(Saturday, July 6, 2013 The Coconut Telegraph is not published on Saturdays)

[Greatest Show on BPK] I have seen hundreds of big and small fireworks display and want to say thanks to the Rotary and the other folks involved for putting on one of the best I have seen in a long while. The timing of the shots was great and the finale was awesome. Thank you and good job!

How come all businesses phones start with, “Please listen carefully as our menu has changed.”

[Weather] This is one of the strangest summers I remember. Usually it’s sunny and then it rains for about twenty minutes in the summer, but the weather lately is rainy and cloudy all the time and often windy. I can’t remember a completely sunny day in the last month. 

[Greatest Show on Earth] Last night’s fireworks by the Rotary Club on Big Pine was the best I’ve ever seen here. It was a real spectacle. The finale was breathtaking. Boom Boom!

Congrats to the Brown’s on No Name Key and their grid exchange with Keys Electric. They always came to the table with clean hands regarding electrification.

The fireworks on Big Pine were the best ever. I thought having it at the park was going to be a problem. Not. It was great. Easy in, easy out, plenty of places to park within 3 blocks.

Thanks to the person who recommended Al Jazeera English. I’ve been accessing the network for a few years now. That said, folks may appreciate No Lies Radio. Link 

[Friday Joke] A woman goes into a dentist’s office, and after her examination, the dentist says, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but I am going to have to drill that tooth.”

Horrified, the woman replies, “Oh, no! I’d rather have a baby.”

To which the dentist replies, “Make up your mind, I have to adjust the chair either way.”

[Poptail] 4th of July cocktail ice pops recipe. Link 

[Regulators] Jamaica is the most over-fished country in the Caribbean, and one of the most over-fished in the world. Chronic unemployment, bad fishing and development practices, pollution, a weak fishery regulatory framework, and lack of enforcement of environmental laws have lead to degraded reefs and the loss of important fish nurseries.

“Massa God Fish Can Done” is a 15 minute educational video which shows how Belize. which also had bad practices and was over-fished, changed to having the most successful fishery conservation practices in the Caribbean. and that Jamaica needs to follow Belize’s example. In Jamaica there is the saying “Massa God Fish Cyan Done” meaning Marine resources are infinite and cannot be exhausted, and that God will always provide. “Massa God Fish Can Done” shows that in fact marine resources are depleted and will continue to fail unless the government, regulators, fishers, consumers all change our attitudes and habits.

Jamaican restaurant owner laments on buying imported fish, Jamaican fisherman visit Belize Marine Protect Area, Jamacan fisherman snorkels in Belize and can’t believe the amount and size of fish he sees and is now motivated to work with other fisherman to protect Jamaican reefs. Video

[Picnic Island Ferry] It is my understanding that the Kokomo Cat II party boat will be providing a shuttle service to drive their passengers home after the trip to Picnic Island. There will be discount boat tickets if you are staying at the motel or have one of the new tiki bar membership cards.

I sure hope the band that played at the Big Pine fireworks has somebody in it who’s someone’s brother-in-law.  I can’t imagine anyone who heard them and hired them because they thought they were any good. 

[“They’d better be a permitted, registered, insured landlord and pay their damn taxes, sewer hook-ups and fees”] I remember the Keys when minding my business got you a “fishing” trip.

Here’s a picture of my great, great nephew Donald Richard Dugan II dolled up for his first 4th of July.

Researchers going deep in submersible for Lionfish. The latest tool in the battle against Florida’s alarming lionfish invasion will be deployed this week at Nova Southeastern University’s Oceanographic Center in Port Everglades in Broward County. Link

[Speaking of partying on private property] That little island off the 7 Mile Bridge – Oceanside – Money Key is privately owned also and lots of people party on it. And I know that they do not clean up after themselves.  If they took their garbage with them that would alleviate the problem of having to hire a third party to clean up after them.

Film captures Keys fishing history. Video

Kudo’s to Kathy Brown, president of the No Name Property Association for having the first grid tied, and most ecologically friendly home on No Name Key if not the lower Keys. It should be noted that she wired the house to code that she and her husband built as owner builders, earning a certificate of occupancy in 1990. Once again, she conducted the wiring of their presently grid tied home. It is a complicated wiring system, requiring the engineering plans of a noted solar expert, and colleague of her husband at Florida Atlantic University, and not a simple matter of Keys Electric installing a meter.

The Brown’s friend, Dr.John Morris, also colleague at F.A.U., built their house along with the Browns back in the late 1990’s. Appropriately, Dan and Linda Morris will become the second grid tied home on No Name Key, Monday. Their solar arrays, and output will be twice the size of the Brown’s. Kathy assisted with the wiring of this home, also. Those curious about what is required to have a sustainable grid tied home would be better advised to consult with Kathy, or the Morris’s for free, than an electrician who has never successfully wired a home for grid tie. Be assured, most haven’t.

