Moron Donald Trump Says Wind Turbines “Cause Cancer”

Ever the malignant narcissist, Donald Trump thinks he knows everything about every subject and never hesitates to shoot off his mouth spewing idiocy.  The behavior says a lot about Trump - none of it good - but even more about the morons in his base who believe the falsehoods he routinely shouts out (evangelical Christians are the least educated of any religious group, which may explain their continued allegiance to a pathological liar). Indeed, its to a point where if Trump makes a claim, the safest course is to presume he is lying until proven otherwise (which will not happen often).  A case in point is Trump's attacks on wind power even as he supports coal, perhaps the dirtiest and one of the most toxic energy sources on the planet.  Vanity Fair looks at Trump's idiocy and lies.  Here are excerpts:

Donald Trump has a long history of attacking wind energy, which he views as a threat to coal and his campaign to transform the planet into a truck-stop urinal, the kind you have to unlock with a key attached to a giant steering wheel. “It’s Friday,” he tweeted one innocent afternoon in August 2012. “How many bald eagles did wind turbines kill today?” A couple months later, he opined: “If Obama keeps pushing wind turbines our country will go down the tubes economically, environmentally & aesthetically,” not mentioning that his own personal aesthetic could be best described as “Louis XIV projectile vomit.” He spent most of 2013 and 2014 fighting Scotland‘s First Minister over plans to build an offshore wind farm near his Aberdeenshire golf course, telling an Irish paper that “wind farms are a disaster for Scotland, like Pan Am 103 . . . Returning to his avian anxieties, the noted animal-rights activist told a West Virginia crowd last summer, “You look underneath some of those windmills, it’s like a killing field [for] birds.” 

His concerns, it seems, aren’t limited to wildlife. “If Hillary got in. . . you’d be doing wind. Windmills. Weee,” he told the crowd at a rally in Michigan last week during an aside that, were he not president, would be submitted as evidence to have him committed. “If it doesn’t blow, you can forget about television for that night. ‘Darling, I want to watch television.’ ‘I’m sorry! The wind isn’t blowing.’ I know a lot about wind.”

[O]n Tuesday [Trump] launched his latest wild attack on wind turbines, an energy source that has long attracted his ire.  “They say the noise causes cancer,” [Trump] the president remarked of the turbines at the National Republican Congressional Committee fund-raiser in Washington, D.C. “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations—your house just went down 75 percent in value.”

As virtually everyone on the Internet was quick to point out, out here, on planet Earth, cancer is not caused by noise, wind-induced or otherwise. Meanwhile, an energy source that does tend to cause health issues, as New York’s Jonathan Chait notes, “is coal, an extremely dirty fuel Trump loves and has attempted to bolster, with almost no success. Aside from costing more to produce than other sources of power, and in addition to enormous air-pollution side effects, coal also emits greenhouse gases in large amounts.”

“Wind turbines cause cancer” isn’t the first piece of medical advice Dr. Trump has dispensed to his followers. In April 2012, he tweeted a story claiming that “people who live up to 2 miles away from the turbines develop such things as sleep, stress and mood disorders once wind farms go up.” (More likely, experts say, the symptoms are psychosomatic.) That same year, he warned that L.E.D. light bulbs cause cancer, and that one must “be careful,” because “the idiots who came up with this stuff don’t care.” Meanwhile, he believes fracking poses “ZERO health risks” and is, in fact, good for you.

Trump is a moron and liar.  His followers are even worse when it comes to stupidity.

The Health Care Crisis in Rural America

Grafton, West Virginia

Here in Virginia, many feel that West Virginia's exit from Virginia during the Civil War was a net positive for Virginia.  That belief is re-enforced daily by West Virginia's near basket case status and its residents' constant voting against their own self-interest. Throw in the embrace of ignorance and religious extremism, and it is perfect recipe for a never ending downward spiral.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the dental care crisis in West Virginia but which is common in other rural areas.  One comment on the piece summed up my views:

It's an old story. Poor rural whites depend on the government but try to destroy it by voting for the worst people they can find. Republicans exploit their ignorance and bigotry to get them to vote against their own self-interest. It's hard to feel sorry for them.

