Benzene in Automobiles

I received a warning alert yesterday in my email messages. I cleaned it up just a little to make it more readable, but I certainly didn’t change the message. I want to use this as a springboard to show how distorted these messages can get and why we have to truth-check each and every one of them before forwarding them to others.

I have another reason for using this particular warning alert as my example; it reinforces a column that I wrote just a few seeks ago. In my column, Useful Car Tips, I made a recommendation on how to best utilize your car’s air conditioning. If you follow that advice, you shouldn’t have any trouble with benzene during the summer. Now winter is a whole different season...

Here is the text of the message I received:

No wonder folks are dying from cancer more than ever before. We wonder where this stuff comes from but here is an example that may explain some of the cancer causing incidents. Please pass this on to as many people as possible. Guess it's never too late to make some changes!!

Car A/C (Air Conditioning) MUST READ!!!

Do NOT turn on A/C as soon as you enter the car.

Open the windows after you enter your car and turn ON the air-conditioning after a couple of minutes.

Here's why: According to research the car dashboard emits Benzene, a Cancer causing toxin into the air of your car. Have you ever noticed the smell of heated plastic in your car?

In addition to causing cancer, Benzene poisons your bones, causes anemia and reduces white blood cells.

Prolonged exposure could cause Leukemia, increasing the risk of cancer. It may also cause miscarriage

Acceptable Benzene level indoors is 50 mg per sq. ft. A car parked in a garage with windows closed will contain 400-800 mg of Benzene.

If parked outdoors under the sun at a temperature above 60 degrees F, the Benzene level goes up to 2000-4000 mg, 40 times the acceptable level.

People who get into the car, keeping windows closed will inevitably inhale excessive amounts of the toxin.

Benzene is a toxin that affects your kidney and liver. What's worse, it is extremely difficult for your body to expel this toxic stuff.

So friends, please open the windows and allow the car to air out before you close it up and turn your air on.

Thought: when someone shares something of value with you and you benefit from it, you have a moral obligation to share it with others.

I went to my truth-checker, www.snopes.com, and learned that there is a mixture of fact and fiction in the above message. (If you want to read the entire Snopes comments and analysis, type ‘benzene in automobiles’ [without quotes] into their search engine.)

According to Barbara Mikkelson, benzene levels are actually higher in older cars, and exposure levels are higher in winter, which suggests that air conditioning is not a major factor in benzene exposure.

I am always skeptical about “facts” in the alert messages. For instance, did you notice that there is no reference source for the statistics on levels of benzene under varying conditions? The anonymous author of the warning could easily have dreamed up those numbers to make the warning seem more real.

If Mrs. Mikkelson’s facts—which are supported with a source—are true, then the opposite levels should prevail. That is, the colder the temperature, the more benzene fume exposure there is.

On the other hand, there is supporting evidence that benzene does present a sufficient cancer risk that we should avoid exposure at any level. That part of the warning is apparently true and good advice.

However, the benzene doesn’t come from the air-conditioner, but from all of the plastic that is present in the passenger compartment; stirring it around with a fan is not a factor in how much you inhale. The more important factor is the sealed compartment you are sitting in. Opening the windows should dissipate the concentration.

Now, back to my original analysis... I believe that the main meat of the warning alert has been sufficiently debunked that I would not consider it “...a moral obligation to share it with others.” However, it might be of value for you to air out your vehicle, even in the winter, before you condition the air with either hot or cold conditioning.

I also recommend that you scroll down and read that aforementioned column and follow my advice on how to air-condition your car in the summer. It has even more benefit, now that we’ve established that there is at least some risk in breathing benzene fumes.

Late Night Reading

I had trouble getting to sleep recently. I didn’t have a good book to read, so I went to the next best thing, something everybody is talking about these days anyway. I decided to read HR 3200, the proposed Healthcare Reform bill in the House of Representatives.

Now, if you want to read something that is sure to put you to sleep, this is it! It has more plot twists than “Anna Karenina,” “Dr. Zhivago,” or “War and Peace.” It is also longer than any of those three classics.

What’s more, it is written in some foreign language that nobody seems to understand, since there are so many different translations of it. And people seem to get really, really angry about that, and they keep shouting at each other.

I guess everyone thinks that the louder they yell, the more likely they’ll be understood.

