| Subject: RE: Light Relief Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2000 14:40:08 -0600 Tony,
Got
some wry chuckles out of those, and also a little personal nostalgia.
Being an old itinerant country-western and two-bit honky-tonk singer
and guitar picker way back, who was hospitalized as a kid because of
malnutrition (damn near starved to death), mother killed in a car
wreck when I was two, "temporary stepmother" nearly beat me
to death and even tried to drown me, I remember I "bin dere, done
dat".
All
my people were timber people. Rough, dirty, nasty work, from
before dawn till after dark. And weather, mill cutbacks, price
cutbacks, broken equipment, weather, no labor, shortage of timber,
everything may take it away as fast as you can earn it. Tree
falls on a man, killing him right in his tracks. Cat hooks slip
from a log, and the recoiling cable snaps that hook right through a
man's head, splattering it like an eggshell. Tire blows on the
highway, and a really big spill and wreck results, perhaps killing one
or more hands. Roughnecking in the oil fields at least has
steady pay and is a big, big step up in the world! But logging
and timber cutting ain't nothin' but the blues all the time.
In
those lines there, somebody wrote it like it is. Cheez!
Today one is awfully glad to say, "like it was". But
like it still is for many folks. And like it will be for a great
many more folks if we do not solve this energy crisis and very soon.
In
a more serious vein, much of the youth of our day have no notion
whatsoever of what it means to not have a dollar in your pocket and no
way to get one. Or what it means to miss a meal because there
are simply no groceries left in the house and no money either.
Or when you would stoop with alacrity to pick up a penny, counting
that penny a stroke of good luck. Or buy a sack of flower for 20
cents because that is all you and your grandmother have, and then be
able only to have biscuits and sawmill gravy for the two of you to
eat. Back when a little syrup for the biscuits was a glorious
treat. When meat was something you might get once a week if
lucky; twice a week was fantastic. When a "good
supper" was a bowl of string beans and nothing else.
When $15 a month rent and $3 a month light bill was an enormous
expense, consuming most of one's effort to get enough money to pay it
and keep the roof over the head, even though a distant father working
in timber far away sent $20 a month and at rare intervals even $30 a
month. When the state finally sprayed the outdoor toilets to
keep down the flies and typhoid -- and as a kid you were damn
glad because it also got rid of the big "jumping tarantulas"
that infested the things, and would jump on you right while you were
"on the seat". When a dentist was something you
had heard about but never seen. When a Doctor's visit was $2 and
you could not see a doctor because there was no $2 to be had.
When every kid in Louisiana had malaria and when a bottle of chill
tonic was an absolute necessity in every house, whether you ate or
not. When diphtheria, typhoid, and yellow fever were still real
killers, and vaccination was something you again had heard of and
never seen. When there were no sulfa drugs or antibiotics and
therefore pneumonia was one of the great killers, and ever a deadly
threat even if one just caught a cold or the influenza. When
there are severe scars on your lungs even today, because of the
recurring bouts of pneumonia as a kid due to severe malnutrition and a
depressed immune system. When you had one old pair of shoes and
not another. When two shirts and two jeans and one coat were the
wardrobe, and you drew water out of a well, and being someplace with
indoor plumbing was a miracle. When the file broke that you used
to sharpen the old rusty axe, and you cried at 8 years old because you
could not afford to buy another to sharpen that damn dull axe with
which you had to cut the wood and carry it on your back to the house.
When you were willing to work and spent enormous energy and time
looking for it, even at 12 years old, and there were hardly any jobs
to be had. When half of Louisiana was literally starving, and
the "commodities program" saved peoples' lives by simply
issuing food enough to scrape by every month. When Huey Long put
in the hot lunch program in schools, and like a miracle a kid in
school got at least one decent meal a day. When there was no
family car, and if you wanted to go somewhere you walked, or walked a
mile or so to the highway to catch a bus if you waited long enough and
somehow had the 12 cents for the round trip to town and back.
When you walked a couple miles to school in the morning, and back from
school in the evening. When you took an axe and a bucksaw and at
eight and nine years old you cut down the trees and chopped all the
wood to cook the food on the stove, and to burn in the single
fireplace to "heat" the house for you and your grandmother.
Where frame houses had outside wood framing and no walls or ceiling
inside (a good one had a ceiling in the main bedroom, which might be a
room that was 10 foot by 12 foot in size!) When a house was
"three rooms and a path".
In
spite of all that, the people in that situation had ethics back then.
They went to church. They taught their children to respect the
law and have manners, and have a work ethic. If the door was
broken and not locked, no matter -- nobody was going to steal anything
from you. That was back when everybody tried as best they could
to sorta look after and help everybody else. That was when the
word "neighbor" had a real meaning.
With
the lessened morals and ethics of today, you can imagine what a new
depression would do to the cities. They would simply explode
with the animals running riot. We wouldn't have the well-meaning
bums we had in the depression, who were just looking for something to
do -- chop firewood, bring in some water, cut the grass, anything at
all -- to get a meal while enroute somewhere to try to get a job. Or
who were riding the rails by the thousands, trying to get someplace
where they heard there were a few jobs available, and needing to
support their families somehow, someway, any way.
Today
with a new great depression you'll get the punks and the goons in the
street by the thousands, all over everything. Martial law
immediately. They'll burn and loot the cities and everything in
them. The cities will consume themselves along with most in there in
them. You will also have floods of the punks and toughs et al
swarming out into the countryside. It will be one great helluva
mess.
I
think about this sometimes when the going gets real tough on trying to
change the scientific mindset and blunt the new crisis approaching us.
