How You Lost The United States of America

You have. How? Wait for it…

I have a friend whose sister is an elementary school teacher. She had difficulty with one of her second-grade students, in that he would untie his shoes several times a day, but couldn’t tie them again; he would whine about their being untied incessantly until she tied them for him. So, at a scheduled meeting with his mother, she mentioned that the tyke needed to learn to tie his shoes. The response?

 “That yo job.”

That is a quote. And an example, for she was in no way alone in that opinion.

Nationwide, Americans think it is "someone else’s" job… to do everything. This is well acknowledged. Nearly everyone has a story about someone they know, wanting, even expecting special treatment from others at some time.

But there is a second aspect, invisible and truly horrible. 

_____________________

The average American – by extension, you – decided you would assign the entire job of “education” to teachers, even aiding and abetting the absolute myth that teachers are nobles, of special status if not divine.

Here are problems, giant ones:

• Parents lose respect in their own home as they claim apathy and ignorance every time their children ask a question
• The teaching profession has evolved into a political entity with no personal experience other than… attending school.

More than half of the instruction, training, and education previous generations received is now gone.

_____________________ 

Almost nothing is learned from family, as arguments about “education” revolve around testing and money. The teaching profession takes an adversarial position to parental involvement, which somehow has turned into a battle for “self-esteem” which somehow has become disconnected with either aptitude or achievement. Kids don’t learn anything substantive? Ignore that. Make sure they feel OK about it, instead. Be hostile to those who insist that your judgment is suspect.

How did you lose the United States of America? By wanting nothing whatsoever to do with maintaining it. For wanting to avoid judgment of people you knew in your heart were wrong, foolish or evil, because that was not only unpleasant but would expose your inactivity, your uselessness in matters of ethical import. You seized on the idea, "Judge not, lest ye be judged" at once, utterly fearful of Jesus' command at the real end of that story: "Go, and sin no more!"
You have never noticed that the founders of this country set up a system depending on you.

 

In all aspects of American society.
Including family. Which you’re teaching to be selfish and entitled.
I’m sure you’re a wonderful person, otherwise.

So you get a “participant” trophy, too.

Loyalty

You look for a dog that is loyal ...why not a partner?

We are told that somewhere in the vicinity of 50% of marriages in the USA now end in divorce.

I suggest that this is not necessary, though it is understandable.

As time passes, more people are taught that what they want now is the supreme consideration. Nothing whatsoever should stand between themselves and utter satisfaction. The evidence permeates media: we are shown a parade of celebrities who have decided they are tired of what has turned out to be the flavor of the month. We are shown athletes in every major sport who reject marriage, for whatever reason... we even celebrate their casual relationship that has produced a child.

But marriage is not the point, however it may speed probate courts and enable emergent medical decisions.

If you embrace a simple idea, commitment, before you engage in what you think may be serious relationship negotiations, and if you find a partner who recognizes its value...

...you may beat those odds. Especially if tough times come your way.

This lady DOES understand: a promise is the heaviest thing you will carry, and that the rewards of life are often on the other side of a... challenge.

May you find your own way so gifted, that your partner can actually be serious.

Who is in charge?

It's not "government". It's YOU. But not really.

As the political season has been extended to a year-round activity, apparently by popular demand, let me apologize beforehand for any offense you might encounter in reading only part of the story.
If you're not interested in politics, you can stop now. I don't blame you.

Only part of the story? Yeah, you're not really looking at legal actions in the news. For decades, I have watched political expediency set aside law. Please note that Reagan, both Bushes, both Clintons and Obama were surrounded by and buried in a pile of criminals. None of them got touched, no matter how much lying they did. You know you saw their fans loudly proclaim they didn't care, too - even before Facebook, outrage was not linked to education, logic, or reason. The list of offenses against the Constitution are countless.

Each generation has had the opportunity to fix this - to see that the candidate was *not* a liar and conniving miscreant bent on enrichening themselves.
You know in your bones that you now have one person in mind. Now, be honest: this applies to *your* favorite, too.

Each generation has been distracted so well that they only *react* to offenses already complete. I am sure none of you has an idea HOW to get a deserving person on the national stage for the next election - I don't know how to do that - but it's clear that the existing political machines are self-serving, that we have no moral superiority anywhere in sight. Nearly half of the country realizes that the existing government does not serve them - yet the other half is certain that this machine holds them dear.

Okay, I guess. Some owners do love their slaves...

The founding documents of this nation say that YOU are in charge, and that there are commensurate responsibilities YOU must exercise.
But that's the most unpleasant and most hastily-denied word on the planet: "responsibility".
All this time, you've been delegating *authority* to elected officials, to act on your behalf. In the process, you probably didn't notice that your collective attitude, "I pay my taxes, now do your job" has undermined us all. Having no idea whatsoever about what you want to happen, your will is now irrelevent, replaced with whatever that ruling class wants.

So you might be offended now that someone doesn't like your stance on a political issue. Sorry - you have to deal with it. No one gets to ignore a society's rules while they interact with it. That's not me talking. It's one of the laws of cause and effect.