Harsh?  Perhaps, but nonetheless descriptive of the problem.  The Post article looks into the causes of the crisis and the difficulty of finding a solution.  Here are article excerpts:

Lynnel Beauchesne’s dental office hugs a rural crossroads near Tunnelton, W.Va., population 336. Acres of empty farmland surround the weathered one-story white building; a couple of houses and a few barns are the only neighbors. But the parking lot is full. Some people have driven hours to see Beauchesne, the sole dentist within 30 miles. She estimates that she has as many as 8,000 patients. Before the office closes at 7 p.m., she and her two hygienists will see up to 50 of them, not counting emergencies.

About 43 percent of rural Americans lack access to dental care, according to the National Rural Health Association, and West Virginia, among the poorest and most rural states, is at the center of the crisis. All but six of the state’s 55 counties include federally designated “Health Professional Shortage Areas,” “Medically Underserved Areas” or both. 

One seemingly obvious solution is to persuade more dentists and other oral-health providers to come to places like West Virginia, a goal of various public efforts. The federal National Health Service Corps program, for example, offers up to $50,000 in loan assistance to doctors and dentists willing to work two years in a designated shortage area. And several states have passed or considered legislation authorizing “dental therapists” — midlevel providers akin to nurse practitioners — to provide certain kinds of primary dental care in areas where dentists are scarce.

[A]dding more providers will not solve the problem of rural oral health. People don’t go to the dentist if they can’t afford to, no matter how many dentists there are. “Affordability is the big thing,” said Richard Meckstroth, chair of the department of dental practice and rural health at West Virginia University.

And affordability cuts both ways. Recruiting more providers into shortage areas can compound the problem, said Meckstroth, putting local dentists into tougher financial straits by increasing competition for a relatively small pool of paying patients. The dentists who arrive under loan forgiveness programs also tend to leave after their two-year obligation is up, what Meckstroth calls a “revolving door” that deprives patients of continuity of care.

According to the state’s Bureau for Public Health, only 40 percent of adults in West Virginia have access to dental benefits of any kind, compared with about 65 percent of working-age adults nationwide.While the state’s Medicaid program covers preventive care for children, adults get no coverage except for extractions or treatment for infections. Medicare offers no dental benefits, either. As a result, according to the West Virginia Oral Health Coalition, 43 percent of West Virginians ages 55 to 64 have lost six or more teeth because of disease or decay; 61 percent of residents older than 65 without a high school diploma have lost all their teeth.

The lack of affordability and access to dental coverage in West Virginia is of course tied to the state’s overall economic precariousness. Bruce Cassis, a dentist who practices in Fayetteville, said access to high-quality dental insurance in his area has declined along with the fortunes of coal. “Less than 5 percent of my patients are affiliated with the coal industry,” Cassis said. “Thirty years ago, they used to be 60 percent of my patient base.” Today, the major employer in his region is the county school board. “They have the best insurance in the area.”

The same is true for the Perrines and Beauchesne, whose best-insured patients typically have government jobs, such as with the school district or the fire department.

Still, the dental-care crisis in rural America is closely linked to the broader economic challenges in the parts of the country that have not yet caught up in this recovery. “How you improve access in rural America,” says Meckstroth, “is to get people jobs.”

Bringing jobs, of course means (i) accepting the reality that the coal industry is moribund, and (ii) an area must be attractive to new business, often those that would be relocating from elsewhere.  This, of course, where West Virginia's (and much of Southwest Virginia) embrace of ignorance, racial bigotry and religious extremism and hate makes the likelihood of businesses moving to the area remote. Meanwhile, those suffering continue to embrace the very things and politicians that have brought on their misfortune.