Wasting a Gift

A Gift to Humans, From the Supreme Being

There are many things in life that I am unsure of, but there is one thing I am certain of, and that is that there is one Supreme Being that initiated the universe. Be it by the big bang, or what ever other method human scientists can attribute to the argument to support the concept for the creation of the Universe. I strongly believe that a single Being existed before the universe. Believing in a Supreme Being is not a matter of religion even though it is often confused as that. In my mind the Supreme Being is a matter of common sense with which we are all endowed.

Planet Earth is merely a single tiny entity within a universe with billions of stars, Nova’s, black holes, comets, and planets spread throughout. What I do not know, nor does anyone, is if there are other planets with life on them. Common sense and the law of probability steer me toward believing there is. I also believe that our knowledge of the universe if infantile, and that the mathematical laws of physics postulated by Einstein are not etched in stone, and can be challenged even if not understood. The limit on the ability to travel faster than light is one of those laws. Life within the Universe is inconceivable without the ability to travel faster that light. Visits to Earth by unidentified peoples can only be possible if they can travel much faster than that the limit which we have calculated within our physics.

The Supreme Being populated planet Earth with humans, and many lifeforms. The Being allowed humans to evolve into their current form. The Supreme Being also made certain that humans would have the ability to survive in this environment. He gave us the resources and the growth of knowledge to extract from Earth all that we need to survive and thrive. Among these resources were air, water, animals, and plant life to provide sustenance. As man evolved he learned to make fire, and to use animal skins to clothe and protect himself from the elements. Man discovered metals within the planet from which he learned to make into tools and weapons. Man learned that he needed protection from predators larger than himself, and he invented weapons to do so.

Fast forward to the twenty-first century in which we live today. Realize how man has evolved and progressed using the Supreme Being’s gifts to us on this planet. We continue to discover new and exciting elements to add to the periodic table, and each one eventually is found to be an essential to life and human development. One resource with which we have learned to use wisely is biological matter. Man has used the resources of the forests and jungles and the sea to his benefit. Trees for wood to build his buildings, to make paper, and foliage to extract chemicals for medicines, and to recycle into compost to nourish the soil in which all these beneficial things grow. At the beginning of the twentieth century man discovered one of the planet’s most useful gifts, oil.

At first, oil was not considered very useful, but man used his mind to discover uses for this mysterious liquid. Initially, he learned that it was a great substitute for keeping his home lighted. Instead of hunting for whales to extract its oils for this purpose, he learned to use kerosene. At each step of man’s evolution, he used the gifts endowed by the Supreme Being to his purpose. Men tamed large animals to carry loads, to till fields, and to transport loads across distances. Then came oil. Man invented mechanical devices to help him with his work. At first, he used the energy derived from burning wood to convert water into steam. After he realized oil could also be burned to produce heat his mind turned to inventing mechanical devices that would use oil to power them.

Man’s genius was stimulated by the Supreme Being’s gift of oil. His invention and knowledge expanded exponentially by using chemistry to separate oil into many components. The process was called distillation, and has yielded fine lubricating oil, tar, kerosene, gasoline, and more. We all know that gasoline is one of the most beneficial gifts we have on the planet. From oil came more gifts as chemists invented new materials using oil as a feedstock for plastics. Plastics may be a bigger gift to humanity than is gasoline. The number of different plastics and their applications are nearly endless, and many have become indispensable in our lives.

Man has not stopped inventing new uses for the gifts bestowed to us by planet earth. Yet we do not seem to appreciate that these are gifts, as is our intellect to invent, and to use them for our benefit. Throughout the entire evolution of man, he has adapted his circumstances to the gifts bestowed upon him. We are but now beginning to learn how to harness the power of wind and the rays of the sun to power our lives. What man does not want to believe is that the knowledge to turn solar and wind power into useful tools may take a century to develop. Man is over-looking the existing gifts he has been bestowed and dumping them in favor of the under developed resources of solar, and wind before there is a crucial need for them to be used. True, we need to develop them, but we don’t need to panic by leaving our greatest resource in favor of an infantile industry that at this time is not essential nor ready to do the job.

No doubt, man is correctly thinking about developing replacements for our most essential power source, but the time table to do so is not urgent. We have hundreds of years of fossil fuels remaining to consume before wind and solar become an emergency. As the time draws nearer to the end of fossil fuel, man will put his brain into high gear to shift the source of power towards his emergent needs.

