Every Generation...

Did you know Americans used to scoff at the USSR for requiring papers to travel in their own country?

Imagine we are sitting at a table - a roadside café in Frankfurt, Germany.

It's 1936.

I tell you, "I had a nightmare. We were here, but it was 1946 instead. The Americans and Russians have bombed all of Europe into the dust, because this new guy running Germany invaded Poland, Russia, France... he won approval to call the Jews inhuman, and killed millions of them in gas chambers, with machine guns, diseases and starvation. Tens of millions more died in Europe trapped between immense armies - the Americans put a thousand bombers in the sky at one time."

Quietly, you talk to the waiter when he next approaches, and shortly the ambulance arrives. Smiling men in white usher me off to the hospital. Clearly I am mentally ill. No one could do what I suggested that Führer was planning; Germany is starting a new age of recovery.

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Every generation is living in the most modern society it has ever known. None of them actually ask for the purges taking millions of people to early graves.

But it happens, largely because no one can believe it, and so no one acts early to prevent it.

Take the lesson.

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Or not. Some people today are calling for "Red Flag" laws, in which an anonymous caller can cause a SWAT team to appear at anyone's house - like yours -  to search for and confiscate weapons. Yes, the suspicion a person possesses a weapon is enough to invade her home, destroying her property and critically endangering her life - all on the word of a person who will merely be charged with a misdemeanor after the door is broken, the flash-bangs go off and possibly the homeowner and her dog are shot. You, and your dog? When will it happen to you?

We have police in the schools.
We have our pre-teen children groped by ersatz police called the "TSA", part of the Homeland Security Administration, because their parents want to ride in an airplane.
Real police have the authority to stop you and put you in handcuffs until they identify you.
Really. You.
And some have the audacity to call others "Nazis"...
I have news: it's not just the current President making this happen. You're not taking the lesson, possibly consumed with the idea that if only those people could be ordered to do what you want, everything will be OK.

The Transportation Security Administration: Federal Charlatans

Ladies and gentlemen, you're being hoaxed, being sold your own fear.

How?

A number of people are making claims about "security" while pointing at the Transportation Security Administration - and they're trying to paint a positive picture. They're wrong to do so, and I will explain why you should be angry at being manipulated.

But where to start?

Okay. Look at the pile of confiscated belongings at the airport. Some are eager to show you a pile of tweezers, scissors, knives (including butter knives), power tools, even hammers and saws. They cry, "See what we have saved you from!"

That's Part 1 of the Big Lie. First: all of those things have flown on commercial aircraft for over 70 years without incident. If you know that people, not things, are dangerous, this will not surprise you.

At the extreme, you might be doubtful of this. Surely, you say, guns are a bad idea. What if I could show you that in the entire history of commercial flight, small arms fire to the airframe has never shot a commercial airliner down? Can I prove that? Sure I can. Just read through the Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Center site.

There is another part of the Big Lie. This is that if we only search airline passengers, the United States of America will be safe from terrorists.

Well, no. Not only do we not even search everything going into the plane (have you thought about the caterers?), we don't screen baggage handlers or even the TSA workers hired to pat you down. You can find dozens of on-line articles where TSA employees were thieves, or where someone was bribed to allow drugs to be shipped on a plane.

Question: if you can bribe somebody to put something on a plane, does that somebody actually know what that something is?

Now, let's step away from the plane for a bit. Does a "terrorist" only have a plane for a target? Of course not. Have you seen an Emergency Response Guidebook?

Oh, yeah. That should have opened your eyes a bit. Yes, we ship, truck, pipe and rail millions of tons of hazardous materials across this country daily. It's in transit right now - the raw materials of an industrial nation. That's us. Some of those materials are actually called Weapons of Mass Destruction when a politically-unpopular person or group has them. We just ship it around. It's right here among us, ready to be used to kill or injure thousands at a time.

We don't care.

So. What are we doing? For convenience, we are allowing ourselves to be presumed guilty of an unnamed offense for the crime of wanting to travel by airplane.

