jedcstuff

More pondering about freedom, war, reproductive control

2012-02-25T20:22:00.001-08:00

At times, I have pondered that the 9/11 plane crash fracas would not have happened if Democrats had won the 2000 Presidency, because the Democrats would be known to not have used it as an excuse to declare war on sovereign nations that had not attacked us, even though one was harboring a person believed to have masterminded the 9/11 fracas ... for reasons not very clear.

I assume (there is that word again!) that the Democrats would not have considered the way-out-of-proportion war response as being appropriate, and the instigators would have known that, and so they would not have bothered with the plane crash fracas, clearly intended to result in the devastating response by America, ruining our economy and ruining the lives of many American soldiers and tens of thousands of non-combatants in those countries. Yikes!

And the Obama Democratic Administration's involvement in the Libyan crisis seemed in line with that, allocating it mostly to NATO activity, and keeping military folks off the ground. Maybe it was still meddling in sovereign nation's affairs, however.

In Afghanistan, there were some deeper root problems, such as the reports of the Taliban men painfully ripping out women's fingernails if they had put Westernized nail polish on them, declaring a right to be attractive to men of women's own choice. This religiously-justified control of women's freedom of reproductive opportunity choice fits well with male desires to control reproduction by an elite few males. But is it America's responsibility to war upon the Taliban to right that wrong? Well, the current GOP considers even American women to not have the right to control their own reproductive choices, either. The difference is not very clear to me, right now, other than the GOP are not ripping out women's fingernails. (No doubt some menacing guns aimed at me could change my public-viewed mind a bit, of course.)

People are complicated in the extreme, as I have often stated in this blog, especially from the view of an Asperger's socially inept person like I am.

Yet that social comprehension ineptness has driven me to expend considerable thought and effort and risk to figure it all out. Even continuing a bit, even after the gratefully received knowledge that as an Asperger-afflicted person, I am incapable of comprehending the social intricacies that apparently seem so natural to non-Asperger's people.

And, the 9/11 fracas comes to mind at times. The hotspots of North Korea, Iran, Syria, Palestine/Israel, and similar nations, provide me uneasiness that a contrived knocking the chip off a shoulder (the Twin Towers were big chips on the shoulder of America) could be in the brewing.

So far, Obama has played it fairly cool, regarding such things. As the elected American President, he has his finger within reach of the Red Button and its lesser alternatives, that I suspect that far more power-crazed men-groups would like to possess by any means possible. He appears to have adequate self-control about pushing the Red Button and its lesser alternatives. And so a question explored here is regarding will the fracas-designers of the world, consider it a waste of time to do another grand 9/11 kind of fracas, so as to pull America - and her Allies - into financially devastating resource-squandering war kind of stuff. Puts lots of money into Daddy Warbuck's pockets, however, nevermind Orphan Annie.

All this who-does-what-to-whom centered stuff seems to be horrendously distracting away from the major resource-responsibility of mankind, and would seem utterly insane activities, except it fits squarely into the ancient basic mode of control machinations of who reproduces, vs who gets "Darwin Awarded out."

The media currently is pointing out the human sacrificing being done in Syria by the Syrian seated powers that be, closely resembles similar recent happenings in Egypt and Libya.

(I point out here that sacrificing a human by shooting a tank cannon round into his or her home killing them, is no less a human sacrifice than other ways historically done. Less in-their-face and perhaps not quite as formal a ritual, but does that matter much to the targeted?)

The American Civil War was the costliest war in terms of American lives, that America has known so far. Brother fought brother to the death. It seemed different from the current uprisings in Syria etc in that the American Civil War was about ending the supposedly righteous enslavement of other human beings. About the extreme enslavement by other people, by an elite few, plantation owners, as a rule.

I wonder, are these uprisings - in Syria etc - caused by such problems? More likely by oppressions that seem unjust by the folks involved. Thus they are more like the causes of the American Revolution than the causes of the American Civil War, except the oppression is from its own government.

I can get even more confused by recalling that in the American Revolution against England, fighting for our freedom, that slaves were the norm livelihood of our esteemed leaders. The Father of our Country, George Washington, General and then President, derived his income from slaves on his plantation, and major income was from growing the now-illegal hemp which supplied essential war supplies such as paper for writing upon and strong material for sails and rigging for sailing warships; and also by the distillation of whiskey, to fill in for the social-pressure-relieving-beverage rum that had been provided previously by England to America. And slaves, presumably fairly well treated but not free to do what they choose, did the work on his plantation. Much as even that of Thomas Jefferson, often considered the wisest man in the American Presidency. It was not until much later, that we did major soul-searching and realized that enslaving others, regardless of their skin color and country of origin, was not a nice thing to do to them; and, although harder work, all that could be done by free people for the benefit of free people, including the elite.

This winding path of pondering has led back to the question of whether outrageous happenings are not committed if the perpetrators do not expect the response to be what they want. 9/11 worked perfectly, it seems, to bring America to her knees and even instigate the internal big-brother fingers into everybody's pie, that some control-freak groups had long wanted to happen for them. And the even more basic question of Who Gets To Reproduce, so often controlled by religious groupings, it turns out if one looks. Much of women's power comes from their power to comfort men on a daily basis, using their in-built apparatus. However, that apparatus also sometimes leads to reproduction; and women declare the right to control that reproduction via their own bodies, including fixing mistakes. At the same time, some types of men unite to figure out ways to grab more than an equal number of women, for them to reproduce by, and nearly always they proclaim some religion or other, as their righteous excuse for doing this. And such men usually have brandished (or secretive) means for killing or maiming other men at hand with which to wreak this on other men, so as to eliminate the women's other options for reproduction; as well as making abusive regulations for women so as to control their reproductive options as well as their opportunity to provide comfort and relief to all men. The Afghanistan-Pakistanian Taliban are not the only folks afflicted with this game, one may notice in the current news streams.

Although it would no doubt elicit righteous rage from both men and women, were it to be said, I will sort of try to figure it out and say it, that if women were free to comfort and relieve every man on the planet on a daily basis, and had the aggregate responsibility to do so, and if there were means to prevent clever groups of men trying to prevent other men from receiving such comfort and even occasional reproductive opportunity, maybe there would be no more war. In such an idyllic scenario, who would want to launch nukes, disrupting it all, ruining a good thing?

Relieved of such stresses, and nightly bonded by loving, worldwide - we might settle down and start getting very responsible with our management of Mother Earth's finite resources, for which we supposedly are responsible: this is happening on our watch. With no more excuse of having to fiddle with the bad boy's machinations, we would have to take on the hard tasks of keeping our world alive, and of reaching out into the solar system's huge resources, bringing life there too, in time.

The food pill again

2012-02-22T19:20:00.003-08:00

A current satirical article "Food pills: A sci-fi staple"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-17131158 interestingly parallels some thoughts that have been getting my attention lately. The thoughts came from a wide variety of subjects, and came to no conclusion, but that is what this jedcstuff blog post is about.

The new item in my thinking is this: for each pound of dinner I eat, a day or so later, I then output exactly the same weight of excrement. The part I utilized was a miniscule part of that pound of food and drink.

Maybe that miniscule part was all that I really needed to consume, in other words.

Now, the ancient miracle is that one can eat and drink the huge amount of material, and somehow extract that miniscule part out of the vast majority of it, discharging the rest of the material back into the world environment.

We living creatures have been doing that for eons. It works. And fairly well matches organism's needs with what is produced by the environment. By the food chain, nature doing most of the work with no effort by us.

And our digestive system making up the rest of the task's work to provide the miniscule but essential nutritional substances that get into our bloodstream and travel around to nutrify all our busy little teeming trillions of cells.

Yes it works. Yet when our human biomass becomes too large a percentage of the world biomass, nature struggles mightily to get the top fraction made for all of us. And indeed from the change from hunter-gatherer to agriculture food supply, we have bent nature's resources increasingly to slave just to our nutritional needs.

Could the next step in the progression from hunter-gatherer to agriculture to something else better matched to human needs, to directly use solar energy to convert our excrement into just the nutrition particles that we need on which to thrive?

And thus back to the ridiculed food pill.

Or maybe bulk materials designed to mimic the delicious meals we so enjoy, but actually be of cellulose fiber and contain a few squirts of that which our bodies will actually accept into our bloodstream to power our lives.

Problem is, what about our silent partners in life, that inhabit our digestive tract? The ones that now actually utilize the vast majority of the substance of our meals, converting it into bacterial biomass that forms our excrement? Nearly all of what we enjoy eating, actually goes to feed this trillions-population tiny critter zoo we carry around in our digestion tract. They also make some of the essential nutrients we need to live, as part of it all.

Maybe we can figure out ways to make this whole system a lot more efficient.

No more inhumane cattle feedlots, pigs living life in a little cage, chickens in tiny individual cages until slaughtered. Why not have far fewer of them and keep them in living conditions pleasant to each of them, while we get our nutrition through more direct means?

We human beings consider ourselves fairly smart. Even at times wise and compassionate, too.

Yet much of science is raw trial & error, ever selecting that which provides less error. (Yet hopefully not losing out on the lateral paths too.)

For example, a couple decades ago I recall buying bottles of what was labeled liquid amino acids, a major part of the stuff we actually use in food. Liquid protein, take it by the spoonful. Yet eventually there was the thought that since the stuff would not spoil, bacteria could not live on it; so most likely we humans could not utilize it either. Eventually it vanished from the store shelves, in the consumer process that efficiently evaluates such things. (Assuming, of course that we are not too bamboozled by the enormous ad machine.)

Population grows, fortunately. More hands to the task of creating better civilization. We took on the task of agriculture and made it work. It took a long struggle to refine agriculture and is still a work in progress.

Lab-grown meat is making progress nowadays, long a sci fi dream too. Just take a few cell samples from cattle, pigs, chickens, fish; and then let those archetype animals get back into their natural-world lives, while we grow food from those cell's designs, to provide our need for meat.

But in the design and contrivance of the nutritional bath in which that lab-grown meat thrives, why not just be more efficient and let it directly nutrify our own cells?

And even fruit and nuts, grain of all types, even vegetables, could their substance be more efficiently be converted into our nutrition as powered by sunlight? As well as provide the above-mentioned nutritional bath for growing meat cells, either in lab-grown meat or directly in ourselves.

Well, I cringe at the thought of enduring three nutrition injections a day, instead of nice hot tasty meals. I much prefer the above-mentioned idea of flavored and textured cellulose meals containing a few squirts of the nutritional components that we actually utilize.

I think it is time for us to go the next step beyond agriculture, and give nature back what she needs to again thrive in diversity. Can we be that smart, wise, compassionate, responsible?

Looking at most of the ongoing news, it does not look very likely.

Human thought and effort seems to mostly instead be bent to the task of destroying or effectively enslaving other humans, largely in the fantasy that specific male lineages each have superiority over the others as supposedly favoritely ordained by the Creator Himself. Reminds me too much of the battles in nature of whales and deer and wolves of one male striving to impregnate the whole next generation with his Creator's supposedly favored genes. Well, anyway, "proven" by which males survive the attacks on each other, of course.

Mankind was supposed to be lots more wise and smarter and responsible in the management of the world's nature than all that.

And, sometimes, we are.

On cellular phones and EMR physiological effects in general

2012-02-22T12:53:00.000-08:00

A long-time acquaintance asked a question of me regarding possible effects of cellular phone usage on a person's split-second decisions. So I thought some of my ponderings about that would make a potentially useful blog post here, in my blog that seems unnoticed by others, or at least disdained. He had originally forwarded an article about electric car EMR proclamations. My reply is as follows, more or less:

Thanks for forwarding the EMR electric car item to me. I guess I replied too heavily. I have looked into the car EMR thing for over a decade and concluded that car manufacturers fixed the problem in later models OK. But the new electric cars, I don't know; would have far larger field strengths to start with, and who knows if the engineers that had fixed the older cars' EMR problems, might have not left a legacy for the newer folks. That was mostly a leukemia problem, BTW.

The case you are considering about the cell phone effects on brains and subtle decisions people make, is an important one, in my opinion.

There are large numbers of factors involved in making such decisions, and separating them out to make a particular one causative in a specific instance, such as you have described, is not easy to do.

Anatomy and neural configurations with the dynamic signal patterns ongoing, might well determine the result, if one could define all that down to the moment of decision. So one needs to make the problem smaller in hopes of making it workable to a solution.

One of the persons could be in a greater hurry, and mind engrossed in the urgent task about to be done, and stepped off the curb early so as to get a head start, but was distracted from checking re oncoming cars, by the busy thoughts. Lots of inputs could have caused the failure to stop-look-listen at that moment.

And one kind of that thought process disruption could be due to EMR effects, I think. Could be, but not necessarily so.

This is beyond the distraction effects if the person has a cell phone to ear and is talking on the phone when stepping off the curb, of course. And also beyond the subtle unobvious effects people sometimes have on each other, unrelated to cell phones and EMR. And of course is beyond the games people play against each other at times, which can get quite unobvious and even lethal if set up just right. The turmoil of bunches of people's doings is usually mostly beyond my comprehension, and too often of tragic results.

Much of my life has been spent in the presence of EMR of many kinds. It was involved in my career in electronics, as an incidental factor. I eventually came to the conclusion that there are injurious electrical fields, but one can deal with them if one knows about them and puts a bit of distance between oneself and the source.

I have concluded at this point that there are three basic kinds of EMR that can be injurious to a person, and they all blend into each other in some ways. They range from the high powered directed microwave beam that can cause a severe headache in a brief moment of being hit by it, and the resulting headache and thought disruption can last for weeks afterwards; I have been the target of such a weapon used from a vehicle but I had seen the microwave transmitter horn aimed at me too, thus was able to figure out something of the source, if not the reason. This appears to not be an accidental thing but rather a deliberate assault kind of thing. Other kinds of microwave beams can instead take a longer time but be a bit like being slowly cooked in a microwave oven, also a sneaky assaultive thing. Back at the end of the Cold War, the Soviets sold a technology to an American group, that used microwaves supposedly for sedating rowdy patients in mental hospitals from a distance - and no doubt other folks, too, as some people are ever making clever power plays on each other.

The second basic type of potentially injurious EMR is of much shorter range and much lower frequency. The common wall warts that plug into wall AC sockets to power our many electronic gadgets is one example of this kind of source. But the range of such signals is quite short, staying a few inches away often is enough for safety, as well as not being there physically very long. Some electric motors, like used in some small fans, or even older electric clocks, can put out a huge EMR field that can at least temporarily fog up a person's thinking, and might cause long lasting mental disruption. The back part of the old CRT type computer monitors were also a source of this problem, especially in the early ones; but it was not entirely solvable, so the flat screen LCD computer screens are much better - though they have their own shorter range problem from their back lighting.

The third type of EMR problem is one of my own hypotheses and have not read of it anywhere in the literature. I would call it "pattern effects" and is quite mysterious to me; it seems to be an effect caused by the pattern of electrical circuitry and steady state signals ongoing in them, and has an effect only at very close distance.

All three of the above could be ongoing when one has a cellular phone to one's ear. There is the short wavelength radio frequency being emitted by the antenna. There is the low frequency magnetic fields by transformers in its power supply, in some phones. And finally, the incidental effects of the pattern of the electrical circuitry and recurrent signals flowing through them.

Whether any or all of these factors is causing a problem short or long term with a given person, is not known unless properly evaluated. And that would not be easy to do. And there is no incentive by the cellular phone people to pay to evaluate, especially if there were possibility that it might not be in their favor. Corporations usually have a physicist talk about effects of a motionless magnet of some field strength, and falsely imply that its benign effects are the same as an alternating magnetic field of the same strength. And there are many kinds of cell phones, each would need to adequately be evaluated. It is not being done, as far as I know.

There are also the previously mentioned lower frequency-specific effects of alternating magnetic fields, affecting some bodily functions, as played with by Tesla among others - remember the white-suited Mark Twain incident I mentioned.

I also have had a long time hobby that is frequency specific, but involves essentially no magnetic fields, but instead uses the small currents delivered between a couple of copper pipe handholds at a voltage around 9 volts. These are pulsed signals, and follows discoveries made by others far more informed in the field than I am. But I have built and tested instruments that push the envelope a bit and thus give me a sense of doing something potentially useful to mankind. Not likely to be used - people consider me a nobody and thus to be ignored - but I make the possibility happen. Among them are very specific bioresonant frequency signals that appear to target some kinds of parasites that sometimes set up housekeeping in the brain, such as Ascaris or Shigella flexneri; and thus the signals can help remove a potential disruptor of a person's mental function a little, if done correctly. Seems to be helping me, for example. I have made a couple web pages about that, see
http://www.audioprogrammedzapper.com/ if interested.

I consider it best to use a headset for a cell phone, and have the cell phone itself kept in a carrying case down away from the head and preferably from important internal organs, and have something keeping it away from the body an inch or two. Or, in my case, keep the cell phone turned off unless needing to make a call or waiting for a call to arrive in a brief time, thus minimizing the exposure time.

And it is important to have enough of one's attention to be utilized in self awareness and ongoing situational awareness, to avoid the distraction factor too, but that is not necessarily part of the EMR thing, although ongoing EMR might also subtly interfere with the instantaneous decision-making of the brain.

People do not generally ask my opinion about such things, so I hope I have not bored you too much with my taking the opportunity to pour out my otherwise unexpressed opinions on the subject. Thanks for asking, it helps my frustration about it all, a bit.

Equipment can usually be designed to reduce most of such problems to a low level; but, people must actually do that, or it does not get done, and thus things become haphazard as they are now. And overall it involves some factors not taught in college electronics engineering. And, a person can only deal with so much complexity at any given time, including engineers; and their managers might not know or care.

Ruminating about life principles and my place in it all

2012-02-09T11:39:00.000-08:00

Another Superbowl Sunday has come and gone now, yet brings to mind football's apparent symbolism. Common male attitude of the world was to get on a team of males, act with them to undermine other males; small contests within one's own male team to climb in status hierarchy within the team; and females will obediently mate with your team if it wins against other male teams, and the higher your ranking in your team, the better opportunities you have for mating.

Taking a wife is mostly like receiving a prize for success and how pretty she is controls some of your status in the male group hierarchy. And this all is to maximize the male's reproductive success,who then strives to continue that whole system of being. Having a wife who believes her success is totally from the success of her man, she will subsequently use her resources to strengthen her husband's successes.

The archetype is for males to strive to prevent other males from reproducing with the females, so as to force the females to be limited to you as their only mate.

This gets spread a bit when lots of males exist, and a single male can be subdued by a group of males; thus the changeover to being part of a team which then strives against other teams, and also easily wipes out lone males not in teams, so as to force the females to not have the option of mating with those lone males nor other team's members.

Early in college I got enthusiastic about the home games; rah rah for the home team and boos for the opponents. I was more aware of the intensity of the excitement of the fans in the stands, than I was for the playing going on down on the field, however.

My one experience in playing football was in college PE class, which gave one personal experience in football, baseball and basketball. I clearly was unable to be adequately aware of what the rest of my team was doing, and my part in it all; and even less so aware of what the opponent team was up to. And I just didn't "get" the part about being physically violent to other people, either. At best i could carry out the appearances of functioning on the team.

This had strange consequences at times, beside the inevitable misfortune ones. For example, when I was put in the place of a lineman on the football team, best I could figure out what to do was from my memories of seeing bullfights, where the bull strove to bash the opponent with his head. So when I was paired up with the largest - and roundest - member of the opponent team - me being quite scrawny and on the short side - when the play happened where I was told to "block" him, I dove at him to bump into him with my head. Well, this did not work very well and fortunately did not injure me - I think. But later when I was exploring a fraternity, and joined it - SAE - and one of them was the same large round young man, who promptly gave me the derisive nickname "Funk El Toro," the inept bull.

Skipping over my subsequent problems with low finances, Asperger's syndrome with no support, getting severe tinnitus in Freshman year, getting ADD and gluten intolerance problems unwittingly, dropping out of the Co-op program with White Sands Missile Range where I worked as an electronics technician, then finally dropping out of the Physics major and trying a Psych major for one semester then throwing in the towel re a formal degree; I just could not cope with the unceasing internal distractions to be able to learn anymore.

A friend sent me email re back when computers were changing over from use of vacuum tubes into using tansisors, and the playout of the above is apparent in my reply this morning, and so I will modify it a bit and put it here.

Apparently thoughts set off in my email talking about computer bits in memory and of when a bit required two vacuum tubes, a simple type called a triode, because it involved three basic parts: cathode with its heater to boil off electrons, plate to receive those electrons when it had a positive voltage applied relative to the cathode, and the grid, which was a sieve through which those electrons had to flow to to get to the plate, and the electrostatic field of the negative voltage applied to the grid, determined how easy it was for the electrons to find their way to the positive voltage plate.

Electrons have an inherent negative charge.

When transistors came along, they worked somewhat similarly, in that they were composed of three sections: the Emitter - which was similar to the vacuum tube's Cathode; the Collector - which was similar to the vacuum tubes Plate; and the Base - which was similar to the vacuum tube's Grid.

Thus transistors fit right in with the two vacuum tube triodes replaced in function by two transistors.

However, transistors were in many ways different from the vacuum tube triodes.

They operated at much lower voltages and power they used, was their main advantage at first.

But the huge racks of hot vacuum tubes along with the big air conditioning units to keep they cool enough, got replaced by transistors to save power and cooling, which got to be a big deal when huge numbers of the components were needed to do something, like in the computers of the time.

Also, the conduction of current within transistors was not limited to the electron flow, as were vacuum tubes, but also current could flow in the form of "holes" where an electron could be but wasn't. So transistors using this mode operated the opposite of the electron mode type.

These two kinds of transistors were identified by the voltage applied to each of their three sections, to make them work.

The one that used electron flow mainly was called the "NPN" type, and the type that used the flow of "holes" was called "PNP" - "N" stood for Negative voltage, and "P" stood for Positive voltage.

And the sequence NPN or PNP referred to the emitter - base - collector sections of the transistor.

The NPN and PNP designation still persists to this day, as well as does NPN vs PNP transistors.

And thus the motivation to do the conversion between vacuum tubes to transistors which you spoke of.

Another part of all this is the reason why two triodes or two transistors were needed to create one bit of data.

They were paired in a circuit called a flip-flop, which was a circuit contrived such that when one transistor was conducting current, the other was prevented from conducting current, by the other transistor.

But an outside-sourced signal could cause the pair of transistors or vacuum tube triodes, to swap states, whatever one that had been conducting before, turned off and the previously non-conducting one turned on.

And stayed that way until it got another external signal causing it to flip back to the other state.

One triode or transistor being on was a "1" for the bit; or if the other triode or transistor was on, the state of the flip-flop was a "0" for the bit.

Other types of transistors were developed too, which would change the kind of circuitry.

Particularly the FET or Field Effect Transistor, which was even more like the vacuum tube triode than the regular transistor, and also needed less power to operate, and thus has become what is mostly used in complex circuitry that needs to draw low power and stay cool.

When the need to minimize mass- weight - when launching spacecraft came along, Integrated Circuits were invented, to greatly reduce the weight and power consumption of the flip-flops in it.

Yet these flip flops were still of the transistor types NPN, PNP or FET, just made very tiny and included the resistors and capacitors that were part of each flip-flop.

My friend had written some recollections of her participation in the early days of computers.

And also of the interactions between the other males involved, how they squabbled amongst each other during routine times, to show who was "better" than someone else, yet they switched to the cooperative mode when the fortunes of all of them went up or down depending on how well they all produced as a harmonious team.

My life as a technician is now more understandable, since I did not know how to squabble and thus was always the low man in any group, yet I was also quite competent in my work, which did not jibe with being low man in the group.

Supervisors would usually then set me aside to take on some loner job that required special competence to do.

But sometimes my high skill level, yet low man status, since it did not support the "competitive" nature of their world, I would be put on a loner task that was thought to not be possible for one person to do alone - apparently to break me - but I did not know that - and sometimes I was able to do it, which must have upset them a lot, in their ego ruled games on the job, now that I think of it.

But usually it turned out that managers appreciated my excellent solutions, and despite my lowest-man group status, I got promotions anyway.

It all irritated my peers of course and sometimes they retaliated.

They did not accept me as a peer, probably because my psychetype was the opposite normally had by a technician, and people prefer to buddy up with same type of psychetype+gender. (My psychetype was more appropriate for work as a teacher or writer, than as a hands-on manipulator of the physical world.)

What my fellow techs did not understand, was that I had been quite bright in high school and got a college grounding both self-taught and in first classes in physics in college, before I got hit by the severe tinnitus, gluten digestive system damage, and ADD, which had suddenly changed me from my prior reading rate of 750 wpm with comprehension, to not being able to remember what I had just read on the previous page. Very hard to study and learn that way.

And also that when working in the FAA, I went through their electronics training that was the equivalent of what an electronics engineer would learn in college; but it was not accredited and thus was unrecognized by employers, but peers did not understand my competency - which was part of their compulsive need to align in a hierarchy that supposedly was based on competency.

But that electronics education was back in the vacuum tube era, and I had to self-teach and take a correspondence course to learn about the early transistors.

And all the rest re Integrated Circuits, computers and lasers etc I learned on my own, often so as to do my work on the job - much as I had learned much of what I knew when graduating from High School - I was disappointed when I was denied college chemistry because college entrance testing showed that I already knew more chemistry than would someone who took basic college chemistry, for example.

My early jobs in electronics involved all-male co-workers.

It wasn't until my middle years in private industry jobs, that women became part of the work groups, first as "wire girls" for their craftsmanship in building things; and in the 1980s some women were showing up as engineers in the groups.

In my retired years this mostly self-taught transistorized electronics knowledge enables me to create such things as on my page
http://www.audioprogrammedzapper.com/zapper2012creation.html

In some of those IC's are many hundreds of transistors, making it lots easier for me to design and build such things.

You are an engineer ....

2012-02-07T15:52:00.000-08:00

Attempting today to figure out what can be saved from an external HD needed be cleared to take over some duty as supplementary disk drive space for my computer, I stumbled upon a scan of a letter that I assume has been stolen from my "secure" files in my garage, along with the ones that I know have gone, the very expert burglars who ever seem to be searching for ways to harm me.

This letter was written by my boss at the time of the peak of my career. It is a dim scan and hard to read, and was not very clear as the original. Handwritten, two pages, it was a letter handed to me at the time I (along with a room-full of other engineers) were similarly being processed through in a RIF. I had glanced at it in my daze, read a few words, saw that he was urging me to remain an engineer. Not much else filtered through my dismay at this latest difficulty in my life.

Not long before that, my father had suddenly passed away in distant New Mexico. A few months after that, the always-difficult relationship with my girlfriend had finally broken up (due to the endless pressure from her many significant others which included five mostly-grown kids, a husband who turned out was not divorced from her, and a hustler of strange relationship intensely with her; as soon as I had used much of my savings to rent a 4-bedroom house for she,her kids and I to live in, they immediately and endlessly battered me to leave, despite my desperate last-ditch efforts to have a relationship at long last, I just could not hold it all together with no help. She liked me, however; but none of the others did.) So I was still recovering from shock of my father's passing, my girlfriend and I breaking up, and I was sometimes living in my car and sometimes in a rented room somewhere, when this RIF also happened.

It was not just this bunch of engineers being laid off, a whole industry was collapsing in Silicon Valley at the same time, based on the flexible disk drive technology. It had been taken over by low-cost-manufacturing Asia; and without the manufacturing base to support engineering, engineering went too. The industry had been so prevalent that it was sometimes said that it ought to be called "Ferrite Valley" instead of "Silicon Valley."

A long story from there to the here & now. Suffice it to say that I was a non-degreed electronics engineer, competing with a huge overabundance of degreed electronic engineer for the same few jobs. Even personnel office staff clearly hated anybody who did not have a degree who applying for a position normally reserved for those who had endured the rigors of getting a formal degree, how dare he do such a thing; they would not even let me apply for a technician job.

It has been a bumpy road from here to there. I guess no other path would have gotten me here, exactly here.

Yet having stumbled upon this scan that I had made long ago, suspecting that hardcopies might vanish, a letter that I had thought about several times in recent times, was like finding a treasure. But, I could not read it coherently because of the very distracting dim handwriting. So I decided to transcribe it, so as to be able to read it well. At long last.

And in so doing, I see I missed a real opportunity back then. He might even still be alive now - but I won't go into that, since it involves a hobby of mine, which is resented by much too powerful folks, and I have prattled in this blog about it already a lot.

Anyway, here is the transcription of his note to me, with the Shugart logos and company addresses etc left off. Note at the time, my nickname had been changed to "Jed" as they were my initials - first name and two middle names - in a place full of Jim's and Tim's that all sounded alike.

"Jed,
I am most chagrined and not a little upset that I could not be here to give you this bad news personally, and to support you. However, the balance was between the importance of this trip for Shugart and our immediate and future tasks and the fact that Rudy knows you well and regards you as highly as I do.

Because of this, I know he will in all respects be a surrogate for me.

I think you had some premonition of this event, but you should clearly understand that it is in no way indicative of my feelings toward you or your abilities.

The plain fact is that this reduction has faced assessment on the basis only of any potential duplication of skills and knowledge which are most locally relevant to our tasks.

I am most concerned that this event not stop you from continuing to grow as an engineer. I perceive you as a very sensitive person and that you have been beginning to overcome some of your own self doubts, and to project your inner confidence, and I urge you to continue this trend.

You are an engineer, all you have to do is to continue to demonstrate this! No person, or engineer for that matter, is an island unto themselves.

growth therefore always will depend upon questing for knowledge and understanding, and this comes as much from asking as from reading or doing.

I feel you will do well and paradoxically feel that in some respects this change will be good for you, I just wish I could have continued to guide and lead you.

Even though I do not know where you will end up, I hope it will be in Shugart, please feel free to come and ask me for advise and information, I am more than eager to help you in any way I can.

Yours Sincerely,
Alastair Heaslett "

The last paragraph I do not remember ever having read before. If I had followed that opportunity, my subsequent career and life might well be quite different from the way it is now.

So I now have another one of those "if only ...." things to be on my mind.

Another significant point about all this, is that Alastair was the main reason I was an electronics engineer; he talked me into it. Several years before, it had come time for me to get a raise, and he told me that I was already receiving the highest pay given to a Senior Engineering Technician, and could go no further, in terms of pay.

However, he went on, if I were to take the title of electronics engineer, I could continue to get pay increases.

I told him I did not want to be an engineer, that would require me to be too rigid thinking analytical minded; I preferred to be free to use my full capacity. He told me that I had already been doing the work of an engineer for the past year and a half; I would just continue doing what I had been doing.

So, with some misgivings, I accepted. And thus formally became a design/development electronics engineer. And a year later became a second level one.

And a year after that, the big RIF.

The letter was urging me to continue on with my capacity as a design/development electronics engineer. And the last of the letter, was not even read, where he offered to help me do that.

How different it could have been, had I done that.

In a blog post here a couple of years ago, I mentioned Alastair Heaslett; I then had received a comment from a woman saying that she was his daughter and that he had passed away long ago of cancer, at a fairly young age.

Yet despite my difficulties in my subsequent career in electronics, in which I never again reached the title of engineer, I think that Alastair's belief in me may have propelled me on to do engineering level work as a hobby, both when employed and in retirement. I had mixed it in with my lifelong interest in space, and came up with the "Centristation" and "KESTS to GEO" major concepts as part of that (I was working as a tech in a small car alarm manufacturing company when I did the major creation and development of those space transportation concepts) and even more pertinent, in the design-development-test-usage of the electro-herbalism instruments I currently create as a hobby, that I think can help mankind very much. For my latest instrument's design including schematics, see http://www.audioprogrammedzapper.com/zapper2012creation.html

Ref posts:
http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2010/03/writing-sci-fi-re-management.html
http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2010/06/rewarding-comment-from-former-post.html

Rivalry what izzit

2012-02-03T22:22:00.000-08:00

Rivalry was, and still apparently is, mostly a mystery to me, what it is, why it is.

I think some exchanges on an email list recent days may be explainable by the other person considering himself a rival to me. Seems to make a bit more sense to me if I apply that viewpoint.

There probably have been lots of examples for me to learn from in my life, that were not recognized as such. As I look back, am reminiscing about a long ago thing that was "rivalry" or so I analyzed as so.

I had briefly transferred for one semester to UNM, in another attempt to get my high school love to again date me. Way back, she had complained about my old 41 Chevy. My first car after that was as dumpy. So I put my little money into a used car that someone had fancied up. It was a 51 Lincoln coupe, that had fender skirts, a sunshade, dual chrome plated headers. It looked like a 51 Mercury, nice looking but known to have no power. The difference was not easily noticed, in that the hood was at least a foot longer. Under that hood was a monster engine. If it got 10 mpg I would be surprised. The dual glass pack mufflers made it so I had to tool around town with a very light touch to the gas pedal.

I had parked on campus to go to a class, and when I got back to my car, I discovered that the car in front of my car was parked right up against my front bumper, and the car behind me was parked up right against my back bumper. That seemed odd, especially when there was 3 or 4 feet clearance on the other end of those cars.

I looked around, and noticed that I was parked across from the TKE frat house. I had a feeling lots of eyes in there were looking at my situation. I had a SAE frat sticker on my rear window; I was dimly recalling that among the games of being in a frat, there were rival frats, whatever that meant, and that the TKEs were our rivals.

So, it looked like I had been identified as a rival to their fraternity, parked across from their frat house, and was going to have to come beg to be able to get my car out.

What they did not realize was that extra of over a foot in length under the hood of my old Mercury-looking coupe.

Figuring this out in abstract - what rivalry was actually about, I suspect other people experience differently and more intensely than I do - I did know something about my monster of a car.

So I got in, started the engine, and put it in forward gear. It was not only powerful but it was also heavy. I gently pushed the car in front of me to skid a couple of feet forward; the engine rumbled a little while doing so, but with barely a fraction of what I knew it could do. It had a 4 speed Hydromatic transmission and it would peel rubber through the first three gears, and its roar would rattle the windows all over the place; this task was very easy for it. Then I gently backed up to contact the car behind me, and pushed it also back a couple of feet. Without a glance at the frat house across the street, I then pulled out into the street and went on my way, quickly forgetting about the weird people-stuff experience.

But my mind spends lots of post-activity trying to make sense of what had gone on in the day. And I concluded that the experience was caused by rivalry.

It still does not make sense to me, other than rivalry is a kind of game some people play to make their life more interesting; and being in rival fraternities enables them to know who is on the rival team. Or something like that.