Assuming man will succeed in electrifying the planet to eliminate fossil fuels he will be left with the horrifying prospect of finding substitutes for making plastics. Man has not thought this problem through to its finality. Think of a world without plastic. Think of plastic within your own life. Your clothes, tools, shoes, packaging, furniture, housing components, just to name a few are all composed with plastics. Man will be forced to continue to refine fossil fuels to make these products.

The elimination of fossil fuels is a direct rejection of the gift endowed upon him by the Supreme Being. Who is man to be so forward as to reject a magnificent gift as this from the Being? In my statements above, I exposed my belief in a Supreme Being, and now I want to expose another belief which is that for every positive in our life there is an equal and opposite negative. What this leads to is an equally negative Being that counteracts the positive one. The current rejection of the positive Being’s gift may be the work of His negative counter-force. There has to be some explanation for why such a beautiful gift is being rejected by man in favor of the current pipe dream to abandon the gift of fossil fuels to that of under developed power sources.

Jumping into an electric world before we are ready to convert completely away from fossil fuels is a mistake that will condemn planet Earth to extinction. Will we have to retrogress away from forward evolution and increased knowledge to achieve the goal of purifying the air, water and earth of pollutants? Do we really want to evolve backward to the Cro-magnon man who lived on a pristine planet Earth, and feared for his life from other larger carnivores, but breathed only the air polluted only by the gasses of volcanic eruptions?

The conclusion I want to direct the reader toward is to re-examine his conclusions about electrifying Earth completely before it is necessary, or even possible.  

Why Rock the Boat?

One of the most amazing thing I have witnessed in my lifetime is the evolution of the automobile. I have memories galore about the difficulty my father went through to provide our family with transportation. I loved to listen to his stories about early adventures as a single man in a new country. One thing he did very early on was to buy automobiles the names of which have long disappeared, namely one he called a Hupmobile. His stories always entailed fixing problems on the side of the road with minimal tools and parts.
Summer Sunday afternoons was the best time to hear him describe the many adventures he had. Usually with a buddy who was also involved. Dad loosened up quite a bit when alcohol flowed freely through his system. Oh how he laughed when he told the story, especially when telling us how the Hupmobile threw a rod half way to the farm in Michigan and they wound up overhauling the engine on the sandy shoulder of the highway.

The car I remember from my early childhood was his 1929 Buick Century. Oh what a splendid tank it was. He owned that car from 1942 – 1952. One of his daunting tasks was to find tires and gasoline. World-War-Two put a damper on auto ownership, but Dad used his car as an part-time insurance salesman. I specifically remember him taking Mom shopping one evening, and she took the three os us with her. He dropped us off at a store, and continued on to his client meeting. When he returned we had a surprise waiting for us. The running board on the side of the car was gone, and the back door was dented. He had to hoist us up one at a time to get us in. He told us he was broadsided by a car that blew a red light. The other car had to be towed away, we drove home.

Dad’s string of cars after the ’29 were a 1939 Buick Special, followed by a 1938 Dodge, a 1954 Plymouth, a 1959 Ford, 1968 Ford, and last a1982 Chevy. all were used cars except for the last three. Each one had it’s share of problems which he continued to fix. His favorite phrase was “Ford, Fix Or Repair Daily.” Just about all of his cars were sold or traded when they reached fifty thousand miles.

My experience with cars is much the same, with one exception. I kept my rides for eighty thousand miles, except for the one I own now. The odometer has 181,000 miles on it and (knock on wood0 everything still works and the only major expenses have been for tires, brakes and batteries.

There is a gremlin in my head that keeps poking me in the ribs to buy a new car because this one is 16 years old and everything still works, the interior is still in fine condition, and there is no sign of rust any where. One day, I will walk home from the roadside, having abandoned a car that died. Or, I will be involved in a minor fender bender that will total the car and force me to send it to the junk yard. I lose sleep over having to spend a fortune on a new car, most likely my last one. Then, this morning while scrolling my phone I found an article that made my day, “These Cars Have the Longest Lifespans
Some cars last longer than others – a lot longer.”

https://apple.news/A5-M4pvjaQZ6yHaRLElSn0w

Inside the article is a list of ten long life vehicles:

1. Toyota Sequoia 296,509

2. Toyota Land Cruiser 280,236

3. Chevy Suburban 265,732

4. Toyota Tundra 256,022

5. GMC Yukon XL 252,630

6. Toyota Prius 250,601

7. Chevy Tahoe 250,338

8. Honda Ridgeline 248,669

9. Toyota Avalon 245,710

10. Toyota Highlander Hybrid 244,994

there, at number nine is my car.