For convenience, we allow ourselves and our children to be groped by an ersatz guard force so abysmally stupid they searched veteran Joe Foss for carrying his Medal of Honor.

TSA Genius On Break

I suggest that if you are letting this happen, you should stop.

And if you are causing this to happen, at least wear the brown shirt.

Consciousness

I was able to attend a lecture by Richard Dawkins, possibly the preeminent biologist on Earth, and I was surprised to hear during a question/answer session that he had apparently not considered the role of evolutionary biology in bringing forth intelligence, awareness... consciousness.

All manner of people use this term without thinking about it. Does it lend itself to thought? Yes, of course. Only a small effort is required. You can actually sneak up on knowing what it is.

But you have to set aside your ego. See, you’re not the only one who has one, this consciousness. It’s not only your neighbors, too. You can see it in anything, any creature which has senses. It’s easiest to see in creatures which have high-enough powers of observation and intelligence to make choices about what they do. But that’s not strictly necessary.

Your cat. Your dog. Look carefully, and you’ll sneak up on the idea that every creature with the ability to tell the difference between “there” and “here” is aware.

Hmm. Aware of their position, relative to what they are watching, hearing, feeling.

And they use these senses to compete. Here comes natural selection: if you can’t compete, you’re just not going to be around long if things get tough. Gee, I bet any kids you have would be wimpy, too. I can see that all around me. People make bad choices. So do dogs, cats, birds. Some of them die from those mistakes.

Of course, people at leisure can make bad choices for a looong time and not be immediately affected. There isn’t any immediate enforcement for some mistakes. Eventually, some of them think that patently stupid ideas are OK. It's hard to pass up instant gratification for anything in the future, no matter how horrible.

I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what those things might be. I get mad pointing those things out.

But the point here is that things like intelligence and awareness are matters of degree, and that breeding changes those things in populations large and small.

Don’t get mad that you’re not the exclusive owner of consciousness. You’ve already seen your dog or cat dreaming. They have it. It was bred into them by Nature’s relentless culling of the stupid.

Don’t be next.

A Global Warming Issue: Automotive Physics

Magical thinking is not the answer.

Repeatedly, people have been offered (and repeat online) assorted schemes for obtaining a fantastic new way to travel willy-nilly in their own vehicle. I have seen boycotts, additives and a variety of biodiesel, hydrogen and hydrogen fuel-cell devices claimed as The Solution to:

a) high prices
b) dependency on foreign oil
c) excessive profits by oil companies
d) pollution
e) Global Warming.

I'd like you to study the issues. That way, you can avoid supporting some liar seeking public office, as well as make some decent decisions of your own as to what to do with your own money.

You may be tempted to dismiss the whole Global Warming thing, simply because you don't want to be told you can't drive somewhere on a whim. Also, you might be confused, or think it is too much effort to understand what is being presented. It's simple, and it's obvious: cars are being driven today, and they have not been before in terms of Earth history, because the idea that one lives a distance away from one's work is a recent development. It is hotter in the city, where automotive and service energy is expended. You can see this for yourself in pictures from space, like this one. Yes, that light represents terawatts of energy expended on the surface of the Earth.

All of the gases generated by the combustion of fossil fuels, and all of the energy generated by those fuels and by nuclear plants is released directly into our living environment.

There are arguments about what to do about this - but those arguments do not change the physics of heat transfer at all.

Okay. What has this to do with cars?

You own a vehicle with an internal combustion engine. Whether it is gas or diesel, it performs a number of conversions to get the energy stored in a pound of fuel to do a certain amount of work moving the vehicle.

Let me digress for a minute.
Energy is a measure of the ability to do work.
Work is the expenditure of energy against a load.
Power is the amount of work done per unit time.
Weight is a force, derived from the action of gravity on mass.
Mass is a quantity of matter. Note that this doesn't depend on gravity at all.
Combustion is a particular kind of exothermic oxidation, where something combined with oxygen reacts and produces high temperature.
Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy possessed by a substance. It is NOT "heat".
Heat is the flow of energy from a heat source to a heat sink as a result of their difference in temperature.