Meanwhile, steady pressure exerted by the actions of Congress will determine whether hobnailed boots come to your house.

You might want to look at that now and then.

The Grievance Industry Wants Your $$

 If I can convince you someone deserves help, I can make a fortune

You may have seen, earlier in this blog, the tremendous hoax behind the term, "African - American". That's not the only case in which people are exploited for monetary gain.

At the sci-fi/fantasy convention, "Dragoncon", it was apparently necessary to single out some demographics for special attention. These groups cannot advance on their own merit, it seems, and so special attention is necessary based on... identity. Not achievement.

So an organized effort must be mounted to see that everyone gets market share.

This is nonsense.

The Dragoncon venue/universe encompasses every kind of performing art - emphasis on, "performing". In general, the audience absolutely cannot tell if the artist is LBGTQ or of a given race, and in fact this is totally irrelevant to them. Elton John and James Brown showed more than 50 years ago that people ignore such things when a killer product is delivered. This has been lost on the professionally offended today.

So:

When have any of us cared who the performer is until after we have seen their work?

To the point, there is serious money to be made in the grievance industry - that industry concerned with the outrage of... third parties. As we have seen the real achievements of minorities obliterated because they succeeded the "wrong" way, we see yet more Reasoning Deficit Disorder.
Such people who insist that the way to success is to penalize the already successful are deranged, and we should not oblige them. Especially heinous is the effect chivvying for advantage has on the market: standards are lowered. This is not the way to get excellence. The mediocre are not magically made great by calling on their personality.

Be careful. The issue is not that such people exist. It is that there is value being assigned to identity independent of contribution to society. Two excellent articles illustrating this are Six Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person, and Fisking NPD About Latinos In The Movies. I note in the latter that LGBTQ+ is represented on-air at nearly ten times their representation in the population.

Somehow that's not enough.

In short: you want success, my attention? Put out great work. Even Hollywood, the most savagely competitive environment there is, asks for that as it pretends to care about those who can't do that.

Electric Vehicles

If You Do Not See The Term, “Kilowatt-Hours”, You’re Wasting Your Time

It is a big deal to some that government is pushing the electrification of surface transportation in the US. This concern is proper, for government has botched many public measures, and “gasohol” is a major failure, wasting energy and foodstuffs in a variety of ways not discussed here, but easily discovered by the witful. 

Electric transportation is NOT one of those mistakes. Let us see why:

In Gray: Waste Heat (click to zoom)

Waste heat, called “rejected energy” by engineers, is highest by percentage in transportation services. Look at the ratio of black to gray on the right of the pink “Transportation” block. Not only does your car or truck idle in traffic, and run at other than its most efficient speed most of the time, it blows ~3 times the energy used to propel you out the tailpipe and another bunch of heat through the radiator, doing nothing at all but heating your vicinity and expelling poisonous gases.
This is the biggest reason electric motors appeal to people who simply don’t want to pay for waste.

So, here are some advantages of electrifying cars, trucks and buses:

• No lubricant service. Internal combustion engines contaminate oil, and a small amount must escape the engine in the process of lubricating cylinder walls. This is a major reason internal combustion engines fail: an owner has no idea what an oil change is other than an expense. You will see nice cars abandoned in neighborhoods all over America because of this - the owner could not comprehend that clean oil is necessary, and could or would not read or believe the owner's manual. Sealed electric motors flatly do not require lubricant changes.
  
  
• No coolant service. Though they last for more than three years in nearly all cases, gas and diesel engine coolants leak and age. Electric motors need far less cooling than those of internal combustion because they do not produce power by converting heat to mechanical energy. These do not overheat, or freeze, OR require warmup to operate properly.
  
  
• No transmission required. Though it is true that an electric motor does have an operating speed which is ideal for its design, it can be supplied through a Variable Frequency Drive to produce the desired road speed (electric motor speed is proportional to supply frequency), thus eliminating any need for a transmission, with its lubricant and other maintenance demands. This drive can be programmed to save energy. Most conventional engines must be oversized or possess added devices like turbo-supercharging to deal with acceleration or increased load, in addition to a transmission to match the efficient speed of said engine to desired road speed. The internal combustion engine demands a transmission because its operation depends on intake and exhaust resonance to move gases to and from its cylinders.
  
  
• Regenerative braking. When you want to stop, part of that energy of motion can be returned to the battery in a way that does not use up brake life.
  
  
• No storage procedures. If you need to leave your car somewhere, nothing rusts, gels or loses lubricant, and there are few plastics underhood to age and crack.
  
  
• Inherent high torque. Due to some interesting electrical laws, a 150HP electric motor makes about 600 lb-ft of torque. Ask a Tesla owner – you’re not tweeting along in George Jetson’s car. Ford has actually run an electric Mustang over 170MPH in the 1/4-mile, in less than 8.2 seconds.
  