Further exploring alternate history scenario re hemp law in 1776

2012-02-01T14:07:00.000-08:00

The sci fi character in Star trek the New Generation was called "Data" and was an android. He seemed to be from the archetype of the Asperger's Syndrome man. An episode that again has come to mind is where Data is trying to learn about "normal" people, and keeps a journal communicated to his maker, about these questions and data he had found involving the subject. I think I have written re this in prior blog posts here, although not recently.

I have been occasionally idly thinking more about my post http://www.kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2012/01/fragataggle.html which also was of the type of trying to comprehend the doings of "normal, non-Asperger's" people, and written a bit more politely than my more frequent posts about "what people really do do."

Although, it is a hot potato topic, inviting retaliation from somewhere. Nonetheless, it seems a unique opportunity to discover something about the workings of American politics, business, laws, and just plain egos in action.

And so, like Data might have perused in his journal, I explore further part of what I had started exploring in the referenced post, "Fragataggle."

What if the hot-topic illegalizing the growth of hemp in American agriculture, were to have been on the books back in the early days of the American colonies. I had briefly pointed out that George Washington would have been thrown in prison and his plantation's major crop burned. So following this thread, what would have happened.

Well, it depends on when this happened. Early enough, he would have been in prison before the American Revolution, and thus not have played his essential parts as General Washington in winning that war for independence.

And as pointed out earlier, without the use of hemp as the raw material for making our own paper when the British source of paper was stopped, war's communications would have been quite crippled, and knowing that, the war for Independence would not have been started, knowing it could not be waged successfully.

Whichever, there would have been no Declaration of Independence, no Constitution of the United States; we would have remained a colony of England, like Canada and Australia, among others.

And of course, without being an independent nation, the Civil War would not have been fought, so the intercontinental railroad system would not have happened to help open up the rest of America, and similarly slavery would still be the norm for colored folks. Surely President Obama would thus not be President, but more likely would be a slave on someone's plantation or manufacturing plant. Today's "Tea Party" would like that; but then, there would never have been the Boston Tea Party in the first place, knowing that we could not fight a successful war for independence without either Washington's participation nor hemp's utility available, as explored above.

Thus without the drive to expand our resources across the American continent, we would not have gotten tangled with Mexico and thus no Gadsen Purchase, and no Arizona would be, since it would still be part of Mexico.

The early Russian colonization of the northern part of California would maybe have become formed into a Russian state there; Japan had similarly made early colonization of the Southern California coast such as near Los Angeles, so Southern California might be part of Japan now. Those depend on the waning influence of Spain in those areas, of course. Otherwise the West Coast of America would be part of Spain, instead of part of Japan and Russia.

And the rest of what is now America would probably just be part of Canada now.

All because the current harsh law against cultivating and utilizing the hemp plant, had been put on the books back then instead of relatively recently.

So trying to figure out why that law got hatched up and put there, it could be useful to figure out who benefits by it. Not so much the toughs who derive fame and fortune by enforcing it, but the larger picture - thugs can go beat up on something else, does not matter to them who.

But most likely some big power and wealth gambit was what got the law against hemp on the books. And they might be those who would want the scenario explored per the above if the law had been put on early in American history. A Russian plot? Not a German plot because they would have known better than to start WWI and WWII, with the resources of America at instant disposal of Great Britain.

Who then? Mexico? Well, hemp's cousin marijuana has been having profound influence on Mexico, lots of people dying violently, but clearly lots of people getting wealth and power thereby. So, that is a possibly of instigator instead of fallout benefactor.

Or, one of the favorite games of powerful business people is to create a squeeze on some common low-cost part of American life, and force an increase in price to the consumer, thus gaining much wealth thereby, without need for increasing value-added. The famous example of soybeans in the stock market, as an example, and considered quite fair to do.

Since hemp has been part of American life since the beginning, even back in prehistoric times, it was a common item, low cost, and a major agricultural crop, such as even of President George Washington's plantation, back then. Its uses for making paper, clothing, rope, sails from its fiber is well known. The outstanding nutrition of its seeds, a grain, was probably intuitively known back long ago, but was not until scientific analysis techniques to show just how outstanding its protein blend is, and how well it is assimilated by the digestive system. And there are numerous medical uses of parts of the plant, and more being discovered, which could cut way down on medical costs as well as have a more functional population otherwise handicapped by unnecessary health problems. And of course the increase in sociability from smoking parts of the plant, called marijuana, although apparently it is concentrated enough only in a certain strain of the hemp plant. But strangely all hemp got lumped together in the same current law, and so that seems likely is the main purpose of why the whole hemp illegalization scenario was instigated.

Am sure this blog post would simply be stamped with some derisive name like "roper" - and thus not read and understood thereafter - by those who need it to be illegal, so as to continue their fame & fortune through lawfully attacking Americans.

Data might well ponder all this too, in the Startrek future, attempting to ask how to make sense of what people were doing back when.

Wheat gluten sensitivity change

2012-01-30T19:44:00.000-08:00

Something unusual for me has happened, a welcome change, so here is an account of it.

Occasionally I will give in to my craving for pizza, which typically has me down in the dumps, in a dimwitted lethargy, before even finishing the pizza. The wheat gluten in the pizza crust presumably hitting my wheat gluten sensitivity hard; I usually eat pizza when I expect to have the next three days not having to deal with anything significant; and by three days the glooms and lethargy have more or less returned to their normal low level.

So last night, not having fixed other dinner yet, I got out the pizza from the fridge, and baked it in the oven. Very tasty but a bit too hot at first out of the oven, it soon was gone. Back here at my computer I waited until bedtime, and noticed the usual dimwittedness and lethargy set in fairly solid, as typical these recent decades.

However, I managed to spend a few minutes testing an idea I had, before hitting the sack. I had recently created two sets of bioresonant frequencies for Cytochlasin B, and its 4th resonance, and I used my new zapper 2012 APZ instrument to apply them to myself through the handholds, about three minutes for each of the two frequency sets. (This is part of my hobby research in electro-herbalism ongoing for past 15 years or so.)

This morning when I woke up, I discovered I had slept the full eight hours, first time in a long time. I got up and did my morning routine. Somewhere along the way I realized that I was functioning as per normal, instead of being in the dimwitted lethargy depressed state expectable from having eaten so much wheat gluten the night before.

And that normal-for-me functional state continued, until mid-afternoon I seemed to be slowing down, so I spent another ten minutes running those two signals through myself as I had the night before. And since then, I seem to be my normal self. Which is fairly well for a 76 year old, enduring life without a woman

It has been a great many years since I have not had a severe reaction to wheat gluten, showing up as the glooms and dimwitted lethargy rapidly appearing and taking several days to gradually go away.

Now, I have been testing several things on myself in recent months, and have run a great number of signals through myself while working on preparing a library of electro-herbalism sets of control tracks for the experimental zapper-2012 instrument. I also have been exploring two other "alternative" devices, which may have had some longer term effect, maybe involved here too. But for now, my best guess is that it was the Cytochlasin B bioresonant signal sets, which is known to be found in pasta and is an immune system suppressant.

Whatever, it quite a surprising and welcome experience. So, this blog post about it. I have not heard of anything else that can deal with wheat gluten sensitivity, except total abstinence from wheat gluten and its relatives.

However, I need to keep on with these experiments, as surely there are other factors involved in my current wellbeing. Which, might not continue. Time will tell.

Fragataggle

2012-01-30T13:17:00.000-08:00

Someone with greater skill and interest in sociological research might well write a book, telling about the fragataggle involved in some particular sociological patterning of our time, exploring the "two things one does not want to know: how laws are made, and how sausage is made." The book would delve into how a peculiar law is made, and its effects resulting.

Possibly the most interesting one would be about the laws regarding hemp currently on the books. Exploring this in depth might provide important insight about our own workings. No doubt lots of uncomfortable insights along the way; and yet just for that reason, it might provide understanding so that we are less likely to repeat the same kind of mistakes.

Such a book might instead also go back into prohibition and its results. But the subject of hemp's suppression is still alive and well on planet earth and thus potentially able to provide more valid data.

The subject of hemp would provide much lively data, since it is an agricultural crop valuable throughout mankind's history, and only relatively recently got banned by the powers that be. So documenting the "what happened?" ought to be very illuminating about some significant aspects of our contemporary inner workings.

The pieces of this fragataggle, in my mind right now, are like a jigsaw puzzle that is still in the box, all shaken up and messy, yet I know that the pieces can all be put together and make an interesting picture, upon being put together in the one reality pattern.

Some of the pieces in my own memory, surely a tiny fraction that a sociological researcher ought to be able to discover in the wider picture now existing, include the following:

A. As of at least the 1950's, a time formative in my life, graduating from High School in 1954, hemp was an almost unnoticed subject, but most everybody intimately knew hemp in the form of rope, since at the time, it was the strongest material for its density that existed, even more than the finest of steels. It was scratchy to the hands, and very flexible and enormously strong. That was what one bought when buying rope or strong twine. I don't remember hemp being a subject otherwise, back then.

B. Somewhere, in the half century since then, something changed. It is currently a subject that has ruined the lives of huge numbers of people; not because of hemp's nature, but due to sociological things going on about it. Huge numbers of people lives have been ruined through incarceration for having the plant growing nearby, or smoking a particular part of some strains of the plant. Tens of thousands of people have been killed in Mexico in the process of getting the smokable part into America to satisfy the market for the smoke. How did we get from A to B? Something must have caused it all, and discovery of that sociological story would be a major part of such a book being suggested here.

C. Hemp growth and usage goes way back. The Swedish Vasa ship, when pulled back up to the surface in the 1960's, was found to carry rolled up sails made of hemp cloth, an illustrious ship that went down back in the 1600's. No doubt hemp cloth was the strongest cloth for its weight that could be made, back then; and it also stood up to the rigors of the maritime environment. Was a material critical to survival on the seas in the days of sailing ships.

D. The cowboy's rope of the Old West was made of hemp. The only rope material in use back then other than hemp, was the soft to the touch cotton rope used for clotheslines, since it did not have the strong scratchy ends sticking out along its surface. Use of any other material for rope, other than hemp, because of the outstanding strength to weight ratio of the material; and it came from a common agricultural plant, that was easy to grow and did not have the pest control problems of cotton.

E. The growth of the hemp plant now is a federal offense, inviting imprisonment if cultivating hemp. Yet the growth of hemp was the primary agricultural product of George Washington's plantation; nowadays, he would be thrown into prison, under the present legal system. No George Washington, and thus maybe no America, if today's laws were in place back then.

F. Back then, the hemp plant's qualities were critical for America's fighting the war for independence. Since England was the only supplier of paper to the American colonies, and since paper was critical in war such as for delivering commands during war, paper made of hemp was used. The Declaration of Independence was written on such paper. Without that home-grown paper capability, we doubtless would not have even considered striving for independence.

G. Some of my ancestors fought in the War for Independence, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. One of them grew hemp as a crop to get started in agriculture. It was economically a very important crop.

H. In the Civil War, sometimes rolled bales of hemp were used as rolling fortifications in infantry battles, no doubt even able to stop cannon balls, thus saving lots of lives.

I. Archaeological explorations of the American Southwest show that hemp was used extensively as a structural material by Native Americans in their daily lives, important to their survival. Hemp was a native plant of America and grew like a weed on its own; that is probably why is had the nickname "weed" back in the 1960's.

J. Besides the hemp plant's fibers being extremely useful for making sails, baskets, rope, paper, and clothing, more recently its seeds were found to provide one of the finest blends of proteins needed by the human physiology, even providing the brain-essential Omega-3's oils, and easily digestible in the digestive tracts of people suffering from digestive damage from parasites and immune system problems. This protein nutritional supplement made from ground up hemp seeds, provides perhaps the finest and most assimilable proteins nowadays, and is easily produced - by other countries, since America currently says it is against the law to grow the hemp plant here.

K. The pivotal sociological event apparently was the discovery that some parts of a sub-species of the hemp plant, if smoked like a cigarette, temporarily provided a peaceful feeling and even expanded some mental powers. It was non-addictive, but appreciated, especially by a population under lots of sociological stress. Somehow that infuriated the powers-that-be.

L. One of the key sociological issues to be discovered by the subject hypothetical sociological book, is how item # K above, triggered the law against not only smoking that peace-bringing, mind-expanding, compassion-providing part of the hemp plant, but also the banning even of the hemp plant itself as an agricultural crop, even the strains of hemp which were not particularly able to provide the relaxing qualities of smoking the plant's particular parts, I think it was called the bud of the flower, that was smokable to provide comfort and ability to have greater insight into some things.

M. Economic business competition often makes thing happen sociologically, and may have been a cause of the illegalization of hemp. One is that people would have to pay huge amounts of money to the medical system and pharmaceutical makers to get the very common tranquilizers, so widely prescribed nowadays, a billion dollar system that would not exist if people were still freely able to grow the particular variety of the hemp plant in flower pots or their back yards. Thus the illegalization enabled some people to make huge fortunes, through such things as making and prescribing tranquilizers. Yet, why would Americans tolerate such a rip off? Part of the social research results would involve discovering that aspect.

N. Law enforcement often cites smoking the "pot" substance as causing traffic accidents; yet, there were no scientific experiments to confirm that or not. I recall reading about an experiment set up by a police department to prove smoking pot would cause significant impairment of a driver, by setting up a heavily swerving back and forth driving course, to be used as a before and after test; the article was written by the guy who was to smoke the pot and then drive the course, presumably to knock down more of the pylons after smoking, than he did before smoking. The article said it would report next on what happened. But, I never saw such a follow-up report; I suspect that is because it was found no significant increase in number of pylons knocked down after driving the course, thus refuting the justification of the police's claims for its suppression of smokers of pot.

O. Somehow the overall growth of the hemp plant became rightful target by assault rifle carrying, flame thrower carrying, enforcement agents, despite that only a particular strain of the hemp plant was able to produce the peaceful mind-enhancing qualities of smoking "pot." Apparently such enforcers were either incapable of learning how to distinguish between the plants, or merely were not taught to do that before going into violent mode.

H. What sustains the continued oppression of hemp and its many benefits to America? Perhaps it involves the highly lucrative prison industry, being paid to lock up the otherwise peaceful people who had been caught smoking or possessing pot, non-violent people easy to control and make lots of money at it. It makes a way to utilize enforcers who are of the type who can use flame-throwers to burn down people's hemp crops without remorse, and gun down people who grow the material, or to grab them, ruin their lives, and get paid well to do such exciting things so necessary for esteem of the bully type of people. It gets them a bit under control and "off the streets" and supervised to some extent, and paid well enough that they do not need to resort to illegal crime to do their natural thing.

I. If hemp and pot were to cease being illegal, what would happen, and what would best be done to compensate? For one thing, the enforcers of item # H above, would need to be found other jobs to do, although perhaps ones that are not so easy as stalking and assaulting peaceful and non-violent harmless pot smokers. Maybe get them to do something actually helpful to the nation, yet still pays them well, keeps them supervised, and satisfies their egos. Another thing, would be the need to release the folks now in prison for smoking or possessing pot; this would also involve coming up with the money to compensate them for the disruption of their lives and probable loss of all their possessions. It would cut way down on the income of the prison industry businesses and thus income of their investors, something not very tolerable to investors. And the sudden loss of income in Mexico re supplying pot to America, would heavily reduce the stimulus for the drug wars down there, which has caused tens of thousands of lives to be lost and countless others to be ruined, in our neighbor country.

J. Somewhere in this hypothetical sociological book, it will be necessary to delve into the actual making of the sausage. How did the hemp plant get from being an important agricultural crop in America and throughout history, to being an excuse for righteous lawful violence and oppression of American people? Usually there are landmark law cases that set the trends. One would have to go back to the records of law, to find these court rulings, and the actual events that that caused them to happen. This would need to be done as candidly as possible, to provide honesty in the finding of the making of this legal sausage-like thing.

K. What could we learn and benefit by such a sociological research and book writing, gathering the fragletaggle jumble and making it into a coherent writing? Well, it ought to be plain that something happened. Lots of clearly big mistakes through the criminalization process gone awry. Some aspects no doubt similar to the not-that-long ago about prohibition of consumption of ethanol alcohol beverages, a subject of a substance utilized even in beer at the very dawn of civilization, and as wine throughout history, clearly long a beneficial substance to mankind; yet prohibition happened, gangs formed to supply it anyway, The Untouchables and the not-so-untouchables warred against them, much hurt to people all over the place, and eventually was taken off the law books, yet still kept under control by the powers that be, taxing the important alcohol previously a freely grown and processed commercial and personal appreciated material. Thus something seems analogous to happen, in that the growth of hemp and its many competitive products, would get "regulated" with the powers-that-be raking in a percentage of the profits, and gaining power by being able to say who gets to grow and distribute and utilize those highly useful and low cost natural products. But most of all, such a sociological researched book hopefully would provide very illuminating insight about the real workings of American culture in our time. And that might, just might, enable us to make wiser choices in the future.

L. What would likely oppose this? Right now, too many powerful and wealthy folks are deriving major benefit from the system just as it is, to make it likely to get corrected very soon. That kind of people do not give up power voluntarily, and they are real tough guys, with much wealth available to manipulate events. So, the proposed book might get blocked - somehow legally - by such folks, unless the book also shows how they too could gain a better life through the exploration of the realities of the multiple situations involved. Civilization progresses by the gathering of true knowledge and making sense of the knowledge, and letting it guide us in making our future better. If we choose to do so.

Yes good karma comes back too

2012-01-22T23:12:00.000-08:00

I have achieved another milestone in my electro-herbalism hobby research adventures: here is a web page quickly thrown together with photos and schematics of my recently-completed "Audio Programmable Zapper 2012" instrument, externally programmable by the user, from 0.01 Hz to 800 KHz, that I conceptualized, designed, built, debugged and have done some basic research with it. http://www.audioprogrammedzapper.com/zapper2012creation.html index still at http://www.audioprogrammedzapper.com/

The website page has a few photos and the as-built & tested schematics. I will put another two images in this post, below.

If the chassis looks like a lunchbox sandwich holder, that is what I used in which to build it.

And, I finally got to use my phase locked loop frequency multiplier in this instrument. Good karma does come back too; this one took some 45 years to come back. Works really nice.

Electro-herbalism utilizes the finding of large numbers of independent researchers, that living things, including structures within ourselves and the many types of tiny critters that live within us, have bio-resonant frequencies.

This new instrument that I have created extends the range of such frequencies up to over 800 KHz; and it is controllable by one's iPod or other audio player.

My low-key hobby research into this field over the past 15 years, has produced results that sometimes astonished my engineering critical viewpoint. Yet that viewpoint requires the acceptance of actual results as being valid reality testing. And so my new instrument could help me discover something interesting I did not know before.

Efforts at wisdoms for New Year's Day 2012

2012-01-01T10:26:00.000-08:00

As is traditional on New year's Day, it is a time for reflecting and seeking wisdom for the coming year just starting.

My thoughts at this point appear to be those derived in the past:

---- Be constructive and productive whether or not someone is paying for it to be done. This expands one's skill sets or at least maintains them, and in some small way adds to the national GDP, instead of the day going to waste.

---- Somehow utilize the principle of value-added to set price levels of goods and services. (This is in contrast to setting price to the maximum that the market will bear, while paying as little as possible to gain that which is price-set.) This would more directly couple expenses and value received. It would also provide a fairer compensation to those doing the work of creating the items to be sold; thus, those who actually do the work that ultimately provides goodies for others, would similarly live a bit more comfortably and have money to spend on others products, making perhaps more experienced wiser choices than do many who are just skilled at buying & selling.

It is only about whose game it is and who is able to play it

2011-12-23T22:14:00.000-08:00

The "other" major hobby I have indulged in, much of my life, is an Asperger's OCD search for a workable way for major access to space from the ground, and putting nearby space to good use in a suitably big way.

My struggles to design and build a bridge within a specific scenario back circa 1970, put my otherwise electronics focused attention toward the nature of materials and of the history of bridge building. That it succeeded in creating a 40 foot long bridge, with a 26 foot long center span 10 feet wide and easily capable of carrying the load of a car, was probably the needed turning point of my attention that got me to seeking a structural way to reach space, which seemed utterly impossible on the surface, considering the known construction limits of tall towers.

Multi-stage chemically fueled reaction engine powered rocket launch vehicle access to space had gotten enormous attention and by then had landed a few men on the Moon and brought them back to the ground; its potentials seemed refined by the best of minds and resources, and it still took enormous resources to put even a little payload into orbit.

The bridge studies and construction success became the idea of using the earth's rotation to swing around a tether, to provide the holding force for vehicles moving from the ground up into space; but then found the strength to density of materials just could not support its own weight of the tether, even without moving payload. A year later I had shifted attention to building a similar structure on the lunar surface through the balance point toward the earth, for efficient transfer of lunar materials for construction, and built of space rated fiberglass, and basic glass material was by then known to be abundant on the lunar surface. But the world was not interested; don't both them, they are doing something else.

The strength to density ratio seemingly insurmountable materials problem of an earth surface to orbit was way too hard a problem for materials researchers, and that seemed to put mankind back on the severe limitation of rocket based space access to space.

Reading of several people who were exploring a way to get around the limitation of an earth-swung tether for space structural access, I even urged the National Commission on Space to explore them in my testimony in 1985, but that was ignored in the commission's resultant report.

I sought why the structural access ideas Lofstrom, Hyde and Smith had put forth were being snubbed, and found the weaknesses of each of them, each severe enough to conceivable justify snubbing by the NCS. That report also had not mentioned my Lunar tether transportation system made of fiberglass, too.

So these things stewed in my mind until I got an insight that began to congeal it into what appeared a fully integrated technique with its enabled applications, and called it the "KESTS to GEO" concept.

("KESTS to GEO" is an acronym for "Kinetic Energy Supported Transportation Structure to Geostationary Earth Orbit.")

This got snubbed by the space activist community too, despite their claim to have the purpose of establishing a spacefaring society. I did not realize this was most likely fueled by the vision of a relatively few elite individuals accessing space via rockets and those few then multiplying and populating the solar system and stars, leaving the rest of us behind.

The concept I had proposed had the potential to indeed enable every person on the planet to economically reach earth orbit (if for some reason they would want to do such a thing) along with means for building habitable facilities for living in high earth orbit. That was snubbed; it was not limiting the exclusive population rights to the few elitists, like limiting of space access by rocketry does.

So I was left to burble in my beer uncomprehendingly, rewriting my KESTS to GEO concept in many forms and presenting it in technical papers at space conferences, just not realizing what I was proposing would wipe out the dreams of those who were on the rocket road to space path.

They suddenly resurrected the earth-swung tether concept, claiming a proper strength-to-density tether material was available and all they had to do was get the money and it would be built; even though such a material was in actuality non-existent, the proclamation and followup space conferences devoted to that concept totally took interest away from the KESTS to GEO concept, which was still in the conceptual design stage. Clever ploy and it worked perfectly.

So let me point out what KEST to GEO was about.

The need I assumed was for structural access to space in a potentially large scale and low cost with very high energy efficiency. The earth-swung tether for climbing, now called the "Space Elevator" had extreme materials problems, but the basic concept would utilize centrifugal force to support the structure. The centrifugal force was supplied by the 24 hour rotational period of the planet. The concept was stuck with this rotational rate and the specific outward force that would provide as supplied by the counterweight being swung around by the planet. And that combined with the molecular bonds that provided the strength of materials of potential tether materials; the two no way were close to matching. And there were construction problems of the tether too, especially if it had to be tapered, that is, maximum girth at the balance point, GEO in the case of the earth access tether.

The KESTS to GEO insight was to provide the centrifugal force that supported the structure as part of the structural function itself, instead of depending on the centrifugal force from the earth's rotation.

This would take the form of an eccentric hoop, resembling the orbit transfer trajectory ellipse between ground and GEO around the Earth, attached to the ground at the equator, and looping around the planet to its highest altitude above the opposite side of the planet. It could go to low earth orbit, but payload would still need reaction engine propulsion added to stay up there in orbit, since the anchored earth stationary part of the hoop structure still would have the same angular velocity as the planet, the 24 hour period of rotation.

The ideal upper altitude was GEO, where the orbital angular velocity matches the planets angular velocity. There, payload would stay in orbit even without any intermediary rocket propulsion step.

The concept developed from there, into various configurations, the best was in the form of a synchronous electric motor infilling the perimeter of the eccentric hoop, with its internal armature mass stream being driven by mass drivers on the ground, to be in such a velocity that their above-orbital-velocity component outward restrained centrifugal force was picked to slightly exceed the inward force of gravity on the mass of the earth-stationary part of the hoop, along with the vehicle's live load it carried between ground and GEO.

And some of that internal hoop armature segment momentum could be electromagnetically coupled to lift the vehicles with their payload from ground to space, thus needing no energy source to be carried or beamed at them.

It looked like it could easily finally enable the economical construction of the Solar Power Satellites envisioned from the 1960's; and one of them thusly built in GEO could beam energy down to power the mass drivers on the ground terminal of the transportation hoop. Many applications would become feasible in GEO. It all fit together quite well, thus providing a path for the masses of humanity to head for space to live and work, and using existing materials and close-to-present electric motor technology.

Did this stimulate excitement and a lets go do it cheer? Nope. It got snubbed.

It did not provide the rocket access to space bottleneck that would enable a small elite to go out to populate space with their genes exclusively. A horde of humanity would have instead have the potential to populate space; thus, no benefit to the few anymore. So it was ignored, and the population assumes anything ignored by the "experts" is worthless.

And that is where it stands now. My Asperger's obsession to provide a way for near future mass access of nearby space by large quantities of people, solved the technical problem, but did not solve the people problem: they wanted to play their game, not mine.

And that was a pattern I discovered on the playground in kindergarden. It is only about whose game it is and who is able to play it. It is not about what different opportunities are enabled by the various kinds of possible games.

Explaining what the Clark-Zapper technology is

2011-12-22T08:56:00.000-08:00

Since posting "A standby and be prepared medical system" http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2011/12/standby-and-be-prepared-for-worst.html I have realized that probably most people have no idea what a "Clark-Zapper" is or the technology involved. So this post is to attempt to explain it a bit. I have found a few instances where there appeared to be deliberate attempts to mislead people about this subject and associated equipment, so thus the need for this explanation.

First of all, it is an instrument that is integrated with a couple of other activities in a health protocol, such as identifying the sources of the particular typical toxin that is associated with any particular chronic health concerns a person has. Then this substance is avoided as much as possible. For example, for an increasing prostrate stress I endured many years ago, where I could not drive for over an hour without having to find a restroom, the book by H R Clark pointed out to avoid anything with the element nickle in it and also avoid all bubbly beverages. My source of nickle was primarily from stainless steel; my acidic system had long even dissolved the stainless steel backs off of wristwatches I wore. Stainless steel table utensils, particularly spoons, I could taste, and taste means some material is coming off the material. Worst, if a stainless steel spoon were used to beat mashed potatoes in a stainless steel bowl, eating those mashed potatoes with even those traces of stainless steel in them, would set off a prostate flare up. So, using high quality camping type eating utensils became part of my regimen, along with using the Clark-Zapper occasionally; the prostate problem has essentially faded away in the process.

So, the Clark-Zapper, or as is sometimes called, the Zapper, (even this term has huge other connotations these days, unrelated to the Clark-Zapper, if one does a search for the term) is a small battery powered instrument. Quality ones range in price from $10 to over $600. They are used to deliver a very small particular kind of electrical current in the body, nominally a series of on-and-off pulses of about nine volts peak amplitude, and they pulse on-and-off about 30,000 times a second. The usual way this signal is delivered to the experimenter or an animal, is by contact with soaking wet paper towels that cover two "handholds" made of copper pipe (copper tubing), each of which are 4 or 5 inches long and 3/4 inch diameter. Each of these sections of copper tubing connect by a separate wire over to the Zapper electronics, which usually is powered by a small nine Volt battery; the simple electronic circuit inside, typically using an integrated circuit called a "555" to "chop" the battery's nine volt output on and off about 30,000 times a second, otherwise called "30 KHz" and connect that small electrical signal to the two wires to the two handholds. (Note that "KHz" is pronounced "Kilo Hertz" and refers to something cycling a thousand times a second.)

This was the form of Zapper as originally described by its inventor, Hulda R. Clark, PhD, and described in her 1995 book "The Cure for All Diseases" which despite its inflammatory title, is still a classic in the field, fifteen years later. I bought one of the very first commercially available Zappers for $200 back then, since even though I had the skills to build one from the instructions in that book, I could not get myself to really think such a thing could possibly help my well-being, and anyway I was reasonably healthy; but I was able to buy one and use it for safety-testing instead. That is how I got around the "mental block" regarding the Clark-Zapper usage, that my engineering-mentality initially had about the subject. Since then I have built several of similar design but of different construction over the years, as I was able to build better constructed ones than that first one I bought. But they all worked equally well, and have provided me with experimental results that prompted me to write this post as well as the referenced prior post; and have written of it off and on over the many years of the experiment.

This particular circuit still is the basis for several commercial Clark-Zappers, as well as a very basic Zapper that sells for $10 on the internet and is built to mil-spec standards out of tiny surface-mount components, making the electronics part of the device about the size of one section of one's fingers; the connecting wires to the battery and to the handholds are the larger part of this instrument; this is a very convenient form for inclusion in first aid kits. And if such a device were included in every front line soldier's equipment, available for rapid use when receiving dirty wounds on the battlefield, no doubt much pain and suffering could be avoided, and even sometimes lives saved. This I discovered when in dire circumstances I received a large dirty wound from a jagged rotted piece of wood popping out of the former stable's ground, and medical help was not available in the circumstances; and flushing out the wound with tap water, using the Zapper, and taping the flesh back together with masking tape, the wound healed up rapidly with no swelling, redness or pain, nor the dozen stitches that would have been needed conventionally. So out on the battlefield, this could be indeed a welcome self-administered healing technique when pinned down under fire, as well as also by medics.

The Clark-Zapper technology has undergone much advancement in the past 15 years, however, primarily in Europe, since the Clark-Zapper is still useable only for one's own research as applied to oneself here in America, by the authorities (why they do that dis-service to Americans, I don't know; clearly they either have never actually tested the device to see if it works or not, or some more ugly reason) yet some very useful expanded features have been developed and made available to experimenters around the world. These typically utilize the bio-resonant frequencies of pathogens, as also described in Clark's aforementioned TCFAD book; these frequencies range typically in the 300 KHz to 600 KHz range. These deliver direct disruptive energy to specific pathogens, while doing so to other pathogens at a much lesser intensity. This provides a more concentrated targeted signal series, and commercial ones that have been found and evaluated for efficacy, typically have sixteen or fewer specific frequencies they deliver to the handholds, lasting about an hour. I have found that the signal series that was made for "headaches" to have the side effect of significantly restoring my ability to remember things; the effect fades off, so needs to be repeated for an hour about every couple of weeks, to maintain my normal memory level, now at age 75.

The primary usage for myself of such signal series, has been to deal with pathogens gotten from mowing the dog-and-cat pooped lawn, breathing in the stuff while mowing, and the eggs of various parasites like Ascaris and Toxoplasma then taking root in my body, and if not Zapped will slowly start bringing back a plethora of problems, particularly regarding mental functioning. One would need to read up on it, such as in the Clark TCFAD book, to comprehend the complexities of these parasite invasions and their effects, as it is quite involved and too much to include here. Suffice it to say that I feel much better if I zap for the pet parasites after mowing the lawn. Also some sources such as fresh veggies from grocery store, and Shigella from some cheeses, sometimes import eggs of various parasites etc into oneself, setting off a battle between them and one's immune system, with some of the critters managing to get to hideout places such as in the brain. Targeting them one by one, while they are still circulating in the blood is quite effective in helping my immune system dispose of these invaders, some of which most likely were involved in my sufferings that eventually led to my dropping out of college long ago, after entering college with a brilliant future ahead as a physicist and in general sciences. (That was complicated also by an unknown wheat gluten sensitivity and trying to live on white bread at times due to low finances in college.) My career and life opportunities would have been far better, if I had known about these things back then. Yet the knowledge and Zapper is now able to help restore a significant part of my functionality, although cannot bring back the half century to live again, of course. And similarly, other people might well be missing out even now.

There are even more potential areas for improving health based on the Clark Zapper technology, which I have been exploring, including designing a special instrument that combines the broad field of electro-herbalism. Building and testing these devices to see what - if anything - they do with the many kids of signals that can be delivered to myself via the handholds, is providing some entertainment to me in my retirement. As well as helping educate me in ways to maintain my own health - and incidentally saving the government many thousands of dollars in Medicare costs.

And I also wonder, why are not all Americans having such health advantages. Well, I explored that part in the referenced post; optimum economical preventive health measures would include this Zapper-based technology, along with the usual veggies and going to the gym. This post is to hopefully better explain what the referenced "Clark-Zapper" technology is.

A standby and be prepared for the worst medical system

2011-12-21T10:50:00.000-08:00

Another thorny problem nowadays is how to balance the needs of several important sectors of life in America. Fortunately it is not up to me to decide this, but in theory I can ponder about it in my blog here.

This one would seek to balance the needs of the American public for good health at low cost, with the needs of the established medical systems for steady income, and with the need of the nation as a whole to have a healthy economy, all at the same time.

Now, I have the advantage of knowing from amply-proven personally experienced data, that there is a technology that provides low cost good health long-term, and does not involve the conventional health system at all. This technology is so inexpensive that it would not drag the American economy down at all, if adopted fully in the country.

The problem is that America is struggling to have enough internal business to keep the economy healthy. Two factors, that of offshore suppliers providing for much of the goods and services previously fulfilled through employment of Americans; and the other being the apparent hoarding of vast fortunes and not letting it be exercised in the American economy, thus also strangling the economy. Neither of these factors are involved in my current suggestion here; besides, they are too big for anyone to deal with. Agricultural exports are helpful, yet do not begin to balance payments internationally; selling war machinery is the other export, but unfortunately war machinery is rarely something that can be used constructively so in the big picture is just wasteful effort. This leaves what exchange is going on internally in America, to keep its economy going well. And a major internal business exchange is that ongoing in the health system.

What happens if the technology were fully adopted, which would probably drop the income of the conventional health care system to about 30% of present level and in a few years dropping to maybe 10% of the 2011 income level?

How to keep the conventional medical system up and running so it can deal with the health issues that it can do best, such as repairing injuries in accidents and assaults, when they are needed?

And the other part of this question is how to deal with this even further loss of internal money exchange?

Now, looking at the big picture, it does not seem wise to be sick simply to keep the economy thriving. There ought to be a better way to do it. Yet right now, that seems to be what is happening, on a huge scale and even weighing down the nation's government, per the news re "healthcare."

