and here.

4 – Antarctic Ice is expanding and the AGW cult can’t seem to wrap their minds around it – see here.

5 – The famed Hockey Stick graph was a fraud – see here.

6 – The Vostok Ice Core Data shows we’ve seen temperatures and CO2 levels like this before and more importantly, CO2 levels follow temperature changes (not the other way around) – see here.

So why does this lie continue to propagate?  I think I know why and just like a tango, it takes two to make it happen.

First we have scientists who have an inferiority complex and a need to be accepted.  These individuals probably had a sad existence growing up and during their school years because they were ‘nerds’ but unlike other nerds (like myself) who were comfortable in their own skin, these climate scientists didn’t like having their fringe theories ridiculed and mocked.  So instead of sticking to the science which didn’t pack a Chicken Little style message, they went hyperbolic and decided to grab peoples’ attentions by claiming the Earth was going to turn into Venus.

I’m sure the first time they said this they were laughed out of the room but eventually they added a new part to the story about how we could solve this manufactured crisis and that is when their dance partner started paying attention to them.

The second accomplice in the propagation of this lie is the SRM.  These individuals are Leftists so they hate Capitalism and specifically Corporate America and once they heard from the fringe climate scientists that we could solve this manufactured problem by punishing evil Big Oil, super rich automotive companies, dirty power generation companies and any other economic engine of the Free World they realized they had a narrative they could push.

Think about it.  The AGW lie and its proposed solutions are tailor made for the Left.  It’s a perfect story to tug at the emotions of innocent citizens who are too ignorant to understand the complicated charts/graphs/math (“NYC will be under water, massive drought, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, Armageddon!!!”).  In order to solve this problem we’ll need a huge Federal Government regulatory effort so we’ll definitely be growing the size of our Public Sector and uniting all Western Countries in an effort to bring us down while building up the Third World countries (since they’ll be exempt to any new regulation).   And what really makes this story sit in the wheel house of the SRM is that the villains in this epic tale are mostly those on the Right.

The AGW cult scientists now had a larger concert hall to tell their story (and Al Gore as their cheerleader) where they wouldn’t be mocked and the SRM had a story they could use to beat up Corporate America and grow the Federal Government.  Both dance partners supported each other and both enabled the other.  The SRM stroked the egos of the climate scientists and the climate scientists gave horror stories to the SRM as well as naming villains on the Right.

As long as these two dance partners are allowed to have the floor, unchallenged, then the AGW lie will continue to take root in the ignorant public and eventually there will be enough AGW cult members in Congress to act and do something stupid.

Let’s hope science and rational thought win the day in the end.  It’s up to us to stop them.

Posted in Climate Change, politics | 25 Comments

Hilton Head Island Sunrise

Posted on 03-Aug-2013 by Highvoltage

Today was the final morning of our beach vacation and I decided to get up early to watch the sunrise and I was not disappointed!

There was a waning crescent moon accompanied by Jupiter that was low in the sky preceding the sunrise as well as the Orion constellation to the right of the moon/Jupiter pairing.  There was a line of thunderstorms off the coast that provided a great canvas for the electromagnetic waves of the Sun and this also made the early wakeup call worth it.

I started taking these pictures about 5:45 am and took them about 5 minutes apart:

hh01

hh02hh03hh04hh05hh06hh07hh08hh09hh10Notice the Rayleigh scattering in the clouds with the deep orange colors that show up during sunrise and sunset and makes these times particularly beautiful when there are clouds on the horizon.  I’ve explained this here if you care to read more on the topic.

The last picture is significant for we that live in the Palmetto State and for those who don’t, Google what our state flag looks like.  Yes the South Carolina flag has a waxing crescent moon instead of this morning’s waning crescent moon but still I couldn’t help but be reminded of our great state flag.  If I had more photographic skills and more energy before my first cup of coffee I would’ve walked down to that palm tree and taken a photo looking up at the crescent moon to really resemble our flag.

Posted in astronomy, South Carolina | 1 Comment