  
• Lowers fossil fuel demand. The case can be made that most personal use is trivial. Look at traffic patterns during peak hours, and notice that nearly all of that traffic is within 25 miles of the motorist’s home. That travel is easily electrified. Fossil fuel really IS limited – nobody is making any more, period – and food distribution worldwide depends on fossil fuel for delivery without spoilage. That’s part of the industry that CANNOT depend on other energy. So it makes sense in the long run to cut back on oil consumption. Thinking the same demand just gets transferred to electrical power plants? Please read the graphic above and examine it closely.
  
  
• Simplifies the transition to durable vehicles. The industry now depends on continuous renewal of inventory and scrappage – even though it is not strictly necessary, even with internal combustion engines. You could be sold a car which lasts, but you aren’t, because it doesn’t reward companies with continuous income. This feature does depend on a major change in business models.
  
  
• No direct emissions. The generation of the electricity stored in the electric vehicle’s battery comes from locations amenable to far more effective emissions controls. Again, examine the above graphic.
  
  

Objections:

• Battery technology is environmentally expensive. True. Another market reality is that since multiple countries are competing for raw materials, their price WILL go up. Mitigating factors are 1) the recycling industry has not geared up yet, 2) Discarded conventional cars and trucks litter the landscape right now by the millions, 3) The lifetime of a properly built electrical drivetrain is several times longer than the best internal combustion engine and is far simpler, producing far less “parts trash”, 4) Fossil fuel supply chains produce spillage and vapor releases to the environment. There will be no electrical Exxon Valdez, or Deepwater Horizon.
  
  
• Battery fires are intense. True. They burn hotter than gasoline or diesel, too. You will note that many traffic accidents with fuel fires burn out before firemen act, including those that total the vehicle and/or produce a fatality. Battery protection isn’t bad, and it can be improved further. Electrical fires do NOT spread like liquid fires do.
  
  
• The average home can’t recharge an electric car. False. 
• Here’s why I say you need to recognize the term, “kilowatt-hour”.
  A Kilowatt-hour (kWh) is a quantity, a measure of potential or expended energy equivalent to a volume of fossil fuel. It is actually the equal of about 0.17 pounds of regular gasoline (make no mistake, gasoline is very powerful, it’s the way we use it that’s extremely wasteful!), and it represents the raw expenditure of one horsepower for about an hour and 20 minutes. Its advantage goes beyond the fact that most of its energy will not be lost through a tailpipe, in that it can be replenished over time.
  See, within the heat limits of the battery, you can charge that kWh in an hour at 1000 watts, or in ten hours at 100 watts. If your house has a water heater, you can charge up to a rate of about 1 kWh per 10 minutes. On a clear day, a rooftop solar panel that comes with the car could charge 500 watts continuously, more on a minivan.
  Don’t miss that this kWh isn’t going out a tailpipe. Gas engines use about 4 times the energy on the road than they need to move the car.
  

• No range. False. This actually depends on driving habits, just like with ordinary cars. The popular hangup seems to be transferred from the idea that you can’t charge the car at home, and somehow, the thing won’t work unless it’s fully charged all the time. Although some people struggle to keep gas in the car and can’t keep their phone charged, that’s not the device’s fault. In fact, all commercial vehicles, like buses and trucks in local service, will always have charge – and there goes a bunch of city emissions. Note that nobody is using interchangeable batteries yet – where you can pull up somewhere and swap your low cell for a charged one?

• Government intervention is forcing electric vehicles on the public. TRUE. Now: You may notice that this was once ACTUALLY NECESSARY because smog was literally killing people in population centers, notably in LA. While manufacturers struggled to deal with emissions restrictions at the lowest cost they could manage - meaning, they wanted to keep existing manufacturing plants and methods - we were saddled with gasohol and such spectacles as the 140HP Corvette (1974 5-liter, CA). Since then, the industry has stepped up such that you can buy cars that will run off and hide from even the best of the 1970s, while air-conditioning you, and getting double the mileage of that, er, stuff. You really think the Tesla is the ne plus ultra?
  

So, the TL;DR:

No oil spillage. No fuel trucks 5 times a day to your local station. Wires instead of pipelines, rail and trucking delivering energy. Tiny maintenance, giant reliability. Lower assembly weight and complexity. Silent traffic. Clean local air. Far fewer abandoned vehicles.

As it is, personal transportation in the USA is a tremendous mishmash of compromises, largely made with convenience as the major factor. This lack of logic is easy to illustrate: you may go buy a 200HP motorcycle, capable of over 100MPH in first gear, for street use, but you can't take a Kawasaki Mule to the store. The DOT is supposed to enforce standards w/r/t vehicle lighting, but any look at traffic reveals this to be a boondoggle, a waste of taxpayer money, as nothing is standardized and lots of vehicle lighting is ineffective.

When you think you have a right to energy, you’ve made a mistake. Figuring out how to do things better is really better for your bank account as well as the environment, and the likelihood that early measures will not be optimum is not a reason to abandon all progress.

Go buy a buggy whip and think about the horse. Cars and trucks are wonderful things, and we have not seen the last of them!