Governmental subsidies are the traditional way to deal with such things. The oil companies are given huge subsidies even nowadays when raking in huge profits; so why couldn't the health care system receive huge subsidies at a similar level, paid out of taxes?

This healthcare subsidy could be used for keeping doctors, medical facilities, and pharmaceutical manufacturers supplied with money, while being prepared for emergencies. Emergencies like ... a huge natural disaster causing lots of injuries; new diseases sprouting up and spreading all over; local sectarian militia violence injuries; and bio-terrorism mischief.

Such a "standby, and be prepared for the worst" medical system could also have much of its daily activity be involved in doing research, while the facilities are also able to be quickly shifted over for meeting the emergencies.

So, this seems to be a way to deal with the business system problem involved in a technology that would greatly reduce the need for the services of the conventional health care system in routine activity as now practiced.

Anyone reading my blog for long would by now realize that the "technology" that is being contemplated going mainstream in a huge way, to greatly improve the average person's health, reduce sick time off work, and greatly reduce the cost of staying healthy, is that of the highly suppressed knowledge field going by names such as electro-medicine or electro-herbalism, particularly involving the basic Clark-Zapper and Rife handheld device expanded technologies. A field I stumbled into fifteen years ago, highly skeptical but exploring its safety aspects, only to find it is not only safe, but in many ways brings very good health maintenance at very low cost, all self administered.

Part of the usage of such a health technology is for each individual to finally accept self-responsibility for one's own good health. How to get that accepted is another question, not explored here right now.

But the otherwise-unexplainable cessation of my need to have the same colds and flu and whatever that is periodically knocking lots of people out of work for a day or two now and then, particularly in wintertime, simply by occasionally using the Clark-Zapper for a few minutes for no reason at all other than it being like the electronic version of "an apple a day keeps the doctor away." Concurrent learning about nutritional requirements along with toxin avoidance as identified by the initial signs of need for better health (like avoidance of traces of the metal nickle, along with avoidance of bubbly beverages of all types, to help deal with potential prostate problems) would be needed, probably accomplished by online training for adults in the present time, and including it in the school curricula in the future.

This way, the potential productivity of America could be significantly increased through better wellness for all, including far less trips to the doctor and of going around feeling miserable. Better functioning employees can help a business thrive better. Per the above, I have also shown how the conventional health care system could be subsidized so as to be prepared to deal with emergencies of any scale, while also keeping partially occupied by doing R&D.

I think that the above fairly concisely explores an American problem that can't normally be socially-acceptably touched, and proposes a solution to it along with a solution to the problem that that creates. It looks like it would all work. If only people were interested in constructive cooperation, instead of exciting strife. Once again, it seems to bottom-line come to the lack of balanced usage of both left and right brained cognitive practices. (And, well, the social problems of bullies being so powerful controlling people-stuff, of course - but that is a different subject.)

Exploring a 1984-like scenario

2011-12-21T08:09:00.000-08:00

A blog post I have long thought of how to word, still seems too complex for me. The whole thing seems nutty to me; why waste people's lives and effort. But, the news is full of goofy things people do instead of being a helpful influence to civilization. So here is an effort at it anyway.

What if somehow it gets proven that various security and law enforcement activities have been tricked into doing some of the dirty work instigated by some special interest group; does the special interest group then have to pay for all the time, salaries, resources used by those law enforcement agencies personnel?

Recalling the old adage that the average person breaks some law an average of three times a day, it ought to be quite easy to nail most anybody, given enough snooping and maybe some falsifying of evidence, and doing misinterpretations about the investigated persons.

While it seems highly unlikely that such a thing ever can get sufficiently proven, since the law enforcement folks themselves will not want to admit to doing such things lest they be thought as not doing their proper jobs, this still seems a worthy question. And maybe way down the line, someone will act to fix the problem.

As a hypothetical example, lets say that Chaos Corporation (am apparently thinking back to "Get Smart" TV show days for names) thinks it needs to defend its business territory from new innovators who might think of a new product that would obsolete the product of Chaos Corporation; and now someone, who is not directly legally controllable by Chaos Corporation, has thought up an idea for a product that would - unintentionally - obsolete Chaos Corporation's bread-and-butter product. Or another example, someone happens to walk in and witness a major deliberate wrongdoing participation by someone else who is part of Chaos Corporation; and now Chaos Corporation needs to discredit the witness lest he ever happens to disclose the odd bit of information he accidentally acquired by walking in at the wrong time and seeing something odd going on. Whatever the reason, the need is to ruin a target person who is perceived as being able to upset some plan of Chaos Corporation.

So Chaos Corporation embarks on a quiet character assassination program to monsterize their target person. And to Chaos Corporation, the target person is a villain, since he is a perceived threat to Chaos Corporation's thriving. And, it all must be done in a way so that it cannot later be traced to Chaos Corporation's doings. So getting the rumor mill to churning away about nasties that the target person is suspected of doing, they pick the things that really push peoples buttons, as well as being very hard to disprove. For right-wing-extremists, he is gossiped to be a left winger. To left-wing-extremists, he is rumored to be a right-winger. To husbands uncertain about their wives, the target is rumored to be a wife-stealer. To moms he is rumored to be a child abuser. To dateable women, he is rumored to be a dangerous person who uses a knife to harm women.

While this is all rumor-churning in the minds of potential onlookers, have a tipster say the target person is growing marijuana in his room, so the drug enforcers bash the target person's door down while he is away at work, and finding no marijuana - just houseplants - they leave silently, leaving the broken-into room unprotected for pilfering by the public. The target person is unwelcome there so has to move; his next rented room has small holes driled into ceiling for an investigator to peer in at the target to see what evil he is up to, but the noise the attic crawler is making is obvious so the target person covers up the drilled ceiling holes, so the owner then posts an eviction notice on his door. The next rented apartment soon is found broken into, but the manager of the building is honest and tells the target that the police and plainclothesmen were investigating a report of the target person harboring a Mexican woman wanted for questioning. From then on, any "plainclothesman" going into the target person's apartment while he is away at work, is assumed by the neighbors and manager, to be going in there to look for drugs or whatever, and to not get involved. But in reality the intruders are just expertly sifting through the target person's files, removing all records of his correspondence with people about the target's innovative technical concepts for new products, as well as grabbing all the new ideas the target person is exploring, so the "investigators" can sell them on the side to aspiring businesses. The target victim cannot make friends with neighbors, as they all are thinking he is a bad person and do not want to get accused of being an accomplice to the "evil person" wrongdoings being investigated by so many people. And through it all, law enforcement begins to believe that "where there is smoke there is fire" and investigative reports pile up, and the bigger the pile, the more likely it is that it must be true. So the effort is to imply great reward to any who would get some mud to stick on the target person; the reward might even be to put a huge amount of money behind some particular political candidate for high office, once the mud looks like it is on the target person.

Now such an effort is not likely to fail, due to the sheer volume of effort that has maligned the target person. And all the target person's innovative ideas have been stolen, so he has no way of getting paid for his creative technological achievements, so he lives close to poverty and his options in life are very few, not even able to get a girlfriend - a girlfriend might become a witness later who would refute much of the plethora of false accusations against the target victim, so it is quite a game to block any desirable women from discovering the target man, thus preventing that possible witness as well as making the target man live in even more misery of matelessness.

This post is about what does Chaos Corporation have to pay as penalty, if somehow this all gets exposed. What would be the appropriate fine imposed, for each document stolen from the target person, for each break-in of his residences, how much fine for each false accusation that gets apartment managers to let people into the target person's rented room or apartment, how much fine for each school bus driver who angrily watches the reported child abuser under investigation, how much fine for each husband who has done something to keep the target person from stealing the wife, how much fine for causing each mom who grabs their children glaring accusingly at the supposed child molester, how much fine for getting store security operations to stalk and record and pester the target person while he shops for food and other things in stores. And how much fine for the real wrongdoings salted into situations, mischief done specifically in a way that it points at the target person as the wrongdoer? How much fine to pay for sparking a juicy gossip item about the target person? And how much fine for every repeated utterance of that gossip item as it spreads throughout the neighborhood, the community, getting just about everybody who is in the gossip or security loop to assume the target person is evil and the observer could be a hero by catching the target person doing something wrong - it is not of interest that he is not doing anything wrong, that is no fun to watch. The target person suspects that he is getting paranoid, all this impossible weird stuff that sometimes cannot be fully ignored; Chaos Corporation would suddenly win the game if the target person gets pronounced paranoid, too. But more and more people come to believe that the target person is evil, thus to not become friends with him or else risk being assumed to be an accomplice. So how much fine would need to be levied for each of these instances of character assassination events?

Probably the bigger question is, would Chaos Corporation even worry about having to ever pay for such an accumulated collection of fines, even if it were all traced back to the source; a paltry sum compared to the wealth and power of Chaos Corporation; it has achieved its aim even then, since there remains no way for the target person to get his innovative concepts into practice that might rival the products of Chaos Corporation, and his word is discredited, so he could not be a credible witness about the evil done by Chaos Corporation. Besides, people with bully urges enjoy the sport of it all, stalking and harassing a person, without ever risking retribution; great sport for the bully mentality, as well as limits the girl's options for mates to not include the target person, thus has to marry one of the bullies instead.

Re-reading the above, I wonder if it ought instead be just made into one of my fiction novels. But the whole thing is so ugly that it would better be just flushed down the toilet like where such things are supposed to go. But how to do that in the real world, seems impossible. Bullies bully; theirs is the huge people-game world, too.

And what a waste of mankind's constructive potential - but I have said that in a lot of blog posts about "what people do do."

Strong willed person

2011-12-19T08:27:00.000-08:00

It is said that some people are "strong willed."

Wondering about myself, I seem to have both a "will" and a "won't."

This morning before my daily cup of coffee, I seem to be more "strong won't-ed" than "strong willed."

A welcome feeling when one's ideas are proclaimed viable by others

2011-12-15T14:18:00.001-08:00

It provides a welcome feeling when one's ideas are proclaimed viable by others, even though they do not thank you and may well have independently thought of it too. It shows that one's innovative concepts are viable. Has happened many times for me; and here is another one.

The article http://www.gizmag.com/shrilk-bioinspired-material/20858/ titled "Cheap, biodegradable, biocompatible "Shrilk" is a potential plastic replacement" where they tell of using the material from exoskeletons of insects to make plastic-like materials, such as one that is as tough as aluminum alloy but is only half the weight.

My high-tech sci fi novel titled "Building Up" that I wrote in 2006, five years ago, described building items including spacesuits out of cockroach exoskeleton material. See the last two paragraphs in Chapter 11, (P. 96 in the paperback) and much of Chapter 16 "Cockroach Spacesuits" (such as on p. 124 of the paperback.) http://www.kestsgeo.com/2sciencefiction/buildingup.html

Such happenings seem to validate one's existence. If only to oneself. Before the early e-book publishers started demanding that one charge for one's e-books, thousands of copies of "Building Up" were downloaded, so the hundreds of innovative technical ideas in that book have been circulating for a long time, hopefully seeding even more innovations by others in the future.

PFIITTA people factor in impedance to technological adoption

2011-11-28T10:11:00.000-08:00

Sometimes the greatest blocks to achieving a technology-enabled goal, is not so much the technical details, but instead, the "people details." I have somewhat frivolously given this a name here: "people factor in impedance to technological adoption" or PFIITTA as its acronym.

Most of my efforts have been for solving the technical details, particularly related to space transportation within the Earth-Moon system, sometimes alluding to that also automatically helping access and utilize points further out in the solar system.

Occasionally, I have commented on the people-problems that I was encountering, but quickly dismissing them as obviously erratic and irresponsible and surely would go away in time, like the various bullies that occasionally harmed me as I grew up.

However, even though I at times completed an integrated technical design that ought to achieve a goal long stated by others, instead of thanks, I got snubbing, derision and outright hostility at times. But mostly there was the lack of helpfulness or appreciation on their part.

This greatly impeded the achievement of their stated goals, such as establishing a spacefaring society, with space access for every human being, in the near future.

So, this writing is an effort to identify the "people factors" that were involved, to bring it out into the open, so that those with goal achievement intent, can find ways to resolve those problems that otherwise apparently will impede the achievement of large scale mutual goals.

I will also strive to provide some suggestions as to solution of the problem, much as I have usually done re technical problems.

I experienced the "people problem" re adopting technical solutions to widespread needs, even in my career as a hands-on person in electronics development work. Co-workers advised me to not bother writing up my innovative ideas even when they were explicitly invited by an employer, because they would be ignored, and worse, if the boss did not round-file your idea, he would change the name of the originator to be his own name instead of yours; I was advised that management was that way. I went ahead and with great difficulty and on my own time I wrote up some of my innovative ideas for products that seemed in line with the company's field of interest, and eventually I found that the warnings by my co-worker were essentially correct.

The corollary to this kind of problem, is the saying that if one wants one's idea to be passed up the chain of command, up the org chart up to where people could take action on the idea, that one would have to convince one's boss that it was his idea, not yours. Only then would the idea have a chance of coming into physically-expressed reality.

Analyzing the possible causes of this phenomenon, might provide some insight about one's future "people problems" before they happen, and maybe find ways to solve them.

Such as the corollary's solution to the problem of the boss either trashing your idea right there or else erasing your name and putting his name on it, was to instead propose the idea to one's boss in a way to convince him that it was his idea, and thus he would strive to move it up the management chain to possible actualization.

This was not true for all bosses in my long career; but too often it was an invisible roadblock to consideration and adoption of one's ideas.

So, what causes this phenomenon? I will hypothesize some possible factors:

1. Managers tend to have the overarching goal of "climbing up the ladder" to higher level management levels, with correspondingly higher pay and rewards. To do that, he needs to show that he is better than others, so that when evaluations happen, or slots open up in the next higher level of the management chain, that oneself will have shown to be better than peers, and most definitely better than subordinates. There may even be a fear of managers at every level, of a subordinate looking better and therefore taking one's job. "Creativity" is a factor in evaluation sheets. So someone suggesting an idea to help the company in some way, scores higher in the "creativity" category. If a subordinate comes up with an idea, if it got passed up the management chain, that subordinate might get a higher "creativity " score than oneself, an intolerable thing to happen. Solution is to make the idea disappear. Or better yet, if it looks like an especially good idea, to delete the subordinate's name from the idea, putting one's own name on it, and pass it up to one's superior. (Who might do the same thing, by the way.)

2. Ideas, unless required as part of one's performance of one's duties, are a wild-card in the game of management. Perceived as an unexpected factor, appearing out of nowhere, seemingly. Management needs to constantly work to get all the ducks in a row, so they can get knocked down predictably, so as to get the management job done well. An idea for doing something different, could cause a big wrinkle in all that work that one has done, making life less predictable, more work to manage. Who wants that, wants more trouble to deal with? The common phrase for this is "don't rock the boat." A new idea thus is seen as something that could "rock the boat" causing havoc. To this mentality, all useful ideas only come from the very top management, anyway, and they appear in the form of instructions for doing one's management job. Anything else is not worth thinking about, and could even upset things.

3. Competing businesses often utilize specific technological territorial claims; thus there can be a phenomenon of a potential new technology design appearing on the scene, as competing with one's own bread-and-butter technology-based business success. It risks getting into the "whose is better" ring, forced to duke it out in the customer purchase arena if not done previously in other more controllable business games. So it is better to keep one's eye out for potential rival technologies which might interfere with the one on which you have staked your fame and fortune upon. And when spotted, set up ways to prevent its success. This might be called "the trolley salesman in the automobile showroom" effect, TSITAS.

One's advertising system can be used for this. Make the same claim as your potential rival makes, such as "establishing a highway to space" or "space travel for all people". Then put on the usual dog-and-pony show, carnival show, dazzling the public with what the established business have achieved, and people will forget the original attractive claims, or else just assume it will come up eventually; after all, look how competent these folks are. This can be done by establishing enthusiast groups based on these mottos like "highways to space" even though they only are only using rocket launch vehicles, and they are hiding potential access to space by structural means. Their bread and butter comes from rockets now and in the near future; one's fame and fortune depends on their popularity. That is the deciding factor, rather than the actual establishment of highways to space or space access for everybody. Related is creating a periodic big convention claiming those goals, but in all the dazzling hoopla, if anyone happens to wander in with the real technology for making a highway to space enabling all people to reach space, rapicly enabling a spacefaring society, the person is not treated well and definitely is not allowed to speak to the convention or otherwise communicate the innovative idea. The innovator is simply ignored out of existence, while he naively is thinking the organization really is for the purpose of establishing "highways to space" and "apace travel for everybody." If there is a lot of wealth available from established businesses based on doing things the old established, but can't do the full job, way, this is a working technique to block the potential competition until it starves to death. And when that has happened, one can then have already prepared "evidence" that one's own business has rights to the concept and exclusive control of it and therefore decides when it will be utilized: after one's current business has dried up. The customer then has no option but to buy into the business-as-usual produced wares. And all the investors, and managers, can rest easier, life is good.

The risk of some technological innovative idea being produced by the grunts down on the floor who are hands-on familiar with the real world, coming up with a better way of doing things, is usually dealt with by use of the "Employment Agreement" form needing signing as a pre-condition for getting a job. This form ostensibly is a declaration that the employee won't steal the company's technological ideas and go start his own company with them. (In my long career, I recall only one co-worker who actually sought to steal others' ideas, but that was just part of the person's mastery of deceit and he became the confidant of management through that trickery.) In practice, since the "Employment Agreement" declares that all of the employee's ideas on any subject, related to the performance of the job or not, are automatically property of the employer; and that the employer is under no obligation to acknowledge them or develop anything from those ideas, the ideas of the employees are essentially dead in the water from the start. Thus the practice of "Yankee ingenuity" is ruined. This saves the corporate much trouble dealing with new ideas that might make waves in their carefully laid plans for getting top management's goals done. Since the employee who came up with the idea has no way to put the idea into practice, why bother being innovative. This "Employee Agreement" ruse has been standard practice for many decades here in the US, even in states which have made laws against it; the employee would have to sue the employer per that law, and what chance can the employee, usually underpaid and no extra cash on hand, to afford a lawyer to combat the high paid lawyers of the company, and what chance does that employee have of retaining his job, either. Nope, it is a well-laid business security plan shared by most technological-based corporations, and it works.

It does, however, heavily undercut the potentials of the country to create innovative new products. As America is currently finding out, in the form of financial big problems.

Continuing this polite hindsight exploration of PFIITTA, the next level of PFIITTA occurs when the company has a Reduction-In-Force, laying off employees. (Quite possibly as a result of suppressing innovation in their ranks, thus falling behind in technological opportunities to expand their business base.) Or employees retire. After some time period up to a couple of years in the case of management folks, the former employee is no longer bound by the signing of the employment-agreement. Only a few folks tend to be innovative; they have been identified during their time of employment, so the next level of blockage of possibly schedule-upsetting or rival technologies from happening, is after awhile, to hire private investigators to covertly gain access to the residences of the targeted former employees, and remove all legal-level proof that they are coming up with innovative ideas; the PIs don't know which ideas might be claimed by their hiring folks, so they just grab everything. This usually takes the form of just stealing all copies, hard and soft, of the first page of all correspondence that has been done with others regarding the person's innovative new ideas. Thus the person cannot provide proof of originality and therefore cannot get patent protection, and without a patent, no one will invest in the idea's creation. Problem solved: no potential competition can get a start.

And, to further make it hard for the innovative type person to gain help in making his ideas come into reality, is to get folks to carry on a grass-roots level of character assassination against the targeted people. This can spread like wildfire in a gossipy community; driving the person to leave and finding somewhere else to live, he will find that all his neighbors and even churchgoers of his religion, have already been "warned" about the foul dangerous character of the newly arrived person in their community; they may even excitingly have been enlisted in "catching" the bad person doing something bad. Needless to say, this makes it very hard for the innovator to get new friends and support for creating innovations. "Character references" are hard to come by, too, even to get another job, of any kind, to pay the bills. It works.

PFIITTA happens.

Deeper even than these business-protection games, is another factor, familiarly described in a song, that goes "anything you can do, I/we can do better." Is is part of the "whose better" factor. If someone's innovative technological idea looks like it will reduce the income from one's own lush abundant income, then potential helpers for that potential technology, can get pulled away to look at what seem to be similar but better ideas, well organized and more likely to be successful. Perhaps even saying they are the innovators of the ideas that were stolen by the PIs from former employee's residences and storage sites. For example, when the hoop-type highly efficient electrically powered transportation structure broke free and finally got formal publication, the old Earth Space Elevator concept was revived out of nowhere proclaiming that a tether material had been found and was in mass production in Japan, and Space elevators were ready to build, right no, put your money right here. It totally took attention away from the hoop-type transportation structure, which had its origins in figuring out how to get around the strength-to-density problem of the Earth Space Elevator structural access to space from the ground. Since no such material was in actual existence, after awhile it kind of faded away, but the hoop type transportation structure was still being silenced by all possible means, at the same time. That suggests that the real motives are not easily apparent; the intent may well be to block large scale near future use of earth orbital space, limited by the feeble means of using conventional launch vehicles - and that also protects the energy wealth baron's empires, by preventing near-future large scale energy supply by the long-proposed Solar Power Satellites in GEO, that are uneconomical if one only has rockets to put them in place and maintain them.

No one likes their income to get reduced.

There may even be pressure to resume the long inhibited nuclear powered launch vehicle technology, in a desperate effort to gain larger scale space access from the ground. The tether Space Elevator and the hoop Space Escalator are the only potential rivals to that technology; so pitting them against each other may block either one, until nukes are apparently acceptable. This is not to say that using the stockpile of nuclear weapon material up by using it as fuel for launch vehicles is a bad idea, mis-useable as it could become; it is merely pointing out possible factors in the blockage of access to orbital space in large scale commercial quantities in the near future by any other means.

One's motives need to be examined, for what one does. The proclaimed motives we make may not be the real ones; not necessarily deliberately, but simply as a response to the overall ongoing scenario. And "motives" is plural: there sometimes are several ongoing motives and some of them might clash. Can get complex. But determining one's own actual motives - plural - is a start at shaping up and getting effective. One does not necessarily tell others what these motives are, all the time, however. Some of them may well clash with motives of others: butting-horns from the start simply wastes time and effort and opportunity. So taking it a bit easy, if the scenario requires it, is wise. But losing sight of one's own motives in all the action, can be a step in the wrong direction, becoming part of the PFIITTA instead of the solution.

Stiction friction snapping

2011-11-18T05:43:00.000-08:00

Stiction friction: That is the word I have been trying to remember: "stiction." In physics I learned that friction, the drag that happens when two surfaces slide along each other, has a higher starting value than the value when subsequently sliding along. It is a bit harder to get two surfaces sliding, than it is to keep them sliding along afterwards.

The reason that this has come to mind, is because of a very irritating phenomena has been happening at my house for, maybe, the past two or three years. It is a loud "snap!" sound that happens at the start of certain motions of certain objects in my house.

It first came to mind while using an exercise machine called a "gazelle glider" (which was something like a ski-machine I had used years earlier, except not prone to produce finely pulverized aluminum particles in my breathing space that were produced by the resistance drag in the ski-machine exerciser. The gazelle glider did not have that problem as it was just a free-swinging foot pedal thing, back and forth in the air.) It had bearing surfaces supporting front and back of each foot pedal, rotational surfaces. It worked fine for a long time - months - until one day it started producing a loud "snap!" sound as it began a particular resumption of motion each swing "Snap! Snap!" it went, and the sound seemed to go direct to the joints in my leg, as if battering them a bit, each movement.

Oiling the bearings with 3-in-1 oil, did not stop the phenomenon. Finally I took the exerciser out into the garage; it seemed more harmful than helpful.

Eventually I bought a low cost elliptical exercise machine. It worked fine for a couple months, then one day after coming home from shopping, it too started doing the same kind of "snap!" sound in its foot pedal bearing.

It sounded exactly like the Snap! that the gazelle-glider had made.

It was predictably happening at the exact same place of the movement of the feet each time, when the rotational joint shifted from rotating one direction to the other. It still does that, and I avoid using the exercise machine because of it. I can't afford to keep buying exercise machines.

Meantime, a year or so ago, the swivel chair I use at my computer here, started doing something similar. It produces the identical "snap!" sound whenever it starts to swivel, or when the seat back tilts slightly when leaning back or then leaning forward. It is a bit intermittent, not quite always doing it with an identical movement of the chair; but the hard snap-sound and jarring is always the same.

It not only vibrates hard into my hip joints and lower back joints, its sound operates against the hardwood floor as if a sounding board. The resulting snap! sound resembles the hitting of the floor with a hammer.

It is distracting every time it happens, interrupting what I was thinking about.

Yet this chair is my one luxury I treated myself to a few years ago, since I spend most of my time at the computer anymore.

Now, I don't recall ever hearing and feeling this loud hard "snap!" phenomenon before, and I have lived through some seven decades of life experiences at this point. And now it has happened to not one but three things I need to use at home. The two exercise machines and the swivel chair were bought at different stores. They all worked fine without doing the snap sound, for some time after buying them and putting them into use at home. The snap-sound is identical in all three different metal machine's joints. The snap sound does not start out weak in intensity and get worse with wear, it is full volume from the beginning, and stays that way.

So now I have recalled that there is a starting friction when something begins to slide along something else.

Oil or grease is commonly used to make both the stiction and friction be very low so as to reduce wear and energy loss in the machine, such as the pistons in an automobile engine, each time they change direction of motion, they would have the stiction happening; but the oil provides tiny slippery bearings so as to make it almost non-existent stiction. However, oiling the snapping joints on my exercise machines and swivel desk chair, does not prevent the stiction from happening.

And the intensity of the snap is very intense from the very first time it happens.

And as far as I can tell, it never quits; one has to discard the thing. They each did not start doing the snap-thing until I had had them in use for some time, months at least. And, to make it even stranger, like many odd things happening at my house, they were not that way when I left home to go do shopping - mostly at the local Walmart superstore - but were that way when I got back home. No one else is supposed to access my residence when I am gone, note; they do not have my permission, anyone. (I could rant on about that here lots more about specific happenings, but won't; just suffice to say that there may also be a deliberateness to the phenomenon's starting to happen, following my being away from control of access to the items at my home.)

The stiction snap! seems to have two effects on me: one is that it seems bone-jarring and likely to increase wear on my bone joints; and two, it interrupts my train of thought each time, greatly slowing down my mental efficiency. My RAS (Reticular Activating System) kicks in with its instinctual alert of possible danger, each Snap! and it takes a second or two for me to figure out what is going on, then I try to remember what I was trying to do just before then, to get back on track. The interruption is most intense on the computer desk swivel chair, since it uses the hardwood floor like a sounding board, racketing all over the room, like someone hitting the floor hard with a hammer, right under my seat; simultaneous with all the joints in my pelvis complaining about being hit. It is not always predictable; some movements do not make the snap in the chair, or they will move a little distance of rotation before suddenly snapping.

I have spent huge amounts of time and effort trying to cope with this weird stiction-related phenomenon, yet finding lubricant does not fix it - although it may sometimes let some movement start going before the snap is made, am not sure - and imagining some opposite to a lubricant being put on the sliding surface as mischief while I am known to be away from home. What could that substance be, I wonder.

All this was of little note, except I recently read - can't remember where - that some aircraft - I think it was an aircraft - that was having problems with something that reminded me of the stiction phenomenon magnified enormously, like I endure at home. The airplane's problem, however, was lots more dangerous, was my impression, as I try to remember more about that news item read - a month ago? This now also reminds me of an article I read long ago - maybe a decade ago, where there was a worry that saboteurs were possibly using hydrogen embedded in the ink of felt pen markers, to wipe a line across a metal surface, so the hydrogen would penetrate micro-cracks in the metal so as to increase its rate of fatigue and eventual failure. The article said there was the worry that saboteurs could casually get close enough to an airplane to wipe the modified felt pen marker on a critical spot on airplanes, so they would fail in use. Have the same mentality mischief makers come up with something that greatly increases the stiction in back-and-forth rotational bearings?

Stiction friction is not always harmful: for example, the bowing of a violin string depends on stiction to generate sound, and one applies rosin to the bow occasionally to make the stiction friction stronger.

Guns or butter or responsibility

2011-11-17T10:43:00.000-08:00

Am struggling over decision to sign petition www.cutnukes.org

An unusually strong feeling inside is to not sign; but all rationality says do sign. I wonder, what is that all about.

A thought is that keep up the arms race thing, but also establish way to prevent the causes of need for such weaponry, and when that is established and used to block the need for such war preparations, then there would be voluntary automatic total elimination of all such weaponry, all over the world.

Still, rationality suggests the petition's recommended gradual cutback on nuclear weaponry expenses is the traditional way to do such things. Like the schoolground, be able to inflict a little damage to the bully if he assaults, rather than him getting away with doing injury and receiving none in return. Bullies tend to be cowards, I think. But they will plot and strike, if they are sure to not get hurt at all in return.

So this blog post is to help me figure out a bit about what my conflict is.

Reading the above, first thought is that to solve the problem, eradicate bullies. Simple as that. Except, of course, bullies are genetically adept at not getting eradicated. And, tend to be wearing business suit and ruling the show. So it is a can't be done thing, that is maybe the only way to solve the problem. Can't get there from here.

So, it is back to the original decision option considerations, since the actual problem cannot be solved, re the eradication of all bullies. Exploring the considerations, maybe I can better resolve my inner conflict re this subject. Lots of things in the pile. And no matter what, is going to require I start it in the middle of the movie, somewhere. Some things are pro and others con, and some a bit of both, so I won't try to catagorize them at this point.

When I graduated from high school, a bit of a boy genius type, I entered college as a physics major, with thoughts of becoming a nuclear physicist and/or thin film phycisist; and I would work my way though colege by working at White Sands Missile Rnge. Rockets were a favorite subject for me, and technology being tested for military rockets conceivably be later used to build spacecraft carrying people; this was 1955, long before the space-race.

The military is a way to get around the technology-blocking machinations of the corporate business territory games. The military can say, the nation as a whole is involved, so cut the crap and lets get the job done, build the new whizbang thing despite it eventually being used to break through the technology stasis made by business-as-usual mega-giant corporation businesses. The jet airliner design was first made in the similar form of jet bombers like the B-47, for example. We might still be stuck with prop driven airliners right now, otherwise, to protect the easy business profits of prop-driven aircraft engine makers.

Much of my early employed years in teh private sector, was involved with creating things for military use, and involved having varios levels of security clearances. Military equipment development was a major focus of my getting a paycheck, back then.

I again think back to my college years. Eventually I became a dropout, note. Causes are complex, discussed elsewhere already. The one field of study that I did complete, was the full fours required semesters of ROTC; it was a State College attendance requirement. I recall recently seeing my momentos of that period, my Army brass insignia and my Sargent's stripes. And what I learned of the ways of conducting war in that training. Back then in the late 1950's, war and the threat of nuclear war was ever in the air, part of life. The "arms race" was largely a technological race, to make more and bigger weapons, to brandish at the enemy, in hopes it would scare him into not attacking; they were doing the same thing towards us at the same time.

It is said that when a policeman has to use his gun, it has lost its purpose for existing, that of cautioning against doing something to require the use of the gun by the policeman.

The nuclear arsenal is a lot like that policeman's gun in that context. If the Soviet Union and the United States pulled the trigger, threw all those nukes at one another in cascade retaliation, it was said it would destroy not only all mankind, but also most other life forms on the planet. So was their actual use ever a real option? Only for the irresponsible, the insane, I think. Yet it was a big race to make bigger and better nuclear weaponry, like baring one's teeth at a rival. A bigger snarl supposedly scares the most.

And we still have those nukes, and it is expensive upkeeping them including building better ones to replace the disintegrating ones. Their upkeep costs will cut into the education and well being of the youth who might otherwise figure out better ways of solving such problems. And thus the petition which is being pondered here in this blog post. "Guns or Butter" was often the theme during WWII, early years of my growing up. Still is, apparently. Can't have them both.

The Soviet Union feared rival, supposed cause of our nuclear arsenal big enough to destroy the world, has stood down,no longer sabre-rattling so much, and getting on with more wholesome things in life. Other countries have sprung up and created smaller nuclear arsenals, supposedly to threaten smaller rivals, such as Pakistan vs India. Numerous other nations have a small supply of nukes or are apparently struggling to make some, to get to be equals in the threat game. Dare any of them shoot a nuke at America, without knowing are arsenal wold immediately erase all life in their country in retaliation - or at least think so? So is America's huge arsenal a deterrent for small nuke use against us? Apparently not, the countries still strugggle putting scarce resources into making nukes and delivery systems, while their people starve to death.

Did I say that people acted rational, responsibly? I don't think I did.

And the existence of being the only super-power (at least military superpower) forms a very tempting prize for any who wold crave to rule the whole world. Bu hook or crook, trickery and deception galore, such clever power-crazies are likely to manipulate the electoral system, maybe stage some war excuse stuff, and get in the top positions to be able to push the red nuke button.

Why do some folks crave to rule the world? I don't recall the why of it being taught, but school history classes often focused on that having happened in the past, over and over again. I seemed a force of nature kind of thing, like the force of gravity causes an apple to fall out of the tree. Oftentimes it appears to be a religious-inspired thing, like the various groups over in Iraq etc are. Figuring out what forces are behind that could b make this blog post go on too long. Suffice it to say that more than some economic belief causing America to be used to kae over the world, some fundamentalist-type religious group might strive to do such a thing.

The presence of all those nukes and the big red button, conceivably lure the "legal" takeover of America, for the purpose of "ruling the world."

(Did I say that people acted rational, responsibly? I don't think I did.)

The Olympic Games were created as a means for letting folks show who was bigger and better, without those ego needs causing bloodshed. The town's high school football team would go over to the stadium in the neighbor town, to bash it out by the rules, to decide which town was better; and the onlooking spectators yelled and screamed while one line of oversize males would crash into another line of oversize males, as they fought for possession of a pigskin. Was it because the pigskin was worth fighting over? No, it was not, it was the ego thing, and the players knew that if they won the game, likely some of those women squeels of delight up in the spectator stands would turn into some pregnancies otherwise not happening, as they later sought to get in good favor with the winning team's players. An ego thing among the girls too, in its own way, able to brag amongst the girls about which great hero player got her pregnant.

How different is this from the historical army from one city-state going over to attack the neighbor city-state, to kill the men and take the women to breed?

Is this the root cause for most if not all such wars, for a few males to breed with more women, by preventing other men from breeding with the women? I'm talking root causes here. Mammalian bulls of many species do such things all over the world and in the seas too. And male people are male mammalians, too. Males fathered by a powerful patriarch often considered themselves the sole valuable breeding stock for humanity, and do their best to make it happen. When all the individuals are used up in a closed system, like Iraq, then it evermore is a contest between the surviving families; and it is no coincidence that each group is united by its own religion. (Exploring this is likely to arrive at even more basic roots to the subject at hand, but I already have stepped on too many toes here.)

