A Giant Leap Backward For Mankind

Posted on 08/07/2023 by Grumpa Joe

My mind is swirling with data I’ve learned about global warming. My latest fad is to watch youtube videos on almost anything that appeals to me. Last week I came upon a video about permafrost melting in Alaska. This morning I learned that for some unexplained reason the air temperature around the poles is 3 degrees higher than it is around the rest of the planet. Earlier this morning I watched a video of a scientist explaining and showing strange thermal activity going on in Yellowstone park. In my feeble brain the wheels are turning in the direction of a theory. Could it be possible that the man made global warming bull crap is the result of something happening in the Earth’s crust under Yellowstone Park? We are spinning our wheels furiously all around the planet with our smartest overpaid scientists working on theories about everything that can cause Carbon Dioxide to warm the earth and to melt the ice poles, and without being able to measure a tenth of a degree of air temperature rise.

My theory is much less complicated. I hold that the melting of the ice caps is the result of a leakage of molten iron at 6000 degrees Kelvin from the core into the earth’s crust. I can wrap my head around a temperature that high and so close to the planet (like within the planet) that could be the cause of something to worry about. There is evidence that the core is actually shrinking due to a unmeasurable temperature decline and causing earthquakes and volcano eruptions all around the “Ring of Fire” a known ring of connected volcanoes at the perimeter of a tectonic plate that encircles the Pacific ocean extending from the north pole to New Zealand and up north again past Japan to the north pole. What do volcanoes do? They erupt and spew hot molten magma into the atmosphere thus relieving the internal pressure of the plate. Where does the molten lava originate? My guess is that is comes from the 6000 degree hot spot.

Unrelated to this discussion, but related non the less, was a announcement made by my equally demented senior citizen partner, the President of the United States Joe Biden. If ever there was a proposal toward a pork barrel project to spend money on something so foolish is beyond my confused mind to comprehend. In his proposal we would block, or bend the suns rays away from earth to cool the planet. The first thing that comes to my mind is a Polar Vortex, an event that is predicted to happen this winter and will cause us to wish we had a big pile of coal behind our house to burn for warmth. We can’t measure any change in atmospheric temperature large enough to melt an ounce of ice, but we will block the sun from the earth? Come on let’s get real.

Truth be known the science world is basking in their glory over taking credit for fixing the millennium bug Y2K, and the hole in the Ozone layer, but I think they are in over their head on this one. All they have accomplished so far is worldwide panic over eliminating gas powered cars with electric ones that will require burning vast amounts of coal, and natural gas in massive power plants pouring their smoke up, up, and away from our daily sight to another part of the globe where it will combine with moisture and cause excessive amounts of acid rain to damage the environment. Just as in the Y2K era we panicked and traded our antiquated computers to handle four digit years which turned into a good thing world wide. Not because they fixed the bug, but because they increased computing capacity by a ginormous amount. Similarly, the legislated ban on fluorocarbon compound freon in air conditioners and refrigerators was designed to heal the hole in the atmosphere known as the ozone layer. Which by the way, opens and closes naturally every year. What happened was a massive increase in electrical efficiency by the replacement of antiquated appliances. I’m afraid this cure toward the electrical car will bring us the opposite, and become a giant leap backwards for mankind.

Filed under: Education, Science | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

Looking Into the Mirror

Posted on 25/06/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Today I completed reading The Last Train to London, by Meg Waite Clayton. It left me saddened. The title caught me when I first picked it up at the library, as do most of the books I read. The premise of this one is what I call historical fiction which by my definition it is a fictional story based on historical events.

The story is told through the eyes of a Dutch woman Geertruida Wijsmuller-Meijer who preferred to be called Tante Truus (Aunty Truus). She is responsible for rescuing ten thousand Jewish children from the Nazis during World War Two by transporting them to Holland and then to England between 1933 -1940. The story is beautiful and inspiring, but the ruthlessness of the Nazi regime that perpetrated their racism upon so many people made me sad.

Deep seated emotions of hatred were opened in my mind by remembering WWII and Nazi atrocities. War stories and news reels of the fighting taught me to hate all Germans and Japanese. It was a struggle to unlearn and reprogram my mind to believe that not all Germans were Nazis. A few years after the war ended my brother Bill was drafted into the army, and was sent to serve in Germany. He spent two years there in the peacetime reconstruction period. He wound up bringing home a German girl to marry. It was she who taught me to separate the average German citizen from the Nazi’s. I thank her for changing my mind.

When I watched our own American people terrorizing cities over the last couple of years with their “peaceful” protests it mirrors the action of the Nazis who “peacefully”(I use the term “peacefully” as sarcastically as possible) took over Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, and Holland with their “loving” treatment of the local citizens who dared resist. If one didn’t do and act as they were told they were shot, beaten, sent to work camps and treated like slaves. Violence, confiscation, and destruction of personal property, torture, and imprisonment were the order of the day. Of course Jews were the primary target, but so were non-jews who resisted or, God forbid, helped a Jew. The one difference between a Nazi demonstration and a BLM, ANTIFA, or George Floyd demonstration was the American protests were totally conducted by citizens, while the Nazis were done by the full German military.

No doubt, it will take me several days to get over this emotional reaction to a story, but I am glad I read it. The phrase “never again” becomes meaningful. The trouble as I see it, is that it has been eighty-five years since these atrocities took place, and there are not very many people remaining alive to be able to reawaken these emotions. It frightens me to think that it will take a new Nazi-like movement in America to reteach us the lessons of damage that can be done by perpetrating such racist hatred.

