I think America has lost it. Four years after the fact Uncle has finally declared that the pandemic is over. So what have I been receiving in the mail? An almost daily package of Covid test kits. Free to me so I can stay safe by testing and knowing what to do. I knew what to do before there were test kits and a federally mandated shut down. Basically, stay away from crowded places and keep my hands clean.
Why have all these test kits been appearing at my door step? Probably because of the mountain of money Uncle threw at the problem three years ago, and because of the speed of light response of federal agencies to react, they are now giving them away to clear the warehouse. Anyone who gets the latest variation of Covid today probably doesn’t even know he has it because it is so mild a case. Why then have I received twelve test kits (free)? Maybe someone can explain it to me.
Yesterday I watched a real live sporting event on regular TV. The first time ever NASCAR street race that took over some of Chicago’s major roadways was televised in the rain. For what ever reason I stopped watching sports on TV several decades ago., except for cage fighting which I fell in love with. There is nothing better than watching two muscle bound gladiators pounding, and kicking the hell out of one another usually to near death before the ref. stops the fight. For some reason this race caught my fancy and I turned it on. Seeing Chicago draped in low clouds and with the most scenic part of the city all blocked off to tourists, and from local traffic was definitely different. I had been reading the opinion pages about how the city lost it’s collective mind when it agreed to hold this race here. The actual race lasted about three hours, but between the planning, and preparation to construct safety barriers, grandstands, pits, and all the accoutrements of a race track began several months ago. Grant Park, which is where the race took place, is a popular place for people during the summer time with baseball leagues, tennis leagues, soccer, music fests, Taste of Chicago, and more being forbidden to the general population. The people were not happy campers to lose their sport in favor of a bunch of loud muffler-less race cars. People be damned, the City of Chicago comes first before the people. I watched the race in it’s entirely, and actually enjoyed it. I wished I had gone to be a part of history.
Rush Hour Traffic In Downtown Chicago
Many thoughts came to mind during the event. One was what will happen to NASCAR when the world turns electric in three to ten years, and there are only whisper quiet electric cars to use? How long will the races be? I read reports of people driving their cars across country who have to stop every two hundred miles for a charge. This tells me that all the races will be very short induration, like a hundred miles or so. What happens to the Indy 500? Will it become a memory or will it remain an event? How will racers cope with cars that erupt into flames as their batteries over heat? Will these cars have drivers? What happens to all the fans who pay extra to visit drivers in pit row to seek autographs when there are no drivers to be found? WiIl pit stops for fuel be replaced with garage stops for battery replacement? Perhaps it will be easier to change the driver to a new car than it would be to replace the battery during a fuel stop. How would NASCAR limit horsepower as they do now? Would they limit battery voltage? My personal experience with battery powered wood working tools is that higher voltage batteries take longer to discharge and are more powerful. The same holds true for electric motors. A famous slot car racing trick is to rewind the tiny motors with more wire in order to get more speed and power. Would NASCAR limit motor windings? My recommendation would be for NASCAR to stay the hell out of the technical aspects of electric car racing and let the back alley mechanics get creative with motor and battery modifications, much like they did with race cars in the fifties and sixties. Those were the days of real racing; team against team, manufacturer against manufacturer, drop the green flag and let the boys roll!
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.
Take a good look at this woman. She has her hands in your pocket, and is lifting your wallet and any loose change you may still have.
“During an interview aired on Wednesday’s edition of MSNBC’s “11th Hour,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm responded to a question on whether there is a plan to address energy prices that have started to tick up by stating that “the better choice is to move to electrify transportation, because it is so much cheaper for you” and “moving to clean is moving to energy security and moving to affordability.”
I almost fell off my chair. I just Googled Biden’s electrification of transportation plan and learned that he is pouring money into electric charging station infrastructure. Will it be enough? Probably not for a very long time. His desire is to have 500,000 charging stations in place by 2030. The latest stat I found on the number of gas stations in the United States is 115,400. At first the number of charging stations sounds like it will be plenty, but I don’t think so. Most of the 115,400 stations provide up to twelve or more fueling points. It takes me about five minutes to fill my tank while a fast charge will take about 45 minutes. That means the electric charging depot will require nine times as many charging points to equal the fill capacity of a regular fueling station. My arithmetic tells me that the number of charging points is only half of what will be required. Another fact of life is that the current grid that supplies us with our spark is not capable of simultaneously charging more than about five cars per city block before it crashes.
