From: billphil@earthlink.net (Badwater Bill)
Newsgroups: rec.aviation.homebuilt
Subject: A great Philosophy!
Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 20:46:48 GMT

I just read this again this morning.  In fact I read it a couple
times. This post cuts through all the crap and tells it like it is.


since when does the Gov care whats constitutional and what isnt, the
constitution is something the Gov quotes when they want to overide the
will and the  vote of the people, as in prop 187 (was it?) in Cal, and
something the Gov ignores when they want to dominate the hard working
tax payer, and with the courts and the law enforcment backing the Gov,
mr tax payer doesnt stand a chance, i say screw the law, as long as im
not unethical or imoral and dont cause harm or endanger anybody i do
what the hell i want, its to  bad that the self serving people in Gov
have forced me into this position,

----Beachbum


I worked for the Federal Government from 1968 to 1993.  I worked for
the wonderful USEPA most of that time.  My opinion is that they are
more crooked than the mafia.  I've watched them steal billions of
dollars from the tax payers to line their own pockets.  They have no
concern for the populous at all.  All these little puke demigods are
wanting is more personal power for themselves.  The FAA is not far
behind them.

In about 1986 the USEPA's  Office of Radiation Programs (ORP)  in
Montgomery Al. was like a bunch of chickens in a barnyard scratching
the surface for crumb of carbohydrate so they could survive one more
day.  Someone there came up with the brilliant notion that they should
make a public announcement to the entire country from some poor data
concerning Radon-222 exposures in residential homes.  They said:

 "There are 30,000 fatalities per year from lung cancer induced by
indoor radon-222 exposure."

The whole country was in an uproar.  There is nothing more terrifying
to most people than the thought of cancer from unseen radiation
exposure.  After that day, the ORP was a fat cat.  They cost the
taxpayers BILLIONS of dollars to go out and measure radon in homes all
across the US.  There are still many programs in effect concerning
this statement.  The radon issue is now about 15 years old and nobody
even remembers why it came about.  All they know is that they need a
radon certificate to sell their home...still!

I did everything I could to expose this while in the government
working for EPA.  What a fool I was.  They didn't want to hear it.
But, from my calculations that number of 30,000 deaths had a
statistical error term of plus or minus 50,000 to one sigma.

For those of you who don't understand error terms here's what that
means.  If you measure the length of a table with a yardstick you
might get 6 feet 0.1 inch.  If you do it with a tape you might get 6'
0.2".  If you do it with a laser you might get 6'  0.0001" and so on.
After you measure it 1000 times and right down all your data you can
tell people that the table is 6" long plus or minus a tiny
amount...let's say 0.11 inches.  If this is an error term to one
standard deviation from the mean (one sigma), it indicates that you
know the table is 6' plus or minus 0.11" to a confidence level of one
sigma. What that means is if you measure that table a million times,
68% of the time, you'll come up with a number in that range.

Now, the EPA radon statement of 30,000 plus or minus 50,000 means that
you might get 80,000 cancers or you might get negative -20,000,   68%
of the time.  This is like saying that your table is 6 feet plus or
minus 10 feet.

In other words you don't have a clue what the length of the table
really is.  It's all bullshit.

Most scientific data is quoted with a 2-sigma error term which means
two standard deviation confidence interval.  In the case of the table
it might look like 6'  0.22"  .   What this means is you are sure to a
level of 95% that if someone measures that table with your tools a
thousand times, 95% of the time they'll come up with a number that's
between 5'  0.88"    and 6'  0.22"

The EPA radon number was 30,000 deaths plus or minus 100,000 deaths to
a 2-sigma confidence level.  That means if you go do a study, you'll
get a number between negative 70,000 deaths and positive 130,000 95%
of the time.

Equating this to the table, it means that 95% of the time when you
measure the table you'll get a number of 6 feet plus or minus 20 feet.

That's pretty poor measuring.  In fact once the number goes negative,
the table doesn't even exist.  In the case of radon, once the number
goes negative, you get healthful benefits from breathing indoor radon!

Of course it's all bullshit.  You can't say with any certainty of any
kind that radon has ANY bad effect on anyone.  This is because you
just can't measure one.  It's never been done in reality.  It would
take millions of people and trillions of dollars to even get the data.


So, what's the deal?  The deal is that the federal government lied to
you.  They cheated you and they robbed you by making such a statement.
What they did was take data from uranium miners mostly who smoked and
projected the high levels of lung cancer in that group down to the
tiny, tiny, itty, bitty level that you might breath in your homes.

I can show that the number means nothing...the 30,000 deaths that is.
Hell, we lived in caves for thousands of years all cooped up at night
breathing carbon monoxide from our fires and high levels of radon in
the caves.  We made it just fine.  Those levels were significantly
higher than any indoor radon numbers I've ever seen too.

This is getting long winded but the FAA does the same kind of crap.
Watch what happens every time there's a crash.  They have to appear
that they are doing something so they make more regulations, some punk
in D.C. gets a promotion out of it and it's swept under a carpet once
again.

I was watching TV a couple nights ago and Janet Reno was talking about
the little Cuban Boy.  She said, "We have to do this because it's the
law!"

I wondered to myself.  What law?  Laws for the poor?  Laws for the
rich?  I don't get it.  The LAW is different for different people.  Do
the Kennedy's have to abide by the same laws that I do?  Hell no.
When they legislate anti-abortion laws they only pick on the poor.
If my wife got pregnant and we wanted it aborted and abortion were
illegal I'd fly her to London.  But, if you are some poor black woman
in a ghetto and you get pregnant, you must have the baby.  The laws
aren't for the rich.  They are and always have been for the poor.

I don't know if it's just that I'm getting older and wiser or things
here in this country have really gone to shit.  Sometimes I think
we're really being made fools of when we pay so much income taxes and
have so little say.  Last week I noticed that the grain growers got a
big subsidy.  Gee, ain't that nice.  They grain growers have a bad
year and I have to pay them for not producing.

What happens if I have a bad year?  Do I get paid for having a poor
business year?  Hell no.  The only break I get is that I pay the
government less in taxes on money I didn't earn.  Do they pay the oil
producers here in this country when OPEC gives oil away at $3 a
barrel?  Hell no.  People hate oil producers that's why.  Almost all
the oil wells in Wyoming are owned by small operators who pump about 5
barrels a day.  They raise their families on it, pay government
royalties on the mineral production plus gobs of state and local
taxes.  They ain't Rockefeller.  They are mom and pop people just like
us.  When OPEC gives oil away and they have 5 bad years do they get a
subsidy?  Hell no.

What are the laws?  Who benefits.  What the hell is going on?  When
Texaco's oil wells in Venezuela are nationalized which means they were
just plain stolen, does the US do anything?  Nope!  When some little
puke crosses the border of Kuwait to grab some oil what do we do?  We
declare war is what we do.

I don't get it anymore.



BWB