The well armed groups in America, fondling their high powerred rifles and nervously glancing around, declaring they are patriots or at lest defenders of their religion, are not that different from teh groups in Iraq, it seems to me. Or Afghanistan. Or Pakistan. Lots of places. In India they still do "honor killings" which are horrid murders of those who step out of bounds of their "groups" to mate with some other religious group or caste. It probably was developed so as to keep one religious group from luring all the women of their neighbors to join up with them instead, leaving the men of the other group mateless and thus tending to vanish from the species.

Wanna-be rulers of the world - or of the neighborhood street gang - are said to believe that if they don't control others, then the others will control them.

It is a who-does-what-to-whom thing. Why does it matter? Because bottom line it is who reproduces and who is left out. Women seek to mate up with the guys who are in control, because that is the way for the women to share in the extra goodies the controlling guy grabs from others.

Bigger gangs usually can conquer smaller gangs. This grows until it is the conquering gang of the whole nation, prowling its borders. Well aware that the guys on the other side of that national border might make a raid over the border; each side has the same urges, or assume the others do too like themselves. Instinct says it is control or be controlled, and being controlled often means being kept from the women. Fortresses are built. Catapults go against the fortresses. Bows become crossbows become firearms and rockets, and nuke-tipped rockets.

Big stockpiles of nukes match up against the other's big pile of nukes. Whose biggest is bestest. Usually, that is; when the use of the bigger and better will kill all of both sides, will sanity start to take hold?

A way to end the=is blog post is to repeat:

Reading the above, first thought is that to solve the problem, eradicate bullies. Simple as that. Except, of course, bullies are genetically adept at not getting eradicated. And, tend to be wearing business suits and ruling the show. So it is a can't be done thing, that is maybe the only way to solve the problem. Can't get there from here.

Testosterone does not make bullies, note. Testosterone provides the git-er-done urge and energy, also needed to take on severe struggles in life. Bullies happen, just because of a warp in their neurological wiring that otherwise enables people to cooperatively work together for mutual benefit.

Will reducing the size of the nuclear arsenal a bit, reduce the urge of bullies to act out their control issues? I suspect not enough. The better approach is to deal with the control issues, then gradually weed out the bullies ... or more likely, continue to put up with the bullies' periodic fracas destructive antics and try to not get hurt as a bystander. Meanwhile do one's best to help civilization along best possible.

Working all one's life when there are no jobs to work at

2011-11-16T22:53:00.000-08:00

"Many Americans say they will have to work until they're 80"

That was my thought too, through my career in electronics as a technician. The jobs back then according to an article, usually lasted on average two years, then the technician was out on the street looking for a new job. The pay was medium to low, and saving money was near impossible. I assumed I would have to work all my life.

That was not so bad a thing to me, as I usually liked my work. A few places, however, was too much stress or co-workers just too nasty. But generally it was OK work, and paid my bills so long as I lived simply. I would usually rise to the highest levels possible as a engineering technician, due to my unusual problem-solving skills in development work. One company even promoted me to a full electronics development engineer title. But too often it took a long time to find a new job when the old one ran out of work.

In 2000 I was working in my highest paid job, although oddly it did not use my skills as much as most jobs had done. Also the working conditions and fellow workers was a bit nutty; there were lots of people who made a show of working behind heavily locked doors, no mention of doing what; and management would not communicate with me at all. A few times it was clear they put me into situations where the slightest slip could be lethal, working with high voltage, in full view of lots of people. And worst of all, they did not use or appreciate my special problem solving skills best used in the past. But, it paid money, and I was way above the usual age for electronic technicians, very hard to get a job. I turned 65. Management people who turned 65 there celebrated and retired immediately. But not me, I would have to work all my life.

Then there was the 2001 fracas, and the company was bought by another company. I heard that much of the new parent company was losing business due to the aircraft industry changes after 2001 fracas. And then a big layoff, dozens of people had to go; and I was over 65, easy pick.

The job market in electronics proved as difficult as expected. No demand for my kind of skills. I was freshly getting Social Security retirement, but it did not cover minimum expenses living in the Los Angeles area even in the worst rat-holes.

I finally got a chance to live in my own home, a tiny place in a far distant desolate area, down payment paid for by my kids; my social security would cover the interest payments but not the principle of the house. Nonetheless, it was a way to survive on social security.

I would have preferred to continue working, although at a job better fitting to my skills. I was a good worker. But the jobs were not there. All I could get were volunteer jobs; a couple times they turned into brief part time paid jobs, but not in my career field. The money helped pay rent in the tiny miserable apartments.

I would still like to work. Paid work, that is; I still do long distance volunteer work, via computer. I surely could be productive at lots of kinds of jobs. But, nobody is providing opportunity for any of those kinds of jobs. Or any jobs; I keep looking in the local free paper; if I was a semi-truck driver I could get a job, or at least apply for one. Otherwise, the paper says there are houses for sale for a couple hundred thousand dollars, but no jobs available with which to pay for it.

Big corporate business contrives to rule America, yet it has not worked to make sure all Americans are employed, adding to the GDP. And employment needs to be compatible to the skills, location, stress level compatible to all employees. Pay level so they can live reasonably comfortably.

Business supposedly is who supplies all jobs. But they are not doing that job well at all.

Another aspect is the subject of job-shops, otherwise called contracting. There were businesses who ran small ads in the paper saying they were looking for certain kinds of skilled employees. One then went and filled out an employment form at their little office. Then one got a call for an interview at some real company; one then was hired, but by the job-shop, not the company one worked at. Typically, if I got paid ten dollars an hour, they paid the job shop twenty dollars an hour for my work; I would put in a hard 40 hours work per week to get my $400, while the job-shop also got $400 but only worked a half hour to get the money, long enough to do the clerical work of taking the money and giving me half of it; although they did cover federal social security and state unemployment insurance payments. So the job shop got effectively $800 per hour doing clerical work, while for the same time period I worked 40 hours doing very complex hard technical work and getting paid $10 an hour. No benefits were paid to me: no sick leave, health insurance. I had to do that several times in my career, which sometimes turned into a real job with the actual company I was working at.

Evicting the occupying 99% from America

2011-11-16T12:58:00.000-08:00

The "Occupy America by the 99%" activities have puzzled me to some extent. It seems to be an effort to get lawmakers to tax the ultra-well-to-do corporations to proportionally pay for supporting the country, instead of just taxing the 99% non-wealthy. Yet the voting system says that things get decided by whom you put into office, and the only way to get things done differently is by voting them out of office and putting someone in there who can do the job. Meanwhile the incumbents are free to rule, including supporting the wealthy 1% who trickily got them into office so as to increase their hoarded wealth.

The Occupier's mass demonstrations might seem a bit like that which has gone on in places like Libya and Syria lately, the masses fed up with the pompous rule by the ultra wealthy who are not sharing the windfall wealth, but instead just using it to live high while scuttling any who oppose, through killing, prison, torture of the few who are so rash as to flip the rulers off. It seems to me to be same basics ongoing between the two.

What is clear is that the intent of Democracy, which we so proclaim is the answer to the world's woes, has simply become no better than the ruling of Syria and Libya. The voting in and out of lawmakers in a democracy, has mysteriously lost the intent of choosing those who can enable America to thrive and prosper among all. we are solidly setting the example this millennium so far, of having lost the path to support of every citizen and enabling all of them to be as productive as they individually can be, enabling the good life for all of them. Instead, it has become the "1% controlling the 99%, without regard to the well-being of the 99%" We as the shining example of Democracy, have fallen on our face, and apparently can't get back up.

I agree that "mere handouts" are not the answer. But, there is a need to give a person a fish so as to keep alive while the person is being taught to fish to feed for a lifetime. And the Social Security retirement system is necessary so the worker can focus on industriously thriving during the working years, while assured of at least a basic survival income in retirement years.

Playing the investment game is not for everybody, no more than is, say, monopoly, chess, kickboxing or football playing is for everyone. Especially for people many of whom struggle to get a basic income tax form done and sent in on time, once a year. Also, investment ideals just soon degrades into putting money into what is likely to get most interest income back, instead of supporting the development of that which will make all of their lives better. And just what are those indications of what will make life better as a nation of people, is not always clear even to those in the know, let alone the grunt who is slogging away at some employer's assigned job, like the proverbial being treated like a mushroom, kept in the dark.

Now, as a socially-dimwitted Aspey, am still aware that the situation is vastly more complex than just the above. People, their needs and motives and fleeting moments are lots more complicated than that. Yet, there are some fairly consistent patterns that seem to exist.

One is that America, declared to be led by self rule for the people and by the people, per that definition, does not exist anymore. Everybody would have a reasonably good job all the time, for one thing, if it was for the people and by the people. They don't, per "Occupy America," among other huge examples ongoing.

Another is that if the wealthy corporations provide jobs if not taxed, they have not been doing so. Look how many unemployed or underemployed exist. And wealth by its very definition means there is plenty extra available to share with that which provided the wealth.

Some of those localized ultra-wealth sources are from oil wells, oil that freely comes from the earth, after a bit of technology applied to drill and then to process and distribute. If the Earth were appropriately compensated for her part of providing that oil, what would the situation be, I wonder. Instead, Mother Earth is just totally ripped off without even a kiss and thanks, by those who grow fabulously wealthy from that ripped-off oil. Sure, the games of who owns what property adn thus gets a share of the takings, is ongoing and supposedly gives all their fare share. But part of the reason that the extra profit is getting hoarded by the "owners" is that the real owner, Mother Earth, is not getting paid.

Who would serve as the administrator for Mother Earth, I ponder in this fantasy that seems correct but would be totally ridiculed by those who like business as usual. Not just oil, but coal, metals, minerals, even drinking water and water of rivers in which to fish for sport, all come from Mother earth. And God the Father, to be complete. But does religion take on the responsibility for this? Not that I have seen, not at all. Not their job.

This fantasy of a proper factor is not about to happen, any more than the schoolyard bully is going to suddenly turn into a benign and caring helper for all the others on the schoolyard.

Who is going to take responsibility for America? Clearly such responsibility involves every American and guest of America. All need to thrive and share in the joy of life, not just those who have figured out how to grab most of the goodies and keep them from all the others, as played by the rules.

Much like the oil is freely ripped off from its source, so also the other wealthy have utilized the infrastructure and employee base of educated and skilled American workers, to gain their horde of wealth. Taxes traditionally are what enables this payback and sustenance of that which enabled the prosperity. If the highly successful profitable corporations could perform the responsibility of supporting that which provides their opportunity for wealth, surely they would have done so, be doing so. But it is not happening. Instead, the patters is similar to little kids, grabbing as many toys as they can possible hold at once, and declare that those are their toys an no one else can play with them, glaring around aggressively, not noticing that he/she is not having fun with them either.

Now, wealth accumulation is supposed to be a result of providing that which is needed and wanted by the customer base. Without the corporation having done the work, taking the risks involved, and producing welcomed goods and services, those goods and services might never have happened. They provide a valuable service for America.

The problem comes in when they forget that it was done for the people of America; instead of for gaining delirious windfall profits to hoard for status. Are such folks being responsible for America; do they deserve to effectively rule America; are they even capable of responsibly ruling America?

Part of the cause of this all is the principles of pricing set by what the market will bear. Thus we gladly pay a small fortune for a new iPod considering it worth it, but the profit is thus such a hue part of the price paid, that the makers of the iPod (and I thank them for that great product, don't get me wrong) reap and hoard great profit, wealth, instead of setting the price to achieve just a nice profit to live well and be able to afford R&D for next products. Yet I wonder, wouldn't it have been better for that extra $75 (or whatever amount it was) of the price I paid extra for the iPod over and above the cost of making it and providing the inventor and manufacturers and retailers a nice living, had instead gone back into supporting the overall system that enabled that product to exist, including way down the line increasing the skill sets of upcoming Steve-Jobs types?

Another part of it all is failure to fully take on the principle of "price-added equaling value-added." Instead, lots of other factors rule, such as scarcity, business territory, and especially the aforementioned "what the market will bear" parameter.

Am an expert at painting myself into corners, so I can easily recognize that phenomenon happening widely in America nowadays. Some it seems likely done deliberately by ruthless manipulators setting up for their future takeover of more "toys." But much of it seems a result of lack of farsightedness for our ruling ourselves wisely, the blind leading the blind into the ditch, thing. Maybe not blind, only tunnel-visioned instead; same result.

America needs to be governed to provide America's well being. Obama & Co seems to be making a fairly good effort at doing that, considering a limited knowledge set evident. Hemming him in and nipping at his heals while he does this, are those who crave ultra wealth and power, and devote their lives to such games, and are being quite successful at doing so.

And, it may be, that part of all the drama is that the public likes drama; to watch a knock down drag out fight ongoing. Winners are the righteous leaders, right? ... but are they there because they are experts in enabling all America to thrive; or are they there instead because they are best at knock-down-drag-out-drama? The Roman Empire provided occasional "bread and circus" to keep the masses happy, under their rule.

If it is truly the 99% who are trying to re-take America, so as for it to be a 100% America, and if "occupying" an area that is not fully their own, I wonder, do the "1%" consider evicting the occupying 99% from America?

Raccoons siblings and fighting

2011-11-10T12:13:00.000-08:00

Since I lacked siblings, and had no peers that went along with me through school years, I missed out on the why and how to squabble over possession of things or doing things. At least I hypothesize that is so. The Asperger's thing probably factors in it too.

As I recall the past experiences of learning from others' squabbling, I now recall a particular kind of phenomenon about conflict. It happened in my last half year living in Old Topanga Canyon, alone, family gone, wife had finally fully dumped me. Yet I also had an interesting contractor job, job-shopper, job at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, helping to develop a spacecraft camera system, in the early 1970's. But the loss of mate and family just really got me down, and eventually I no longer had a chance to get a non-contractor job at JPL as a result.

But this post is not so much about that. It is about the phenomenon of fighting over something.

It was quiet there in the canyon, living alone. There got to be a little game played, where I would hear some little noises out on the front porch; opening the door, I would find a group of raccoons, all in an arc around the doorway, nearly all of them sitting up on their hind legs, looking so cute. It was obvious: give us some goodies to eat.

I kept a sack of dry cat food there by the front door, which I fed to the cats outside. So I would reach in and take a handfull of this dry cat food, and toss it into the midst of the group of raccoons. Immediately they were down on all fours and wolfing down the goodies, very quiet and busy, nobody noticing anybody else. But then, as part of the ritual, when each could not find another easy morsel, there was always one piece of cat food left, right in the middle of them all. Then they all would erupt into a ferocious fight, huge fangs barred and making snarling growls and whistle sounds, like they were about to kill each other. All over that last little piece of food.

This went on awhile, a frenzy of violence in which nobody actually got hurt; then one of them would have gotten that last little piece of cat food. And suddenly they all were up on their hind legs in an arc around me, looking so peaceful and cute, waiting for me to toss in another bunch of pieces of dry cat food. It was an instant changeover, from melee of frenzied battle, to suddenly again sitting up so cute and peaceful begging for another handout from me.

It worked. I would reach in the bag of cat food, bring out another handfull of food and toss it into the their midst, scattering it. The busy finding and wolfing the morsels down then went on until just one piece was left. Somehow they always left the one piece, so as to put on the enormous show of ferocious battle amongst themselves, to determine who got it. Then that last piece was gone; and they were suddenly again sitting up on their hind legs looking so peaceful and cute, expectantly waiting for another handfull of food from me.

Apparently they had learned the trick long before, and taught next generations how to do it, by bringing the little ones along to watch.

When I would tire of it, I would toss a last handfull out and close the door. Soon I would hear them headed across the front porch and away, no doubt to do the same show at the next house.

The point here is that fighting, even the fighting of very large-fanged creatures emitting fearful noises, in a frenzied whirl of furry bodies too fast to keep track of, can be done just for the show, the attention; and, it got them all an easy meal, most every evening.

Fight lets fight to prove who is better

2011-11-10T10:18:00.000-08:00

Something long puzzling me finally seems to be getting a bit clear.

The background info would take long boring pages to describe, so I will just pick out some parts of it.

The phenomenon that never made any sense to me, yet happened at times usually "out of nowhere" always happened in a complex context of what was going on at the time. Different scenarios ongoing, different contexts, all very confusing to me.

Eventually it sifted out like something about some boys just wanted to fight. they made endless excuses to fight. "Picking a fight" was a term I heard somewhere and it fit what I was experiencing from some other boys occasionally. The thousands of specifics all could be given a lowest common denominator of they just wanted to fight me.

Never made any sense to me. The boys who did it looked like the other boys, so there was no way for me to tell which were the obnoxious ones in advance. Sometimes he would gather a bunch of other kids on the schoolyard to watch while he made words at me and then began to hit me; the other kids seemed to enjoy watching that.

Although sometimes there was no big show. I recall in San Francisco - circa 1945 - when I was nine years old and had my first pair of glasses, which my parents could barely afford, on the schoolyard I noticed a large boy quite a ways away, suddenly start running very fast in my general direction, cause unknown; but then he rammed hard into me, knocking me out and when I awoke on the pavement I found my new glasses had been smashed. I don't recall seeing that boy before or afterwards. The significant thing to me was that he was lots bigger and heavier than I was and that for unknown reason had deliberately rammed into me very hard. And my new expensive glasses, which made an amazing difference in what I could see at a distance, were shattered. Fortunately, the broken glass had not injured my eyes.

That I was always the smallest boy in the class might have had something to do with it. I suffered from asthma, and so I had to restrict my physical activities, part of it. I was ever the new kid on the block, as my father sought to find some place where my mother and I could live; both of us had severe asthma and doctors could not fix it, and the rumor was that out West there were places where asthmatics could live well. The epinephrine spray had not been invented yet, and it had not been figured out yet that the kapok in bedding, used during the war, was a cause of severe asthma; and that kapok mattresses and pillows followed us wherever we went, but not knowing that, it only seemed to mean the area was not the right area for asthmatics. So we would move elsewhere as soon as dad could get a job there. I was in and out of school after school, new friends suddenly lost forever again, over and over again. And also there ever were the strange boys who for no reason i could figure out, just had to assault me.

Near as I could figure out, they just liked to fight. And of course win, thus picking on me, the smallest boy in the class and who had no idea what fighting was about, having no siblings to learn from. And friends were not into fighting me, of course. So it was just this thing, out of the blue, some boy would suddenly pounce on me and start hitting me. Sometimes there were words just before that, some excuse for hitting me, apparently said to me but seemed more to impress the other boys and girls who gathered around.

Eventually it seemed that the purposes for picking a fight with me involved their gaining attention from their peers that way and perhaps making them afraid of him, which apparently was an advantage to him. Sometimes I noticed such boys had a cluster of boys and girls that followed him around, and was something he apparently craved.

In later years of school, I noticed that this enabled them to have intimate relations with the girls, too. Eventually I figured this provided a reproductive advantage to them; even in high school, the girls attracted to the tough boys were clearly pregnant. If the urge to assault people like me is a genetic thing, that would clearly be making more of them in the world.

Meanwhile the girls in school did not seem to notice that I existed. There were some really attractive young women in high school, that I enjoyed watching their beauty, but I did not know how to get a date with any of them. Besides, the pregnant ones clearly were involved with the tough boys. I had learned to be the automatically meek one, so the tough boys did not need to beat up on me physically any more to prove something.

I craved to interact with my peers, as they seemed to be having so much fun and I wanted some of that too; but from the beginning of schooling, I had also found out that I had no idea how to play the games they all were having fun playing. I could not "get it" about wanting to be a bit physically violent to others' bodies, nor the wanting to out-do them at something. And there were apparently complexities of invisible rules to each game, by which the others played, but at best I could only abstractly figure them out, and that part seemed useless to me.

Over the years, I learned that there was apparently a standard treatment of boys like I was. It involved getting them to take the blame for capers the boys did, sometimes "scapegoating" or "getting left holding the bag." I was trying to learn how to be friends with the others and be involved to have fun with all of them, especially with the girls; but the result over and over again was some variation of getting beat up, or cleverly getting framed for mischief they were doing. It did not prevent me from desperately wanting to be involved with them; but I learned that there was something different about me that kept me from comprehending what it was all about.

I had become adept at learning things on my own. All I had to do usually was to dig in and I would figure it out. That worked in my school classes, but not for socializing, though I assumed all I needed was more experience learning about socializing by getting involved with whatever was going on. It seemed to me that in later years the boys of the type that would for no reason assault me, were now trying to trick me, having fun at that. It was apparently their game of "outsmarting" me. Why that was important to them, was incomprehensible to me. Meanwhile, I was quite smart in schoolwork; having been in and out of so many schools as I was growing up, often in the middle of a school year, where some states were a year behind or a year in advance of the school I had just been pulled out of.

So I had lots of practice at figuring out schoolwork stuff on my own; and became called a "brain" at times. I did not understand the ego factor, the who-is-better-than-whom stuff that drove the behavior of the boys that had beat up on me over the years. I did not feel smarter than anybody else, nor want to appear that way to others; but I did like to learn things, especially science. In high school, I was tested at 750 words per minute reading with comprehension; and the day the IQ exam was given, I was sick at home with severe flu, but I dragged myself in to school to take the test, muddling my way through it despite the misery, and got a score of 120. I graduated with four majors: English, Social Studies, Science, and Math. It was not my intention to do so, it just happened that way. I was reading a book a day in addition to my school studies; most of the extra reading was in science, philosophy or science fiction, or an occasional western novel. I got elected President of the newly formed Science Club in High School, even though I had no idea as to how to lead a group. Yet still there was this occasional mischief of "trying to outsmart me" in social doings; that was easy to do because I did not understand social doings but I craved to be involved with others anyway. Thus it was easy to set up a demonstration of how some boy was "smarter" than me. This was mostly a nuisance to me; it also later seemed associated with why it was so hard for me to get a girlfriend, since the girls wanted the guys who could beat up or outsmart other boys.

"Picking a fight" seemed to be the common denominator of all these problems. The boys who "picked a fight" and then won the fight - and they usually did, because the victim rarely had an interest in fighting - got lots of attention, were very popular with their peers and especially the girls. It had advantages, for sure. But I had no capacity for such behavior. It was important for me to figure out the phenomenon, so as to hopefully be able to cope with it.

It was not until a decade or so ago, that I learned of a psychological condition called "Asperger's" that described my condition perfectly; I then realized that all my struggles of throwing myself into intensively social situations, so as to learn how to be social, would never work; I simply did not have the neurological wiring to make it work, ever. In a way, that understanding was freeing to me; I no longer had to try to "learn" to be social like all the others. I was to be a fringe person, yet always interested in what others were doing; and I was seeking other ways to demonstrate my value to others, mostly hoping to find a compatible girlfriend as a result.

So the decades of life experiences of large variation, had identified a pattern of behavior demonstrated by some of my peers, that involved "picking a fight" and then making some big show of stuff, generally harming someone else as a result. Made no sense to me, other than ultimately it got the initiators to be intimately involved with the cute girls. Eventually it trickled into my consciousness that there needed to be no other reason for it to go on, since it enabled those kind of boys to reproduce themselves, while others like me did not have the opportunity.

Simple as that. Lowest common denominator.

My seeking understanding of what was going on in the world around me, had derived that pattern, that was identifiable in a wide variety of scenarios. Including politics, I have noticed in recent decades. The identifying characteristic was always the "wanting to fight." They would find all kinds of reasons to pick a fight. "Knocking the block off of one's shoulder" was one term of it, apparently a means of declaration for such shenanigans. Even the ramming of planes into the Twin Towers seemed like "knocking the block off of the shoulder', a call of "let's fight, fight" to prove who was "better."

It still makes little sense to me, why it is so important for people to sometimes do that kind of stuff.

It was often portrayed in the comic book as I grew up; but that was obviously intended to be goofy behavior to be spectacular, keeping the reader's attention.

Anyway, the current politics here in America, off and on for many decades and even more so at the start of this millennium, seems to have a lowest common denominator of people wanting to fight. Some people are trying to get things done for the country; others are ever trying to pick a fight. Striving to interfere with what others were trying to do, is a way to instigate a "fight."

Although I know that the urge to do this "fight" instead of constructively working together to achieve mutual benefits, has no true political affiliations, currently the "GOP" seems to be almost exclusively doing this kind of activity, apparently just wanting to fight. For no apparent reason; they just want to fight. And are very practiced at fomenting irritation to others trying to get the job done, and embroiling them in a fight of some kind, thus distracting away from the task at hand - the task of helping America - and grabbing attention to themselves. They seemed to have been somehow hired by some of the super wealthy, to take over government so as to reduce the taxes on the profits of the super-wealthy corporations; simple as that. Thus the present GOP seems to be merely hired mercenaries brought in to fight. And the Democrats who are trying to help America per those who elected them to do the job, are too often caught up in this fighting thing instead of being able to get the job done for America. The GOP has not always been that way; in the past, they have been able to do a good job of guiding America. But nowadays, it seems to me that they are just sunk into this "picking a fight" thing.

In other words, they like to fight. they don't like to build or learn about nature to help restore nature or advance civilization; they only want to fight, to tear down.

And like the kids on the schoolyards, all that fighting stuff gets lots of other people to gather around and admire the ones picking on and doing the abuse of someone. And in later years, the assaulters usually would first work to spread rumors that their intended victim was an abuser, and therefore the proclaimer would be a hero by beating up on the victim. Quite a clever technique, to keep people from realizing who were the actual abusive ones.

Part of such groups under the control of those who crave fighting, is that their members do not dare think on their own, or at least dare not vote any other way other than the way demanded by their fighting leaders. Thus they vote as a block, no matter the cause. And nowadays it seems to generally be with the intent to tear down the Democrats, so as to then take the helm of the country, like they did from 2000 to 2008. And look what they did then; what actually happened, nevermind the fluff and show. Always with excuses, of course. Got to have two major unwinnable wars with those who could not attack us in return, for example. Wars are apparently great fun for those who crave to fight. Although those in Congress are not those who have to go slog in the dust and dodge bullets; but they like to get lots of attention thereby. Fabricate cause for widespread fear, then go spend the nation's money to go bash somewhere, shifting huge moneys to war corporations and it all going with little financial accountability - who dares interfere with the nation's security by investigating where the money goes? Easy setup for endless scams.

So the bottom line is the identifying of those who have the motto of "fight lets fight to prove who is better" instead of "let's build together that which will help all of us."

It is a phenomenon where a few folks are striving to rip off the others, for the exclusive benefit of those few; thus gathering around lots of admirers hoping to get some of the fallout from the action. And it goes on without restraint, due to the craving of large parts of the population, to watch the drama of others fighting, taught such as in assaultive sports games.

The key to the understanding of it all, may well be, instead of the apparent obvious, actually instead is the unseen unidentified third party: those to whom are being proved who is better-than whom.

Although in the earlier background, fighting was about bushwhacking someone to rob them and take their mate away, long ago; nowadays such as in Congress, "fighting" is really about proving who is "better," to those who are watching. Generally, that has the same overall result as in the earlier reason for "fighting:" to rob them and take their mate away, so as to out-reproduce them to take over the next generation.

Walruses do it, whales do it, wolves do it, cattle do it, elephants do it, some monkeys do it too. "So," as it is said, "what's new?"

Re surprise inspection in a prison in Mexico

2011-11-08T10:30:00.000-08:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-15630892 "Prostitutes found in Mexico jail ... A surprise inspection in a prison in Mexico has revealed the presence of 19 prostitutes, 100 plasma televisions, two sacks of marijuana, and 100 cockerels for cock fighting...."

I can't resist posting on my blog about this, despite my opinion likely to irritate lots of kinds of people.

Over the years I have heard about the notoriously bad prison conditions in Mexico, but even they are not inhumane enough to not let wives of inmates to occasionally visit their husbands intimately. Unlike here in America: we are even more inhumane than that; or maybe a bit sexually insane in general, with all the clever suppression by bullies who think that all women righteously belong to them because they are influentially stronger and more aggressive.

Anyway, the items listed in the news article are amusing. Other than the cock fighting stuff; that seems not so nice; although, perhaps watching the example of two roosters' total ferocity in slashing at each other so as to gain exclusive mating rights to the hens, might remind human men they are not quite that violent; who knows. As for the prostitutes there, I say good for all the men and women, yay. Less suffering in the world thereby, assuming all the men there were equally comforted by the women. And as for the televisions, we Americans know well the addiction to the boob tube, improving the quality of life a bit... usually. And the marijuana, it also would probably reduce the suffering of the inmates while they serve their time in prison; as far as I recall, marijuana only made people more peaceful and at ease socially, and caused no harm to anybody as a result of smoking it; might even have made them a bit more humane or at least better aware of nature's beauty. So it would also have contributed to a better environment for the inmates there, I would think, a small amount.

(I could grouse again at the idioticy of making hemp unlawful in America - because it is associated with marijuana's smoking by a few. Hemp has always been an important agricultural crop in America; nothing could match the strength, light weight and utility of hemp rope, stronger than steel for its weight; the only problem being it is scratchy to the hands. It's light weight and super strength made it used to tie up battleships to the dock in WWII, for example. No need to have huge expensive industrial factories to turn petrochemicals into rope; just plant seeds and it grew, and needed far less poisonous pesticides put into the ground than did comparable and less strong cotton crops. As far as I know, the only harm from hemp was when vigilantes would use hemp rope to lynch their victims.

Follow the money: who is it that benefits greatly by making hemp unlawful in America?

Yet also, I must say that my viewpoint is from an earlier generation, where smoking part of the hemp plant was unheard of. Tobacco is what people smoked. Was only decades later I heard of people smoking marijuana; some of my friends provided examples, and I did not see where they were made dangerous to others, except in their occasional antics to avoid getting caught smoking it. Their often uncanny awareness sometimes astonished me at times, however; so maybe all people ought to have the same advantage. All strange behavior to me.

But to banish the native hemp plant's growth from America as a result - are they really the same plant or is it that enforcers cannot tell the difference, I wonder - really needs some unbiased research and analysis. I wonder if the fear of turning all those imprisoned marijuana smokers, "guilty" of that victimless crime, out on the street, having them angry at the associated "law-enforcers;" and paying them full compensation for wrongful imprisonment, is why the anti-hemp-anti-marijuana laws are not revoked instantly.

Even nowadays, returning hemp as an important agricultural crop in America, as it was throughout all but the most recent history, would especially enable the processed hempseed as a much needed outstanding protein profile food, for better health of Americans. Instead of having to totally import that potentially important nourishing food, reducing the need for environmentally resource-expensive meat as partially comparable protein source. Especially for people like me, whose intestines are damaged by eating wheat gluten, and find it hard to absorb enough protein to be properly nourished. Corn and rice are not quite adequate substitutes.)

Anyway, back to the ranch, if prisons are meant to cause pain and discomfort to wrongdoers, then why not hook them up to some shock machine, making them jump around for a few seconds each day as "punishment," or maybe give them a couple lashes each week in revenge. Or each in turn have to sit in isolation while they are barraged by audio recordings of how awful and nasty they are and giving threats of fearful physical harm, for 15 minutes each day. Then for the rest of the day, let them live in their imprisonment served time humanely, including having a normal lovelife - whether from their wives or from prostitutes - and TV, and marijuana to ease their stress.

But it is well known that people learn by example, and having them spend time in great deprivation and abusive conditions on and on, like is standard here in the US, simply teaches them to do that to others, somehow, when they get out - just be more clever about it, obeying the letter of the law if not the intent of the law.

To experience the suffering of their victims, they need to have empathy so as to be able to feel the other's pain - unless of course the person is a psychotic person craving to feel others in pain - the empathic experience ought to be the way to get the wrongdoer's attention; then, teach them by example the proper way to treat others. Show them the difference, through rapid comparison, to get their attention. That might work.

But those who are inherently bullies and who have wound up in prison, of course, probably need a bit of different conditioning; and although I doubt that bullies can really be taught better intrinsic manners, they can be taught through rewards to serve as law enforcement, or working in certain types of supervision in companies, using their nature of stalk-&-assault to gain obedience of others, sort of constructively, by getting their needs to have others fear them that way, and yet under supervision and behavior rules, to not usually harm others. A salary would be cheaper than imprisonment, and possibly could get them to sometimes do something constructively, I would hope.

But, I know despite such ranting's making sense, that things will go on business as usual. Prisons are a huge source of income for those businesses. Possibly part of the incentive to have marijuana use imprisonable is to keep that money rolling in to the prison business and their investors.

As often happens, what people actually "do do" seems astonishing to me.

But the stalk-and-assault musclemen bullies do rule here, even in business suits. Even as prison guards, most likely; who else could tolerate watching such misery? Only those who had been abused as they grew up, I suspect; their subconscious fantasizing righteous abuse for wrongful abuse. And imprisonment's forcing of obeying, certainly is abuse. Although, I understand the need to restrain the rare violent nutso bulllies from insanely rampaging around as bullies too aggressively. Most of them do the bullying by the rules; but sometimes apparently they don't restrain themselves, and so freak out and cause "unlawful" harm to others. Stuffing them into a prison might seem all that can be done, to get them off the streets, out of other people's hair. But it ought to be temporary. And teach civilized manners to them there. What actual deterrent the threat of prison has on keeping stalk-&-assault natured bully people from doing their thing, is not so certain in my mind, as implied by the law-and-prison system.

Mexico's prison condition discovery per the news article, seems to be indicative of potentials of other ways to treat people.

And our reactions to that, ought to tell us something about ourselves, if we stop to look. But we might find that too uncomfortable to our egos.

Anger and alternative-health and conventional-medicine and Steve Jobs

2011-11-06T11:36:00.000-08:00

(Ref http://ideas.time.com/2011/11/04/steve-jobs-and-the-lure-of-alternative-healin/ )
I normally do not comment on others' writings; freedom of speech and all that. All people can have their own say; and it is not my place to refute some things that others have written.

But in this case, an article pushes too many of my buttons and the article is likely to really mislead some folks. The article is titled "Steve Jobs and the Lure of Alternative Healing"

The article starts out with "Steve Jobs’ decision to treat his pancreatic cancer with a vegan diet, herbs, juices and acupuncture rather than the surgery his doctors urged..." and ends with "... questions we should now be asking in the wake of Steve Jobs’ untimely death."

In between she claims her own father died because he took fish oil capsules instead of submitting to major chest surgery.

I think she had some bones to pick, blinding her to some things. (I have the same kind of problem myself, as a writer, at times.)

My reaction is a bit complex, as also was the many themes of the referenced article.

