Noel's Green (make that SUSTAINABLE) Blog » Thinking

Theodore Roosevelt brought us the Square Deal.

noel — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 02:41:26 +0000

We need another Square Deal. Its starting to happen, in spite of the terrible division in our government. Obama and the Democratic party are looking strong. Contrast that to the dissolution and confusion on the right wing.

Republicans, look at your current state of affairs and compare that to the great accomplishments and leadership of the GOP in the distant past, before the Bushes, Reagan, Nixon and Eisenhower!

Keep in mind, what Teddy said about America:

“A GREAT DEMOCRACY HAS GOT TO BE PROGRESSIVE
OR IT WILL SOON CEASE TO BE GREAT OR A DEMOCRACY.”

Republicans (not you who call yourselves conservative), listen up. He used the word progressive and great in the same sentence. We have to lead, follow or get out of the way. For more information about this great man, read the wiki on him.

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And here is something completely different :
The Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide widget to be added on this blog for monthly tracking of CO2

Sweet ending to a beautiful opera

noel — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 21:09:17 +0000

Finale to Les Miserables

President Jefferson said:

noel — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 04:06:49 +0000

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”

Listen up Newt Gingrich! How radical was that?

A Flow Chart for commissioning

noel — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:57:57 +0000

Alright, I will get off my high horse now and back on my regular horse. Back on the subject of energy and high performance buildings. Recently I have had the good fortune of connecting with some very good people and I am busy again at my profession. I am working with a great commissioning team doing LEED projects. I must say, it is gratifying to be using my experience and brains for a good cause: making a better built environment.

Here is a flow chart that I like. Charts are great for reducing complicated processes down to one glance… I like a good flow chart because they are visual, and I tend to be visual, maybe because of my defective ears.

This chart was borrowed from ASHRAE by the National Institute for Building Sciences (NIBS), and is posted on their Whole Building Design Guide web site. Click on the thumbnail to see the full size version.

America, love it or leave it.

noel — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 03:34:02 +0000

I love it. I love to vote my conscience.

To be clear on this, I plan to vote against every incumbent, on every side.
I have lost my patience with entrenched power.

I have lost patience with the right wing, those great hypocrites. What the hell are they doing?

I have no respect for the big corporations (meddling) with the news, opinion, and politics.

I have never had respect for those who complain and whine. People like Sarah Palin. Why is she back in the news? (Is she some kind of exotic curiosity of history?)

Like the senator said , “If you have nothing to good to contribute… why don’t you just go home?” ( He was about to go home himself…)

“…we hold these truths to be self-evident, except…”

noel — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:43:03 +0000

It’s become a sad fact that politics in America has become polarized. Moderates and centrists are now squeezed into a hairline dividing the left and right. The media has a part in this, cable television and the Internet especially. Take Fox News, claiming to be “fair and balanced”, and an evident mouthpiece for extreme right wing Republicans. At almost any turn, they bash Democrats, moderates, and the middle.

Judging by FoxNews accounts, George Bush was an excellent president who hardly ever made a mistake. Now 14 months into Barack Obama’s first term, they are telling us that everything wrong with our economy is Obama’s fault. They use Reagan’s famous catch phrase that he is all about “tax and spend”. They never mention that Bush presided over the bailout of AIG, Fannie Mae, Citicorp, et al, using $1 trillion to “borrow and spend”.

FoxNews opposes health care reform effort in knee-jerk fashion. They did the same thing with the job stimulus bill(ARRA), the energy bill, the carbon cap and trade proposal, and almost every other proposal coming from the President. Facts are hard to come by at Fox. Instead of constructive and intelligent criticism, they bitch and whine – and have wasted a whole year doing so. FoxNews supports the Republicans, who are the party of “NO”!

Their polls are slanted (and the numbers are often “out of range” compared to polls by others). They seem to be merely entertaining their right wing viewers. They feature weird celebrities like Karl Rove and Sarah Palin to distract. They hire sensationalists like Glenn Beck

and Geraldo Rivera

to expouse a point of view focused on trivia. They invent fabricated issues like health care “death panels”, what kids wear, religious expression issues, et al, to avoid reporting on the reality.

The most popular pundit at Fox, Bill O’Reilly, continuously scoffs at the idea of global warming. Glenn Beck calls global warming a left-wing plot. Strange. Their ultimate boss, CEO and founder of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, believes that global warming is a serious problem. Murdoch has directed his company to fight global warming by becoming “carbon neutral”. Murdoch’s own employees are undermining his directions!

FoxNews doesn’t discuss the health insurance industry itself. They prefer to broadcast people who bitch and complain about the legislators, including majority leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, calling them all kinds of names. Medical costs and health care premiums have been skyrocketing for years. Fox News omits this critical fact, except to tell us our taxes will go up if the reforms “take over” the supposedly free insurance market. But this insurance market is hardly free. It is out of control.

Truth: I know someone shopping for individual health insurance at this time. He paid $250 a month at his last employer for his group plan. Now he is looking at costs close to $1200 a month because he needs an individual policy. The insurers tell him that regulations set these insurance rates anyway. So what is Fox News talking about?! We need health care reform to control these costs. FoxNews must be fighting it because they are actually lobbying hard for the insurance companies.