Anyway, I started this long and boring text and before I got two pages into it, I was already lost. But I kept on reading as best I could, and then I got to a really interesting phrase up on pages 50 and 51. Here it is:
SEC. 152. PROHIBITING DISCRIMINATION IN HEALTH CARE.
(a) IN GENERAL. Except as otherwise explicitly permitted by this Act and by subsequent regulations consistent with this Act, all health care and related services (including insurance coverage and public health activities) covered by this Act shall be provided without regard to personal characteristics extraneous to the provision of high quality health care or related services.

Did you understand that??? Do you know what the phrase “personal characteristics” means??? Do you realize that “this Act” was repeated THREE TIMES in that one sentence???

Geez Louise, is that convoluted, or what? No wonder nobody in Congress wants to read those 1017 pages of weirdness. I’m still trying to figure out what “extraneous to the provision of high quality health care or related services” means.

Doesn’t “extraneous” usually mean “not pertinent, or irrelevant?” Oh wait! There is a second definition in my dictionary. Now get this: “Coming from outside; foreign.”

So, everything before the word “extraneous” is either irrelevant or not pertinent, or else THIS IS THAT MAGIC WORD THAT SAYS ILLEGALS WILL BE COVERED BY THE BILL. OMG, I just uncovered the secret plot!!!

Well, after that discovery, I had little chance of getting to sleep that night, so I read the rest of the bill and found zillions of other indeterminate phrases and words. “Personal characteristics” is repeated numerous times. And, by the way, the butler did it. Well, at the White House they call him the "Chief of Staff."

I came to the conclusion that whoever wrote that horrible piece of prose must have been a William F. Buckley (RIP) wannabe. (No, the late William F. Buckley wasn’t a Republican from Ipanema, I meant Rest In Peace)

I think the writer(s) failed. It’s no wonder people are screaming at each other.


(I have to include this disclaimer: Please try to see the humor in the above piece and for gosh sakes, laugh a little. There is plenty of time for crying later on.)

Voting on Saturday

I wonder how many people know why we hold our national elections on the first Tuesday in November. I’ll tell you a little later, but I want you to try to guess what the reason was way back when the United States of America was formed.

We have over 300 million citizens in this country, and around 75 percent of them are eligible to vote. However, in the last presidential election, as important as it was, only about 125 million, slightly over half of those eligible, voted. That is a disgrace!

I have tried in the past to convince our federal government to allow Internet voting, but it has fallen on deaf ears. One thing many states have done, including my current one, Georgia, is to allow early voting. This is a great help, since it alleviates crowding at the polling places. Even so, I had to wait in a pretty long line when I voted early in the last presidential election in 2008. I can’t imagine what it would have been like had early voting not been allowed.

My original idea on online voting was probably thought to be insecure from tampering, although I thought it would be easy enough to use Social Security number and a secure password to log in. I have voted my proxy votes for my stock holdings for years in a similar manner, and it works very nicely.

There have been numerous disputed ballots from overseas, especially those absentee ballots from our troops stationed in remote areas of the world. I truly believe that the disallowed ballots changed the results of several elections, and cost at least one United States Senator his seat.

Online voting would have validated those late ballots and those without postmarks on them. I certainly hope that we do have the opportunity to vote online someday.

Okay, that is enough time to keep you guessing. I must confess that the reason I know the answer to my original question above is that it was the answer to a Jeopardy question.

The reason election day is the first Tuesday in November is to allow rural folk to finish the harvest and to get to and from the polling place without having to travel on a Sunday. How antiquated is that?

Don’t you agree with me that we could get a lot more people to vote if we changed the day for election to a Saturday. After all, polls are open from 7 AM until 7 PM, and most working people work between 8 AM and 5 PM. That makes it improbable or impossible for a working stiff to get to the polling place and vote for about 10 of those 12 hours.

Anyone who starts work at 8 or 9 AM would be hard pressed to vote before going to work. Lines at the polling places are always long between 5 and 7 PM. After a hard day at work, would you forego or delay your dinner to go stand in a long line to vote?

It’s no wonder our voting percentage is so low. Saturday voting would possibly boost the numbers closer to 200 million.

Useful Car Tips

My column this week will be all about car tips. I have already given some of them to you, but this is a compilation of all the ones I’ve gained over the years, plus some I just recently learned.