One is that the loss of Steve Jobs is a major loss to the world, and to myself.

Another is that I had never heard that Steve Jobs was at all into any sort of alternative health protocols.

What I do know, and was amazingly not mentioned in the article, was that Steve Jobs had long suffered from pancreatic cancer, and had been away from Apple for a long time because of it, on a previous occasion. During that time, he had a liver transplant, a major surgery, which he clearly submitted to; no fruit and veggies thing. And in itself the doctors overall did amazing things; several people I have heard about recently also died of pancreatic cancer, and invariably it is quick, very painful and unstoppable by anything. So that he survived at all to go back and do more great things at Apple and elsewhere for years, is a major credit to conventional medicine, one of their few successes in the field.

How the author of the article missed that major point, seems hard to understand, unless she was blinded by something, or simply did not do the research for the article ... which is written as if authoritative.

In a liver transplant, an organ transplant normally involves having to severely compromise the immune system, so the body does not quickly reject the transplant. But poor immune function leaves the body at risk from all kinds of problems. He lasted for years after the liver transplant, amazing, and very welcome. But for the contention of the article that we lost Steve Jobs because he did not submit to doctors' advise and their surgery, and instead tried a fruits and veggies diet "instead of submitting to surgery the doctors wanted" seems to have missed some major data; and is very misleading to the reader.

Now, I realize a common misconception of "alternative health" is to eat fruits and veggies instead of Super Sizers, and to workout in the gym. This does not know what it is about, at all.

And, could be that similarly Steve Jobs did not know any more about it either. Alternative health protocol knowledge is highly suppressed by the conventional medical business system; and it takes many years of trying things to learn first hand, for a person to begin to have really relevant knowledge. I doubt he had time for that, busy as he was, a high accomplisher. That he at last minute tried a cleaner diet to help the body have its best chance, considering his medically-destroyed immune system due to avoiding the liver transplant rejection, sounds like could be helpful.

But surely not full use of the Alternative Wellbeing full knowledge set. For example, alternative holistic wellbeing would first deal with suppressed anger issues, known to overstress the liver areas. For someone dedicated to enabling personal computers all his life, and dealing with doing that in the brutal business world, surely caused him lots of anger that he apparently had no means for relieving. Thus, little wonder it blew out his pancreas and liver, per that knowledge set. Deal with causes, and the body function failures are not so likely to happen, and not surgeries, immune destruction etc, needed (and thus less money for those folks, note. Follow the money.)

But that was not his followed path, despite the article's author's contention. He went full bore to get the high tech stuff done, "d__mn the torpedoes" in the harsh business rival world, probably having no idea about needing to be responsible for his own physical well being. If something breaks, take the body, like the car, to a fixer-upper shop; then get back on the road pedal-to-the-metal again.

I particularly have my buttons pushed about this, because his was the electronics world, and there were relevant electro-herbalism technologies developed in time to maybe have saved his life, but the heavy-handed suppression of them here in America probably kept him from learning about them. Even if he did, he, as an engineering-minded person in electronics - like I am - would have probably been too skeptical to even consider it even if he had managed to hear about it. It has taken me many years of testing of the technology personally, for me to grudgingly say that for sure, it can do some incredible things to help maintain a person's health. I would even say that it is likely that if doctors and hospitals had proper use of the same electro-herbalism technology, that thousands, maybe millions of people would remain alive and well that instead die each year. Responsibility? Do no harm? Or is it make highest income, instead? I too can get grumpy and off the edge, just like the article's writer, blaming this and that. And I have direct personal research knowledge of it all, not just hearsay.

I'm not a medical doctor. Am only an amateur scientist, in several fields of science, as hobbies. (Well, I also do formal scientific work in a field of biology as a volunteer, even currently.) The point here is that if it is science - instead of solely what one was taught and accepted without question - it is mandatory that one test, evaluate, the device or protocol, to see what it actually does in your own experience, before one can declare something works or does not work. That is the essence of the Scientific Method: do the unbiased testing in a completely capable mode, and find out what actually happens in reality. Happened that time, anyway. Repeat the test, get the data. See the trends, repeatability. Get others to do the identical test elsewhere, if possible, and compare notes. The general term is to "measure efficacy."

In electro-herbalism experimentation, one gets to test efficacy using the instrument one knows best: their own being, their own body. Evaluate before and after, and the fully described protocol in between. This is so easily done by an individual; it does not need hundreds of millions of dollars of FDA-required formal double-blind testing, to see if it achieved anything for oneself in a given test. there are many thousands of individuals who have already done such testing and generally find it is a working thing. Well worth formal research and inclusion in conventional medical practice.

Problem is, it appears to work too well.

Even the mere basic original Clark-30KHz-zapper does. Works much too well. As a personally owned and used low cost home instrument, in correct usage, my experience is that it would cut down on income in the conventional medical system an enormous amount. A wild guess is that it could cut down on doctor visits by ... 90% ... who knows. Much higher hospital recovery rate and less time in hospital, I would project.

And nobody wants to lose a good job. Medicine nowadays has the responsibility to be a very profitable business; instead of the responsibility to provide low cost consistent long term good heath for all Americans, using all means possible... including electro-herbalism and other alternative protocols that are found to work effectively, an efficacy-based system.

I wonder, what it would be like if the whole medical system's directive was of the latter type, instead of the former.

Quite a dilemma.

A way to break loose from the present expensive patent-and-sue system of idea territory control

2011-11-05T10:54:00.000-07:00

To get around the problem of patents and lawsuits effectively strangling new creative technological ideas for new American products, instead of the patent-and-sue system we now have for combat between individuals and companies, how about making it like the interstate highway system, a governmental and unbiased system for rewarding originators of the ideas and products based on those ideas, so that all technological patentable ideas are freely useful by all Americans in their products.

The compensation to the originators - and which could be secondary inventors too, anyone independently coming up with an idea even if already someone else had previously done that somewhere - according to a share of the amount of application of the idea in American technology products.

It would be paid for by a general tax as a fraction of the sale price of all technology products, without regard to which technological ideas or patents were involved in their creation and manufacture.

This is justified because probably all but the latest bit of an idea for technological innovation, is actually built on all the technological, scientific, engineering ideas developed and made available throughout civilization's growth, probably going back to the Greek scholars and even to the stone hatchet or even the invention of tamed fire for cooking.

The benefit of such a system is expected to be the unfettering of idea makers and manufacturers and technological product developers, so they can rapidly proceed with the implementation of their products and ideas for products. No need for a massive expensive legal department to root in the patent stuff to find which ideas can be pursued in a new product, which is something important for the backyard lone inventor, especially.

For example, let's say that Apple comes up with a new patentable idea. The idea is disclosed in the patent and registered with the patent office. From then on, everybody can freely use that idea in their inventions and products. Apple would get compensated for their invention by an appropriate portion of the taxes collected during the sale of technological products.

This would enable rapid building upon new ideas of others; more importantly, it would enable creation and development of new ideas and innovative products, without the hassle of wondering if someone else had thought of parts of it before, and would act to block the new product. It would also stop the technology-strangling business practice of patenting some key part of a technology, with no intent of using it in a product, but simply to prevent it from being used by a rival business; thus, more kinds of products would become available to the customers, expanding the functionality of the nation.

Opponents to this concept, I fantasize, would be those who derive fame&fortune off of the existing patent-and-sue system; those who consider their patent base as a means of control rather than just financial gain; those who would find it disturbing because it is not the way they are familiar with doing things or thinking about things; and the conservative political group who want less governmental influence and fewer taxes; this makes sense insofar as the risk of some political group getting itself into office who are in it for power and control by a mere few Americans, for their own exclusive benefit. Liberal politicals would question how could privateering such a system be made unbiased and unrestrictive by whoever was controlling it all. Then the costs of paying for it out of detailed tracking of which patent, which idea and in which proportion of each new product, would be overwhelmingly costly and time consuming, almost as bad as the present system and probably even more expensive. So it seems best to me to have it as stated above, paid for by a general tax on all technological based products, from toothpaste to jet aircraft. Even agricultural products depend a lot of technology for their products, such as tractors and fertilizers.

Such a system would be of great benefit in teh upcoming expansion of civilization into nearby space. Although much of teh technology being utilized by upcoming corporations, such as launch vehicle technology, was developed by NASA and therefore paid by American taxes and therefore free to use, newer space access & utilization technologies could be hamstrung by trickery use of the patent-and-sue system by those who patent some key part of a new upcoming technology, with no intent tu use it for goods or services, but merely to prevent rival ways of accomplishing needed things, from being utilized. Much of the space industries are solely based on gaining profit and have little intrinsic interest in the unbiased expansion of civilization into the resources of nearby space, and thus are likely to prevent American best approaches to space, if that is the way they gain most power and wealth.

This proposed system would also wipe out purpose from the often abusive corporate practice of the unrighteous application of the so-called "employment agreement" ceding all ideas by the prospective employee in the future to the employer, regardless of the employer having any intent to utilize the ideas of the employees. This has been blocking the nation's utilization of the vast majority of technologically-interested workers, people who are hands-on in technology and often get new ideas simply by the stimulation thereby of the technological creative part of the mind not involved with the performance of the job for which they are hired to do, which insight can inspire any time of day or night, on or off the job, and most of the time have nothing to do with their fulfillment of their hired-for job accomplishments.

By adopting the system proposed here, technological product advancement could be gotten out of the virtual exclusive control by wealthy companies, and back into the hands of the independent inventors and developers, including small businesses and backyard inventors, where currently most ideas have to die in the present expensive patent-and-sue system of idea control. All would ultimately benefit, from the huge wealthy corporations to the backyard lone innovators, insofar as contributing to the technological capability of the nation.

(Nonetheless I expect this concept to be deep-sixed, because "it is not how we do things, and we are the ones in control here, not you." The place is crawling with bullies.)

Avoiding the use of a war to unite a country

2011-11-03T21:19:00.000-07:00

Am wondering if some of the changes in the nature of the news articles online, is due to an ancient phenomenon.

Uniting a nation by having them work together to fight an external threat, is much like getting siblings to cooperate to fend off an external threat. But when the external threat is gone, then the siblings bickering among themselves resumes.

Historically, leaders have united their countries by creating wars, to utilize this effect.

Now we are winding down a pair of wars well designed to be unwinnable and therefore long drawn out. But now ending. That means the probable phenomenon of bickering among ourselves will make up more and more news, in our seemingly insatiable thirst for drama of winners and losers.

There is so very much that needs accomplishing, that requires our working together to accomplish them. Sure, we can survive, limp along in the same old way, without those achievements. But why would we choose that? Yet it seems we have chosen it, per the daily news announcements.

Surely there is a better way than having a nasty war ongoing, to unite us to work together instead of doing the bickering mischief. But leaders throughout history have used the war card to win the game of internal cooperation, instead of something else.

We might be at a turning point, in this phenomenon. But we need some new ideas about it, fast. Else we will destroy ourselves in the bickering, or else another war or two will get concocted again, to solve the problem.

Maybe it is suppression of technological advancement

2011-11-03T17:38:00.000-07:00

Interesting phenomenon chatting with someone who has some idea about some of my space concepts, who can understand, yet clearly has business interests that constrain conversation. The subject matter is not involved in this post, but are the interesting thoughts developed in myself, apparently as a result.

One is the contrast between the two old sayings: "A bell cannot be un-rung," vs "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound."

The other is that, on revisiting my experiences writing files and posting them on the GEnie network - before the internet - and the equivalent of chat threads, the interesting thing now twenty years later, is the fact that responders chose to respond to my writings and chat threads with antagonism instead of happiness that they now had new opportunity for creating fine new things, with the ideas now existing because I had made them and made them freely available there.

That puzzled me back then, as well as was frustrating to me then; but now, there is a bit of different thought coming up about it. It was their choice, to work constructively with me; or to tear my creative concept constructions down or hide them from others' view. The overwhelming response was to go the destructive interference path. That is the thing I am noticing now.

Something about their psychology, or their situation, most likely caused that to happen. What could it be?

Supposedly everyone in that group had the same goal, to advance into space as fast and as well as possible. The concepts I had created and wrote about on my dozens of files on the GEnie Space and Science Library, would help achieve those mutual goals.

It still does not make sense to me.

There has got to be more to it all.

Maybe it is simply suppression of technological advancement; but then, again, why? It ought to benefit everybody, so why assault it?

I could push my self-protective paranoid-button, and say it was not my concepts under attack, all varieties of them, but instead it was me under attack.

Well, that again ends up in another door to nowhere: why? Or even, why bother doing it? ... maybe it has something to do with why there are bullies. Might be the same answer to both questions.

Being stalked in stores and contract killing

2011-11-03T11:39:00.000-07:00

Re the referenced article, it appears to be a contract killing. And such a thing is quite commonly set up, in my experience. Very frequently I have had men stalking me in WalMart - and Safeway and Radio Shack too. Sometimes just one man; sometimes a group of four, and at least one of them carrying a sealed soft drink bottle held by the neck as if ready to use it as a club.

Oftentimes the club-carrying man shows up right behind me in the checkout line, if no one else is there. Typically he has no cart being pushed; just has the beverage bottle being swung suggestively by its neck, instead of being held the normal way of holding such a container.

Interestingly, whenever I bicycle to Walmart and wear my helmet while in the store, the bottle-club carrying guy phenomenon does not happen. I wear my bicycle helmet in the store because oftentimes the personnel seemed to think I was stealing it from the store, so by wearing it while walking into the store, hopefully security personnel will notice that. I did not correlate the wearing of the helmet and the lack of a stalker in the store isles or behind me carrying a beverage bottle held like a club, until many trips there; apparently the intent was to strike me in the head with the bottle-club, and the helmet would possibly protect me from such an assault.

Part of the weird phenomenon is that apparently the guys arrive there just before I do, as if somehow they had figured out where I was going a bit in advance. Seems impossible; but fairly consistent.

Pondering the possible who and why of it, has produced only possibilities, some going back to the 1960's militant nuts; most of the possibilities from later times such as by those who have stolen my technological concepts for their businesses, probably related to the very expert robberies of my residences over the years; and also what apparently is carefully contrived bad-mouthing about me to ruin my reputation, done by some widespread influential group. Mixed in at times has been mere "crazy-making" mischief, too, to confuse things.

And I wonder, when is the "boss" going to give the go-ahead for a killing, like the article describes. Unfortunately I have no other way to get food and supplies, so I have to endure this.

Continuing engineering failure analysis of social systems re technology

2011-10-28T13:06:00.000-07:00

(Continued from http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2011/10/failure-analysis-of-lack-of-acceptance.html )

So far, the failure analysis of the social systems needed to establish early space colonization for humanity, have brought up factors of lack of congressional funding; judging the originator's credentials instead of judging the concepts themselves; lack of peer-membership with the potential evaluators; interference with existing business investments and career planning; unfamiliar technology to the evaluators; and the business choices of going for easy profit instead of the vision of early space colonization.

The 1972 Lunar space elevator concept, called the Mooncable, brought up those factors, as mentioned in the referenced post which is part of this overall message.

The next concept utilized for this failure analysis of needed social systems, relates to the the "KESTS to GEO" concept. So the last part of the preceding post is repeated here, as it is part of the description of what was tried and how failure was the result.

The second example for this kind of overall system failure analysis, is my effort to gain interest in my concept for rapid expansion into high Earth orbit, initially with the purpose of building abundant Solar Power Satellites to provide plentiful clean energy to nations around the world. This concept would bypass the Space Elevator's severe limitations, yet be able to do the same efficient access to high earth orbit, probably even more capably too. It would use the outward force of internal centrifugal force to balance the weight of the structure in the planetary gravitational field, instead of utilizing strength of materials to do the job.

I created this "KESTS to GEO" concept - acronym for "Kinetic Energy Supported Transportation Structure to Geostationary Earth Orbit" - to bypass the problem with the Earth Space Elevator concept, that of the lack of a material strong enough for its mass to support its own weight between GEO and the ground. I was keenly aware of this problem, having thought of the earth space elevator idea in 1969 - not the first person to do so, it turned out - then realized that the tensile strength to density ratio problem that really made a problem for the concept. (However, that effort later enabled my 1971-1972 creation of the Mooncable concept.) So I constantly sought other ways to have large scale access of earth orbital space.

The early 1980's concepts of Keith Lofstrom's Launch Loop rocket lift to the fringes of the atmosphere by a trapezoid shaped tethered out-flung loop of continuous material, and Rod Hyde's "StarBridge" vertical tower to the fringes of the atmosphere, supported by electrodynamic drag of high velocity paramagnetic beryllium disks flung upward inside the structure, excited my hopes for early large scale space colonization in my time; even Earl Smiths' "Texas and Universe Railroad" concept of an out-flung expandable iron belt from the earth surface to GEO, although had some major flaws in it including that it would not go to GEO if anchored in the high latitude of Texas, got me to do my first speech supporting those concepts, as well as my Mooncable space elevator concept, to the National Commission on Space in 1985. But to no avail, the Commission's report did not mention any of these things.

I mulled over the why-nots for a few years, discovering the major faults within each of those systems, and finally figured out how to combine all those concepts and add some new components, to make what appeared a workable large scale ground-to-GEO access space transportation structure of high efficiency, supported by the outward force of high velocity armatures circulating throughout the quasi-elliptical hoop around the Earth, connecting the equatorial surface to GEO. The materials and technology were well within the contemporary capability.

But the problem remained, of how I, as still an unknown in the field, could get this concept into the awareness of those who could take it to the next steps. About that time, I had gotten connected to the GEnie Spaceport Library, via my 300 baud modem connected to my long-obsolete Adam Coleco computer; as always, I lived on the edge of poverty, earning a living as an engineering technician in electronics; I worked for a small car alarm manufacturer at the time. Finally I could get the attention to my Mooncable concept and my new KESTS to GEO concept, I thought, through the GEnie network, connecting with other space enthusiasts involved with technology.

Even the GEnie Network was sponsored by General Electric, a large company who could possibly be able to build much of the KESTS to GEO system, I thought. I posted the initial insights there in 1988, and had largely fleshed it out in 1989, posting many files in the GEnie Spaceport Library.

But the reaction I got as a result was lots of angry replies, not involving technology, but bringing up other issues that readers would have to wade through before getting to the technical parts of the chat strings back then.

It took me a long time to realize that the KESTS to GEO concept would obsolete the ground rocket launch vehicle industry, on which these folks based their futures. No wonder the anger.

But clearly they were only interested in their personal fortunes, not the vision of large scale economical access and utilization of high earth orbit, and the large scale access of the Lunar environment and Mars' moons and asteroids, all now potentially in the near future, instead of something that would only have to withstand the test of real physical construction and usage generations later, as were the other forms of space colonization views as based on rocket systems alone.

A general pattern seems to be forming as I write here: the wideness of the vision of the evaluator, controls the trend of the resulting decision. If the evaluator was not fitting the concept into the wide vision of extending humanity into space colonies, then the criteria would be based on such things as the concept's potential effects on the evaluator's career, the corporate business potentials, the disruption to existing personal investments such as into petrochemical energy sources so as to gain personal wealth that way, effect on esteem from non-peer level concept offerings, and potential effects on international interactions. Thus what seems to be a failure of social systems, is simply reduced to success at supporting continuance of other considerations. Not looking to early space colonization, why disrupt existing plans for enabling that to happen.

In the KESTS to GEO enabled SPS case, done by the pointing out of the essential nature of large scale worldwide energy sources that are not primarily based on burning of petrochemicals in the air, simply stimulated efforts to create "green" energy sources and transportation systems, from existing technologies of wind, photovoltaics, wave energy, nuclear, and geothermal energy sources; maintaining the hydroelectric dams, and electric cars.

Such a diversity of energy sources is important for a resilient energy supply. Yet since these "green" energy sources are not producing more than a small fraction of the nation's energy needs; we have to burn coal aplenty to provide the vast majority of our daily energy usage.

The concept of building Solar Power Satellites in GEO, adequate to supply the vast majority of civilization's energy needs on into the future, enabled by building the KESTS to GEO transportation structure from ground up to GEO, is still being intensely avoided even now in 2011, some 22 years since the concept was fairly fleshed out in 1989, and long enough to have developed working structures built between equatorial ground and GEO by now, and a few prototype Solar Power Satellites of operational capacity already built and being used to supply all the energy the transportation structure system needs itself, as well as supplying gigawatts of energy to the power grid.

While the failure to implement this is a failure to be able to provide plentiful non-petrochemical energy for civilization along with large scale space colonization in GEO and on the Moon, it is not a social failure in the sense that it enable continuance of business-as-usual, in the comfort zone of those who make things happen. And, there are fewer big goofs made, when people stick to the familiar; never-mind the lack of preparation for the needs of the future of civilization. There is also the social quirk that people generate far more emotional energy when things fail as they do when things work fine; witness the major agony over the crash of the Challenger, yet no comparable rejoicing across the nation in the many successful flights that the Challenger Space Shuttle made before that. Goofs cost the doer far more than successes are rewarding to the doer, in other words. Risk not taken, means not risking condemnation due to failure.

But, this is analogous to when a man fails to approach a woman in hopes of courting her, for fear of rejection by her. No loving has a chance of happening. In this case, we not only have no chance of life preservation diversification via space colonies, but also we are stuck with our planetary oxygen being converted into unbreathable carbon dioxide, in order to have electrical energy lightening our homes, and our massive cars get pushed around in the commute each day.

So let's look in more detail as to how the KESTS to GEO concept was shot down, and why. Each factor can be a factor in extrapolating what will happen in subsequent efforts to revive the concept, as well as in new forms of space access and utilization concepts.

The initial efforts to gain awareness and interest in the KESTS to GEO concept are described above, utilizing the GEnie Information Network.

Other avenues were also explored, however. A visionary article on the concept was published in a non-technical magazine called "Meditation Magazine" in 1990. A talk was given to the Los Angeles Chapter of the International Society of System Scientists, on the subject of KESTS to GEO in 1994. A description was given as part of a RAND study seeking new space systems concepts. The early vision of KESTS to GEO envisioned its high energy efficiency, high capacity continuous operation between ground and GEO, to enable a couple of prototype space colonies in GEO, modeled after the Stanford Torus 10,000 person space settlement design of 1975, originally intended for construction in the distant future at L-5 built out of Lunar materials; but KESTS to GEO would enable them built in GEO without first creating a huge Lunar infrastructure. So it was also proposed to build a classical wheel-type space station in LEO, totally built teleoperated until assembled in LEO, before the first manned presence would be needed there; this concept was called "Centristation"and would be a 100-200-person R&D habitat to work out many of the interactions of a near-self-sustaining 1-g environment in actual space conditions. The wheel structure would first be built on the ground and debugged there as much as possible; each of the component modules would be designed and built for use as their own fuel tank during launch. Thus it was titled "Wet launch of Prefab habitat Modules" when I presented a peer-reviewed technical paper on the Centristation concept to the Space Studies Institute at Princeton, NJ, in 1995.

May I mention the factors that this was my first attendance to such a space conference and knew little about doing such a thing; I was still very nervous about public speaking, having only done the one testimony to the NCS in 1985 as mentioned before; and that in my impoverished state - employed as an electronics technician at a car alarm manufacturing company at the time - all I had was a 386SX computer running DOS at home so I had to format the document to SSI specs, using poster freeware to make the camera-ready copy of the paper. This paper got published by SSI/AIAA in 1995.

Such a wheel- space station in LEO was in line with Gerard O'Neil's wonderful vision for space colonization that was the lifeblood of the Space Studies Institute.

But the KESTS to GEO concept was not in line with that SSI vision; it would bypass the need for an initial Lunar infrastructure and colonies built at L-5 which would build the Solar Power Satellites; KESTS to GEO would build the SPS out of earth materials, economically brought up for construction in GEO by the electrically powered and supported transportation structure. In other words, I did not realize I was trying to propose something that would wipe out their grand vision's purpose for happening.

Thus it is no wonder I was ridiculed and booed out after I gave my technical paper to SSI on KESTS to GEO in 1997, naively thinking them to be focused on getting SPS built in GEO and space colonization to happen much quicker than their existing vision would. I thought they would welcome my vision with open arms; but in reality I was seen as a disruptor, and invader, something to be stamped out of existence.

It was easily seen that if enough orbiting satellites and space junk were put into the space between ground and GEO, that continuous structures like Space Elevators and KESTS to GEO Space Escalators increasingly become at risk for collision and thus destruction. Stall these transportation structures long enough, and they would not get built because of this, thus assuring that rocketry business would continue on abundantly, instead of becoming obsolete. And so they did that. And that is the situation now. We are stuck with rockets, the incredibly inefficient rocket launch vehicle access to earth orbit and elsewhere.

Nonetheless, there is still potential for building KESTS to GEO, if mankind chose to do so.

Anyway, after getting the boot from Princeton, I nursed my wounds but saw no flaw in my technical concept itself; so I submitted a technical paper to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) space conference in 1998. It got rejected. I rewrote it and it finally got accepted for presentation and publication in 2000, and thus became the first peer-reviewed formal technical paper hardcopy published on the KESTS to GEO concept. Two years later, I wrote a more complete paper on the subject and presented it to the ASCE 2002 space conference. But clearly there was some interference going on; NASA had sponsored someone to make a spectacular proposal saying that the Earth Space Elevator was ready to build, if money were available to do so. And thus no one was interested my concept when something else could be built right away, that would do a similar job. Of course, we now know that it was not ready to build at all; but the timing was just right to shoot down the budding KESTS to GEO concept. In 2004 a third technical paper on KESTS to GEO was presented my me, and the paper published, but clearly it was being ditched by the rocket launch business interests who freshly had been given contracts for the manned Mars project by NASA.

I began to realize that NASA itself was actively against KESTS to GEO. Impossible as that seemed to me to be; was not NASA devoted to advancing space utilization including space colonization?

But, rocketry systems were what NASA folks were experts in. Not some weird electric motor completely encircling the Earth; their academic and corporate expertise would largely be obsolete and they would have to go back to college, maybe to fail this time. Nope; keep business as usual.

And after all, NASA has the mandate to enable America to stay ahead of the Space Race, to protect America from possible lunar bases built on the Moon aimed at us, like Cuba back in the 1960's that was what NASA was created to do, and now it has the task of maintaining that technical expertise of manpower and manufacturing. The scientific folks can do relatively safer robotic missions to Mars and the other bodies hurtling around in our solar system, keeping their technical expertise up through that kind of exercise, and also happening to see what the potentials are out there. But space colonization is not in NASA's mandate. Solar Power Satellites are not in NASA's mandate. Congress sets NASA's purpose. NASA is just doing its job. And, the prospect of them having to build a KESTS to GEO most likely is scary to them; too different and too many goofs inevitable, like in early rocket development.

The KESTS to GEO concept would provide a means for electrically lifting goods and personnel from ground up into GEO and back, potentially very energy efficiently. The amount of energy added to each pound of mass lifted from the equator up into GEO is only 7,300 KWh, or 73 cents per pound, if at a energy cost of 10 cents per KWh. Lifting an average person up into GEO would therefore add the amount of energy to his mass, about the same as the cost of a trip from coast to coast by airplane. Building things in GEO could become very low cost and rapid instead of the incredible cost and effort of rocket launch to there, as is required now.

KESTS to GEO can take many forms. For example, KESTS could also be built for ground to LEO access, or even be used in circular form, linking pressure-supported towers located around the planet along the equator, for highly efficient intercontinental travel. But the most useful form would be from equatorial ground up into GEO, where something will stay put, with no intermediate use of a rocket propelled vehicle or other free-flying vehicle. Walk onto KEST on the ground, walk off into GEO.

The KESTS to GEO structure would not have its weight supported by the counterbalance of a weight swung around by the Earth's rotation, as would be done in the case of the anchored tether Space Elevator concept.

Instead, it would provide its own internal centrifugal force in the direction opposing Earth's gravitational field everywhere, but constrained high velocity armature segments endlessly circulating within the hollow hoop structure at velocities several times that of the orbital velocity along that path.

Thus the surplus outward centrifugal force supports the static weight of the earth-stationary part of the structure.

The whole transportation structure is essentially a synchronous electric motor. In its primary form, all the energy is input to it at the ground terminal, by electromagnetic accelerators synchronously re-accelerating each armature segment as it passes through the accelerator; the armature segment then coasts all around the planet within the hollow hoop, back again the the earth terminal accelerator where its energy losses along the way are replenished over and over again. Millions of such armature segments comprise the high velocity mass that provides the outward push against the hoop structure, supporting its weight and the weight of its live loads.

The armature segments' upward-bound mass stream are also configured, at least in part, for being electrodynamically braked against by coupling to captive spacecraft, thus lifting the spacecraft up between ground and GEO; thus the vehicles carry no energy source nor need any beamed to them by lasers.

The captive spacecraft carrying construction materials and personnel up from ground to GEO, would move continuously up one side and down the other side gently back to Earth. Counter-rotating mass streams within the hoop are needed for this, note, laterally coupled by the constraints on their inductive extreme high velocity maglev tracks. The continuous lift of materials up to GEO make rapid construction of large scale Solar Power Satellites possible.

It also make s possible the construction of spaceports in GEO, where rocket components would be electrically lifted efficiently up to GEO, where the reaction-engined spacecraft would head off to space, already 91% up out of the Earth's gravitational energy well. Returning to Earth is just as efficient, no re-entry energy to be dealt with.

This would enable a whole new paradigm about civilization's relationship with space at the vast resources there of room to grow, material to be found, energy from the sun 24/7, and opportunity to establish space colonies abundantly in high earth orbit as well as on the Moon, Phobos, Mars and asteroids, for starters.

But we chose not to do this. Business as usual is lots easier. We have kids to put through college, etc.

In 2005 I naively also tried presenting papers to Space Elevator conferences. It was as popular as a Ford salesman babbling away at a General Motors new car showroom. They published three of my KESTS to GEO related technical papers, but they somehow ungrouped the graphics so they are meaningless, useless for communicating the concepts.

I finally got the message. Corporate aerospace does not like KESTS to GEO.

A friend who understands the world more than I do, urged me to write science fiction about my concepts, instead of technical papers. I at first resented that, fearing people already call my concepts science fiction, not having been built yet. But, eventually I discovered that writing high tech science fiction about my concepts was cathartic, finally living out the building and usage of such transportation systems involving Centristation, the Space Elevator, KESTS to GEO and Circular KESTS. It got to be fun and interesting to do so, and was lots easier than traveling to space conferences and coping with public speaking tying to convince hostile people of the worth of my concepts. I had to learn how to format the sci fi novels so they could be printed as paperbacks, and made available for sale at Amazon, but nobody buys them, nobody knows they are there, and Amazon does not bring them up in title searches. I have also made most of the novels into eBook format too, via Smashwords.

What more can I do to help space colonization happen?

In evaluating this kind of effort for what caused the failure to get these concepts to be made physical, so that the larger goal of establishing living systems off-planet can be achieed, some factors need to be considered. There is a characteristic integration among the pieces of the concepts, different from team designs or design by committee; for example, although the Centristation in LEO project would be built using over 200 launches of a three-part reuseable teleoperated launch and docking system, using conventional chemical rockets, and its purpose is to get advance R&D done for the construction of 10,000-person Stanford-Torus type space colonies in GEO, that it still needs the KESTS to GEO already built to at least a small lifting capacity girth, or at least built to access LEO from the ground. This is because of the need to staff it with some 200 people, perhaps as many as a thousand people. It would take the transportation capacity of a KESTS to put that many people into orbit in a short time, and to get them back again in a hurry if need be. The orbit of the Centristation would be chosen to not intersect with the KESTS to GEO. The characteristic integration of such large scale projects is the result of both a predisposition by the individual, plus the very long term obsessive pursuit of a subject for achievement that is characteristic of someone with Asperger's Syndrome. In this case, consider that large scale earth to space transportation structures were sought and found as early as 1969; and some some 42 years of mulling over the basic transportation problem having been done even since then. It is the result of much of a lifetime obsession with the subject. Both conscious and subconscious mind ever at least partially looking for hints of pieces to the solution of the puzzle the Asperger person seeks to build.

Yet the naive Asperger person believes that humanity will accept him/her finally, when a successful concept design is produced. Like the fable of the rejected "different" Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer at Christmas time, the goal is to come through to save the day. Such fantasies are rarely realized in the real world, however; the real world just usually dismisses the Asperger's great creation as somehow unworthy; or if not, the Asperger must have stolen it from someone of high academic or corporate stature. This is because of the non-Asperger's nature of ever striving to prove he/she is better than... somebody. The Asperger with the concept is considered a show-off, trying to be better-than you; therefore, must be put down, in order to restore everybody's status. Such petty processes are busy influencing what happens to the concept; and will normally result in either someone else stepping forward and declaring it is their idea, or someone else's idea, thus the concept originator is righteously put in his/her place; and the concept is now loose and available for all the regular folks to use without involving the originator anymore. (Unfortunately they usually do a poor job of utilizing it, settling for merely one implementation of it that makes them money.)

For some reason, the group psychology needed for some corporation to form a team to develop such a concept to bring it into reality, needs to thusly pry rights to the concept from the one who has spent much of a lifetime creating it, by trickery like that; it shows that they are smarter after all. The concept is thought to be completely the property of those who are in the team and the team's financiers; and indeed patents are not awarded to the originator of the concept that describes how to build something, it is awarded to whoever follows the instructions and thus puts it into practice before others do.

Yet the spread of new concepts need to be done. Like the story of Archimedes, having long struggled with the very complex problem of how to calculate the exact volume of a complex metal object volume so as to be able to correctly measure its density and therefore determine the type of metal of which it is made, having noticed in a bathtub how the water rises in exact displacement of his complex body's shape, he made the connection that the same thing could be applied to the complex shape of, say, a gold jewelry item; simply measure the height of the liquid it displaces, inside a constant cross sectional area container. The integrated volume is found as easy as that. And so this technique was eventually communicated widely, so that all people might utilize it. The concept becomes part of civilization's tools.

So, to seek engineering failure analysis of social systems, and find ways to resolve the problems, it is suggested that people seek more understanding, and make it available to others, I suppose, like in this writing.

Jim Cline 20111028 Ephrata, WA, USA

Failure analysis of lack of acceptance of space access system concepts

2011-10-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

In engineering doing development work, there sometimes is a need to debug something. The first step in debugging is to evaluate the data which discovered the failure to live up to expectations; this data and its failure analysis needs to be as thorough and accurate as possible, so as to be more likely to fix the problem in the subsequent effort.

The development of space colonization might benefit from a similar approach. Looking back at failures is no fun; but if we don't learn from our mistakes, it is wisely said we are doomed to repeat them.