[Climate Change Joke] I’m glad to see that one poster finally posted that anthropogenic climate change is the real issue.

There is climate change, no one denies that. The question is just how much is due to human behavior and the bigger question is just how much economic growth are we willing to give up on the chance that we can do something about it. It goes something like this:

Doctor: I think you have disease X
Patient: Are you sure?
Doctor: No.
Patient: what should I do?
Doctor: we could cut off your leg, and maybe that would fix it, then again, maybe not.
Patient: When would we know?
Doctor : In 25 years, maybe more.
Patient: So you want me to cut off my leg and limp around for 25 years and that may fix a disease that I may not even have by then.
Doctor: I would do it, but then, I’m a doctor and can still make a good living with one leg.

Fanci Seafood will be closed on Sundays until August. Everyone have a great summer! CLOSED THE 4TH OF JULY

Last week FTR guy was all in a tither about the cost of President Obama flying to Africa. But when former President Dubya and Laura showed up with their entourage in Tanzania, not a peep. But now I found out why no outrage at the cost to the American taxpayers. President W and entourage flew Air Tanzania coach class.

If it is true that Pigeon Key is mostly deserted on weekends, just like during the week, then why on earth is our County Commission even considering dumping more tax dollars into supporting a not for profit organization?  I agree there are not enough taxpayers wanting to visit Pigeon Key more than once so why spend millions of our tax dollars. I would imagine it would be better to support this not for profit group, than to purchase yet another marina to further decay and slid into the Gulf of Mexico (Hickory House).

Some of the tools scientists use in reef fish surveys. Link

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.
(Photo Joe Britz-Munson Island) 

[Prejudice] I’m prejudiced against everyone and everything that is not like me, but I live with it and try to be nice to all.

[Abandoned Wind Generators] This is a long winded response to yesterdays long winded tome. Debunking Anti-Wind Myth of 14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines in California. (continued below in Long Winded Tomes)

[More bar wisdom] Men get drunk at a bar for 2 reasons:
1) They don’t have a wife to go home to.
2) They have a wife to go home to.

[Term Limits] I agree that is the only way to get our country back from special interests and to get Congress back to doing the peoples’ work in the peoples’ interest not the politician’s.

[Fireworks Colors] Sodium produces yellow/gold colors. Barium creates green, copper compounds produce blue, strontium salts give you red and titanium metals give you silver coloured sparks.

Other commonly used chemicals are carbon which provides the fuel, oxidizers which produce oxygen for burning, magnesium which increases the overall brilliance and brightness, antimony that gives you a “glitter” effect and calcium which deepens the colors.

[Our greatest hypocrite?]  Thomas Jefferson who penned our Declaration of Independence and wrote that all men were created equal and were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, kept and owned over 100 slaves until the day he died.

[Alcohol] So what you’re saying in a roundabout way is the main difference between Pigeon Key and Picnic Island is alcohol.

[Seniors Boating] Now that the CT has published a funny link showing seniors trying to enjoy boats in spite of their natural age related lack of athleticism, let’s find a funny video about twenty-somethings falling over and puking while drunk and generally acting like idiots. Video

The law of supply and demand means that price adjusts so that supply and demand equate. Until you figure out how to charge people to live on the planet, your analogy in meaningless. Since Abolition humans are no longer a commodity.

[Friday Joke] A man escapes from prison where he has been for 15 years. He breaks into a house to look for money and guns and finds a young couple in bed.

He orders the guy out of bed and ties him to a chair, while tying the girl to the bed he gets on top of her, kisses her neck, then gets up and goes into the bathroom. While he’s in there, the husband tells his wife:

“Listen, this guy’s an escaped convict, look at his clothes! He probably spent lots of time in jail and hasn’t seen a woman in years. I saw how he kissed your neck.” If he wants sex, don’t resist, don’t complain, do whatever he tells you. Satisfy him no matter how much he nauseates you. This guy is probably very dangerous. If he gets angry, he’ll kill us. Be strong, honey. I love you.”

To which his wife responds: “He wasn’t kissing my neck. He was whispering in my ear. He told me he was gay, thought you were cute, and asked me if we had any Vaseline. I told him it was in the bathroom. Be strong honey. I love you too!”

[Egypt Coup d’état] Why does the US rush in full blast  to recognize these new revolutionary governments like in Egypt?   They should ease into play, kind of  lay back for a few years until things there normalize and see how the local situation turns out.