Filed under: Biography, Book Review, Education, family | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

The New Industry In America

Posted on 02/06/2023 by Grumpa Joe

For the past few years a new movement has come in to existence in America. Our towns at one time were filled with industrial plants that made things. People worked in them and were proud of their efforts. Today, our towns are being filled with new buildings, one larger than the other. They are all medical buildings, clinics, labs, imaging centers, and offices. This afternoon I drove north from Frankfort toward Orland park on U.S. Route 45 known as La Grange Road and counted the following new businesses: 1.) Advocate Medical, 2.) Loyola Medical, 3.) Duly Medical, 4.) Northwestern Radiation, 5.) Midwest Express Clinic, 6.) Northwestern Medical, 7. Advocate Group Medical Center, 8.) Northwestern Medical, 9). University of Chicago Hospital Medical Center. All of these establishments stretch over a short five miles of road. I could describe a similar scenario if I describe leaving town to the west. Surrounding these huge buildings are the private offices of hundreds of physicians in business to heal people.

It seems to me that America is sick, very sick, both physically and mentally. What really impresses me about all of this is that people complain about not having health care. What they really mean is that they have to pay for health care. The real problem stems from employers and health insurance companies. Employers feel that they need to offer health insurance as a perk to keep their employees. Health insurance companies dictate what they will pay for services. This only means that physicians inflate their prices to extract a maximum from the payers. Other culprits that causes major inflation of medical services are government healthcare programs like Medicare and Medicaid. These two organizations are notorious for setting limits on what they will pay for.

Operating alongside this medical industry is a vast under ground network of doctors and labs that take cash only. Of course they charge less because they get paid on demand, and don’t need staff just to submit documentation to insurance companies. Because it is always an insurance company that pays and the insurers are paid by employers, the patient feels that he gets the service free. This irritates people who do not have insurance because they see their friends getting so called free health care.

Add to this dimension the fact that modern doctors rely heavily on using modern technology to help them diagnose sickness. One of my friends who was a surgeon told me that many of his foreign class mates came to America to become doctors so they could return to their home country’s to save lives. Most of them finished school, got their license but never returned home. Why? He gave two reasons, 1.) they could make more money working in America, 2.) Their home countries did not have the same modern diagnostic equipment they learned to use in school. In their home country they would have to relearn their medicine in old country ways. Today, doctors depend on computers to assist them with diagnostics. Artificial Intelligent diagnostic programs can listen to a patient’s symptoms, analyze his blood test results and produce a list of possible illnesses in order of probability. Who needs a doctor when the computer can do a more thorough job? In most cases the doctor has become a data entry technician who can speak the language of medicine.

What we need to do in this country is to forget about medicine, and to learn to live healthy lives by eating nourishing foods, exercising, and getting enough sleep. Instead we have learned to live precariously, and when our bodies fail we run to a doctor to fix our problem.

In the “good old days,” when industry flourished in America, workers needed only graduate from high school to get a job. They learned how to run machines and to make things. Today, it seems, that workers need a minimum of fours years of college and if you want to be a doctor you will go to school for eight years, and you will be limited to fixing people, not cars or houses, or plumbing, or electricity. We the people of America donated all of those jobs to the people of China, Mexico, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and countless other countries in the world. The result is we send our kids to college, but fail to demand that they learn usable skills with which they can earn a living. The result is we have generations of game playing, order taking kids who wind up bored with life, and take to using drugs and laying around.

Yes, we have a new industry in our world, but we fail to recognize that a large percentage of youngsters will never make it in the information society and will fail in life.

Filed under: Education, family, Government, health care | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

Wasting a Gift

Posted on 14/05/2023 by Grumpa Joe

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.  

Filed under: Cars, economy, Education, Motivation, Science | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

I Stepped In It Again

Posted on 30/03/2023 by Grumpa Joe

Today I decided that some of my problems with a slow computer is the result of using Norton anti-virus protection. The decision was predicated on receiving an e-mail invoice from Norton reminding my subscription was up for renewal. Not trusting the e-mail request I went seeking the Norton web page where I could opt out. I lost a lot of time searching for the page. Frustrated, I finally decided to call their help number on the invoice. My bad, first I didn’t trust this invoice, and then I use it to try to solve my problem.

The sound of the agent’s voice was heavily accented and most likely from a foreign country. I explained to the agent that I wanted to unsubscribe from my subscription, and wanted a refund. She assured me this would be no problem and told me that I had to fill out a special form to do that. I explained that I could not find any such form on their website. She said she would help me get to it. After an hour of her help a new screen popped up on the screen flashing on and off from APPLE warning that my computer has been compromised. Oh no! Suddenly it all made sense. These people are sophisticated hackers who are in the business of stealing from unsuspecting naive dupes like me. I shut the computer off and hung up. I will deal with Norton another way.

I had to leave to drive my wife to a doctors appointment and when we came home I re-started the computer in safe mode. Everything seems to be working and I won’t know if I lost any data until I start looking for files.

What really bothers me is that they used Norton’s logo and made everything seem legit both in the email and while they were helping me. Maybe it was Norton I was speaking to, but I wasn’t taking any chances beyond what I already did.

This is another case for using artificial intelligence in the core of the computer to sort out the thieves. It also points out that companies that rely too heavily on computer automation to replace human contact, and those who hide from telling customers how to unsubscribe, and to get refunds is not really interested in protecting the customer as they are in taking their money. Buying a product like the Norton antivirus takes but a button push to make the transaction. The reverse should be equally easy.

Filed under: Biography, Education | Tagged: , , | 2 Comments »

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