I personally know of several such failures on the path to space colonization; so, despite my dislike of rehashing the unpleasant and often incomprehensible, subsequent events have provided me with significant understanding of what was going on in the bigger picture, that probably caused the failures to get those early starts in space colonization.

Sifting out what seems the most pertinent parts - the whole scenario and sequence of related events would take volumes to write - the following items are some of those failure analysis findings:

The first one has to do with the failure to build Space Elevator technology on the Moon, using the leftover Apollo Saturn 5 launch vehicles to emplace a seed elevator cable on the moon. This concept was informally gotten to NASA and in mid-1972 was given a rejection by the NASA Inventions & Contribution Board. This concept showed that an existing material, space-rated fiberglass, was capable of being used to build what is now called a Space Elevator, but I called it the Mooncable back then. A cable made of space rated fiberglass, built into a tapered constant-stress-cross-section shape, could be built linking the lunar surface with a somewhat lower gravitational energy level toward the Earth, going through the L-1 balance point, where the thickness was greatest. It took me months of hand calculations to prove that the material was up to the task; and my concept description described a way to utilize motor-generators traveling up and down the Mooncable, using conductive tracks on the structure to connect the earthward-downward electrodynamic braking energy over to lift another motor generator tractor up off the lunar surface toward L-1. The system thus provided a siphon-like effect, so my more extensive description was titled "The Mooncable: Gravitational-Electric Siphon in Space"This was a deeply integrated concept description, where it integrated the mooncable structural transportation mechanism with a major product so as to make it a profitable activity, supplying a useful material to the Earth. Foamed steel, a material only create-able in zero-g, would be made at a manufacturing plant located at L-1 balance point on the Mooncable, by using focused solar energy to melt nickle-iron brought up by motor-generator tractors from the Lunar surface. The metal would be filled with gas bubbles there in zero-g at L-1, while being input to a mold, which would shape the material into the form of a re-entry glider, for the trip from the earthward-end of the Mooncable to the Earth's surface. The cast gliders, with the durability of stainless steel yet the density of wood, would float in the ocean after landing, and be towed to land where it would be sawn up and used for construction material, such as for energy-absorbing crash barriers lining the middle of freeways; and building fireproof homes that were nearly impervious to weather effects. The Mooncable structure itself would be made of fiberglass, and glass is an abundant material on the surface of the Moon; so the only thing needing landing by Saturn-5 launch systems would be the original seed cable, plus a robotic operated glass materials plant. The timing was right; we were still landing astronauts on the Lunar surface, and this seemed an appropriate next step to build upon Apollo, and enabling economical establishment of a lunar manufacturing facility on the Moon, a first space colony. And the project could be started immediately, right then in 1972.

But it did not happen. What was the failure in the system? So here is an engineering failure analyst effort:

Looking back, there seems to be multiple points of failure, and each provides an example for preventing similar failures for present and future efforts striving for space colonization.

One factor was that it required Congress to vote to provide appropriations. And that congress was showing its meaningfulness by hacking off a percentage of the funds asked for Space Shuttle development, standard Congressional practice, to show they are doing their job. Unfortunately, the Space Shuttle proposal did not provide extra fluff to play the game of having its funds chopped back some; thus solid rocket boosters had to be put into the design, and ultimately we lost a spacecraft because of that, the Challenger and her crew. So NASA was in deep struggle for money to get its job done; the Mooncable project would have required a significant amount of money to achieve even its first steps, despite use of the two Saturn 5 vehicles that were built but not going to be used.

Much of this was explained in the brief letter the NASA ICB chairman sent to me with the rejection of my informal proposal. This rejection had another major effect, in that when my wife read the rejection, saying no grant funds were forthcoming, she was quickly out of my life, very pragmatic lady she was, and I was no longer as good a money source as other men would be. The effect on me was that, being an Asperger, now without a pragmatic mate to take care of the social etc aspects of my life, in despair I threw away my promising career at JPL and basically just existed for the next half dozen years. Occasionally I would try to find someone interested in my Mooncable concept, but I had no connections. In the early-1980's I made another effort, by writing an article for the L-5 News, but it was rejected.

I think a significant part of the failure of the system for establishing Space Colonization that way in the mid-1970's was my lack of credentials: I was an unknown in the field. the concept was not allowed to speak for itself, in other words. This seems to me to be a significant failure mechanism in the overall system: not letting a concept speak for itself, but instead first looking at the originator's standing. It is analogous to people in the military look at the number of stripes on your shoulder, to decide whether or not to pay attention to you. The academic standing, the industrial position standing, is where the evaluators looked, and they found I was a nobody, had not even graduated from college, had even switched from a physics major to a psychology major for a semester before dropping out, clearly a loser. And possibly a related factor, how could PhD's in high positions, admit that someone who was a college dropout came up with a concept to get the job done, and the credentialed folks had not thought of it, what would people think about that; better just ignore the originator, and no one would pay attention to the concept. Later, the concept could be revived by accredited folks who could build careers on it. And that happened: Pearson wrote an excellent paper on such concepts four years later, in 1976; and even today there are businesses proposing building a Mooncable-like Space Elevator through L-1, so it was not a dysfunctional concept. It was a failure of the human aspects, not the technological aspects.

So the failure mode here is that of using the originator's credentials to speak for the capability of the concept, rather than let the concept speak for itself. Part of this may be the inability of the initial evaluators to evaluate the concept adequately, especially if it is a really different thing from their field of expertise; and they do not want to admit that.

The second example for this kind of overall system failure analysis, is my effort to gain interest in my concept for rapid expansion into high Earth orbit, initially with the purpose of building abundant Solar Power Satellites to provide plentiful clean energy to nations around the world. This concept would bypass the Space Elevator's severe limitations, yet be able to do the same efficient access to high earth orbit, probably even more capably too. It would use the outward force of internal centrifugal force to balance the weight of the structure in the planetary gravitational field, instead of utilizing strength of materials to do the job.

I created this "KESTS to GEO" concept - acronym for "Kinetic Energy Supported Transportation Structure to Geostationary Earth Orbit" - to bypass the problem with the Earth Space Elevator concept, that of the lack of a material strong enough for its mass to support its own weight between GEO and the ground. I was keenly aware of this problem, having thought of the earth space elevator idea in 1969 - not the first person to do so, it turned out - then realized that the tensile strength to density ratio problem that really made a problem for the concept. (However, that effort later enabled my 1971-1972 creation of the Mooncable concept.) So I constantly sought other ways to have large scale access of earth orbital space.

The early 1980's concepts of Keith Lofstrom's Launch Loop rocket lift to the fringes of the atmosphere by a trapezoid shaped tethered out-flung loop of continuous material, and Rod Hyde's "StarBridge" vertical tower to the fringes of the atmosphere, supported by electrodynamic drag of high velocity paramagnetic beryllium disks flung upward inside the structure, excited my hopes for early large scale space colonization in my time; even Earl Smiths' "Texas and Universe Railroad" concept of an out-flung expandable iron belt from the earth surface to GEO, although had some major flaws in it including that it would not go to GEO if anchored in the high latitude of Texas, got me to do my first speech supporting those concepts, as well as my Mooncable space elevator concept, to the National Commission on Space in 1985. But to no avail, the Commission's report did not mention any of these things.

I mulled over the why-not for a few years, and finally figured out how to combine all those concepts and add some new components, to make what appeared a workable large scale ground-to-GEO access space transportation structure of high efficiency, supported by the outward force of high velocity armatures circulating throughout the quasi-elliptical hoop around the Earth, connecting the equatorial surface to GEO. The materials and technology were well within the contemporary capability.

But the problem remained, of how I, as still an unknown in the field, could get this concept into the awareness of those who could take it to the next steps. About that time, I had gotten connected to the GEnie Spaceport Library, via my 300 baud modem connected to my long-obsolete Adam Coleco computer; as always, I lived on the edge of poverty, earning a living as an engineering technician in electronics. Finally I could get the attention to my Mooncable concept and my new KESTS to GEO concept, I thought.

Even the GEnie Network was sponsored by General Electric, a large company who could possibly be able to build much of the KESTS to GEO system, I thought. I posted the initial insights there in 1988, and had largely fleshed it out in 1989, posting many files in the GEnie Spaceport Library.

But the reaction I got as a result was lots of angry replies, not involving technology, but bringing up other issues that readers would have to wade through before getting to the technical parts of the chat strings back then.

It took me a long time to realize that the KESTS to GEO concept would obsolete the ground rocket launch vehicle industry, on which these folks based their futures. No wonder the anger.

But clearly they were only interested in their personal fortunes, not the vision of large scale economical access and utilization of high earth orbit, and the large scale access of the Lunar environment and Mars' moons and asteroids, all now potentially in the near future, instead of something that would only have to withstand the test of real physical construction and usage generations later, as were the other forms of space colonization views as based on rocket systems alone.

This post is getting too long, so I will continue this in a subsequent post.

Is patent law doing what it was intended to do?

2011-10-27T21:21:00.000-07:00

Patents were intended to protect the one who had struggled to create something new and achieved it, from the horde of copycats.

Copycats, from the bully sitting next to you as a schoolkid - who passed his tests by copying your answers, and you had better not try to hide your answers - could start from where the innovator left off, and without that life resource being used up in struggling to create the innovative thing in the first place, they could run with the idea and make their fortune with it, never compensating the actual originator who made it possible to exist.

It is an ancient problem. It was generally ignored; the upper crust tending to be formed of bullies who had no interest in supporting those who had been ripped off. So the innovators, who had found a way to make something new, would do their best to hide their secret means from the prying eyes of others; so as to protect their business making and selling their innovative thing. But when those innovators grew old and passed away, the special goodie that they had made and sold, vanished from the market and no one else knew how to make it anymore; and so everyone had to do without that special something from then on.

That was something that got the attention of the bullies who ran things, when they got deprived a bit, that way.

So a compromise was set up, where the innovator would be granted a limited time to exclusively make and sell his/her innovation-based product, if they would disclose how to create the innovation. I think it was seventeen years, in which it belonged to the innovator; thereafter it was free for all to copy.

The rulers of the land thought they had wisely solved the problem, providing for everybody's needs by issuing patents. And, it all sounds reasonable: 17 years of protection for your idea, your answer on the school desk test; then it is given away for free. The copycats could still make their fortunes by making the innovator's thing, except they had to wait some years to do it. And the snoops did not need to spy to steal the innovator's ideas anymore; it was all there, disclosed in the patent.

But instead of peace and prosperity resulting, there were fights over who would get the patent. Innovations have to be built out of the things already available, and so the search for new ideas for innovations went on being done by multiple people, often times. The early days of electronics often involved many quite angry disputes over who came up with an idea first, for example.

And all our innovative ideas are built on a vast legacy given by others of the past. Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Newton, Einstein, Jobs, and millions of others, put much of their lives into making the bricks out of which we now build our innovations. They are gone now, and best we can do is give a blanket silent mental thanks to their lives and their gifts to us, with which we strive to build anew, much as they did in their time.

Yet without the promise of a patent protecting you, there was little use in doing the long involved work of finding a way to create a new and useful thing, since the copycats, who often were also tough bullies - or hired them - stalkers & assaulters, would just grab away any success one had.

Nowadays, The start of Apple Computer by a couple of guys in a home garage, could not create the personal computer line that many of us so cherish. There simply are too many folks incredibly skillfully snooping and able to invade one's workspace while you are gone shopping, to keep anything secret and documented long enough to get a patent to protect the innovative thing. Huge corporations with almost endless deep pockets can hire industrial spies, to make sure nothing happens to challenge the huge corporation's business technological base, their "intellectual territory." Protects their investors; what else do you want?

Another way the huge corporations protect their existing intellectual property technological base, is by making sure that no one comes up with something better. This is done by requiring workers in technological fields, to sign an "employment agreement" that not only keeps them from stealing the company's intellectual property - the "employment agreement's" apparent intent - but also steals any and all ideas about anything that the employee might suddenly think of on or off the job. Those hands-on workers are the ones most likely to come up with lateral field ideas for innovation, since they are fascinated by the potentials of innovation, and are ever matching up their background knowledge with whatever they encounter in life, on or off the job. And so they are the ones most likely to come up with the really innovative new approaches. To prevent them from leaving and starting their own company based on their own innovative idea, the "employment agreement" forbids them from doing that. Thus, the nation is deprived of countless advances that would have solved problems and made life more bountiful. But it protects the various big employer's profit bottom line. The employee, who most likely is living with little surplus income from the job, cannot get patent protection from his/her innovative idea, which has nothing to do with their job or what they have seen others do on the job there. The employer claims ownership of all such ideas for innovation, but has no interest whatsoever in developing or making the new thing available to customers; so the idea is just dead, right there.

So, is the patent system achieving what it was intended to do? Imperfectly, at best.

The gaining of patents has merely become a game tool among businesses, patents mere pawns in their monopoly business games.

Gone is its original intent, to protect the innovative folks from predators.

Yet for sure, some businesses will hire a bunch of engineers to strive to produce a management-defined specific innovative thing; and that specific innovative thing deserves a patent's protection in the classical sense.

Yet the original intent of the patent system, to prevent loss of innovative product knowledge, and eventually make it fully available to all, by granting the originator exclusive right to produce the products utilizing that innovation but for a specific limited time only, has resulted in not only the "patent agreement" technique for suppressing innovation, but also the widespread "industrial espionage" against the backyard home inventors, making sure nothing becomes patentable by them, and thus unable to get financing for making their new product; the innovation dies right there, and thus all the consumers lose what might have been, as a result.

America has come a long way since the U S Patent system was set up. Could there be a major revision devised, so as to both reward innovation, yet also make such innovation immediately available to all?

This is something worth thinking about.

Some things seem headed a bit in that direction already. Open-source software, for one. Creative Commons licensing, for another. Yet these do not reward the innovators; they merely are some means for enabling some innovations not to just die due to strangulation by the intellectual-property-territory tools of big business, who would simply have grabbed any loose ideas and patent them as if they had done the work - sometimes patenting just to prevent others from utilizing the ideas. Copycats have free use of the innovative ideas, but now they need to acknowledge their sources for the ideas their products are based upon. At least the originators get their name mentioned, even if no other reward. And, that often is enough thanks.

Yet, sometimes an innovative idea is taken and run with, by a talented person skilled in actualizing such innovations, and squeezing hordes of money out of it, by them knowing how to manipulate the system. That kind of skill and effort surely deserves reward for making new product available to the consumer. They sometimes become billionaires over such doings.

And I wonder, how fair is it that they are billionaires due to their excellent business skills having achieved; yet the original innovative concepts on which their fortunes were based, get only Creative Commons names mentioned, but those innovators may be living in poverty.

This does not lure people to do the work of coming up with innovative ideas for solving problems or enabling new opportunities in our lives.

Maybe the system needs some new inspection, and wisdom applied, to match the world as it is now.

Twinning a rich MCG with a poor MDG to infill the world

2011-10-27T12:48:00.000-07:00

Am trying to convince myself that the MCGs have more chance of success than the goal of getting Jabba the Hutt to voluntarily morph into Robin Hood. Millennium Consumption Goals for the world's rich, to pair with Millennium Development Goals for the world's poor, could take the form of twinning: linking each specific 20% MCG in a rich country/community with a specific 80% MDG in a specific poor country/community, covering the whole world. Like the Sister Cities idea. Jabba, what say?

Most likely we Americans cannot get our collective hypnotized focus off of the "us vs them", "me vs you", "make them look bad so we will look good", "who is better than whom", kind of paradigm, to even consider this kind of thing. But, hey, writing it down is maybe a start.

I wonder, how did we get out of the feudalistic Dark Ages up into our industrialized enlightened civilization? Might be worth a think, as we apparently are headed toward a Feudalistic mode of the Aristocracy vs Serfs, divvying up of America; Owner-management vs Sheeple. A head start in placing seeds to get out of that trap, might make it easier. And take less time than from the Dark Ages.

And am a bit sad that the best that the 99% can do to get their potential productivity back online nicely, is to sit on the doorstep of the 1%. Are we really just Sheeple?

Sure, the owner-managers are the ones with the right-stuff to get productivity going; the workers are not generally built that way. But the owner-managers are apparently out to lunch. Or maybe out in their mega-yachts unaware of it all. Or maybe their college degrees did not teach them responsibility for the whole system that supports them and everybody else; instead got taught mere grab-root-growl competitiveness to "win," nevermind the whole system that provides us all existence?

What happened to the 200 KHz stereo system technology?

2011-10-23T16:58:00.000-07:00

As I wait year after year for a particular new kind of product to come out, that it has not done so, gets more puzzling.

It has maybe been ten years ago that I read of a very interesting technology, that would enable low energy hi fi stereo for homes. Excellent bass yet without big woofers. Highly directional music, for stereo in different parts of the room. Ought to be low cost, too.

I got even more interested when seeing employment ads by a company in San Diego looking for engineers to help create these products.

Yet, I keep looking and reading, and even bought some systems that I supposed used that technology, but did not; were something else each time.

What I remember of the technology, it used ultrasonic signal generators, probably crystal resonators, small and low cost. Operated around 200 KHz acoustical mode. Worked by the interference pattern at the ears recreating the sound, in great stereo and also as a function of where you were located in the room, such as real variation at where an orchestra plays. System operated at low power.

I have wondered if the Bose receivers that came out about then, used that technology; since it advertised exceptional stereo music yet low power, but I could not afford the then $300 to buy one to find out.

Recalling the descriptions of that 200 KHz audio technical concept and findings, it was also useful for steering the interference patterns so as to have some things only perceivable by people at certain locations in a room. That could be useful, for, say, a movie director wanting to send instructions to specific actors on stage.

As time goes on and I continue to not find such type high fi stereo devices on the market, I wonder if somebody figured out a not-so-nice use for the technology, and bought the rights out. The ability to direct audio to people located at specific places in a big room, could be used for not-so-nice manipulation of people and events. Bullies would probably like such a tool to do their control issue thing, another trick to fiddle with other people's lives. That could explain why I cannot buy a nice low energy high quality stereo setup for my home, that uses such 200 KHz interference pattern music delivery technology.

If cell phone use does not cause tumors does that mean it is totally safe

2011-10-23T15:38:00.000-07:00

For several years I have watched the research reports about dangers of cellular phone use. A repeated finding, such as the linked one here, is that cell phone use apparently does not cause cancer or tumors, per studies.

Somehow I get the feeling that people take this to mean it is safe to use cellular phones. As if something is found to not cause cancer, then that the something cannot harm in any other way.

Similarly I have noted that, as an amateur radio operator as a hobby, that obtaining a license involves rote learning that the only effects of radio waves is heating of tissues. This has to be "learned" to be able to pass the licensing testing.

The main career i ended up spending my life on, employed life that is, was hands-on electronics technician work of many kinds, often engineering related. Lots of years of experience intensely in electronics equipment surrounds.

And in recent couple of decades, a scientific hobby exploring potentials of electro-herbalism, such as the Clark-zapper type equipment, on myself.

There is a huge variety of types of signals that can be received by the human body, as well as by different parts of the body. I have seen far more effects on my body, than could be caused by mere "heating," by electrical signals.

And cell phones up close can deliver other energies besides RF from the antenna. For example, inductors can produce local energy of a different type too, alternating-magnetic field type, limited to very close range but the brain is close range to a cell phone.

And my 15 years of electro-herbalism experiments intensely suggests the frequency and form of small electrical energies into to the human body, can cause very specific effects, unrelated to "heating." The ones long researched by amateur scientists in the field, consistently find they can be very helpful to the body; and the frequencies, waveforms and energy levels have long been explored as to which ones are useful. Safety of these appears be quite high.

But the cellular phone does not emit such energy signals. And therefore is a potentially somewhat different field of study. The point here is that different forms of electromagnetism, as well as different frequencies, and physical body input area, do appear, I believe, to make a significant difference in effects.

Some cell phones, held against the side of my head while making a call or receiving one, can sometimes give me a peculiar headache that takes a long time to go away, for one thing. Caused by mere heating? I wonder. Mere warming up part of my brain cells seems unlikely to do much different that normal heating by sunshine or hot shower, which do not cause such localized peculiar headaches. But delivery of resonant energy to small areas, could possibly cause some disruption, I think. Could be killing off some brain cells each time used; but we have trillions of them, therefore so what? How would one measure the killing off of a fraction of one's brain cells be detected and proven, I also wonder, considering that millions are "normally" lost all the time.

I often see girls and young women going around with a cell phone to their head, as they go down the street. If it is burning out bunches of their brain cells, how good a mother will they be able to be, to their children. Or employees somewhere. Or wife to a husband. How can such accumulating dysfunction be separated by normal human variability, I wonder.

And maybe no one cares. Especially the makers and sellers of the products; no disruption in sales appreciated by them.

Hundreds of millions of the cell phones are in use around the world; look how many popped up taking movies of the recent brutal killing of Gaddahfi, for example; they had to be already in their pockets beforehand. All those hundreds of millions of people are carrying out reality testing of possible harmful tests of cell phone use. They are not dropping dead on the spot. That indicates some level of safety: that they are not dropping dead on the spot, is the specific data measured. And the gadgets clearly are really liked by all those folks, around the world. I have one in my pocket too, though it is usually turned off. In my youth, the comic strip character Dick Tracy wore such a device on his wrist all the time, a videophone to talk to other people; it is a device long envisioned.

And yet, I occasionally feel some odd subtle energy striking me, that appears to be some radiated energy from elsewhere. For example, one of my kitchen windows cannot be walked past without getting a fairly noticeable headache on the side of my head facing the window; keeping the metal venetian blinds mostly closed, helps, but it takes a metal shield beyond them to better block whatever it is. And papering the inside of my front wood door with aluminum foil, works well to block the oddity of a different kind of pin-point spark-like "energy" sometimes hitting me through the closed wood door when certain vehicles rumble past when aligned with my door. Am probably more sensitive to this kind of thing, due to my background.

I think that there is a lot yet to be learned on these subjects. Unfortunately the main people with such money for research are only wanting new weaponry and surveillance technologies. Hopefully some research will be also done by unbiased benign folks, and the findings made available to everybody.

As with everything, such knowledge and technologies can be used to help or to harm, depending on the nature and intent of the user.

Yet, some things can be designed to be mostly useful for helpful things.

And inadvertent characteristics of things needs to be explored too; which are too often ignored in the cheap-as-possible rush to market. Exploring lateral possibilities is often not even considered in development work, especially in science and engineering. Even more so when the research path is strictly limited by upper business management toward getting maximum bang for the buck.

Did Gadahffi have long term lead poisoning?

2011-10-21T12:48:00.000-07:00

A blog is a place where one can spout off about things that do not directly concern him or herself.

So, in that opportunity here, after more reading online about Muamar Gadaffi's recent past and even more recent demise accounts, in looking at his photos, I wonder, he looks like he has major lead poisoning, probably for a long time. An old bullet never removed, from original fighting?

Accounts of his last months as leader, reminds me of the erratic decisions and brutal orders of the Roman Empire rulers before its fall. Their case, lead poisoning by the lead water pipes and drinking utensils.

So I would suggest via this post, that no doubt will not get heard let alone headed, I would suggest that a bit of hair and some drawn blood from the corpse, for analysis of heavy metals poisoning, and possible other factors, be gotten. Some for contemporary technology formal chemical analysis; and other samples saved for the far more sophisticated analysis techniques being developed.

The effect I got from the Bad Karma of unnecessary killing of an animal

2011-10-21T11:13:00.000-07:00

A friend has suggested I write a post here which is part of what i wrote her in response to her feedback re my post re the tigers etc, and asking about my former marriage, long ago. She has suggested labeling it "The effect I got, from the Bad Karma of unnecessary killing of an animal......" So, here it is:

"... Re the unfortunate rattlesnake, that happened - about 1968 - in Old Topanga Canyon, our home for 6 years until she decided it was time to ditch me, and my life was ruined for years after that, in my own self pity and despair. I threw away a potential career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for starters. However, I slowly have learned how to function as a lone Aspy over the decades since then, living without a "normal" woman to deal with the intracies of social world existence.

http://www.escalatorhi.com/PhotoStories/905otcr.html

http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2011/10/i-hope-they-save-those-rare-zoo-bengal_20.html

Recalling that incident of the tragic rattlesnake's killing, I now have also recalled another item that seems related: the snake symbolizes one's R-Complex (short and polite for the "Reptilian-Complex" part of our brains), the part that deals with the physical world; the next rainy season, in the very place where I killed the snake, in the middle of the stormy night, the side of the mountain in back of the house collapsed and smashed in the house, mashing in the 20 foot long wall, and we had to abandon the home in the dark and raging pouring storm, phone, electricity, water all already torn out, across the then-footbridge to escape, only to find the road had been washed out in front of us and a huge tree had fallen behind us, so we could not leave.

So be careful, do not offend your R-Complex."

There has got to be the responsibility for the big picture

2011-10-21T10:45:00.000-07:00

The defeat in Congress of the plan to up the taxes of the super-wealthy, to pay for creation of some jobs that the super-wealthy did not create from their vast surpluses, is the result of some reality-testing now done. Attempting to comprehend what is going on, my first thought is that President Obama is, and has been, responding to the situations as he finds them in his job, that he expects law makers to be as rational as judges, and that is his skill, to plead his client's case. In this case, his client is the people of the United States.

An insight I had - urging this post be written - is that his rational lawyer mind is not having to deal with the fairly rational field of lawyers and judges, but instead with the ruffians who originally create the situations that then require court scenes to sort of fix. He is thinking he is dealing with rational lawyers but really is dealing with gangsters instead, and he does not seem to realize it.

He does get the part about the game of rival political parties, the part where it is important to each side that they "win." Nevermind what the other effects will be, which in normal sports is just who has the ball, who gets the trophy, who gets the hoorahs. It is a mindset. It is not completely appropriate to the governing of a nation, where the fate of hundreds of millions of people are at stake.

The GOP uses its banner that says that all jobs must be created by private business, period. They apparently are blind to the fact that private business has had the opportunity to do that all along, still has the opportunity right now, and yet has not done so, is not doing so. Those are the reality test's results. How cannot they see the fallacy in their claim? Most likely they don't care, they just want back in the driver's seat, a power-craving phenomenon.

Perhaps they are suggesting that private industry moguls are just sitting on the needed jobs, held hostage but will open them up if the GOP wins. Or maybe expect the desperate voters will hope so, and put them back in the office, so they can do the 2000-2008 thing again. (Are we ready for spectacular excuses to go to big war again?)

And, the scenario is that where private business controls things, there is a kind of class system going on, the owners and managers, vs the working class.

I was a member of that working class for the almost 45 years of my employment working for a huge number of companies. I have seen the patterns. I see little reason they have or will change soon. So I have basis for what I babble about here, as if someone else will hear.

Most of that work was done for private business, although some of the early years, nine of them, were for the federal civil service. So I have seen lots of variety. Even the civil service provided variety for me: I trod the deserts helping survey land and objects on that land; I worked as a museum technician, helping prepare displays; I operated missile testing equipment; I maintained complex electronic equipment. Private industry employment only provided electronics high-tech work for me, measuring, testing, building, debugging, making things work; yet in a wide variety too.

Owners and managers got in their positions generally because they had the urge to control other people, and had talent and opportunity to do so. The others, the working-class like myself, were willing to let others do the planning and provide pay for doing whatever their boss told them to do, then the worker could go home and live their own life until going back to work the next day. It was a system that worked, although rarely led to the full potential of people be applied to the full needs of the nation. It all was sort of happenstance, whatever goods and services that some owners thought up that would make them some money. Not fill the needs of the nation in a larger world; had no interest nor attention in doing that. Not their responsibility. It was the government that had the responsibility for the bigger picture, and strove to fill in the cracks in what was needed to enable the nation to work as a whole.

In the GOP plan, it appears that they assume that this would all would magically change, that business people would somehow start automatically filling in all the cracks in operating a nation, even though they have never voluntarily done so in the past.

Maybe the GOP has some secret formula to resolve all this, kept in hiding. (Maybe it is that they themselves plan to rule over all, forcing everybody in the nation to beg them as individuals to do favors and work for pay, so they can survive. Bullies have those instincts to force those situations, and it works well for them.)

There is one kind of scenario where this scenario seems to work, in some circumstances. We currently have several large "religious" groups who tend to have the larger picture of enabling their males to breed faster than other group's males, and the thusly growing larger voting population gets them into office eventually. These "religious" organizations have the intent and expertise for helping their members prosper, that the organization itself prospers as a result, and reproduces faster. What if the whole nation were to be declared all members of one of these "religious fundamentalist" groups? Would they then apply those impressive chains of assists to get all the people in the nation to usefully work, considering the whole nation as the system needing assistance in prospering? At present, such organizations depend on prospering by taking from the larger non-member group in which they exist, the nation. If they were in control of the whole nation, they would possibly then see the whole world as the larger group from which to extract goodies - and of course extra women so that the in-group of the "religion" can reproduce faster - the root motive for it all, most likely, when all the fluff and layers are peeled off. To solve a problem accurately, one needs to first define it accurately. Or one can merely look at a little piece of the problem and seem to solve it, job done.

But in the upcoming situation, it looks to me like the problem needs more clearly defining, or it will just get messier as a result of efforts to fix things. And, that can provide lots of continual conflict that provides the drama that people seem to crave.

Do I want it to get more drama, messier? There is a balance between colorful interesting events ongoing in my life, vs the neat and predictable gray-suited stiff walking lock-step mode of life.

The kind of drama I would like is that of scientific discovery and comprehension, responsible care of our planet's ecosystem that gave us life, and reaching out to the lifeless vast areas of space to which we can bring life, and get living room and resources aplenty in return.

But the current drama is of the type of "who does what to whom." Much too much so. It appears that is because that is all they know how to do. The responsibility for the people and the world is mostly missing in it all. The responsibility seems to be of my family prospering at the expense of your family fading away as a result, the "who does what to whom" kind of thing.

We don't have to do that. We have a choice in the kind of drama we experience. A small part of that is in the political process, who we vote for to put into office. We can hope that those voted for have better capability and knowledge and good-will to do the job better than we ourselves could do. This can get to become a sport game playing activity, much as is tying our country's progress up in knots lately.

Could we somehow start looking at the big picture of America - and America in the larger world at times - and see all the needs needing filled, and arrange private business to get all the pieces, every one, done? Congress paid NASA to pay prime contractors and sub-contractors to build and operate the Moon landings. Private industry generally would not have done that, no big profit from selling a few moon rocks acquired as a result; no reason to go to the Moon, nevermind the Soviets' doings. But private industry did get the pieces done, big and small; yet were paid by the federal government from taxes the people of the nation paid to have it all get done, no missing pieces.

There has got to be the responsibility for the big picture.

I hope they save those rare zoo Bengal tiger's DNA and others' too

2011-10-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

The news says that fifty rare animals were gunned down in the past 24 hours, including eighteen rare endangered Bengal tigers. Here in the United States of America; not in some far away jungle warfare nation.

The sub-stories of the event appear to be very complex and surely tell a lot about human psychology. A huge amount can be deduced from reading the various news stories about it. I resist pointing out some obvious ones, about the assumptions made and declared truth and justification for the shooting frenzy.

A lot that many would probably not want to be exposed.

It seems to me that it would be valuable to document as much of that as possible, in unbiased unemotional terms, merely tell it like it was. If the data could be obtained, that is; most involved would be defending their actions; and probably in afterthought, defending their actions to their own selves.

(I live with a similar memory, of killing a large rattlesnake merely because it might have become a danger to others. I told my wife about seeing it, she said kill it. Is that justification? I did not think I could capture it for sure, for transporting to the wilderness. The critter was not being threatening, and was just moving along in plain sight even though it could have withdrawn to safety; it did not fear me nor was going to harm me. But I took a shovel and killed it, and it began to look alarmed by my lack of friendliness just before I struck. It haunts me still. Its presence coming from under our canyon house explained the cessation of rodent sounds in the area above the room, rodents that could have munched through wiring and caused great damage; the rattlesnake had done us a favor and was headed home. It was one of those "might have become a danger to someone" justification things.)

Such a massive event probably will never happen again; and thus could be valuable learning lessons about human behavior. Some of those lessons I suspect we don't want to know. Yet without the knowledge, how can we learn to not repeat them, when the chips are down in some other kind of unexpected spectacular event? And those will surely happen, as they have throughout history. If they had been documented and analyzed and taught from the previous episodes, perhaps those zoo-fed and raised non-hunting rare animals would still be alive today. Maybe even their owner too, although I can see why the law enforcement would have considered him a potential loose cannon, and have put the screws to him till he broke. Did the news folks notice that the zoo owner did not take his gun and wipe out a bunch of semi-random people, like seems common in the news these days, like in Seal Beach a couple of weeks ago or in Tucson? Give the guy some credit. Considering the scenario of place, he even seemed to be offering his remains to feed his cherished lions and tigers even though he no longer had money to feed them anymore, apparently, freshly out of prison. And freshly out from being caged behind prison bars for a year, what did he see the kind of life of his cherished exotic animal collection, there behind bars, unable to run free and experience life, just as he had no longer been free to fly airplanes, race boats, ride motorcycles?

And those freed lions and tigers, did they give any officer or bystander even a tiny scratch of injury? Did any of the dozens of them that were being gunned down, put up resistance? I doubt it; they were used to people bringing them food and admiring them, and now were probably quite puzzled as to what was going on.

And yet, such large feline predators loose in the night growing hungry and unpredictably baffled about what was going on and what to do about it, would have been a heavy responsibility to those supposedly protecting life and property. And although they did not have the knowledge - nor equipment, most likely - for how to safely capture such critters even in the daylight; but they did have the knowledge of how to use high powered guns to easily kill without risk to themselves.

What was Right and what was Wrong, is something I cannot judge from here. Most likely it was all just interplay of forces and situations. And surely we could learn from those forces and situations, and decisions and actions that happened for real. If all were documented without bias nor as part of "justice" preparations.

Could that be done? I doubt it, considering the probable professional psychology of those involved. So humanity is doomed to repeat lessons not learned. This time, humanity seems to have "won" but in the bigger picture, maybe not so certain.

At the very least, I hope that those animals will all quickly have tissue samples saved in 95% Ethanol and some curated by nitrogen freezing, so that given future technological advances, their DNA could maybe some day be restored to the dwindling pool of DNA of their kind. Especially of the Bengal tigers; those gunned down represent over 1% of the present entire world population of them.

Part of why this is "pushing my buttons" is because of my volunteering in natural history museum settings. Such as in a marine biodiversity processing center for a couple of years, curating specimens in ethanol. Yet also when one historical society discovered I was a volunteer both with them and at the major natural history museum of the area, I was given copies of old news articles, and was asked to see if I could get a grizzly's skin back to those who claimed it. Totally out of my arena of volunteer work, but I did learn what I could about it.