Wow! My car might last for another sixty thousand miles. At the current rate of driving that could be six more years. By then, the State of Illinois will most likely tell me I’m too old to be driving. On the other hand, my brother is ninety-one and he still drives back and forth a hundred miles to his summer home in Michigan.

The prospect of buying an electric vehicle at a time when gasoline powered cars are enjoying the best reliability in history is scary, I think I’ll just buy a slightly newer model from the same company that made the one I drive now.

Frozen and Locked Out

My adventure yesterday was different from any I’ve had in recent times. I encountered a gremlin in the Death Star. I went to get something from the trunk and it wouldn’t open. Pushing the little black button on the tail light didn’t make anything happen, so I went to the dash board to push another button, nothing happened. Oh well, I’ll sleep on this one. I didn’t sleep, I went to Youtube and asked how to open a trunk without the key. Amazingly, a page full of video’s appeared. Many from Toyota experts. I had enough information to try the next day when it would be warmer and drier.

By mid-morning I was ready to open my trunk. I tried all the tricks I learned in the videos, but none of them worked. What next? I went on the prowl for tools that might help. I found a windshield ice scraper in the garage. That’s it, I thought to my self. I went outside and pushed the little black button on the tail light at the same time I had the scraper wedged into the trunkline space by the latch. I pushed the button and heard the latch cycle, at the same time I pried the trunk with the scrapper and wallah! the lid popped open. Nothing like a simple pry bar to break the ice seal that made the lid stick. I then found a dry rag to wipe down the seal around the trunk opening to help keep the lid from freezing shut again. I was happy again.

Never Before Now

This morning after taking my wife to her doctor appointment I stopped to fill up the Death Star with fuel. I remember when gas was 18 cents per gallon, and I could drive, and drive, and drive on a buck’s worth of gas. That won’t happen again, my bill for a fill-up came to $51.64. Even when I drove a motorhome across country I never spent fifty dollars for a tank of gas not even in California where they are noted for high gasoline prices. Match that to my current grocery bills and the old pocket book is getting pretty thin. I don’t spend much money on anything except food and gas. Fuel for the car and fuel for the body. All of this is because the government wants to dictate what we do and how we do it. Instead of allowing natural capitalistic market forces drive prices according to supply and demand they insist we need electric cars and we need to become vegetarians like in Neanderthal days.

I almost see the electric car thing becoming a reality, but I don’t believe it would get very far if it weren’t for Uncle pressing his Green New Deal on us. I watched a lecture by Jeff Brown, a financial guru, who is predicting that two very significant technologies are about to explode in what he termed TechShock. His claim is that artificial intelligence by itself is a very strong tech sector, and the electric car is the second. Putting the two together will produce a synergetic new technology of the self driving car. This concept will make so many new things happen it will make our heads spin. So, his advice was to invest in companies that will produce things for the self driving cars. Lithium batteries will be key in this new industry, and all things lithium will become hot.

I have written about the electric car before citing that history repeats itself. In the very early days of automobiles electrics were being made to compete with Henry Ford’s Model T. It failed because of the problems with batteries. At the time I wrote it was my opinion that battery technology was not advanced enough to provide reliable power for cars. Granted it is getting better, but the infrastructure needed to support a world of electric cars will be the stopping block. Jeff Brown cited that Volkswagen is broadcasting that their electric car will have a range of 310 miles and promises to have ten minute recharge. It sounds great until one realizes that these super charging stations will have to replace gas pumps or at least work along side of them. Three hundred and ten miles is a decent range on a fill up, but finding a charge may be near impossible, and will be for many years to come. Remember when cell phones first came out and all was well as long as one stood within the range of the local cell tower? It has taken over twenty years for the phone services to provide the towers needed to cover the population and then only if you stay along interstate highways and cities. Try finding a signal in the boonies away from the highways.

Let’s say that the fuel companies overcome the charging station shortage, will we have enough power coming through the lines to give us what we need when we need it? My prediction is that the need for power will reveal the Herbie that dictates the progress of electric vehicles. Finally when all of these impediments have been addressed and overcome, then I believe we can safely junk our gas hogs for an electric.

In the mean time, I am driving my sixteen year old Death Star with 172,000 miles until I can order up a self driver to take me where I want to go.

It’s Not Funny