I know that we all buy our vehicles and start driving them without ever referring to that booklet they put on the glove compartment called “The Owner’s Manual.” That is too bad, because there is a wealth of information in there that save gas, engine wear and tear, and lives.

In case you want to question my authority to be giving advice, I once drove for Greyhound as an over-the-road bus driver. I’ve never forgotten the training and tips I was given as a driver for Greyhound, and many of the ones you will read here go back that far.

Tip 1 – Always drive with your seat belt fastened, especially if your car is equipped with airbags. That goes for driver and passengers. When an airbag inflates and the person in front of it is not wearing a seat belt, severe injury can result, including suffocation and broken bones. I know that seems weird, but the force of that airbag, combined with your forward motion, can create tremendous impact. Buckle up for safety is a good rule.

Tip 2 – When you turn on your air conditioner (I guess all newer autos are equipped with an A/C) on a hot day, I’ll bet you turn it to “Max A/C” to get the coldest air. Wrong! Use the normal A/C first to exchange the hot air in the passenger compartment with the outside air coming through the fluid that is in the A/C to cool it down. Once you get to a reasonable temperature in the inside, then switch to “Max A/C” to recycle the cold air. From then on, no outside air will come through the vents, only the already cooled air inside the vehicle.

I also recommend that when you get into a hot vehicle, you roll down the windows before you turn on the A/C and get the really super-heated air out while you drive the first few hundred yards. Then turn on the A/C just before you roll the windows back up.

Tip 3 – When you are driving in any kind of precipitation, and whenever you are using windshield wipers, put your headlights on. It makes your vehicle more visible to other drivers both ahead of and behind you. If it is snowing, and your lights against the snow tends to blind you, then use your parking lights instead, but have some lights on. Taillights are especially useful, if traffic is heavy or if it is also foggy or in blowing snow.

Tip 4 – If you drive with automatic shift, learn to use the numbered gears or the “standard’ Drive—the one without the circle around it. It gives you more control of your vehicle when you are on steep downgrades or on any wet or slippery pavement. That in turn saves you from skids and also saves your brakes. If you shift from overdrive to standard drive just before you get on a downhill grade of 5 or 6 percent, you will notice that you don’t have to use your brakes at all most of the way down the hill. The engine will act as a brake for you. I guarantee that you will also feel more in control.

If you drive one of those “funny cars’ with a standard gear shift, then the same tip applies, but in this case, just shift down one gear to achieve the same effects. The top gear is like an overdrive, so the next one down will give you the control and braking you need.

Tip 5 – If you like to go “a little bit above the posted speed limit” here is a tip for you. Due to the inaccuracy of speedometers, most police officers, even those with radar units, will give you a little leeway. If you have a GPS device in your car, you will probably see that it doesn’t agree with the speed on your in-dash speedometer. The GPS will probably read 2-3 miles below the speedometer.

I trust the GPS, and I use it as my guide to the correct speed. On the interstate highways, I usually drive about 3 miles over the posted speed, but I have gone past many police units using radar guns at 5 miles above, and I’ve never been stopped for speeding.

I wouldn’t try the above on a country road or in any populated area along those roads. Obey the posted speed limit to the letter there, or even go a few miles below the speed limit. We all know about speed traps, so be forewarned.

Here is just one more tip about speeding and radar... If you spot a cop up ahead in the median, and it looks like he has a radar gun trained on you, please resist the temptation to hit the brakes. That is a dead giveaway that you are probably speeding, and he already has your speed on the gun. He is more likely to let you get away with a few miles over the limit if you don’t react at all.

I hope these tips were helpful, and that you learned something today that you can apply to your enjoyment of driving.

Take the Pledge

I have seen a lot of pledges going out over the Ethernet recently, and now I have one for you. I’ll get to it in a moment, but first I want to explain what brought about my change in attitude.

If you are anything like me, you get about 20 emails per day. Half of them are probably political or religious messages from friends and family, which, although interesting and informative, leave some doubt as to their authenticity or veracity. If you are tempted to forward them on to other friends and family, you should first check them out at either www.snopes.com. or www.truthorfiction.com to determine if they are merely urban legends.

I try to use one or both of the Websites before I forward, but that takes up more time. Then, there is the new dilemma: both of the fact-check sites are under attack as being biased, so we cannot absolutely trust them to be accurate either.

The messages I hate are those that have a warning at the end that you have to “...forward this message to at least 10 people.” Those messages come with a reward/punishment for your actions. I usually delete those messages—I’ve always seen them before anyway—before I get through the first paragraph.

