On Windmills and Wind Turbines

 

Let’s get this straight; a wind turbine is NOT a windmill.

Never was.

Never will be. 

It’s like calling a donkey a zebra.

It’s like calling Chewbacca a human. 

It’s like calling ‘Ted’ Cruz... well, no one would ever call ‘Ted’ Cruz...

Never mind.

Let’s start with the basics. A windmill is a ‘mill’. A mill is a machine which grinds grain. Grinding grain is a process called ‘milling’. The machine which grinds grain (oats, wheat, rice, barley, etc) is a mill.

Many coffee drinkers use a mill on a daily basis to grind their coffee. These aficionados of freshly brewed java may call their machine a ‘coffee grinder’ but it is, in fact, a mill. It grinds the coffee beans to a smaller size that suits the needs of the coffee drinker the preferred method of brewing coffee to suit taste.

 Terms to consider is here are ‘granule’ and ‘granular’ which stem from the Latin word ‘granum’ from which the English word ‘grain’ is derived. How ‘bout that?

 Now back to our rant.

 A mill is a machine that grinds; a machine that makes granules. A mill granulates.

 A windmill is a large machine – usually pre-industrial – which harnesses the power of the wind to grind grain. Wind drives large blades or ‘vanes’ which cause the wheels and cogs of the machinery to turn. The purpose of the turning machinery is to grind grain.

The proprietors of such machines are called ‘millers’ as their enterprise is the milling of grain and the maintenance of the large machine which mills grain. 

To recap; a ‘windmill’ is a machine which utilizes the energy of wind to grind grain – i.e. to mill grain.

A wind turbine, to reiterate, is NOT a windmill. 

Admittedly, a wind turbine is also a machine which has large blades or vanes which are turned by the wind, however. This is undoubtedly the source of the unfortunate confusion. It is tantamount to confusing a cat for a dog or mistakenly identifying Mitch McConnell for a human. It’s understandable but dismaying. 

A wind turbine does NOT mill anything. Its purpose is to harness the power of the wind to turn a turbine which generates electricity. There is no ‘miller’. There is no grain. There is nothing granulated in a milling process.

A wind turbine is NOT a windmill. A windmill is NOT a wind turbine.

By now, dear reader, you’ve wondered why such a big meal is being made from this seemingly innocent misuse of a term. 

Malapropism, for one thing. Malapropism comes from the French phrase mal à propos, which means ‘ill-suited’. The word ‘malapropism’ was coined in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's ‘The Rival’s, 1775. A character in the play, Mrs.  Malaprop, continually misuses words. Sheridan’s intent was for a comic effect to ridicule the upper class as ignorant and unsophisticated.

The continuous misuse of the term ‘windmill’ when referencing a wind turbine is a show of ignorance.

Another reason for making such a meal out of this is ‘solecism’. Solecism is the misuse of a word or mistake in grammar. In the modern derogatory parlance of social media, a ‘grammar nazi’.

 The departed New York Times writer, William Safire, decried solecism as a form of insanity. The constant and consistent misuse of terms (so his argument went) leads to ‘solipsism’- the idea that the world is created by an individual’s mind.

 In this matter, the solecistic individual claims that grammar and terminology are irrelevant or inconsequential. The solecist is declaring a mastery over reality which is not real. Such a declaration announces not only ignorance but a mild psychosis.

 To consistently write ‘you’re’ for ‘your’ or ‘their’ for ‘they’re’ may seem harmless enough, but it is akin to mistaking the moon for the sun.

Or a donkey for a zebra.

Or a wind turbine for a windmill.

The ‘former guy’ (ugh) persisted in mislabeling wind turbines as windmills.“You know, I know windmills very much,” he erroneously speechified in 2019 when deriding wind turbines. That sort of ignorance must be combated. It must not be accepted into common usage. Yet, news readers, politicians and social commentators persist in this lexical error.

That is why such a meal is being made here of this solecism.

Wind turbines are NOT windmills.

(nota bene; when searching for images, Google search offered both windmills and wind turbines when asked for windmills. ugh...) 

Snake Oil from the Anti-Vaxxers

 

24% of recently Americans polled say the they will NOT take a vaccine for COVID-19.

According to a Monmouth University poll, one in four Americans “say they will avoid getting the vaccine at all if they can help it.”

https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_020321/

WTF- over?

This preposterous posture of ignorance and disregard for their own health and the general health of the nation is the result of the enduring campaign by anti-vaxxers and anti-science proponents.

There are folks who have prospered with a cyber-based cottage industry of anti-science insanity. These people (Ty and Charlene Bollinger among them) are hawking flimflam. They are swindlers of the oldest sort; they are snake-oil salesmen and the huskers for snake-oil sales. They are kooks devoid of medical certificates, degrees, authority, warrant or authenticity.

