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We were treated to several hours of high winds and rain last night. I recorded a maximum gust of 26.03 MPH just before midnight. I could hear the gust as it poured over the ridge crest and into the valley. The distant rumble became louder as it rolled downhill until it passed us with a shrieking sound that told me the velocity was much higher above the trees.
I can tap into local weather radar in Morristown TN and keep an eye on the storm cells they are tracking. Being able to see the height of the storm cell clouds and the predicted tracks is a great feature when local television ignores the area we live in. Several of the cells were moving extremely fast last night. I noted two cells moving at 76 knots and one at 87 knots. That’s fast and indicates some real risk of wind damage for anyone in those paths.
When I took the dog out at 0630, both wind and rain were gone and the sky overhead displayed stars. By Hike with Mike time there were some clouds moving back in but the winds were still calm. Gloria called from Limestone at 1215 to let me know where she was going after class and wanted to know if it was as windy here as there. It was nearly dead calm here. Since then the wind has returned and I’ve seen two gusts exceeding 17 MPH. It is currently bright, sunny, and 62 °F. The forecast calls for it to drop to 25°F tonight and to 13°F tomorrow night. That sort of cold should yield interesting creek shots as the exposed rocks and branches develop ice coatings. Tomorrow’s hike with Mike should provide some good photo ops.
The creek is running high and fast. I could get a flow rate if I wanted to risk falling into the water or freezing my hands in that water. Honestly, it is not that important. Standing by the creek, or just walking along the road beside it, the rushing sound of the water is constant. I’m sitting inside now and can hear it in every room of the house. At times inside, and right now, all the time outside, I can hear the lower frequency sounds of rocks moving down stream. These are big rocks moving, not just sand and gravel. Boulders the size of BBQ grills are moving freely down valley. As they move, they change the flow patterns in the creek, altering the sounds as the water rumbles into holes and hydraulics.
I notice that Sarah Palin has another op-ed piece in the Washington Post. This one, probably ghost-written in my opinion, claims that global warming is largely a hoax. Like all the other rabid opponents of science, she has jumped onto the hacked e-mails that deal with accepting or discarding data from a particular analysis program as proof that global warming is a conspiracy hatched by liberals, socialists, and intellectuals to bankrupt hard-working capitalists.
We’ve really damaged our standing in the world’s scientific community by allowing the religious right to devalue science in our educational programs. Palin, like Huckabee, doesn’t believe in evolution; but does believe in the literal interpretation of the Christian creation myth. It would be somewhat less alarming to find the occasional politician who fails to understand science if it weren’t for the immense number of potential voters who also fail to understand science. For too many of these people the tea party sponsors with their disdain for anyone who got beyond high school, or for anyone who reads any magazine that doesn’t feature a swim suit issue, are likely to become the primary source of misinformation concerning any matter of public significance.
We’ve spent too many decades handing the government over to the same people we handed high school over to so that they could run it for their benefit. We collectively handed high school over to the cheer leaders and the athletes in popularity contest elections that helped condition us to vote for them later in life. Even though many of us knew that our high schools would have been better off if the student body governments had been handed to those of us who could read and write, handle mathematics, and recall that Africa is a continent, not a country; we allowed ourselves to be disenfranchised by the athletes and the cheer leaders. We knew that we should have been involved in student government but didn’t want to put up with the frustration of trying to deal with the favored children. We were too busy working toward academic scholarship to try to unseat those already guaranteed athletic scholarships. We were finding beauty in language, mathematics, science rather than in layers of makeup, hairspray, and slavery to fashion. So we opted out. When the elections rolled around we voted for someone we couldn’t stand, someone we knew to be unqualified to run a paper route. Or, as I did, we ignored the entire process and did not vote, thereby being able to claim that we did not support the charade.
We screwed up badly in letting “them” have the reigns of leadership – empty of power though they were. Doing so conditioned us to vote for the adult analogs of the athlete and the beauty queen. We’ve done so with ever greater frequency since television brought the visual lure into our homes. It is far easier for the lobbyists to lure us to vote for someone we should be throwing out of office if the lobbyists can wave a poster or a commercial with “them” instead of “us” in our faces. We’ve already done most of the work for them. We voted for JFK, for Reagan, for Dan Quayle, for Clinton, for Bush II, for Obama, all too frequently, on the basis of appearance. “They” waved a heroic image or a handsome, made-up face on the posters and “we” lined up to repeat the high school election experience.
So now we are less than one year into the national electoral cycle. The apparent GOP front runner is a middle-aged former governor of Alaska, a former jock and former beauty queen. She’s never finished out any job she started. She apparently doesn’t read - anything. She believes that the earth is less than 6000 years old, and would sell her parents and children for power. She has no ethical platform, no intellectual capability, travels the country stirring up racial hatred and trying to disenfranchise anyone who fails her religious and political purity test. And, she is telling you and me that global warming is a hoax. That’s scary enough. But even more frightening, truly horrifying, perhaps 25 percent of the potential voter base believes her misinformation and is willing to accept her as a valid candidate for POTUS.
We are in serious political trouble!
time to submit an op-ed to the Post, Stev. seriously.
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