The political messages are especially silly, because most of you already know my position on the current political scene. It also agrees with about 99 percent of the people with whom I correspond. Therefore, I don’t need to see the message, nor does anyone in that circle of friends. It is called preaching to the choir.

On the other hand, those of my email friends and personal friends who do not agree with me on politics or religion don’t want to see those messages anyway. They are not going to read and heed them, because they have their own ideas and positions. What is more, some consider them offensive. One person replied to one of my forwards this past week with a request that I remove him from my list of contacts.

I could go on, but I think you get my message by this time. If not, here it is, loud and clear—QUIT SENDING THOSE KIND OF MESSAGES TO ME!

Now, the pledge:
· I, (insert full name here), pledge that for the next month, I will delete every message of questionable value or truth.
· I will not forward any message that praises or slanders any political, religious, ethnic or racial person or group, whether true or false.
· Withstanding the two tests above, I will not forward any message of more than four paragraphs or 250 words, regardless of content.
· If I have occasion to send a message longer than four paragraphs or 250 words, I will forward it as an attachment, warning recipients of the content and length in the body of the message text. The recipient is then at liberty to open the attachment or delete the message.

I will be the first signatory to the pledge. During the entire month of August, 2009, I will apply the pledge to every message I receive. However, I hope that messages of that type will be fewer in number. I trust that you will sign, or otherwise commit to the pledge, too.

Maybe we will decide that the pledge needs to be extended indefinitely.

Government Health Care

We are being moved by the president and the Congress toward universal health care. On that we can all agree. And although President Obama is once again calling for speed of passage—even though the implementation isn’t scheduled for four years—more and more of the American people are rising up in protest. Their representatives in Congress are constantly assailed with petitions, faxes, emails and letters from constituents that are urging caution and delay. The more we learn about the 1,018-page bill, the more we find objectionable about it.

Here are two points that I haven’t seen explored yet, but both are terribly important in the debate over universal health care. The first is history that explains why health care costs are where they are today. The second is a projection that will shock you, because it is my estimate of where a lot of the money to pay for the program will be found.

Pretend for a moment that you run a business that provides a service. Further, assume that it costs you $1,000 in wages, benefits, payroll taxes, retirement, and materials in order to provide that service. Now let’s compare two customers for whom you provide your service in exactly the same manner.

When it comes time for the customer to pay you, the bill for each is $1,100 (you do want to make some profit, of course) and Customer A pays the full amount with no complaints. However, Customer B wants to haggle over the bill, and agrees to pay you only $600. You object to the amount, but you know that this customer will give you a lot of referrals for future business, and besides, he is adamant that $600 in the maximum he will pay for your service. You finally agree to accept that amount.

You just provided $2,000 worth of service, but you only received $1,700 for it, so you are now in the hole $300 instead of being up by $200. You also now know that any referrals from Customer B will likely only be willing to pay $600. How are you going to make up the difference so that you can operate at a profit?

Of course, you are going to raise the price for everyone by a few hundred dollars, with full knowledge that not everyone will pay that much. You hope that enough will pay the new amount to make up for those who will not pay what providing the service costs you.

The new price is raised incrementally to $1,500. Customer B and all of his referrals will not pay that amount, but will pay $600. And by the way, Customer B is influential enough that he can put you out of business if you refuse service to his friends.

If we make the service provider you run a hospital, a clinic, or a doctor’s office, then we can identify Customer B as a Medicare/Medicaid patient, and customer A as anyone else who either pays out-of-pocket or has a private health insurance plan.

Health care costs didn’t start to rise until the late 1960s, just after President Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law, and they really took off when Medicaid was added. I know, because I still have the bill form the hospital where my son was born in 1966. The total amount for a four-day stay, mother and child, was under $200. By 1971, when my daughter was born at the same hospital, the cost had already increased fivefold. Ask yourself how much it would cost today with even the normal two-day stay.

Now you know why it costs so much in both premiums and deductibles to use private health care. I also know why the hospital charged me $90,000 for an outpatient surgery, but Medicare only paid about $30,000 of that amount. Who do you suppose paid the balance? The same situation exists for doctors and other health care providers.

Now I’ll disclose that second point. This one you can ignore if you aren’t on Medicare and don’t have any parents who are on, or about to join Medicare. That probably doesn’t dismiss very many of you.

