Letters to the Editor
catling
Published Letters: 37 Editor's Choice: 8
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It's not just a quiet year for the Atlantic Basin
[Read the article: Cyclone Sidr: A hurricane by any other name ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Northern Hemisphere in general has had a quieter than usual cyclone season by a number of different ways of counting. Yes, there have been storms in odd locations, and some very powerful storms, but even with Intense Cyclone Sidr, most numbers are running 30% lower than normal, and 2007 has had the lowest total Northern Hemisphere tropical cyclone activity since 1977. And with the Northern Hemisphere season about 90% complete, we're unlikely to come anywhere close to normal for the year.
Some compilations here:
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/
What's interesting is that one of the global warming theories getting kicked around in the weather research world right now says that this is what's supposed to happen: a fewer number or storms and storm days, but the storms that do make it will be stronger than they would have historically tended to be. (see Dean and Felix in the Atlantic this year)
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Romney won by playing to the right bases
[Read the article: Mitt Romney, president of Michigan]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And it wasn't just the auto industry. He knew exactly how to play to the I-196 Dutch crowd led by the DeVos family of Amway fame. It's the biggest group of evangelical conservative Christian voters in the state. They're generally white collar, fairly affluent, and are far more likely to vote for a successful businessman that was seen as sharing their values (dogma aside, the Mormons and Christian Reformed Church have a lot of similarities when it comes to social values) than a Southern Baptist who portrays himself as 'the guy next to you on the assembly line'.
If you're familiar with the area, it's easy to see that Huckabee never had a chance there, and from there it was only a matter of Romney distinguishing himself from McCain.
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Rudy's big problem was that he started to seem like Jeb!
[Read the article: Punch-drunk Rudy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So here we have a guy who spends the first half of every stump speech building up how he's good in a crisis. Floridians had that same guy with Jeb!, who was probably a better crisis manager than Rudy was, and in some ways, had to deal with much harder problems than Rudy did. (In 2004, he had multiple metro areas where 98% of the power grids were gone or down, 50% or more or sewer systems were inoperable, and 20-40% of local road grids were impassible)
And Floridians remember that even though Jeb! was good at showing up, and not hanging around reading 'My Pet Goat', once you got past that, there wasn't much to the guy- lots of problems in multiple parts of state government, and there were times when Jeb! looked out and out incompetent. Because we know that showing up during a crisis is the easy part of it is the easy part. It's rebuilding when the winds and water have receeded that are far harder things to do. (Look at New Orleans)
If Rudy had really known the state like he thought he did, the national catastrophe reinsurance pools would have been the very first and biggest point on his stump speeches.
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There have been studies on long term effects
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's not like this is a new issue, or somehow unique to baseball/football/basketball.
Anyone who followed Olympic sports in the 70s and 80s remembers the East German women's domination of sports like track and swimming. They always claimed that it was hard work, and that the Americans, English, French, etc. athletes were just lazy. But if you looked at the physiques of many of the women involved, there were assumptions about PEDs being made.
East Germans said they had been never caught using, so therefore they weren't using. But lo and behold, when the wall came down, evidence appeared that there had been systematic doping going on in East German sports programs during that entire time. Kids as young as 11-12 were routinely given 'vitamin shots'.
And now many of the women involved have had long term health problems- autoimmune issues, more problems carrying healthy babies to term than other German women, birth defects, other gynelogical problems. One former shotputter claimed her body was so messed up by testosterone injections that she later needed sexual reassignment surgery because she felt like the doping had left her more male than female.
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Ah Irony
[Read the article: Conversations: Sheryl Crow]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sheryl Crow and Karl Rove actually have beach cottages a few miles apart in the Florida Panhandle. Rove's cottage is in a small town that was laid out to encourage travel by car and bike and limit auto use, and was also built under newer building codes that in part encourage better energy efficiency.
Crowe's beach cottage is in a smaller older development that made local headlines for its longtime refusal to hook into the municipal sewer system. Because of this, there were problems there with septic tanks becoming uncovered and developing serious leaks during tropical storms and hurricanes. Result- lots of human waste was dumped into the Gulf of Mexico as well as leeching into nearby groundwater, and concern that waste also contaminated a nearby fragile coastal dune lake. (The area was pressured to finally accept sewer services after Tropical Strom Arlene and Hurricane Dennis both exposed septic fields there in 2005)
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Error in the last one
[Read the article: Conversations: Sheryl Crow]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I meant to say 'encourage travel by foot and bike, and discourage auto use'
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Rove's cottage
[Read the article: Conversations: Sheryl Crow]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Unlike a lot of famous people who own property down here, Karl Rove has his own name on the deed. So it's real easy to figure out exactly where his house is.
A fews days back, I was joking with some friends about heading over there and putting a bunch of Clinton for President signs in his yard.