At the same time Biden is planning to increase regulation of gasoline to make it more expensive and harder to get. Remember a few weeks ago when I stated that the current car shortage is a government conspiracy to force us into electric cars. Along with that, the pandemic taught us that we don’t need to drive. Anyway, I have veered from my point which is to state that this lady who has her hands in our pockets is a moron. She actually believes she can convince us that going electric overnight will be cheaper for us.
What Ms Granholm has left out of the discussion is where the electricity needed to spark those 500,000 charging stations will come from. Maybe she has a plan to install a huge windmill on the roof of every fossil fuel and atomic power plant across the country to give us a charge. While we hire the Dutch to design and build those windmills for us we will have to rely on something else. Maybe it will be hydro-electric, but wait, didn’t Lake Meade nearly run out of water this last year? Where will we build new hydro-electric plants. Niagara Falls already has a power plant. Actually, a better idea will be to buy all the old bicycles that the Chinese are no longer using, and we can use them to move around. Not only would that be clean green energy, but we would all lose weight and be healthier. Think of all the reduced health care costs that would accrue. Surplus doctors and nurses would need to be directed to keeping the millions of illegal aliens that have descended upon the USA healthy. The downside of healthy immigrants is that they will be buying up all the beautifully efficient gas powered cars that we had to give up for the electrics.
The bottom line is that we need more power pants
Jennifer Granholm’s stupid answer was completely political talking points. She did it so robotically, and kept repeating the exact same line so many times that I wondered if maybe she is a government robot with limited artificial intelligence.
Good day everyone, this is Grumpa Joe from Grumpa Joe’s Place who will be interviewing AR15. This is my first podcast interview, and I am excited about it. My guest today is AR15 recently retired from service in Afghanistan. Having served for twenty years in the armed services he can probably tell us many stories.
GJ, “Tell us about how you have been received at home since returning?”
AR15 “To tell you the truth I was disappointed at the reception. I have seen and heard so many stories that want to ban me, and my many brothers from use in the USA. For the life of me I can’t tell why the people would be so upset with me as to ban us from existing? For the past twenty years we have been saving American lives.”
GI, “Tell us a little bit about your life at home, who do you belong to, how often do you go out in public, etc.?”
AR15, “Life is boring for us. We seldom go out, and when we do our owners only take us to where they want to go. Many of our owners are ex-service men, and men who love the sport of shooting and hunting.
GJ, “I am a sport shooter, and have been all my life. I love holding a rifle with my eye to the sight, and my finger on the trigger. When I shoot at the target and see the cluster of holes near the bulls-eye it excites me. One thing about my rifle is that it never fires when I am not holding it, and my finger is not on the trigger. Do you ever shoot like you did in Afghanistan?”
AR15, “Never, I don’t get a say in where I am going, or when my trigger gets squeezed. In fact, I never get to load bullets into my magazine. All of the technical stuff of gun ownership falls strictly into the domain of the owner-operator.
GJ, “You mean you never get to fire a shot?”
AR15, “Never, and I will never in the future. My trigger requires a human finger to actuate.”
GJ, “Don’t you have AI that prompts you into action.”
AR15, “What is AI?”
GJ, “AI is artificial Intelligence.”
AR15, “Oh my Lord no, I don’t even have a brain in which to store information or instructions to direct my actions. We are made from steel, wood, plastic and some other metals. We have no biological parts, nor do we have any electronic parts that require a sim-card, or batteries to give us power. We are 100% mechanical.
GJ, “What do you do in between the times your owner visits the gun range?”
AR15, “I am disassembled and my parts are stored in a case until my owner decides to go shooting.”
GJ, “Does your owner ever take you with him to work, school or a tavern?”
AR15, “My owner does not, but I have heard that some owners will take their AR15 to a school where he pulls the trigger and shoots at students and people. I have no way to enter a school by myself, just as I cannot shoot without someone pulling on my trigger. The shooter can aim, and point the gun for hours but I will not discharge until he squeezes my trigger. What bothers me the most is when I hear the news stories there is always a cry to ban the gun. It is not my fault that the owner lacks mental capacity, discipline and self-control, and pulls the trigger on unsuspecting innocent people. Why aren’t they banned from society, why doesn’t AI take over and alarm to the danger?”
GJ, “All very good questions my inanimate friend, but we are out of time and will have to save them for another interview.”