If the universal health care plan does go into effect, what do you suppose will happen to current Medicare/Medicaid patients? Well, we really already know, because they are specifically addressed in the bill before Congress. They will be placed into the same program as all other citizens. And whatever premiums are finally agreed upon for those in the government plan—it really isn’t “free” you know—Medicare patients will have to pay the same rates.

Now ask yourself a few questions here.
1. Will premiums for Medicare Part B go down, go up, or stay the same?
2. Will premiums for Medicare Part A be added?
3. How does the government collect those premiums?
4. Will your Social Security be affected by universal health care?
5. Who will now pay the increased costs of treatment described above?
6. What is the only means of saving money in government health care?

I think you get the idea that seniors are going to be hit hardest by the new health care, because they will pay higher premiums and will receive less treatment. The reason I included those of you who have parents on Medicare is because you are probably going to have to do more to support your parents, not just with health care costs, but with every day costs. Too.

If you followed this to its conclusion, you must know that the decrease in payments and in treatments is going to put a lot of health care providers—especially specialists and surgeons—either out of business, or out of country. That will make even allowed services much harder to find and will increase the waiting time of everyone. Does anyone in Congress even try to listen to anecdotal evidence from Brits, Canadians, Australians or those from any country that currently has national health care? IT DOESN”T WORK THERE, AND IT WON’T WORK HERE!!!!

Lest we forget them, there will be a few winners in this universal health care, but even they are only partial winners. I am referring to the undocumented immigrants and those who are on Medicaid. They will probably not have to pay any more than they do now for their medical treatment—nothing. However, they will lose under the rationing of services and the lack of qualified doctors.

The Next Civil War

One of the first things I learned when I entered the military (USAF) in 1956 was that our American civil War—also known as either The War Between The States, or The Northern Aggression—was still raging on.

Yes, ninety-one years after General Robert E. Lee signed the formal surrender of the Army Of Northern Virginia to Ulysses Grant’s Army of the Potomac, there was still some doubt as to the outcome of that four-year struggle.

I had never been exposed to the Southern sentimentality before that time. Heck, I hadn’t ever been below the Mason-Dixon line. It took me only a short time to realize that there were some “foreigners” in our midst. But then, come to think of it, I was the foreigner, since I took my boot camp at Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas.

The reason I bring up the subject is that it ties into my topic for this week; and that topic is indirectly tied to one that I posted a some time ago, the writing of The Battle Hymn of The Republic. I received a response to that column that linked to a website of vitriolic invective (whew, I love big words) regarding the penning of that famous song.

A fellow named Michael Dan Jones was the website author, and he was highly critical of Julia Ward Howe and of the song she wrote. I will include the link so that you can read them if you choose. http://www.plpow.com/Atrocities_BattleHymn.htm.

It is apparent that the Civil War (or whatever you choose to call it) is still going on for some people, including Mr. Jones.

One of the more fascinating facts about The Battle Hymn of the Republic is that I have listened to several versions of it, and the word ‘transfigures’ is rarely pronounced as it should be, with the ‘urs’ sounding like the word ‘yours.’ Instead, it is pronounced as ‘ers.’

I got curious and looked up the word in the dictionary, since I really didn’t know its meaning. Here is Webster’s definition:
1. To change the form or appearance of
2. To transform so as to glorify
If I interpret that correctly, transfiguration is the change in appearance of Jesus so that his body actually glows and his head is encircled by a halo; he is beatified. If that is so, then I suppose Julia Ward Howe actually believed that the Union soldiers would be Transfigured by their very act of fighting in the war. Now that’s a little overboard to me.

If I can believe what I hear from the current members of the military, things haven’t changed much in the fifty odd years since I enlisted in the Air Force, and there is still some rivalry today over the North-South alliances. I wonder how much animosity there is going to be over the next four years with a black president who seems to fan the fires of discontent on an almost daily basis.

We may yet have another civil war in this country, but it won’t be North versus South this time. It may well be either a political or a racial war. I hope I’m wrong, but I do see a lot of signs and I hear a lot of talk about it every day. President Obama and his party are not helping with all their baiting and class warfare.

If you are prone to prayer, you had better pray for some peace and understanding in this land in the coming days. Otherwise, Battle Hymn of the Republic might well become a national anthem once again.