A recent study linked “Natural Gas” (methane) burning stoves in homes as a cause of asthma. In fact the study says 13% of childhood asthmas are caused by burning gas in homes. This was picked up by the popular press (NBC, LA Times, many others). Googling today shows a bunch of sponsored links “refuting” these claims. But they are from places like The Government Accountability Project and Truth In Science. The American Gas Association predictably weighs in. What is more disturbing is several .gov sites seem to line up with the pro-gas folks, or at least add to the confusion (NIH, others).

What seems to be factual is that burning gas gives off toxins known to cause breathing problems. Actual measurements of gas stoves show high levels of these compounds. The push back basically comes of the form that the study isn’t “scientific”. Well. Yes. You can’t go exposing children to toxins to see how many get asthma. At least not today in America. So I’m going with “breathing burning gas vapors bad, especially for kids”.

This all started as a small data point on induction cooking. Even without the asthma and the global warming and the barrage of misinformation, the cooking experience is superior on induction. If you want to read more about the asthma connection, Scientific American seems fairly FUD-free.

The Health Risks of Gas Stoves Explained

I’ve been seeing news stories about how the rise in the minimum wage in California in particular, is causing the fast food industry to shed jobs. I have been skeptical, because this doesn’t line up with other, um, reality. Are fewer people eating fast food? I haven’t heard of this. So how are workers keeping up with the increased workload? I joke that maybe McDonalds will have to stop selling French fries. Are profits down? Are stores closing? I haven’t heard of any of this, particularly in the articles talking about the damage the higher minimum wage is doing. Now we learn that the billion dollar Hoover Institute at Stanford has been puting out fake data, and it has been picked up far and wide by news services. Hoover is posting retractions. Will news services? I suppose much of the damage of this false narrative has already been done. From Drop Site.

The Minimum Wage Claims You Keep Hearing Are Totally Fake. We Can Prove It.

I’m not sure what is more interesting, that methane emissions are going down (26%!), or that they are being tracked at all. And it would seem to a high degree of accuracy. Well I guess if we have to switch to new A/C systems the frackers can at least stop pumping all that methane into the air.

Methane gas emissions plunge in the Permian Basin

A good read, at least for people not familiar with Gene Sharp and similar writers. I would say there are always things to object to and fight against. No need to wait for things to get really bad. Fix things when the problems are still small. It’s easier. I constantly try to repair my world (the world?) by voting with my money and my feet. Do business with the Good Guys and avoid the others. If it gets too bad, move on, as much as possible. Anyway a good read for everyone caught off guard by America’s most recent lurch to the Fascist side.

10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won

Woke up this morning thinking about the song “Ramon” by Don Walser from his 1998 album Down at the Sky-Vue Drive-In. I noticed it wasn’t on Spotify. The AllMisic page linked to Amazon and I clicked on it but but it was a missing page and served me some unrelated classical music. I found his old web page (Walser passed away in 2006) but it no music or even lyrics. Glad I have a copy of Down at the Sky-Vue Drive-In. Maybe I need to buy another Don Walser CD or two.

Im reading “The Man of My Life” by Manuel Vazquez Montalban and there is a passing reference to Catharism. I need to read the Wiki in more detail, but I’m surprised I never heard of this before.

Catharism

A good post from Statistia on Crime Clearance Rates (which seems to be another word for “convictions”). I was mostly interested in murder, which seems to be about half. However, my understanding is murder is usually a crime of passion between people who know each other. So 50% seems pretty small.

Some searching gives numbers on the single digits of convictions for “random” murders in the US. Which brings me to my real subject of interest: the apprehension of Luigi Mangione for the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

I continue to be very skeptical that kids behind the counter of a McDonalds in Altoona, PA identified the killer from somewhat poor surveillance images. My best guess is our modern Surveillance State quickly kicked into gear and all of the mechanisms put into place for our long running War on Terror quickly tracked their target. The McDonalds kids were explicitly or otherwise given the information. Or maybe that wasn’t even necessary. I haven’t seen any interviews of these young heroes. Normally I would expect to see them on every TV screen and eventually, perhaps on Dancing With The Stars. But nada.

Of course I do expect our extensive (and expensive) Surveillance State should do it’s job. I’m just not clear exactly what that job is at this point. I heard one commentator call the killing a terroristic act. Maybe. But I do know this. If I were shot in similar circumstances I would not expect similar treatment. Is the Surveillance State just here to protect the wealthy and their property? Some say that is the purpose of all police. Not a bad thing, but if it’s the only thing, it may be less a tool for justice and more a tool of repression.

I found myself re-reading an old book review of Thomas Pynchon Inherent Vice. Maybe Doc Sportello was on to something after all (Drugs to Do, Cases to Solve)

Crime clearance rate in cities in the United States in 2020

A few months back I did a clean start for my new Raspberry Pi 5. Clean new everything, including Ubuntu Linux and all software. This included email. I installed the new Thunderbird mail client and even moved my decades of email (in local files) over. Things were frustratingly slow at first. After much reading and tweeking of various settings, things finally settled down and my mailer did everything I could have expected.

Fast forward to last week. My wife’s Windows 10 machine is ending support for the default mail client. I recommended Thunderbird. All went well at first. In fact it found old emails going back to the 1990s in another folder. Nice. But things quickly slowed down. Really slow. I googled around and it seems to be a common problem, similar to what I experienced on Linux. But solutions offered on line were all over the map. And results reported were uneven (worked for some, not for others) I tried a few but none worked for me.

Then my wife email client on here phone (not Google but from a 3rd party) also slowed to a crawl. No explanation for this one. Fought for a few hours and late last night came to the conclusion Google was to blame. A quick search turned up the page below. I guess the 30,000 emails in my inbox and the 16,000 in my wife’s led to a slow start as Gmail IMAP synced all that data. Too bad there are tons of “fixes” out there for a problem that mostly goes away by itself. Though cleaning out our inboxes has helped out quite a bit.

Gmail bandwidth limits