[A super laxative for Mr,FTR and other ultra conservatives] If you ever find yourself in a crowd composed of FTR and others like him, just yell, “Look it’s Hillary Clinton” or Nancy Pelosi or some other strong willed intelligent woman’s name and stand back. When they hear those words (it’s hard for them to hear anything other than their selves telling each other how smart they are) they will piss their pants and fill their Depends. It’s amazing how these women scare the shit out of this bunch of braniacs. I always thought that the ones who could solve all the problems of the world were barbers and cab drivers. Now I realize that the regulars at the Senior Citizens Center could also do it.

The FTR guy creeps me out. How can someone hate so much and not go around shooting people? Instead of seeing the glass half full, he can’t even see the glass. I hope we never get the country he wants. 

[Intelligence Failures of the Surveillance State] Analysis of the government’s ineffectiveness when it comes to protecting its citizens from terrorist attacks provides us with a record of gross misconduct, incompetence and inefficiency. Intelligence gathering failures by the government are voluminous. Misuse and abuse by the political appointees heading up these bureaucracies is alarming.

Since the Islamic militants declared war on the United States there have been 70 separate and successful terrorist attacks launched upon Americans, while living within the United States. These radicalized Muslims have killed 3,101 innocent men, women and children. They seriously wounded 2,283. Those numbers do not include Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan’s alleged murderous rampage at Ft. Hood, where 13 soldiers were killed and 32 wounded. This incident was deemed an act of workplace violence rather than an act of terrorism.

These casualties do not reflect any of the murderous attacks launched by terrorists on Americans and their civilian employees living outside the Continental United States. These numbers are startling: 37 successful attacks leaving 1,414 individuals killed and 5,237 wounded.

Please understand that the members of our Armed Forces and their civilian contingencies, who are being killed and wounded in Iraqi and Afghanistan, are not included in the aforementioned tally.

Is this what you call ‘intelligence gathering’? Securing data to preemptively take the attack to those who are determined to harm us has been disorganized and inept. There aren’t many secrets nor much to tell. A bloated and amateurish government bureaucracy unable to do its job, where an employee is rarely terminated or demoted for being a bumbler isn’t comforting.

Do we want our lives scrutinized in perpetuity by a government that views the Bill of Rights and Constitution as obsolete and irrelevant? The advent of a surveillance state that digs into our lives, as it exacerbates its power and control, is a death blow to the liberty and freedoms that we once held dear.

Perhaps if the government spent more time infiltrating and penetrating behind enemy lines, rather than surveilling law-abiding citizens, our world would be a safer place. 

Fox News would just love to help start another civil war here with lots of shooting and killing and stuff.

Undoubtedly there are some in the CT community who still smoke. You folks should beware of the long arm of the Obama admin.  The National Institutes of Health (NIH) so far has spent over $400k of your tax bucks to come up with a new “detection” of smoker’s method. The University of Alabama has come up with a prototype device.  It is underwear. Smoke detecting underwear. The device, underwear, is “The Personal Automatic Cigarette Tracker” aka PACT. It will keep track of how many times the wearer lights up, how deeply the smoker inhales, and the number of cigarettes smoked.  They say that the purpose is to develop a strategy to immediately curtail smoking in real time. Perhaps they are considering an electrical shock, or maybe the smoke police busting down your door. All of this makes an excellent argument for smokers to go commando. What’s next, beer detecting socks, fat detecting flip flops, Rob Roy detecting shirts, impure thought detecting glasses? Maybe the Obama war on cigarettes is the reason that the Feds had 71% more wiretaps last year than the year before. Nah!

Part 2) The IRS debacle now has more twists and turns than an arthritic snake. So far we know for certain that the IRS targeted the political enemies of the President. That should scare the crap out of each and every one us. Imagine the outrage if GWB had done it.  There would be riots.

Even though we know that it happened, we still don’t know for sure who ordered it. We know that the IRS boss and the next in command made scores of trips to the White House, a very unusual occurrence.

Maybe, just maybe, there may be some answers soon.  Perhaps you will remember Louis Lerner.  She is a fairly high ranking executive in the IRS. Recently she appeared before a congressional committee.  She read a prepared statement, denied any wrong doing, and then refused to answer any questions. She availed herself of her 5th Amendment rights. There is controversy whether or not her reading of the statement was a surrender of that right.

But now, she is telling the world that she is ready to testify if she is granted immunity. That’s a whole new bag of worms. By the offer she seems to be suggesting that she did something illegal, or perhaps that she is afraid of the wrath Obama Justice Department if she tells the truth.

Without a doubt, the committee is seriously considering granting her immunity, but they will not grant it until they receive a proffer of what her testimony will be. This will be high drama to follow. We must all be wondering how high up the Obama ladder will her testimony take us. This could be fatal to Democrat politics for years to come.