When your vehicle was built, it was designed with literally hundreds of compromises in place. The term, "blueprinting", known to gearheads, means simply to make an engine conform perfectly to the design document; in the process, the engine gains efficiency, which lets it make more power.

How does your engine make power?
First and foremost, your engine is an air pump. It must pump air to provide oxygen to the cylinders for combustion. Cylinders are a convenient place to combine fuel and air, burn them, and extract the resulting energy by allowing the expanding gases to act on the piston. As the piston is forced outward, an assortment of rods, levers and gears turns the fuel's kinetic energy into mechanical energy - the motion of hard car parts like wheels. The end result is to let you do four things:
1) Accelerate your mass to a convenient velocity
2) Overcome rolling resistance
3) Climb an incline, increasing your store of potential energy
4) Literally "pump" your car or truck through the wind.

Regardless of the fuel used, these tasks are FIXED by the configuration of your vehicle and the load it carries. You CANNOT dismiss any of these tasks and still move your vehicle.

What can you do?
Strictly speaking, you can only change the way you drive: go slower, avoid hills, drive less. The rate at which you do these things, particularly accelerate, has a tremendous impact on energy consumption.

There is a spectacular table of obscure things at this link.
A compact car uses 94HP worth of chemical energy to yield only 20HP of mechanical energy - forward motion.
Wow. Why holler about a "miracle carburetor"? That's why - if only we could recover some of that wasted power!

Wait a minute. The engine design depends on the fuel supply. I CAN'T burn radically smaller amounts of fuel in that engine. Gasoline only burns within a few percentage points by volume, mixed with air.

Can you change fuels? Within limits set by the design of your engine, yes. Obviously, you are not swapping diesel and gasoline without destroying your engine; each engine is designed for its own fuel. Manufacturing variation may make a change of fuel brand or grade useful, but you have to take careful records to make sure you're not fooling yourself. ("Super" gasoline has anti-knock additives which suppress combustion. You actually get less energy from a gallon of it. Engines designed for it compensate for this in their design.)

So, can you get another engine in your next car?
What kind is best? The turbodiesel, until electric storage batteries are improved further. All of the technology is well established, and special manufacturing techniques do not include the high environmental costs of battery manufacture.

Take a look at this link about fuel.
So, forget alcohol. Notice the 66% yield vs. gasoline? Yes, that's a 50% mileage hit, along with a bunch of other problems with water entrainment and cold starting problems.
See the Hydrogen's 279%? No wonder people are clamoring about it.

But can you use it? Your engine's not designed for it; you can make it run, but not well. Your engine design is wasteful of heat. The production of H2 - the gas, hydrogen, occurs as a pair of atoms - is well known, but it's expensive to make.

Take a look at the Treadwell site, and you'll see the company which makes oxygen generators for the US Navy; I used to maintain two of them on a ballistic missile submarine. Their 7L16 model used about 65KW to make ~100CFM oxygen and therefore about 200CFM hydrogen. Now - go back to the link above and figure out how much H2 that really is. (Spoiler: about 18 grams)

In short, the lesson is clear: no matter what people say, you're not driving a Suburban or a pickup truck cheaply, because energy is not really cheap. The production of energy depends on completely rigid natural laws. You have mistaken convenience for economy or efficiency, because manufacturers have made it so easy so far for you to zip around town in two-plus tons of steel. 
This bulk is not necessary, and when refinements arrive, you'll appreciate them. After all, a modern Corvette, complete with catalytic converters, will run away and hide from a Plymouth Superbird - while getting twice the mileage, running the A/C, displaying GPS info and listening to the stereo. 
Other examples abound!

Your Health Care Should be Yours - Not Up To Others

The "Affordable Care Act" Established That You Are A Commodity

Keep these things up front where you can remember them:

• "Health insurance", as discussed today, is simply socialized medicine. Be honest and enforce that term.

• The entire purpose of "health insurance" is to pay doctors, not you. Someone has to be paid to treat you, because nothing is free. Money is not coming to you.