An old newspaper photo showed a lean & mean looking mustached man holding a rifle, next to a dead grizzly bear. He had killed it after he had set a bear trap chained to a heavy log, which had caught the bear and thus could not go anywhere nor attack anyone. It was titled the last grizzly bear was now killed ... nevermind that the grizzly bear is the animal on the state flag. Big hero and celebration feeding all the neighborhood bear meat barbeque in the town park. (A park I was quite familiar with, many decades later, near my apartment.) The grizzly bear's head and skin were given to the natural history museum. The museum then sent the bear's skull to experts at Berkley, who advised that it was not a species of grizzly that had ever lived anywhere in that part of the state; it had come from far north. It was quietly decided that the bear had escaped from the Los Angeles Zoo, and was wandering around foraging on the landscape, lacking a zookeeper to feed it recently, a few tens of miles from where it was caught and killed; the zoo was reported to have not fully solved the problem of containing all its charges at the time.

How similar the psychology and events. But the older story had gotten covered up a lot. And clearly the gun toters in the current news article had not learned the lesson; most likely never heard about it. "When will we ever learn?" Maybe when we get lots stronger and even far more wiser than strong.

Tar sands, pipelines, and big-picture decisions

2011-10-18T19:47:00.000-07:00

The Sierra Club is having a campaign to stop the oil pipeline from Canada down to refineries here in the US; the complaint is partly about the environmentally-damaging source from tar sands, too. (Or would we like fracking contamination of our drinking water?)

Normally I would stand with environmental protection concerns. But after much thought about the bigger picture, on this one I abstain from the vote of participation. It is the bigger picture that must be consulted.

The reasoning is as follows:

We Americans have built our lifestyles around cars and trucks. This consumes an incredible amount of oil for the energy to propel these vehicles, that we send huge amounts of money overseas to get more oil, tens of billions per year.

Much of my life I too consumed gasoline in my cars as if it were in endless supply and of our own produce. But nowadays, people know better, and have the choice to moderate their petrochemical fuel consumption.

But they generally choose not to. Instead of buying their teenagers bicycles to use to go to school, the soccer moms fire up the family SUV to take them to school and bring them back in style. To go get a couple items to finish off dinner prep, again fire up the SUV or other gas hog vehicle to make the trip there and back, the foreign-bought fuel pushing the multi-thousand-pound vehicle to grocery and back, with the half pound of grocery food treasure. The local Walmart has a huge supply of bicycles for sale, along with basic supplies like helmets. But when I put on my backpack and bicycle to Walmart to get groceries and supplies, mine is usually the only bicycle parked on the parking rack there at the store.

Point is, we Americans could be doing lots more to reduce our oil consumption, yet we are not doing that. We still live it up, burn the gas, to heck with the nation and world problem it makes.

Thus we need more and more oil to feed this problem. There are security problems about the supply from overseas, as was so well experienced in the gas lines during the gs shortages of the early 1970's. Could happen again, even lots worse.

We have a better chance of protecting a pipeline from Canada to refineries in Texas, than to guarantee endless oil from overseas.

We have not been able to wean ourselves from excessive use of oil for energy, despite being aware of the problem for decades. Sure, it is hard to change ones ways, even a little bit. But life is ever changing; we constantly adapt. But to the energy problem, we just have not adapted.

Even lots of politicians say there really is no oil supply problem, no CO2 building up in the atmosphere due to our industrial civilization, altering the basic energy balance from the Sun. It wasn't taught them in school; therefore it does not exist. It is all a plot by the politicians on the other side of the ball court.

America must have a continuous supply of energy, and lots of it. We are making some success such as some solar panels up and a few wind turbines up, but we are stuck on the notion that it has to be cheaper to get energy from wind and solar, before we will abandon coal and oil as our primary source of energy. Energy to run our factories and light our homes and swirl our washing machines. The idea of building wind power infrastructure when it is in competition with other energy sources, is ridiculous to those who do not comprehend that even some energy from local sources is better than none, when things have gone sour.

Can we continue to guarantee that things do not go sour on us re invasion by another country, simply by reminding them that we have enough nukes to destroy all life on earth including them? Well, we cringe that North Korea or Iran may make a nuke or two, that we don't control. Hardly enough to destroy the world like we can do, but enough to make a terrible mess of a big city or two, or vaporize one of our great aircraft carriers at a strategic moment. Yet perhaps the bigger risk is that we will be conquered by starving us of critical supplies, and energy is the most obvious one. All energy self-sufficiency we can arrange as fast as possible, is a better protection than waving our world-destroying pile of nukes, to guarantee we get enough energy to power our lives.

It is abundantly proven that we cannot curb our demand for petrochemical energy sources, in great quantity. It is a choice thing, as pointed out. Therefore we need to do second-best, and that appears to involve more secure and diverse petrochemical sources, such as the Canadian tar sands pipeline.

Actually it is "third best" in my opinion. We could have already solved this energy problem, if we had taken on the task of building the Kinetic Energy Supported Transportation Structure to Geostationary Earth Orbit project, well outlined back in 1989, plenty of time to have developed it and have it operational used to lift construction materials to be building abundant Solar Power Satellites beaming totally clean electrical energy to America, in quantities enough to start shutting down coal fired power plants by now. (Sure, call me a crank, a loner, lots of bad names, reaffirming the rightness of business as usual. I just mention it here, as it rightfully belongs in the energy picture. Period.) And sure, wind turbines ans solar panels on the ground, are pitifully weak compared to the enormous energy demands of the industrialized world. This KESTS to GEO transportation system and the SPS energy sources could have well solved the problem, but it was not in the hands of the wealthy and powerful energy producers, so it was suppressed and had no chance to be done by now. And sure, they will eventually take the project over as if totally their own, when petrochemical sources peter out. Is lots easier to do that control game. But lots of suffering for humanity has to happen first, in the profit-controlled scenario.

Anyway my tirade about "KESTS to GEO" over, back to the current apparent scenario. We need petrochemical energy for our cars and trucks. They do not go very well without gas in them. Compromises need to be made. We chose not to go the KESTS to GEO solar satellite power route. We have done foot-dragging re the wind turbine and solar panel route for even a significant share of the energy needs. We are stuck with petrochemicals as our energy primary source, for a long time.

A pipeline from Canada's tar sands to our Texas refineries, seems a more secure supply route for a significant supply of our petrochemicals to move our cars around back and forth to our jobs and back home.

Beside the offshore oil sources, particularly in the middle-eastern areas, we are dependent on lots of oil pumped from ocean oil rig sites. In a big conflict, do you realize what happens if the other nation(s) use subs to chop those oil lines up from the ocean bottom, with no chance to shut their blowout protection system? The environmental disaster would be incredible, but right now since we are talking about fuel for our cars nevermind the environmental consequences, think of all that oil not getting to our refineries so that soccer-mom can drive little Suzie to school in the huge SUV?

Part of long term survival involves shifting from hand-to-mouth little-picture attention, to wider view big-picture attention in which our many little pictures all are all laced together.

America needs to have her greatness not so much on her ability to march off to war to save the world, but to save the world in other ways. Like, adequate clean energy to power our lives. Or if we continue to be unwilling to be part of the solution, at least not be so much a part of the problem.

The definition of forgiveness is giving up your just right to revenge

2011-10-17T19:50:00.000-07:00

"The definition of forgiveness is giving up your just right to revenge."

Is the endless activity of tit for tat stoppable without this precept?

Yet I wonder, can a bully ever by retrained to serve as a useful member of civilization, without experiencing the pain he/she gives others. To discover that to bully means getting bullied right back, instantly. And therefore maybe figuring out that bullying is not the best mode of relating.

It may be too much to ask of bullies, to teach them to identify with others that can be hurt, and feel their pain as if his/her own, to see what it is like. (Hopefully to not sadistically want more of it, however, as some psychotic phenomenon.)

The taking of revenge seems to be instinctive effort to let the wanabe bullies be aware of the painful mess he/she can do, so as hopefully to later choose a more happy wholesome outcome for all concerned.

Yet clearly in practice, as in Israel-Palestine and Ireland-North-Ireland, the tit-for-tat just goes on and on. You hit me I hit you back. And then the other says and does the same thing back. Back and forth, on and on. Is the lesson being learned, to not hit "me"? Apparently not.

(I resist repeating here, the ancient mammalian archetype of the two stags, battling each other with their horns to the death, that only one of them will have the two does to breed; instead of each having one doe to breed, as 50-50 implies.)

The technique of applying "the definition of forgiveness is giving up your just right to revenge" has been brought and shown to be effective several times in the progress of civilization. It can work.

Yet it is also demonstrable that a bully will use you as a doormat on and on without end, unless something stops him/her from doing it. Forgiveness, turning the other cheek, does not always get the bully to lay off.

But it does keep oneself from adding to the wrongs being done, the bad karma being made. So this forgiveness may not be part of the solution; but it is preventing oneself from becoming part of the problem.

--------------------
However, there is more. What appears to be a new tool for ending this endless Hatfield-McCoy phenomenon that people sometimes choose to play, appeared quietly about a dozen years ago and has been getting the field testing done ever since. Although its intent is not to relieve the impasse of feuds, it may incidentally be able to resolve the problem.

It goes by the simple name of "Emotional Freedom Technique," abbreviated "EFT." It is a technique for giving a person emotional freedom so as to clear trauma's energy patterns from the person.

The scientific principles by which it works have yet to be acknowledged; but that it works and works very well, has been proven tens of thousands of times in field testing; oneself can test it by following a simple procedure. The problem is, that it's theory of operation involves an ancient understanding of the human being, that is not yet acknowledged by today's cadaver-measured medical system's understanding of the human being. It requires a plain let's see if it works attitude, to discover its truth for oneself. Generally it involves calling up a trauma in memory and holding it there while tapping a few times on a few points on the face and upper body, such as the inner eyebrow point, the outer edge of the eye socket, under the eye, between the nose and upper lip, between the lower lip and chin, on the hollows below center of the collar bone, a few inches under the left arm's location, the top of the head and the edge of the hand. Then notice the intensity of the trauma's distressing energy; it normally has reduced way down, perhaps no longer can be found at all in the memory of the event. Simple to do, yet profound in what it does.

As for EFT's potential involvement in resolving tit-for-tat messing around, it can be pointed out that the result of doing EFT on oneself or on others, is that the event's memory remains quite clear, but the trauma's disruptive energy is so thoroughly gone that it often is not even remembered as ever existing. There is no vision nor energy for driving oneself to take revenge. Other far more effective paths for solutions can then be sought and found. The Hatfield-McCoy tit-for-tat knee-jerk game is seen for what it is; and much more pleasant options are far more interesting than making more mess.

The Emotional Freedom Technique uses the hypothesis that people have several specific internal energy flow systems, and those systems get disrupted by trauma that locks in those disruptions, to forever after disrupt the person. Bullies use the technique of beating up on someone once, to form a trauma imprint that the injured person must thereafter obey the bully, fantasizing the traumatic disruption pattern would be repeated physically if ever not obeying the bully. The EFT protocol involves calling up the trauma in memory and holding it in one's attention, while tapping a few times on each of the end-points of those energy flows, thus balancing one's energy flows; and the trauma pattern's disruption is then gone. It does not matter if one agrees to the energy-flow hypothesis; the EFT protocol just works, regardless of the belief system.

Now, those who use bully techniques in today's world are not just the ones using bombs and guns, or being dictatorial tyrants in the Middle-Eastern countries, or religious sect obedient fanatics. There is a hierarchy of bullying, and sometimes can be reflected in parts of the corporate or political org chart. Thus to let EFT erase all that buildup of trauma enforcing chain of obedience, is probably not appreciated by the powers-that-be, since it might undercut all their years of clever abusive fighting to get to the top. Thus EFT gets suppressed from general awareness; and all then continues to work as before, business as usual, top dogs stay on top.

Nonetheless, EFT remains a potential game-changer, in the phenomenon of the otherwise probably endless tit-for-tat revenge game that we as humans have the instinctive option to play. We have another option besides that of saying "the buck stops here" in the game of tit-for-tat abuse, by applying "the definition of forgiveness is giving up your just right to revenge." We now also can use EFT's protocol to neutralize the energy that compels us to seek revengeful activity, or even to continue to monsterize the ones making the most recent tit-for-tat move. We can see the world clearly, at long last, for what it is. And make our decisions from that wonderous place. We can choose to no longer be part of the problem, and to instead be part of a real solution, since we are no longer dancing endlessly to the tune of the trauma.

And then perhaps becoming a humanity, more worthy of the name.

It is an entertaining hobby instead of a business territory challenge

2011-10-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

The purpose of building these instruments and doing the experiments as an amateur scientist, sometimes needs clarifying. First, it needs to be said that it is not to challenge the authority of standard health practice business territory, nor to challenge health regulatory agency territory. Its purpose is to entertain the amateur scientist, the hobby arena researcher; much as amateur astronomers peer through their telescopes at the sky sometimes, to see what they find and to practice their ability to do reality testing for themselves, using their own equipment.

Some people like to go hunting, for their entertainment; and sometimes bring back some food for the table, another benefit besides amusing themselves. Some people like to go out in the football field and bash into each other, mock squabbling over the location of the football, and they get benefits of exercise and social interaction, as well as showing off in front of the girls who are looking for mates; thus also additional benefit to the players besides the basic entertainment value of doing the sport. And similarly, some people like to explore the huge arena of nature both inside and outside, including experimenting in what might be called electro-herbalism or electro-wellness, as I sometimes do to amuse myself; and yet, sometimes it also, like the hunter that bags food for dinner as an added benefit, I often find my wellness is improved by my entertaining hobby.

For example, I was up in wee hours this morning using my new experimental APZ zapper, since I was continuing to worsen from the surprising respiratory distress that was caused yesterday by sanding some very weathered old wood and applying an unfamiliar sealer to it, in the garage. The 2 AM start of the frontal-headache phenomenon, as well as much of the lung congestion, has abated as of getting up this morning, but there is still fluid flowing up from the lungs now, some tightness of breathing but part of it seems to be long term dusty struggle in this house. I had done two of the standard 30 KHz 7 minute long zaps via wet paper towel covered copper tube handholds, and also used my pre-recorded audio-frequency control tracks when the APZ was in the audio-frequency-controlled mode, using "sinusitis_frontalis" and "asthma" signal sets for a few minutes. Anyway, call it placebo or whatever, it appears to be helping adequately - or maybe it just went away by itself, who knows; yet, whatever, it is a most welcome result. Both living room air cleaners have failed recently - and both failed while I was off shopping at Walmart - so there is the chronic nighttime "dust' problem maybe figuring into it too. The computer room and bedroom still have working air cleaners, however.

I was reading an article yesterday saying that a formal scientific test of the medical drugs given to PTSD veterans was found to be no better than placebos given the test subjects. That also goes along with an article I had read maybe a year ago, that the majority of "standard medical practice" has never been subjected to formal double-blind scientific testing. Yet it is still utilized, since that is what they were trained to do and are required to do in their profession. For example, doctors have long given antibiotic shots and pills to patients who clearly only have a virus infection, the doctor knowing the antibiotic is not effective re the virus, but also knowing the patient expects the antibiotic and it will provide a placebo effect that clearly helps the patient get well faster.

Placebo effect has its limits, however. As a wise man said a couple millennia ago, "Which of you by taking thought can add a cubit to his height?" His point is well made, that placebo effect or declaration works only so far. There are "real" effects of some things.

Yet in the broader sense, whatever works in the desired way, is useful. Whether placebo or non-placebo effect, does not matter much. Getting the job done, does matter. And so far, my new type zapper - the APZ - seems to be useful to me.

And finding out those effects, entertains me. It is not just my parakeets who need entertaining, to improve the quality of their life; but also myself.

And like amateur astronomy, there is a lot to the subject matter that needs to be learned, and equipment made or purchased, to carry out the discovery of what works, what is real for the amateur scientist at the time. Can the rings of Saturn really be seen, using one's telescope, on a given night looking in a very specific direction in the sky? Similarly, the discovery of "what works" and "what experiment does what, if anything" in oneself by use of the APZ type zapper, involves learning lots about physiology and awareness as well as instrumentation.

I am also dimly aware that most people have no idea what "electro-wellness" could mean. The severe electrical shock therapy that is used on some deranged mental patients? Frankensteinian hookup to lightening bolts to revive life? Sticking one's fingers into the wall power sockets? All sorts of goofy things. To tell people that it is delivering tiny electrical currents to one's body through handholds, the signals from about nine volts peak in the form of pulsed on-and-off waveforms at specific frequencies, to explore by reality-testing for potential wellness benefits to oneself, as an amateur scientist, too often just gets a glassy-eyed reaction; like, maybe, they are still thinking of high voltage severe shock therapy for the deranged.

For some people, like myself, it is lots more entertaining to explore this, than it is to go hunt game in the wilderness; although I like to go hiking in the wilderness. And, just as the hunter who bags a rabbit or a buck in the self-entertaining sport of hunting also sometimes benefits his dinner table fare, is not challenging the commercial feedlot businesses nor grocery store chain business territories; so also are the findings of the useful protocols of my use of the Audio Programmed Zapper are not for the purpose of challenging the business territories of the standard medical business system.

(Eventually however, who knows, my anecdotal findings might ultimately help lead to some business finding some circumstance where it is more profitable to utilize similar equipment and protocols, than to follow its previous business path - and the regulatory agencies similarly agree to benefit for American economical well-being. Might be; who knows?)

Apparently that needs to be said.

Medicare, the Hulda Clark type zapper, and the American economy

2011-10-11T23:05:00.000-07:00

I occasionally experience some ill-concealed hostility from otherwise intelligent people, about my interest in "alternative" health protocols, and that I have had lots of success with them.

Why would I bother with such things, since I have medicare to cover conventional medical costs, now being officially retired?

While I have great respect for the business-as-usual medical system, I also have lived through experiences that encourage some significant skepticism in its infallibility.

Starting when I was a toddler: several times I almost died from asthma. I remember it well, the experience of there being nothing in all life except to push a little space in my lungs, then drag a tiny bit of air in there, then with great effort push it out to make a little space, then drag a little air into that lung space, over and over again. Occupying all of my awareness, attention, and effort, on and on.

Meanwhile the doctors were saying that asthma was all in the head, a psychological problem, not doctor's problem. And offered no help. My mother had asthma too. My dad struggled then, as later in much of his working life, to help us.

I now find it hard to believe that a toddler, child, youth could experience asthma as a psychological, not medical, problem, per official authoritative doctor proclamation. But that is what the business-as-usual medical system declared back then, in the 1940's, proclaimed about my intermittent struggles with the gasping thing that demanded I stop and do nothing but deal with the gasping for air, whenever it struck.

Lots of people were dying of asthma, year after year. The business-as-usual medical system finally pulled its arrogant nose down out of the air and found that adrenaline shots would provide relief of a severe asthma attack. My dad got used to giving us shots, when the asthma got too bad, which seems to me happened a couple times a month, back them. It was wonderful, to be able to breathe easily again. For awhile.

The asthma seemed somewhat related to allergies, as well as to having done vigorous exercise in the presence of certain airborne substances. The connection with wet moldy hay in season, along with bermuda grass molds, was apparent. It was not for years that it was discovered that the kapok being used in place of cotton during WWII years for stuffing in mattresses and pillows, could cause severe asthma; simply encasing the mattresses and pillows in plastic well sealed, brought relief for breathing at night, once that was discovered. I don't know who had discovered that, was it some independent observant experimenter, or the business-as-usual medical system. Very welcome, whatever.

Asthma had been found to be place-dependent to some extent. So my father set his career course to find jobs in places that my mother and I might be free of asthma. This involved lots of motels to live in, as we tested out place after place; when the kapok thing was announced, each motel room's mattress and pillows got sealed by my mother, and that indeed helped a lot.

Then business-as-usual medicine discovered epinephrine, and sold it for use in a squeeze nebulizer from which I inhaled, when asthma was grabbing me as a youth. Worked wonders for me, but could only be used a couple times a day at most. That kept me going through high school years. I think present-day puff inhalers do the same thing, but easier.

Fortunately I no longer struggle with asthma. But I do remember the various attitudes of the business-as-usual medical systems along the way; and it suggests that things are no different nowadays.

I am thankful for those medical advances that made my life continuance possible, in critical years of my youth. And for medical advances since then. Great stuff.

But I also remember that the business-as-usual medical system made a long series of declarations about reality that proved wrong later. Fortunately they were able to change their stance, although it might have been just due to making more money that way, along with fewer dead patients.

I also remember in the early 1950's, when it was found that my parents and I carried the amoebic dysentery, symptom-free, acquired during the months we lived in Mexico City, while dad worked to help eradicate the foot-and-mouth disease problem in Mexico that was headed north to America. The business-as-usual medical system declared they knew all health things, and gave each of us enough arsenic to kill us four times over, except in somewhat smaller doses stretched over two weeks, to kill the amoebas in our intestines but not quite kill us too.

Now we know that arsenic is a carcinogen, as well as a deadly poison. Giving it to somebody as a medicine is unthinkable now. But the arrogant we-know-all medical experts in the early 1950's considered arsenic the good thing to give people. And to their credit, it worked - nevermind the side effects later.

Kind of like way back when they gave people with syphilis mercury to cure it. Really, they did. Biologically-bound mercury. A banned substance now.

In fact, the thimerosal biologically-bound mercury was abundantly used in my youth, swabbed all over my skin whenever I got scrapes or cuts. Great OTC disinfectant, merthiolate. Was used in vaccines too, to keep the stuff from decomposing in storage.

Always, it was the all-knowing business-as-usual medical system's protocols.

So do I think that magically today's business-as-usual medical system knows all the answers, or would use answers that made them less money?

I have some skepticism about it.

The toddler gasping within an inch of his life, many times, while the arrogant doctors declaring that "it was all in the head," remembers. Too well. Almost dying, over and over again as a toddler and young child, makes an impression.

So in the early 1990's, as I was employed by a company who refused to provide health insurance, I began to look into herbal remedies. Homeopathic remedies too, a bit, although they were almost too mysterious and magical, yet with my strong engineering career experience record, the thing that counted was what actually worked. Start with theoretical educated best guesses, then get hands-on and figure out what made it actually work. I was especially competent at that.

Staying healthy became part of the same mindset. And without health insurance and with low pay - yet also very appreciated pay for a man well past the usual age for that employment - being of an ever curious nature, explored vitamins, herbs, and alternative health things, when I could sort of afford them.

The search was for what actually worked, for me. And it got interesting too, at times.

I have written in this blog before, about how I stumbled into Hulda Clark, PhD's, "zapper" device information, and got my very skeptical self to give it a long term safety test on myself. With no conscious thought that it could improve my health - I was already in fairly good heath as it was, I thought. And the many subsequent years and experiences that gradually got my skeptical scientific-engineering mind to grudgingly decide the zapper thing not only worked as declared by its inventor, Clark, but did it easily.

Now, at times when I mention the effectiveness of Clark's zapper technology to people who ought to be concerned with good health, particularly in emergency situations, I get the "uh-huh you crazy nut" response. I ponder the psychological state of mind that would produce that kind of response, and come up with some messy muck. But then I recall the skepticism I had for the zapper and related protocols, myself, 15 years ago. And what many opportunistic personal experiences that it took to convince me. Those folks have had none of that reality testing.

And sometimes their careers depend on the zapper not working: what if people in general could easily and cheaply take care of much of their own health at home, not needing the huge medical business-as-usual system to live healthily? Would be scary. I have been through several RIF's, layoffs, including when a whole field of people got laid off simultaneously by many companies. Tough times for those employees. One such experience was what got me into that electronics tech job at low pay with no health insurance, for example, in the mid-1980's.

But I keep reading about the huge medical costs here in America, ruining the economy. Political giving the boot to Medicare and Social Security.

I think there are people with heavy control issues involved in all that. But this blog post is not about that kind of thing.

Point maybe is that my findings over the past 15 years, anecdotal as they would be considered, were facts, reality test results, and very consistent. If placebo, they are very good placebos, very reliable as to effectiveness. Dare I compare to equivalent medical protocols in those instances? No. Am not quite that naive about the powers-that-be.

But it suggests that if people were given even the basic Clark-designed zapper for use at their homes, and gotten to use it correctly, the medical expenses of this nation would drop enormously. And the amount of sick leave taken would drop a lot, thus helping employers. Eventually Medicare would have little to cover thus of little expense to the country, and thus of no political contention anymore.

I won't bother trying to name the many expletives I would get applied to me by suggesting such a thing.

The one difference between that mindset, and mine back fifteen years ago starting to do a safety test of the zapper on myself, was that I was willing to see what actually happened, and was unbiased as to results that might be found. And strived to do the experiments accurately per Clark's writings about the new technology. That were even so surprising to the inventor, Hulda Clark, PhD.

But reality-testing is about more than just economical good health for America. It also is about the reactions to such a post as this one.

If America's medical system was made entirely non-profit

2011-10-11T10:19:00.000-07:00

I wonder what would happen if America's medical system was entirely made into "non-profit" category goods and services. No more motive of gaining wealth off of the sick and needy. I think there would be lots healthier people and far less cost for health maintenance.

And, if I were to mention this publicly, what fury would descend on me, I wonder. (Have read lots of stories about the "accidents" in the medical system that disposed of those who were showing that some alternative was working where conventional medicine had dismally failed. Educated experts do not like being shown up, any more than other people do.)

And yes, modern medicine has produced lots of modern miracles. They are competent at what they do: great chemists making pharmaceuticals of extreme complexity; surgeons with steady hand and eye, skilled at excising what seems to be the correct thing, in there among the complex wiggly body parts.

Yet what they are not so competent at is keeping people well and in top notch shape, simply just to make that happen for everybody. A different kind of goal.

Too much of what goes on in the system appears to be control issues, territory protection instead of better products and services, and above all chasing after medical systems that make the most profit among the alternatives, for the investors, instead of chasing after the most effective goods and services, when there are choices.

It is perhaps fitting that those investors are then stuck with the less-than-could-have-been medical system availability to them, wealthy or not.

Well, I make lots of mistakes too, both from lack of full comprehension, or of mischief by the "inner saboteur."

Yet from outside the system, I can still contemplate what would happen if America's medical system was entirely made into "non-profit" category goods and services. Lots better health for the nation, when it is health that is what gets rewarded.

But the real situation is that sickness services are tremendously big business at present; and there are political techniques to prevent change away from that - I recall seeing a recent cartoon that pointed at that kind of thing, where someone was going around screaming "socialist! socialist!" at anything that would focus on getting the job done instead of focusing on business profit game playing. And in other ways, am not skilled at predicting what people would do; the medical system might just pack up and move to some other country, for example.

It is not easy to change one's ways. And without a strong enough reason to change, it won't happen. Apparently, living a life of good health mostly self-guided, is not generally a strong enough reason for lots of people.

Black turtleneck sweater time

2011-10-07T22:41:00.000-07:00

"Steve Jobs 1955-2011" reads the online news items. For someone I never met - that I know of - Steve sure made a big difference in my life.

That year 1955, when he was born, was also a major year in my life: My freshman year in college, and the year that somehow I changed from being a young man who got high grades with no interest in good grades, and read at 750 WPM with comprehension, to a young man who had extreme tinnitus endless screeching in the ears, ADD and could not remember what was on the page he had just read. What a situation.

So the time span of Steve Job's life covers the same time span as my own struggles to cope with that new scenario in my life. He sure had his struggles too; he did lots better than I did.

There in my early efforts in college I recall one of my wishes, that someone would build a "teaching machine," modeled after the reports I had read of books that were written with statements to be learned, immediately followed by the reader to respond to a question about the item just read. If the answer was not correct, the lesson was repeated, until the student got it right. There would be no exams without 100% learned, upon testing. Everyone would be an "A" student. Period. Nothing falling through the cracks.

I think Steve Jobs got that "teaching machine" built. It sits in front of me, called an Apple MacBook computer. Except no one has programmed it to do that simple read-answer, read-answer, instruction program on it.

I read that Steve Jobs was buried today.

He seemed to be a competitive-natured Aspey. Along with another one, Bill Gates. Quite a game. It seems to show me that an Aspey can have a competitive nature. Unlike me.

Apparently associated with being a achiever.

Steve is said to have dreamed of creating a computer where people could be creative upon it. I think I demonstrated that a bit today; affirming he achieved his dream of that.

Today I finally got my 2010 novel on the way. CreateSpace is now sending me a proof copy of the paperback version; and Smashwords seems to have initially approved my eBook version today too. I did not struggle to make a linked table of contents this time as it would have taken another day and that effort seems to be associated with epub rejections later. "Three Species on Lava World" is its title. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/94705 You can read half of it there for free. The cover came from a photo of the camping trip in 2009 to Mt St Helens, nearest thing to a volcano that I had a personal photo of.

The "graphical interface" that Steve's Apple Computer spread to the masses, made this book's creation possible for me to make. If I had to struggle with a DOS command line while writing on some machine owned by IBM that I had to stand in line somewhere for hours to use for a brief time - which would likely be the situation without Steve Jobs & Company - it just would not have happened, way too much struggle, distracting things.

Today I ordered online a black turtleneck sweater, like Steve Jobs seemed to wear a lot. Wearing black, in the "holistic" viewpoint, both blocks "negativity" hostility sent from others, but also unfortunately cuts down on one's own life energy. So it seems to me that probably wearing such attire would be best only during brief times, when one had to achieve, in a situation where hostiles might be poo-poo-ing you, yet you have to get the job done. I wonder if Steve wore such shirt too much of the time, reducing his life energy way too much, eventually cutting his life short. Yet at times it might be important to one's success, while enduring a peanut-gallery rivalistic arena, where creative harmony is all that is really appropriate to achieving the task at hand.

Apple's Steve Jobs can't be dead, he has too much to do yet

2011-10-05T19:17:00.000-07:00

Too many prayers not done. Too many petty gripes not balanced with hoorays about neat things accomplished. Great sadness at hearing that Steve Jobs has transitioned.

Back in the mid-1980's, he was working off barely in my awareness as I struggled through my many personal life struggles at the same time he was creating Apple Computers. First I heard of Apple Computer, was hearing that the company I was working for in Sunnyvale CA was manufacturing flexible disk drives for Apple Computer, and it was helping finance the company that employed me at the peak of my career, Shugart Associates, a division of Xerox; I had become a non-degreed design-development electronic engineer, at the urging of my supervisor, Alastair Heaslett, in 1982.

Unknown to me, Apple computer was forming, in nearby - and often passed by in my travels - Cupertino, CA.

I did not become more aware of Apple Computer until my oldest son Paul, who was an avid Apple Computer enthusiast, got me aware of Apple Computers; and I bought my first Apple Computer in 1996, a Performa - 630c was it? - already obsolete and thus on sale, for my freshly laid-off low finances, at a Fry's electronics store. I had had a 386SX before that, running on DOS command line before that, itself a big step for me, but the Performa was what was hoped would enable me to find a new job, connected to the internet. The Earthlink.net internet connection came with 6 MB of web pages, so I got to learn how to make my own web pages, some of which remain at http://home.earthlink.net/~jedcline/

I type this on my Macintosh MacBook circa 2009 model. A thing made possible by Steve Jobs.

Who the news says has passed away tonight. At age 56. He ought to have been just taking another time out while getting ready to do more great things. But gone? Can't be; too much to do yet.

But clearly with the pancreatic cancer, liver transplant and all, he was dealing with suppressed anger issues, very intense. He probably did not know how to cope with anger issues; he was just an achiever, getting on with things despite opposition. Opposition that just seemed to be opposition, instead of an offerer of constructive alternatives.

I resist calling such "opposition" some bad names here.

Yet competition is said to drive new achievements otherwise not of interest; Apple was in competition with IBM. The monster huge invincible IBM.

I take another sip of my evening's ethanol beverage, no food in sight nor of interest. When the potential rescuer of America has - ceased - it is too much.

Lots of folks would be glad of this. They have harassed me for decades, too. (More suppression of calling bad names here.)

For my own part, I had neglected to keep Steve Jobs in my prayers lately. And I was focusing on minor irritations re my computer acting weird and obnoxious, clearly a virus had gotten in, probably with my trying to run old DOS stuff programs in an emulator. No good energy to Steve Jobs.

I had realized in recent months that Steve Jobs was the probable only person who could implement, in the private sector, the "Internet connected home manufacturing-education workstation" concept, often mentioned in this blog. A way to get all Americans back into contributing to the GDP while also expanding their skill sets, using computer technology.

(But no, some power-crazed folks want to rule America dividing it up into their own petty feudalistic kingdoms, protected by the nation's Cold War leftover nukes.)

I had also considered him potentially able to get Pixar to create an envisionary animated movie about my KESTS to GEO concept to save civilization.

But I had no way to contact him. And I now suspect - dimly - that he did not want to take on all the opposition, the foot-dragging and sabotage, all over again - of opponents who want to continue to do things the same old way, despite those ways don't work in the long run, but they provide wealth in the short term.

Could be, he had just said he wants out. Enough is enough. People did not give him enough appreciation energy, and instead focused on the fringe small problems. Myself among them, too often.

Nevertheless, I have a MacBook here in front of me that holds another sci fi novel book I have been writing, and is almost ready for self-publishing, thanks to the technology that Steve Jobs & Co made possible for me to do here on my home personal computer despite living in retirement poverty. I'd better keep it rolling. Lest more be wasted. And, my MacBook is enabling me to explore my tiny step improvement in an electronics-related technology that I dreamed that could save Steve Job's life - along with countless others - if only there were a way to get around the obstacles put there by those who gain great wealth from others illness misfortune. On to make another tiny step and see what results.

You can't get there from here? Steve Jobs proved that you can. Almost.

Starting a productivity consciousness

2011-10-04T10:19:00.000-07:00

Might it help if people started a "productivity consciousness"? First would be setting up measures for one's own productivity - that includes defining "productivity" too. Then making a continuous record of one's productivity. Some people might also measure and keep track of a group overall productivity, too. And extending to the group of all America and of all other groupings, including the whole world's productivity.

"Productivity" seems a better measure of the economy's performance than is "profit." Profit can include moneys made off of something that actually did not undergo improvement by value added, for example, and without value added, although profit increased locally, the overall value of the system did not improve; it was just a shift of money. Productivity seems a better measure than profit, of the economy's performance.

Defining productivity would be a key thing to do; so for starters, each individual could define his/her accomplishments that provided productivity by the person. Productivity could be as basic as preparing a cup of coffee for oneself this morning: checkmark, "one cup of coffee produced, out of the coffee-making resources at hand, work done by myself accomplished." I expect to do more formatting of my latest sci fi novel today; that appears to be planning, part of productivity: "I produced a plan to do more formatting on the novel I started writing last year."