Part 3) A news source is reporting that Texas Pro-abortion protesters chanted ‘Hail Satan!’ at the Texas State Capitol to drown out pro-life advocates singing “Amazing Grace.” A blogger captured the chant on video. – See more

Isn’t that just so special. Liberal hearts must be bursting with pride.

[Abandoned Wind Turbines continued …] Type “14,000 abandoned wind turbines” into Google and you’ll get 70,000 hits. And not one of those links has the facts straight. Not that any of the bloggers using that number care. One, who doesn’t use his real name, even goes so far to reply that because he was challenged about the accuracy of that number, referred his readers to . . . yes, another blogger who repeated the same lie.

The best I can determine–that’s a lot of links to check–this myth all started with someone in Hawaii who was sore about a small group of abandoned wind turbines at South Point on the Big Island of Hawaii. (I may have complained about those turbines myself at some point.)

What Makes Good Propaganda

All good propaganda begins with a kernel of truth. Joseph Goebbels knew this and practiced it well. The Nazi’s called it the “Big Lie.”

What you do is take a kernel of truth and distort it just enough to prove whatever point you want to make. It’s very simple, but powerfully effective.

The Kernel of Truth

Here’s the kernel of truth: There were 14,000 wind turbines in California.

That’s simple enough. That’s a number that can be verified. You could call me for example, and last week several media outlets did just that.

The Propaganda or the Big Lie

Our Hawaii blogger then takes that fact and makes this.

“California’s wind farms — then comprising about 80% of the world’s wind generation capacity — ceased to generate much more quickly than Kamaoa [the abandoned wind farm]. In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills.”

It sounds authoritative stated with such conviction. And he quotes one wind energy advocate extensively, yours truly, to buttress his assertions. (This is the reason so many media outlets then called me for verification.) But note that he doesn’t quote anyone in that paragraph, certainly not me.

That’s the brilliant part. You make a wild assertion under the guise of authenticity and your reader just swallows it–hook, line, and sinker. Then you reel them in.

There’s more in the blog of course. For example, there’s a photo with a telephoto lens that shows a jumble of turbines on truss towers. I’ve taken that picture myself in the past.

The telephoto lens makes the shot particularly ugly. The rule for photographers in using telephoto lens to make a point is to state explicitly that the photo was taken with a telephoto lens. Of course they don’t do that in the blog. Why should they. They have a propaganda point to make.

The caption says “Tehachapi’s dead turbines”.

This photo then appears to reaffirm the statement of the “14,000 abandoned turbines” made earlier.

But what the reader won’t know, but I do, is that those turbines work, are operational, are in service–whatever you want to call it–and generate electricity. They are far from “dead”.

As a critic of dead turbines for many years–and that’s the reason I am quoted extensively in the blog–I can tell the difference between abandoned, or what I call derelict wind turbines, and those producing electricity.

I suspect the blogger doesn’t care one way or the other. He has a point to make.

What You Need to Know

This is how such pernicious propaganda works.

The anti-renewables (anti-wind, anti-EVs, climate skeptic, anti-everything) blogger makes a bogus statement. Then an affiliated or sympathetic fellow-traveler reposts the blog as gospel. Then the post goes viral. Within weeks if not days Google will have a unique search string to take you to the innumerable sites around the globe where variants on the original blog can be found.

But of course it doesn’t stop in the blogoshere. That’s not the intent. The intent is to get the propaganda into much wider circulation than a few wacko web sites.

That’s where the next phase begins.

The affiliated bloggers then send “news tips” to their allies in the so-called mainstream media (MSM) alerting them to a “scandal” or a “coverup” (there are a lot of conspiracy peddling blogs out there) that needs “exposed”.

Susceptive writers in the MSM then read the blog, make a few cursory phone calls as if to do their own original research, and then write their version basically parroting the original blog. Tom Leonard’s over-the-top opinion piece in London’s Daily Mail is a good example.

Now the bloggers have a MSM endorsement of the original propaganda, and the whole cycle can begin again.

The theme then bounces around the echo chamber until bloggers tire of it and move on to the topic du jour.

In the meantime, any anti-wind, anti-renewables, or any climate-change skeptic has a handy reference to use when they need it.

My Position on Derelict Wind Turbines

I have been a critic of derelict wind turbines in California for years in part because I knew some day it would be used against not only wind energy but renewable energy in general. Apparently, that day has come.

What I say in my letter to the Daily Mail is if you pay a fair price for the electricity, then it pays to operate the turbines. And if turbines don’t operate they should be removed. It’s as simple as that.

I go further and say that the solution to abandoned wind turbines, as I informed the Daily Mail, is a removal or demolition bond. This is a well-known concept in common law, something we share with Britain.

And I’ve been saying that for more than two decades–you can quote me on that.