Yet, they hold a substantial number of Americans in their sway.

One must ask; How is this possible? The answer to that innocent question will fill volumes in the years to come as historians and journalists attempt to decipher the madness of the Trump years. There is not space or time or inclination to explore this dispiriting phenomena here.

Make no mistake, though. This dismissal of science is madness. It is a stark departure from sanity and reality.

However, the Bollingers (mentioned earlier) should not be branded as insane or included in the number of the deluded. Not at all. They are clear-eyed cons working a grift. They are making money hand over fist by hawking their snake oil and proselytizing others to embrace their anti-vaxxer nonsense.

Perhaps that is the most disturbing aspect of this social-media induced madness; that it is a crass, crude grift which naïve, uninformed people are taking as sincere concern for matters of personal health.

 

Not A Political Piece

 

This is not a political piece, per se. It’s not specifically about a political personage or about political process. It is about science. As written before, here, at the Palmer Report, science and the Biden attention to scientists will, if not hamstrung by political crab-walking, supply the solution to the many crises facing humankind.

Far too many have been made ignorant of science by cult-like thinking and theocratic propaganda. The MAGA-cult, QAnon, intelligent design quacks, flat-earthers, anti-maskers, etc, each in their own peculiar way, have caused the dumbing-down of the United States. Pandemic Deniers fit squarely within that bizarre panoply of anti-science and ignorance.

(Our last president, a dysfunctional toad of a man, was an amalgam of the collective ignorance and prejudicial superstition represented, in part, by the aforementioned cults of anti-science.)

I digress…

If this article were a Venn diagram, the reader would see a considerable amount of over-lap displayed therein.

One area of duplication that would be evident in such a diagram is between the deniers of the pandemic (which would include ‘anti-maskers’) and those espousing the ‘intelligent design’ and deny the veracity of evolution. 

To much dismay, COVID-19 has morphed into at least two new variants. This morphing is also known as mutation. The process of mutation is also termed ‘evolution’. The virus is evolving; it continues to evolves just as our species and all species continue to evolve. (Homo sapiens sapiens evolves far more slowly than any strain of virus, of course. We’re far more complicated.) 

Thus, we have evidence of evolution before us. The new variants of C-19 are more readily transmissible, possibly more deadly to certain segments of the population which casts the efficacy of the current generation of vaccines in some doubt.

In-Quiring Minds

 

QAnon. 

 It really raises lots of Questions. (See what I did there?) 

 It’s not so much intriguing as it is perplexing to those of us on the outside. 

Although the MMS and the lib-tard talking heads like to call the QAnon followers stupid and ignorant, they must be, on the contrary, quite bright and studious. I mean my head fairly reels trying to keep track of all the conspiracies. 

For example; a pedophile ring headquartered in the basement of a pizza parlor that has no basement. Really astounding! (Is there a star-gate or something to a Satanic universe involved?) 

Or the idea that a guy, JFK, Jr, was murdered in a plane crash by the Clintons but is still alive and working for Q? Is there a handbook or something which settles some of these basics? A sort of ‘Q for Dummies’, or something? 

To be honest, watching YouTube videos and trolling 4-channel isn’t really my thing. Perhaps it is a case of my being of an earlier generation which read books. My brain is woefully addicted to facts, sad to say. I get off on reading foot-notes and perusing indexes, glossaries, lists of dramatis personae, so a hand-book would be right up my alley. It could be in a proprietary cypher, of course, like the writings of Nostradamus. 

 Just an idea – I’m spit-balling. 

Another question niggling at my lib-tard brain is one that is a bit more... pedestrian. I hesitate to ask as it is rather crass, but here goes:
 

I was delighted to see that Q-Anon (Am I saying that correctly? I’d hate to make a faux pas like Qevin McCarthy did the other day on camera…) 

Anyway, Q-followers have meetings. How delightful! The camaraderie and sense of community was clearly in evidence. I particularly liked the guitar sing-along towards the end of the meeting. 

‘Where we Go One, We Go All! 

WWG1WGA. 

Brilliant! Very stirring! 

That leads me (at last) to my crass question:
When you all go out for lunch, how do you split the check? Is it all ‘even-steven’ or strictly ‘dutch’? Or is the bill picked up by Q? Maybe special Q credit cards? 

 I ask because when BLM or Antifa or #metoo meet, George Soros picks up the tab, as you know. That takes a bit of the bother out of planning Marxist anarchy, you see, although I do envy your sing-alongs. 

 In-Quiring minds want to know!