Glenn Beck plays on the fears of the right-wing by repeating the word socialism over and over in reference to health care and energy policy reform by the Democrats. Glenn Beck may tell you that he cares about American families. I highly doubt it. He has an agenda to help the interests of big health care, not to mentions big banks, big insurance, big oil, and so on.

Voters who represent the center, should call out Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News for this mixed-up news and commentary. Maybe this is beginning to happen.

Howell Raines, in this March 14th Washington Post commentary, Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News? says that Ailes is “using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history.“

He goes on to say “Fox [is] turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: ‘The American people do not want health-care reform.’… For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party…”

Last, but not least, Raines makes the point that “The American people and many of our great modern presidents have been demanding major reforms to the health-care system since the administration of Teddy Roosevelt. The elections of 1948, 1960, 1964, 2000 and 2008 confirm the point, with majorities voting for candidates supporting such change.”

So, my question is, with truth out the window, “in whose back pocket is the News Corporation?”

Now about that $500 hearing aid tax credit …

Current Events: Cliches

noel — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:09:53 +0000

Here I will get on my high horse again.

A list of words being used too often, and thereby lose their true meaning.
In my opinion, these fit the definition of CLICHE. These words are currently being used in the media and opinion places online frequently and, in my opinion, incorrectly. English language students, take note.

Green
Leftist
Right wing
progressive
balanced (A FoxNews marketing buzzword)
Conservative
Christian (hope that doesn’t offend true believers)
Terrorist
liberalism
socialism
freedom
Republican
Democrat

This is an interesting web based application that analyzes text to discern political bias. I have only tested this post so far, but I will venture to guess that it is more sophisticated than most media pundits. It rates this post as neutral, by the way. I must be in the center, hmmm.

Food for thought and debate, if such a thing is still possible.

President Theodore Roosevelt had it right!

noel — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:28:14 +0000

Let us go back to the tried and proven. The Bush sponsored tax cuts did not do what they were supposed to do. We forgot to take Teddys advice, as quoted below.

The tax cuts did not increase our national economic vitality one wit. They should be allowed to expire post-haste. Especially since we need the money to offset more energy conservation tax incentives (such encouragement creates public good). US policy should lead the world in energy conservation, not follow!

About taxes, Teddy Roosevelt(who is among my most admired people), said:

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered–not gambling in stocks, but service rendered.

The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means.

Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective–a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

Words to remember in November.

Some of my friends want me to clarify what I mean above. If Teddy had it right 105 years ago, and we had a balanced budget in the 1990s (Republican controlled Congress/Democratic President combination), we should have stuck with it. Democracy like ours really suck when voters get confused and switch the formula, like we did in 2000. Once upon a time, I had a theory about an optimal combination, a Dem president and a Repub congress, and I will be damned if that didn’t work under President Clinton. Looks like we might even get back to that state, but it will take 6 more years of President Obama working with a Republican Congress just to get back to where we were when Bush got elected in 2000.

Why is a BSME worth it and a BSCS not?

noel — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:21:13 +0000

Stymied by details of education again!
I have devoted 30 years… to this field and still the issue of education comes up again and again.

Certain states will not approve my application for licensure, citing my education not being adequate. I do not have a BSME (BS Mechanical Engineering), and my degrees are not both accredited by the correct (EAC) commission of ABET(Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology). My first degree, a 1977 B.S. Environmental Design is not ABET. Ok, understood. On the other hand, my second degree, a 2000 B.S. Computer and Information Science, is ABET accredited, but by the OTHER [read: WRONG] commission (ABET/CAC), which someone decided, in a place far far away, a long time ago, was not an acceptable education for licensing a professional engineer.

NOT FAIR!

Being NCEES registered is not enough, to the surprise of many people.

Many companies need a professional engineer. I am available and ready sometime the question of location comes into play. 30 years of devotion to HVAC engineering counts for nothing in some states. Shame on them.

Here we see a big disconnect between the real world and the rules. The regulations and these firms that blindly follow, would rather have an individual with a BSME and 6 years of experience (to mess it up) than having one with (2) related science degrees and 30 years of directly relevant and professional engineering experience. Even with a superb resume.

Here I stand again, rejected one more time for this sorry excuse.

THE LAST ENERGY CRISIS- 1970s and a B.S. Environmental Design

noel — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:10:53 +0000

I have a BS ED, which is a science that encompasses the junction between engineering and architecture. My expertise is in buildings and how they work. I focused all my career on design of the built environment and building systems. I was educated in energy conservation, neighborhood preservation, and solar energy in the 1970s. I was trained to create design solutions for all kinds of advanced issues like

active and passive solar heating,
air conditioning,
historic building preservation
human factors like indoor air quality

I first learned how to do an energy model with pencil and paper. It was very exciting to learn how to design and justify energy conservation measures. Then the Energy Crisis went away about 1982. The energy recovery methods that I thought were so cool were no longer needed or cost effective. But the career path open to me was still basically HVAC controls and design. So, this is what I did, and this is what I do.

To be sure, most, if not all, of my professional peers are schooled in mechanical engineering. ( and they possess a B.S. Mechanical Engineering). I do not have that specialization. However, I am uniquely qualified and experienced.

Like many professional engineers today, my desire is to serve the design and construction industry. Many people do not remember the 1970s. I prepared for an energy shortage then, and I remain ready to help attack the problems of this new energy crisis.