Establishing a viewpoint of "productivity" in oneself conceivably could get more awareness of productivity in one's own life, and hopefully that viewpoint will remain when looking outward as being part of the American economy.

"Productivity" would be made specific at times, such as a foreman measuring how many 6-32x1" screws got put into the widget today by the crew, for example. All the other things that went on to support those screws insertion are minimized in that particular measurement, such as the coffee breaks, the phone call home to check on baby's getting-well progress, the ordering of more screws for the widget to be used tomorrow; yet they all are productivity too.

So some forms of productivity may be more "significant" than others seem to be; thus maybe there needs to be a category like "productivity affecting the American balance of trade with the rest of the world."

In this focus on productivity it is clear that I, as a retiree, am still productive, writing this blog post, despite the fact that I am neither employed to do so nor being paid to do so; yet at least in my fantasy, it could help the economy if read and understood by folks. This is an important aspect of the proposed "productivity viewpoint" in that it does not need to be defined by doing something that someone pays you to do. Usefulness is more the criteria. Usefulness to oneself and usefulness to others. And usefulness in the overall picture, however wide that picture is selected to be in any given scenario.

There is both "potential usefulness" as well as "actualized usefulness," analogous to planting an oak's acorn, vs a giant oak tree that has grown from an acorn's guiding pattern; grown out of, and into, the environment that the growing tree found itself in and being part of all along. Thus "potential usefulness" is a valid parameter, as well as the potential usefulness of the environment the acorn finds during its efforts to produce an oak tree.

Somewhere such a "productivity consciousness" would come back to apply to the specific focus of Bernanke in the referenced article, put in terms of the "economic outlook" and most likely to the economy itself.

Recycled water is not new

2011-10-01T14:10:00.000-07:00

The term "recycled water" is usually greeted with a sense of being something that is contaminated and probably capable of causing illness and toxicity if consumed.

And, a given sample may well indeed exhibit those properties. Or it might not.

Think about it. Is there any water on this planet that is not recycled water? Any water in the vast oceans that has not gone through countless ocean fish kidneys and been excreted? Any water in the most pristine mountain stream that has not gone through those ocean fish kidneys and elephant kidneys, even human and dinosaur kidneys, countless times before you see it merrily babbling away among the rocks in the stream bed?

Even water that has been just now made by burning hydrogen in oxygen, is made from oxygen and hydrogen atoms that have been through countless incarnations as water molecules at other times and places, each atom has a history of being in clouds, hurricanes, oceans, rocks and inside living organisms of vast variety.

All water you drink is recycled water.

The thing that controls a given sample of water's tendency to make one ill from pathogens or toxin content, is just that - the pathogen and toxin content.

It may also be true that a sample of water with no pathogen or toxin measurable content, yet still carry some kind of mysterious "energy" imprint to the imbiber of the water; but that is a different kind of thing to explore.

Meantime, the point here is that all water we drink and bathe in, is recycled water. The main difference is in what the water has been through most recently, that adds color to the water - or removes it.

Schools of thought in the healing arts

2011-09-30T14:24:00.000-07:00

Just as there are rivalries between universities, of esteem re competency, there are rivalries between schools of thought in the healing arts. There are rivalries in academic excellence of graduates, fields of study, and sports team competitiveness. Among fraternities, a bit similarly. Among religious groups, similarly. And between automobile brand showrooms: don't dare put an auto of a different manufacturer in a competitor's showroom.

The point of this here, is that to some significant extent, the healing arts have similar competing rivalrous groups, each proclaiming better-ness in some way. There are competing brands of pharmaceuticals; but pharmaceuticals are competing with herbalists, from which the pharmaceuticals sprang. Yet herbalism has continued to be increased in its knowledge base, too.

And there is a newer field in the healing arts, sometimes calling itself "electroherbalism," the generation of small electrical signals into physiology, that some researchers have found to closely mimic some herbal effects.

Another school of the healing arts has a body of experiential knowledge based on measuring and adjusting flows of a subtle energy in the physiology, such as in Touch for Health and Applied Kinesciology in general. And there are the various kinds of spiritual visualization gentle hands-on or distant-healing, and religious faith healing modalities, sometimes to directly offer energy advise on a subtle level to the being that is in need of better health, or calling upon an invisible God-being, often a wise powerful male figure spiritual presence, to do the healing as requested by a third party.

The field of Internal Medicine tends to work hand in hand with the pharmaceutical schools, to supply the herbal-chemical-developed substances utilized in that school of the healing arts.

The purpose of the healing arts is nominally that of improving the state of health of people and other living beings.

There are the surgical arts, such as for helping repair and provide a healing environment for broken bones of various types. There are those who do manual adjustments of the skeletal joints, such as of the spine in chiropractor work.

If a person feels in need of improved health, whether it is just a desire for better wellbeing in general, or responding to some perceived dysfunction that is significantly reducing the person's state of health, which mode of the healing arts will be considered best for the person?

Assuming that all of these schools of the healing arts are equally available for healing improvement of the person - sometimes called a "customer" or "patient; or even merely oneself.

Often the apparent severity and the level of urgency of the ongoing situation will strongly direct to some particular school of the healing arts, such as a broken leg would most likely seek out a surgeon with expertise in repairing that kind of bone. On a different part of the various spectrums of wellness, a person may just feel "out of sorts" after a hard day at the office, and would likely not seek out a surgeon, but rather someone in Applied Kinesciology or herbal arts - or even go for a cup of coffee, as an herbal help.

Nutrition is also part of the healing arts, food and drink that is chosen for the improvement of wellbeing, which is not always the same as tasty food or convenience foods.

Just like different college football teams, each have their very intense proclamations of superiority and their bands of followers; some groups much stronger than others, perhaps more for the wealth and power of the group more than actual general ability to improve the state of health of people and other living beings.

More apparent is that there are fields of specialty, such as the surgeon bone-setter and the chiropractor bone-adjuster, and the massage and physical workout specialties of relaxing, toning, and strengthening the muscles attached to those bones, part of the bone functionality.

Some groups have sought to gain a greater share of the customer base by having laws enacted favoring their modality of the healing arts, too. But here the decision factors are more controlled by business profit directives, than of resulting human wellness. The resulting success at gaining wealth from the customer base, and using that wealth and influence capacity to find ways to block customer access to the other rival healing arts modalities, has resulted in the ongoing wellness level of the human population, and that of the supported other living forms on this planet, such as in agriculture. Worse, that "allopathic" modality of the healing arts, in proclaiming that it is the one and only "true" means for healing, is stuck with having to take on healing tasks for which it is not ready or even inherently capable of developing efficacy in healing.

Yet it seems to me that it would be far better to instead pick the healing arts best suited to the wellness need, based on efficacy in the whole ongoing scenario of each individual wellness improvement need situation.

Abundant oil abundant CO2 low oxygen is test of responsibility

2011-09-25T21:07:00.000-07:00

The news of fracking making huge amounts of oil available here in the Americas in the near future, is exciting news. I think that is where the fine couple living next door who had been working in the local wind turbine industry that has unfortunately been laying off people, suddenly vanished and went; since they had been oil workers before. Boom town in N Dakota.

Not being dependent on oil from the Middle East is great news. Us sending 80 billion dollars over there each year just for stuff we burn up over here, can now start to cease; and then those desert countries now can use their oil and selected microbes to make their land into desert paradises, with plentiful edible hydrocarbons for livestock. And, well-fed folks tend to not want to go raid their neighbors on this planet.

But. People do not seem to notice that burning oil for energy, consumes the oxygen of our atmosphere. People do seem to dimly realize that it does produce rising CO2 levels.

I have long thought that Nature had used the power of sunlight gathered over millions of years, to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere into the form of coal and oil underground, so as life could exist on this planet. We now enjoy that oxygen abundance and low CO2 in the air.

Maybe it is the deep memory of asthma in my very early years, of gasping for tiny bits of oxygen so as to continue to live, that makes me sensitive to the issue of us losing our oxygen in the quest for cheap energy for our civilization.

In the recent few years, we have had a brief look at solar power use for directly powering our robustly growing civilization. We seem to think that cheap hydrocarbons ace out solar energy.

I will watch to see if we have learned anything about responsibility for the environment upon which we base our lives.

Right now I have little confidence we will use much wisdom. Profit rules; nevermind the costs to our lives. Our medical system is a plentiful example of our wisdom, since it is not guided by efficacy, but instead too often guided by a system of egos and reputations and maximizing business profits, instead of focusing on maximizing our healthy lives at low cost. Most likely this attitude will extend into the energy vs loss of breathable air arena, too, along with ocean acidification etc.

I could say something about an educational system that promotes this sense of irresponsibility; but I won't here. Also an informational system involved in it too.

Anyway, the local neighbors driving their huge SUV's here sneering at my bicycling with a backpack to buy groceries so as to save oil for other uses, are now vindicated. Or so it seems.

Jobs, the economy, the CCC camp system, and the US Civil Service

2011-09-25T11:16:00.000-07:00

The creation of jobs has been an Obama administration focus for a long time, recognizing it is key to reviving the American economy.

There is much conflict as to who creates those jobs and who reaps the profit. Dems want the government to create the now-missing jobs, and America as a whole reaps the benefit; GOP wants the jobs to be made only by private businesses for their own profit and only if they make immediate profit for the business owners, and the rest of America is out of luck - a system of overwhelming leverage by the "business owners."

While I think that it is best that the jobs be based on supplying product needs of the nation and the world, and businesses have experience in doing that, I also am quite aware that private business has not been doing the job of maximizing the usage of the human resources of America - and they are currently still having much opportunity to do that yet are not doing it.

So, the reality-test has resulted in lack of doing the job of giving all people adequate and comfortable employment.

I think of the old technique exemplified by the Civilian Conservation Core that was instrumental in bringing the nation out of depression before. Typically young people would go off to "camp" sites and be taught to build things, getting things built thereby as well as giving those youngsters useful employable skills for when the economy revived back to normal functionality. Only the government could do that, the "government for the people and by the people" as we supposedly are.

As for cost, right now, the system that provides the nearest equivalent is the military, which brings in the young people, trains them and gives them experience in applying those skills. So the cost equivalent is the past decade's wars that supplied those skills and experiences to the young people. (I speak here of cost to the American taxpayer; not the concurrent cost to the nations we attacked so destructively without provocation, which is a karmic cost we have yet to fully face, a different subject than is being explored here, but useful in comparison of the two kinds of systems for government training and experiencing for our young people.) Thus comparable trillions of dollars would be justifiable in a new "Civilian Conservation Core" and similar job training & experience functions, paid for by the taxpayer base, like the wars were. In other words, some trillions of dollars spent over a decade. A bunch of money. But far more constructively in both skills and accomplishments, than was the war mode.

I have some life experience relevant to all this. I was a depression child, and thus was an only child, no siblings with which to learn people skills or have as helpers later. My parents were both employees of the U S Civil Service, another aspect of the government's depression-recovery activities, alongside the Civilian Conservation Core (CCC) system; my parents met while employees at an Agricultural Experimental Station, a kind of facility that worked to help develop agricultural systems improvement knowledge, a function that farmers themselves would not finance yet would benefit from enormously. My parents both remained lifetime U S Civil Service employees, doing a wide variety of jobs along the way.

One place we lived was Window Rock, Arizona, when my dad worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The place had been built by Civilian Conservation Core (CCC) youngsters in the depression, learning skills and applying them, producing worthwhile things and being employed while the nation was still in depression conditions. The house we rented there was made from bricks carved out of the red sandstone mountains of the area; I often wondered how they had chiseled out and hand crafted those pieces of rock to make them near-identical bricks from which the house was built. The little desert town area had an integrated co-generation facility, its electrical powerplant's cooling water being pumped through all those red sandstone brick homes there as well as the larger administration buildings, supplying steam heat during the cold parts of the year, a high desert place that got significant snow. I well remember those steam radiators in the rooms of our house. All that system of homes, administration buildings, and powerplant co-generation system, was built by those youngsters of the CCC camp system, paid for by the government's CCC system for recovery of the nation. No doubt those youngsters learned a lot of new trade skills and responsibility while building all that; and those skills and responsibility attitude later helped the nation thrive when the private business system once again needed employees. Although I did not notice later a need to carve bricks by hand out of sandstone mountains, the craftsman skills to do that surely were useful in other private business endeavors; and the bricklaying clearly useful later too in conventional employment.

In a way, I too, received some later-useful training while in such public systems. In the mid-1950's I was a US Civil Service employee on my first electronics job, helping man a radio telemetry ground station involved in the testing of guided missiles, while I was a physics major in the co-op program with White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, probably headed to be a nuclear physicist. When I later had to drop out of that program due to the severe tinnitus and ADD that hit me in my Freshman year, making studying near impossible, I then got experience in surveying in the desert as a rodman-chainman, learning another new set of skills, in the Civil Service system. Seeking a woman to marry - there were twelve men for every woman at the NM State Collage I attended and so the competition for women was fierce and I lost out - I went east and got a job as a museum technician at the Smithsonian Institution in DC, another Civil Service Job, again learning new skills involving both my native artistic skills and my technical-type skills. And after that I went to work for the FAA as an electronics maintenance technician, and received formal electronics training in electronics engineering, as part of that job; all back in the vacuum-tube era of electronics. When I left the Civil Service system, advancing into employment in the private business system, those basic electronics skills were a head start, although that also was the time when solid state electronics was coming into being, and I was always self-educated in electronics from then on, learning what I had to know to do my job well, for a lot of different companies, and I became a top electronics engineering technician, even formally became a non-degreed electronics design-development electronics engineer at the peak of my career, in computer disk drive development.

So I not only did useful productive work needed by the country while an employee of the U S Civil Service system (which I pointed out was started in the depression days to get the country functioning again) but then those skills and experiences got me a head start for when I joined the private business system as a corporate-system's employee. The U S government's job system enabled both my parents and myself to have a modest job income, do useful work needed by the nation as a whole as part of that, and when the economy was up to it, I went on to be a highly productive employee in the private business system until the economy went into a slump and I got laid off and was too old to get an electronics tech job anymore, and was of retirement age, so eventually I gave up and decided I was retired, just doing volunteer work and an occasional part time paid work in newly learned fields related to natural history.

So those are real-world experiences involving a public employment system operating in parallel with the private business system, how it really worked. All benefited.

Expecting an uncoordinated private business system to "naturally" upgrade the nation's job skills as part of jobs created to include that task, employing a maximum number of people doing things they could learn in a non-excessively-stressed lifestyle, has yet to be done. Or even talked about, as far as I know. They do not consider themselves their brother's keeper, as the saying goes.

Speaking of "brothers keepers", a scenario I see possible in the existing arena, that does not involve a government-sponsored job-creation system like the CCC and US Civil Service system, is that there is one religious group, rapidly expanding, that has always been business-focused, teaching its youngsters about business by requiring all its young males to own and operate some kind of business as part of their growing-up process; and probably would like to take the Presidency and make the whole nation a business system under their control and for their exclusive profit. But it is a young religion, not adequately identified with America as a whole; and thus likely would be run secretly at the core by their religious elite, instead of by the will of the American people, especially at turn key events and issues. Does America want that to happen; will it happen by default, I wonder. (And I worry about any "fundamentalist-type religious patriarchical organization" getting its fingers on the trigger button of America's vast nuclear arsenal and war machine. PC&APCA, too often proves correct. Beliefs that one's religious grouping is God's exclusive chosen ones, always gets humanity into trouble, sooner or later.)

So it seems to me that a combination of a new CCC-type system, with an expanded U S Civil Service system, both wisely guided (well, it was wisely done before, somehow,) is the most workable way to go at this point.

And of course I have, for several years, urged the formation of a "Home internet-linked educational-manufacturing workstation" system be established as part of America's recovery; but the private business system has ignored that; and since it is for the benefit of the American economic system's recovery, it might as well be part of that hypothetical CCC & US Civil Service expansion mode too, so as to include getting the essences of manufacturing back into the American mind. And to enable everybody in the nation - everybody - to get into the part-time job-holding slightly productive mode mindset, a solid place from which to go beyond there.

There are ways to solve the problem, if enough of us remember that we are Americans instead of special-interest group members.

Attempting to comprehend business ethics related to religions

2011-09-19T13:21:00.000-07:00

Examining over my lifetime, I have formed a hypotheses, another regarding "what people do do." The back of my mind seems to always be sifting my experiences, attempting to comprehend them, including personal ones as well as those heard or read from others and news and magazines over the some seven decades I have been reading. The current insight hypothesis, attempting to form it into words at least somewhat adequately, might be stated as follows.

A group of inter-related people-phenomena involves business ethics, religious grouping, and patriarchal authority. It starts with hypothesizing about why some groups of people can rob other people of their ideas that could be used to start a business. It is thought that these folks would not do that to members of their own group. On further inspection it seems related to "religious groups" in which they would not do such ripping off of the business-potential concepts of one of their own group.

The justification for this is that the brothers of their own religious group consider all non-members as not brothers, and those outsiders are doomed to eventually be destroyed by God anyway, so why not grab away their goodies in life, if they are tricky enough to do that without getting caught. And coordination of a few brothers make it easy to pull the theft off.

The key point here is that first they chose to rob the idea-originator instead of attempt business relationship negotiation to share in it; and that they mentally justified this ethics by being told that all non-brothers are doomed anyway, so it is not really theft of the ideas for new business products.

Further analysis of this phenomenon, sees a consistent pattern involved in this human behavior, including through much of history such as in the Old Testament too. Apparently genetically-related males have a subtle linking that makes them special, and they often are of different mothers but the same father, such as in harems and sheiks, and other polygamous-founded groups. Lots of examples past and present.

As for the apparent innate hostility between these bunches of guys who have different polygamous fathers, all seems quite consistent with the ancient mammalian herd pattern, where males battle it out to get all the reproduction access by just one male or select few; the others being forced out of the safety of the herd by the dominant male which then fathers all the next generation of the herd. Human males sometimes seem to have inherited this behavior quite accurately, except they do not use horns on their head to assault each other, but have a far wider range of trickery and weaponry available. In the Old Testament the tales of some tribe leader deciding to go wipe out the males of some neighbor tribe and taking the women as slave wives, for example.

In modern America and other nations, there are various religions who are out attracting new members, though what happens is that new reproducing age females get absorbed into being single-moms or temporary marriages, and the incoming males are sternly told that to seek to attract a woman in any way is to sin and therefore be punished. This phenomenon seems strongest in the newer "fundamentalist-mentality" religious sects around the world, which are attempting to grow in numbers as fast as possible; even in ancient times this made more potential warriors to fight those of other "religions."

Also, on another aspect of those "religions," there is a spiritual aspect, each religion claiming exclusive adoption by God, who in each case is called different from the God of each of the other religions.

And in this spiritual part of the phenomenon, are not-easily-observed but-repeatable effects that science has so far avoided exploring much; but are part of the whole universe that science seeks to accurately describe.

The "religions" however, clearly deeply know of the phenomenological techniques to set themselves up for advantage, more powerful when bonded well and particularly bonded through genetic closeness.

Yet, the phenomena are not really linked to patriarchs and their broods; but are actually universal to mankind and life in general.

This hypothesis seems to be a best-fit to a wide range of observed phenomena in my lifetime. Science seeks to understand all of nature and her phenomena, including that of human beings. The root concepts of fatherhood, motherhood and progeny siblings, are spread through all kinds of life forms, even plants. The subtle resonances of genetic closeness tend to strive to maximize its own kind's success in each case, as if a separate God was their shepherd, in each case. It takes a larger view grasp to see that those gods are really aspects of one God that is subtly being one with all creation. Maybe a God that is enjoying the show. Or enjoying being in it as the players.

And so, explaining how the business ethics that encourages ripping off of non-same-religious-group members instead of doing honest negotiation to share with the non-member's creations that have business potential, it is just part of the show.

And the stresses created by this behavior are well known to eventually reflect back on those who made those decisions, until they learn about "karma" and then responsibly become a higher form of being. Per present-day human inter-relationships and similarly those of thousands of years ago too, we as a species clearly are repeating the lesson, still not generally having learned it yet.

It is not only the gathering and valid integration of knowledge, but also what is chosen to be done with that knowledge, that defines the quality of beingness. Perhaps this is useful as a parameter of wisdom.

American jobs and a hypothesis of scrappiness and harmony

2011-09-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

The creation of jobs for American workers is really important, I think. Everybody needs a work income - well maybe some of the already-rich folks don't, but the rest of us do - and that also has the important result of adding to the nation's Gross Domestic Product.

President Obama has a jobs bill that he feels is a best-fit compromise way to get some of these jobs going, to maintain essential infrastructure and education that is part of what makes this nation function.

Yet there are those who are opposing this jobs bill. Vehemently opposing.

Apparently their claim is that jobs only ought to come out of the private sector.

It ought to be very plain to everyone that the private sector is not actually doing that; otherwise there would be no unemployment problem ongoing. (Notice the unemployment problem happening right now and getting worse by the day? Notice?)

This is a plain reality test about the claim that private business is willing and able to get the job done for America.

Now, it is possible that the missing jobs are being held back by the wealthy private business employers, just to cripple the present Administration so as to have their own people take their place. I think this is called "politics." The implication is that once the GOP is back in the saddle again, the private employers will release the money to create those needed jobs.

But I think business is more practical than that. If they thought they would make money by hiring the unemployed, they would be doing it. It is not being done. And would not be done even if the GOP was back in the saddle, running America like it did the first eight years of this century, if dependent on individual business bottom line increase.

I doubt that depending on voluntary private business support of America's workforce optimum utilization is going to happen. Responsibility for the whole system is rarely involved in ordinary business establishment planning. The only folks that get a job are the ones who happen to be handy for filling a job function needed by some private business. The other potential workers are not even thought of by businesses.

This all seems fairly obvious to me, and ought to be obvious to most everybody. But clearly it is not obvious, otherwise the GOP folks would have no backing and would soon be outta there.

That is not the situation as of today's news; the GOP is right in there blocking the Administration's best effort to get jobs going to both reduce the number of unemployed, and to get critically important things done needed by America as a whole, like the above-mentioned infrastructure and education items.

Not part of Obama's job stimulation plans, is the manufacturing jobs-creation system I created and have proposed for several years already. It is hardly the only way to do it, but as a relatively simple and quickly implemented technique for rapidly enabling America to get back into the everyday manufacturing mentality, it looks capable of achieving that. It would get everybody into the productivity loop, increasing practical manufacturing skills and education level, without commute expenses and energy costs, and producing a few salable items the nation needs, at lower cost than can be done by conventional manufacturing in the US. Everybody wins. Except, clearly some powerful folks don't think it is a win for them, else it would already be happening today. (In case somebody does not know what I talk about here, it is the "Internet-linked home manufacturing-education workstation system concept.") I think that America needs real manufacturing capacity development based on the technological level of the nation.

And it clearly is not currently getting created by private business; and even if the Administration comprehended and was interested in it, the politics has blocked money availability to do such things by the government.

(Worse, there have been some sleazy scammers online pretending they are doing it, giving it all a bad reputation. Deliberate?)

If America were as great and competent as we assume, such problems would not exist. We seem to be able to come together to wage war on an outsider, and achieving wonders while doing so; but we are not nearly so capable for doing our own housekeeping.

Maybe it is our portion of scrappiness nature. Gotta have those conflicts to show whose better. Right down to the individual young man graduating from high school, needing to show off so as to get more attention from the cute gals by whom he could eventually reproduce; all often part of the creation of the next generation.

Groups form since they usually can wipe out the mere individual, ganging up on him overtly or covertly. And those groups form confederacies with other groups to get greater leverage; and states become the United States. And that Union faces outward to the world, ready to scrap.

Yet at each level, the grouping needs to have internal harmonious functionality, supporting the whole. On the smaller level, this is forced by the need to take on the rival groups. Improved productivity of goods and services can be part of this internal harmony enabling things to get done. Can be, but not directly linked to success intrinsically.

And that is the problem explored here. It is not a generally recognized intrinsic mechanism for internal harmony. It can get aced out by the scrappiness social force.

And that seems to be what is happening in America right now re job creation.

Refs:
http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2011/08/again-thinking-of-how-to-revive.html
http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2011/09/again-on-internet-linked-home-sited.html

Good luck Mr Gorsky

2011-09-15T05:57:00.000-07:00

Way back in the early days of email, I had received a humorous (yet said to be true) account of something that happened on the first Moon landing. Since the file had already gotten in a format no longer readable by my recently operating system upgraded computer, I thought it worth converting via an old computer and placing here, as possibly a place to preserve the gem instead of letting it turn into bit dust like so many files have already done, as formats go obsolete.

So here it is, minus the names in the email path, of course, and fixing carriage returns:

"When Apollo Mission Astronaut Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon, he not only gave his famous "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" statement but followed it by several remarks, usual com traffic between him, the other astronauts and Mission Control.

Just before he re-entered the lander, however, he made the enigmatic remark "Good luck Mr. Gorsky."

Many people at NASA thought it was a casual remark concerning some rival Soviet Cosmonaut. However, upon checking, there was no Gorsky in either the Russian or American space programs.

Over the years many people questioned Armstrong as to what the "Good luck Mr. Gorsky" statement meant, but Armstrong always just smiled.

On July 5, 1995 in Tampa Bay FL, while answering questions following a speech, a reporter brought up the 26 year old question to Armstrong. This time he finally responded. Mr. Gorsky had finally died and so Neil Armstrong felt he could answer the question.

When he was a kid, he was playing baseball with a friend in his backyard. His friend hit a fly ball, which landed in beneath his neighbor's bedroom windows. His neighbors were Mr. & Mrs. Gorsky.

As he leaned down to pick up the ball, young Armstrong heard Mrs. Gorsky shouting at Mr. Gorsky. "Sex! You want sex?! You'll get sex when the kid next door walks on the moon!"

True story."

9-11 The bottom-line root-level solution that has worked in the past

2011-09-11T09:58:00.000-07:00

This will be a bit blunt, and some tough people won't like to hear it. But one cannot solve a problem by dealing with the wrong problem.
The "9/11" decade's commemoration ongoing today reminds me that the 2001 fracas was an example of the extremes gone to show how deeply the human mind is related to the same root as the monkey mind's kind of motives. Clearly the fracas demonstrates that we are not nearly as advanced a species as we like to proclaim in the classroom. Only the degree of cleverness and tool-using capacity surpasses that of the chimp mind, but the motivation part is too much the same. Call a spade a spade, and move on from there, best possible.

It is doubtful the perpetrators crashed the planes just because they were bored and did not have anything better to do that day; therefore it had a purpose, and most likely that was to do exactly what it achieved, to bait America into throwing its wealth away waging a historically unwinable place of war in the desert mountains in a far away land, at a vastly greater cost to America than merely rebuilding the towers, putting out "wanted" posters, and beefing up security would have cost.

That the World Trade Center towers were chosen to be the first to be hit, in a series of hits done not knowing how rapid America's defense would catch up, and considering that the Trade Center was a major symbol of the economy, not that of government, points out that it was primarily an economy fight, not an ego or "religious" fight, despite first appearances.

That kind of baiting into more disastrous battle only works between bully minds, note; the challenge of who is better than who.

Wiser people recognize the gambit and respond in far less costly, and more effective ways; but the bully mind has just got to instinctively go bash-em back to show the watching fertile gals just who are the better alpha males. Some leaders have not learned to tame those deep instincts as well as others have, and the perpetrators picked the right bunch to bait; it worked perfectly. "When will we ever learn?"

How about starting to learn now? (I hope that does not involve the bully-minds disposing of the messenger. As I said before, this was a bit blunt, and some tough people won't like to hear it.) But one cannot solve a problem by dealing with the wrong problem. Just how much do we want to solve the real problem, so it won't keep coming back to insist we play its brutal ego game?

The bottom-line root-level solution that has worked in the past is that of demanding a woman for every man, and a man for every woman. Starting when coming of age and occasionally swapping around ever seeking an adequately best fit as we grow up and older. No lonely bed any night for anybody. No hoarding of mates. No bully allowed to deprive anyone of a mate by any means anymore.

And that then leaves constructive cooperation remaining for our attention, and thus opportunity to show the finer side of being human. There is a very big world out there needing our intelligent responsible care, if only so that we continue to have its capable support in return; and an even bigger and interesting universe awaits, if we are up to the task.

Musing about the octahedron shape

2011-09-09T13:04:00.000-07:00

One of the Platonic Solids, or their edge equivalents, has long been of interest to me; and am not sure why, but is again on my mind now. It is called the octahedron.

That shape seemed to draw my attention during breaks when working as a contract electronic technician at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, when I would often wander next door to the Von Karman Auditorium's window display, showing replicas of their spacecraft as of back in the early 1970's when I worked there. Although not of equal sides, that octahedron basically was a horizontal triangle coupled to a smaller horizontal triangle above it, rotated by 30º, and the corners all connected by similar rods, each set forming another triangle itself. This clearly had the effect of a minimum yet stiff structure that defined two parallel surface's relationships with each other. In other words, the support of a higher parallel surface, by a lower surface; rigidly held yet with fewest parts to do it.

Although composed only of triangles, the octahedron shape also contains a square, if one looks for it. Cut through the plane of this square, it creates two pyramid structures that have a four-sided base. I don't know if this has anything to do with my interest in it at this time. I seem more interested in the aspect of supporting two parallel planes with maximum stiffness for the amount of material involved.

Maybe I need to make a table? Where to put it in my tiny already overstuffed house? And a triangular-shaped tabletop is not an efficient way to use space in a basically rectangular house structure. Yet it is interesting to me again now.

Maybe I could adapt it to become a major part of the solar concentrator projects in my back yard, coupling ground level up to swivel level of the six foot diameter dishes.

Well it seems I just have to make some kind of 9/11 post

2011-09-08T21:18:00.000-07:00

Well it seems that I just have to make some kind of 9/11 post. Lots of online news articles about recollections and asking people where they were on that day ten years ago. So what could I say that is worth saying on the subject?

I was at work in Pomona, CA, working at Orbital Sciences Sensor System Division, as an electronics technician, doing whatever I was told to do. I had no radio or direct source of info, but clearly others in the room were responding to something unusual, and I was noticing things. None of it made sense. It is an overwhelmingly complicated world to me, and it often seems to me that people do irrational abuse and hostility damage to each other when they could be instead working productively together for mutually beneficial things. But I learned long ago that those who declare themselves to be bosses, are the only ones with any say so. I needed a paycheck, and so I did my work and tried to keep a low profile to avoid the flak.

As I slowly learned over the next few days, what happened clearly was out of the comic books I had read as a youth. Classical comic book plot thing, except not in the colorful comic book pages this time. And the date done, 911, was the American call for emergency help. Clearly whoever planned the fracas was really tuned into the American way.

But it developed it was done by a bunch of Saudis. Yet next thing I heard we were invading Afghanistan. And then Iraq. So what kind of nuttiness next, I wondered. But not for me to have any say. Most likely anything I would have to say about it would be based on very incomplete info, anyway; and no one would pay attention.

And a few things happening in that time frame still seem to be pertinent yet unknown how they fit in; all could be quite erroneous in conclusion, too. So some part of the back of my mind watches and collects possibly related pieces of the puzzle, one of lots of such puzzles about life.

Stuffing those specific data points of that time era, into the upcoming anniversary date, I wonder, is there going to be a new idiotic thing happen in line with that monkeybusiness again. The news has articles seemingly with that same question, too. And I feel a general unusual level of anxiety which I have learned is actually some empath skill I have regarding people's emotions in my area, that I cannot easily separate from my own emotions - decades of experience has shown me something weird but consistent. I live with it and get on with life. But like the "Super Bowl Sunday" effect, something seems in the air and its cloud's lightening will likely strike somewhere, like that stirred up from the energy generated by millions of couch potatoes excitedly yelling on Superbowl Sunday, synchronized by events seen on screen. All strange to me. But, ignored at my risk.

All I can figure out at this point is that this is an opportune time to be prepared for emergency, like a fire drill. Check your supplies, stored drinking water, food for a few days, first aid kit, radio, flashlights and spare batteries, maybe a tent and camping supplies.

Around here folks would also have some high powered guns too, useful for quickly causing the extinction of all deer and other edible species of animals in the first day or less of a major retreat to the wilderness by the hordes of survivalists. And, some fishing equipment; there are some lakes and the Columbia River is only hundreds of miles away.

Some people might even have solar chargers for their batteries.

I tell people to have a Clark-type zapper as the best thing in their first aid kit but people just think I'm a nut and ignore me; or worse, look at me suspiciously. I do my best, even if I apparently am the world's worst advisor or salesperson. Having Aspergers one sort of gets used to that kind of thing, even it it makes no sense to me. Probably like a color blind person trying to interact with color.

Yet despite the conclusion that this is a good time to take stock of one's survival supplies, and being aware that American comic book story writers were not those subsequently chased at the waste of America's wealth, I also have the nagging memories of some real oddities in the weeks before and after that signature 9/11 event. In these past ten years I have formed several quite different hypothesis about them, including that none were related at all, and some quite related and in one rather detailed data hypothesis suggests I may have inadvertently played a part in preventing catastrophy in the LA area at the same time. Or, I was being set up to take the rap for local militants' monkeybusiness. Lots of hypothesis. All waiting for more data to see if it fits into those puzzles. Something could be up, long in the planning and not going to seem like from the real source.

Most likely 2011-09-11 will come and go with nothing much unusual happening, however, much like Y2K did.

So very much needs doing in America and the world right now; constructive activities for all our mutual benefit. How about us using our energy to act responsibly? Why? Well, life can be much better for all of us that way. Is that likely to happen? Well, there can always be a first time.

Productivity increase by broader utilization of worker's education and viewpoints

2011-09-08T17:32:00.000-07:00

In the proposed jobs system, it seems the way to do things that people already know how to do. And to provide an educational system that supplies the business system with competent workers. But the workers would only have the voice of collective bargaining regarding benefits and pay. What I am realizing is that all those workers for those businesses, have a huge knowledge base and they are right there seeing reality on the job. It seems a great resource being wasted if there is only top-down communication flow from management. Management is missing out on a major resource about the actual products and services being produced by the workers on the floor. There needs to be a rewarded communication path from the intelligent worker seeing opportunities that management does not realize, ways that could improve efficiency or product quality or even variations for potentially successful new products. Management would do well to acknowledge the intelligence and viewpoints of their workers at all levels. This is not the normal way business has been done in the past, I know. Yet if we are to do better than before, we need to find ways to do it, and this seems an area worthy of exploration.