• If you do not pay, you are not a customer, you are a commodity. Things will be done by policy, not the way you desire. Your wishes simply will not be considered, however much you believe Santa is real.

• A policy is not treatment. If you do not make the market favor health care providers, no one will treat you. Your policy, subsidized by government or not, will be worthless.

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Basic questions do not get asked as often or as loudly as they should:

• Why should I ever pay for something I DO NOT RECEIVE?
• Why should government - really "other people" - pay anything you can handle?
• Do you recognize that all resources, government included, are limited?
• Do you know what your insurer's current practices are, and their relationship with your doctor? How about with other doctors? What do they have to say about non-routine procedures? Prescription painkillers?
• Why are thousands of people who have nothing to do with actually treating you involved?
• Why does the Explanation of Benefits - from an insurer - have dollar numbers on it that no one was paid?
  

Supposedly, a doctor will provide services for less than a "list price" in return for guaranteed payment - as the system pays money obtained by force from taxpayers.

What?

Really? The doctor doesn't adjust his prices to deal with the overhead of hundreds of forms he has to submit, and the correspondence regarding his services? Extra people in the office and at the insurer's offices do their jobs for free?
Of course not.
So, people want government to step in?

Why? 

Aren't you really, seriously nuts, proposing that? You don't like what government is doing in the Middle East, you know public housing sucks...
The IRS is not your friend. Why would you even begin to think a Federal medical authority would be? Is it really that important for you to think that you GET something for "free"? You don't!

The Veteran's Administration has been proven to let veterans DIE to reduce their workload. THAT is a government-run healthcare system. Its administrators, just as is the case with health-care insurers, suffer no immediate penalty from withholding care.

Yet the Affordable Health Care Act has penalties in store for you if you get care other than by Federally approved means. Your health care plan cannot be better than Federal authorities decree unless you pay a surcharge - and the bulk of you will pay thousands of dollars before you get one Band-Aid™.
Yes, you're sick; sorry, fill out the forms and wait. Wait some more. You've been promised that no one will be denied care. 

"I'm sorry, you'll have to wait," says the receptionist. "You're not being denied care, it just isn't available right now. Have you submitted your paperwork? Then, the system is working perfectly." Oh, you want to go somewhere else to get treated, because some bureaucrat has not got it through their thick head that disease does not wait? 
Sorry. You can't.

No.

So, you are sick. The clerk is not sick. You will do as you are told. Cry. Watch in the mirror as the disease eats you alive, count the bandages in the trash basket as you wait for the permission of someone whose income will never be challenged and who states that the system is working perfectly because paperwork is filled out.
Oh, wait...
In addition, this monstrosity is set up so that not only initially, but after you are signed up for it, it will reset and CANCEL the arrangements you have made with your doctors.

Doctors and hospitals are charging more and closing locations because of the costs of the "Affordable" Care Act - and small businesses cannot extract enough value from your labor to cover you if you work full-time and are therefore mandated coverage. So full-time jobs have been lost by the million.

Oh, joy. Did you vote for this? It's what happens when the ignorant clamor for government to give them something for "free".

"Free" does not exist.

Did you notice that the Affordable Care Act supersedes medical decisions made in your presence? Not only can you NOT keep your doctor, you cannot even keep the treatment she prescribes unless it is approved by someone who has never seen you.
Perhaps you have been told, “your insurance will not cover that” when your doctor wants to do repeated analyses, like MRIs, X-rays or lab work for rapidly-changing conditions. There you go: the “system” will work against you. You were charged for your policy, given a deductible to prevent you from using policy money, and then denied service... maybe in such a way that it's difficult to pay out-of-pocket for uncovered items.

The President of the United States LIED about this Act. It was pushed into law by "public servant" Nancy Pelosi, who said, "We have to pass this law to see what's in it." Why would you even think about supporting it? Why aren't you thinking about jail time for Ms. Pelosi?

_______________________________________________________

I have another proposal, which will still ensure medical professionals get paid, which must happen. Here's a message you may wish to send your Senators:

Dear Senator:

I believe I have a model for health care which could revolutionize the industry, improve efficiency and make you the object of public admiration. Bold claim? Well, let's see.

We should set up a new "Medical VISA Card" to change the system to a CREDIT model - like this:

• This card would be issued by an existing Federal agency or contractor to every person attaining majority, or to the guardian of every person for whom one is appointed, upon their voluntary acceptance of a contract. Chipped, this card would establish positive ID for that person. I call this a VISA card just because that company now has all the assets in place to do this. The program could bear another name; I suggest Galen , after an astonishingly well educated medical researcher of antiquity.

• The card would be for prescription medicine and for visits to licensed doctors and dentists.

• The card would enable the consolidation of medical records and practices into  "portable" form. Some states today insist that "your" medical records are the property of the attending physician, and some consider them to be yours. Neither of these views serve the public well, but with a secure chipped card, all records can be accessed with the card in a chip reader at registered office locations. This feature could allow vast improvements in the administration of opioids and psychotropic drugs by preventing or reducing hoarding and prescription fraud. Software can easily track the daily use of these drugs, exposing when usage exceeds the prescribed amount for a particular patient.
The secure database can allow research discover new way of combatting disease as new medications and their efficacy are studied. This will allow those who truly suffer to regain an effective dose.

• Procedures designed to improve the accuracy and monitoring of diagnoses can be approved and paid for by the patient, on demand. There are many conditions where lab work and imaging can’t reasonably be restricted to one or two tries.

 • The card would have a "threshold". Reaching this number would trigger agency review and participation. The agency would take over treatment costs and decisions once they are beyond patient capabilities. Think of a value determined by a person's assets - the method by which credit is responsibly extended today. This is not a number a person has to reach - it is the current value of assets as officially reported.

• The balance would be due from the holder to the "medical VISA" agency, exactly as bank and other credit cards are handled today.

• An interest rate on outstanding balances would be established to pay the direct cost of the program (overhead), and to support an investment fund to be used for catastrophic illness and disability of all participants in the program (benefits).

• Card holders could be shown instructions for getting medical attention, and encouraged to avoid using emergency rooms for routine care. Hospitals could issue the medical card (facial recognition software can prevent multiple, fraudulent accounts) to send patients to other clinics.

• Medical VISA card holders could build a positive, interest-paying balance in their medical account, as this is portable medical insurance. It doesn't depend on where you work!
This feature will eliminate the impossible burden now placed on business owners by removing the hiring and hours thresholds for "insurance" coverage through work. That never made sense.
Bingo. More full-time employment.

• This system does not discriminate between individuals based on anything but their documented assets, and then, only to determine when the agency steps in. It doesn't care about citizenship or race. If you are a non-citizen, you would be positively identified by this card.
This relieves the nation of the medical burden of transients. Also...
There will always be a percentage of the public who cannot pay for their medical care. This is a difficult situation, but until the system is self-financing, it cannot pay these charges. If you value health care programs as humanitarian and representative of the goodwill of the United States, funding MUST be established. Lying about this will do no one good.

• The card and contract is voluntary for those who wish to avoid identification and to make their own medical arrangements, in order to avoid identification and bureaucratic complications some may find intrusive and/or impermissible. These arrangements may be obliged to register upon first use of public funds for treatment, a reasonable protection against fraud.

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Make no mistake about the fundamental nature of this card: up to the "threshold" amount, the holder MUST pay. People simply won't be careful with other people's money. This is true, even if it is unpopular.

Current rhetoric insists on calling today's medical plans "insurance". It is not, because there is no one who will not receive benefits.
A credit model for the delivery of services makes more sense by far, immediately removing the opportunity some have taken to lie, to characterize health care as "free" - which is completely impossible.

Senator, people understand credit cards. It's time to re-establish and strengthen the patient-doctor relationship.

This will do that. Need treatment? See available doctors, check their reputation for service and prices. Get treatment. Hand the doctor your card. Pay the balance.  

If you find merit in this, feel free to add to or subtract from it and pass it on - because there is a truth you cannot escape or deny:

You will not get to say what happens unless you are the one paying.