The state of our society is sobering. Much of the moral fiber we
had back there in the former great depression appears to be gone, or
at least badly bent. Back then, a half-starving man would still
help an old crippled lady or gentleman across the street without a
second thought. Today he would likely knock them down and steal
their purse or coat -- or just slit their throat to try to get
something from their meager belongings to maintain a dope habit.
And
that's not even mentioning what has already been "seeded" in
our country by those who hate us and mean to destroy us. Just
read Lunev's book, and he will tell you (actually released by the CIA)
a way or two that the Soviets used to bring in nuclear weapons to hide
in our major population centers. Every big city in America
already has secret caches of weapons of mass destruction -- including
nuclear weapons and BW weapons -- under foreign control, and terrorist
or "Spetznaz" teams are already on site in the U.S. waiting
to unleash them on command. War, it seems, has now
"solved" the problem of the enormously expensive strategic
delivery system for delivering WMD to the "distant"
strategic targets. The weapons are just pre-sited in the actual
target zone in advance. Even the "emerging" nations
can have "poor man's nuclear bombs" -- i.e., biological
weapons such as anthrax, modified smallpox, etc. Pound for
pound, BW weapons yield greater casualties than does U235.
Vaccines are useless unless (1) specific to the strain, and (2) given
far in advance. After the strike, vaccines against the strike
agent are just so much dust sitting on the table. Bubonic
plague, e.g., is always with us, endemic in the fleas on the rats,
etc. In a great disaster, when there is a great disruption of
routine, the rats are disrupted too. They come out in contact
more, and guess what -- bingo! you have an outbreak of bubonic
plague, even though the actual strike itself was something else.
There are lots of "complicating factors" such as that, which
are usually not discussed because no one has been able to solve them.
So
future great wars and great "Pearl Harbors" will occur
right here in our cities, not "over there" somewhere.
Indeed, having a military reduced in size and yet having our forces
strung all over various places in the world as "Robocops"
exacerbates our internal strategic vulnerability to giant proportions. An
inflexible "liberal" position will get you just as dead
as will an inflexible "conservative" position. We
don't need the stereotyped old "positions" any longer, we
need "new positions" for the real world that has come
upon us. The promising therapeutic means that COULD be developed
to cure mass casualties of all kinds, are not even being worked on and
are not going to be worked on because of the adamant and dogmatic
opposition of the entire scientific community.
Unleash
the WMD en masse here, and there will presently not be enough military
left in country to even keep and restore order for some time, until
mobilization can be accomplished, etc. There are not even BW
masks for our populace, let alone protective clothing! Once you
develop anthrax symptoms, for example, there is little that can
be done for you. In a great emergency, triage applies. That's an
ugly word, but necessary in dire circumstances. The most
desperately sick and needy will simply be moved aside and left to
die, instead of "wasting" precious medical treatments and
supplies on them uselessly. The desperately short supplies and
treatments will be reserved for those more lightly injured, and who
will have a reasonable or good chance of surviving with treatment.
If available, painkillers will be used to reduce the dying agony of
those "set aside to die". We are speaking of millions
of Americans here, not one or two. We are saying that, in dire
circumstances, the medical procedure used will be to set aside
millions of them without any real treatment, and just let them die.
No heroic measures will be taken, and no Civil Liberties Union will be
around to file lawsuits.
In
the absence of sufficient military forces immediately available,
during that slack period immediately after great WMD strikes, the
cities will be destroyed and much of the countryside around them.
And
nobody, but nobody knows how to decontaminate an anthrax-struck city
and major population center. Remember the mysterious spray
patterns -- I watched some right here over this city. There are
known chemical agents developed that will kill the anthrax, including
in one's body if one breathes in the chemical mist. But they are
rather harsh, and life-threatening to the weak, aged, and sick.
With strategic war now changed into WAR IN AND ON CIVILIAN POPULACES,
one is now faced with enormous MILITARY decisions that must be taken
with the lives of the CIVILIAN POPULACE ITSELF. In short, as in
a military attack you must lose some to gain some, in the "brave
new world" war we now face, you must often "deliberately
lose some to save many". So our military and civilian leaders
will be making decisions that directly result in the deaths of
thousands of U.S. civilians, in order to save -- or try to save --
millions.
Welcome
to the real world of hard military decisions when war is in and on and
of the civilian populace. Any damn fool can make a decision
where there is a "right" or "good" option and a
"wrong" or "bad" option. Unfortunately, war
presents us with a continuing series of situations where one must make
brutal decisions when there are no "good" options, but
only several "bad" options. In that case, one is
forced to take the "least worst" option. Let me give
an example. Decades ago I used to teach military officers the
rules and procedures for the use of nuclear warheads in the Nike
Hercules system -- a system which was sited to save or try to save
some of our cities against attack by nuclear bombers. With a
bomber attack, e.g., or cruise missile attack, and with the attacking
vehicles known to contain large thermonuclear weapons with dead man
fuzing (i.e., they are "armored" and will "blow
loose" from a destroyed carrier vehicle, then explode "full
nuclear" when they strike the ground, down and dirty with massive
resulting fallout), one faces the absolute necessity of achieving
not only target kill but weapon kill as well. Else the massive
nuclear fallout alone will kill the entire area in a few days.
So one might have to place a nuclear burst on a low-flying target,
right on its nose -- and say, with the target at 1,000 feet altitude
above a major population center. Voila! you just killed
20, 000 Americans, and perhaps your own wife and children in the
suburb underneath your burst. Yet the decision had to be made,
and the officer had to press the appropriate switch.
These
are now the kind of awful decisions that will have to be made in case
of full WMD strategic attacks against our population centers.
One should also verify that this is indeed the recognized strategic
threat facing us today.
These
are the type decisions our leaders and military chiefs are now facing
when full strategic warfare with WMD erupts in the great population
centers of the U.S. You do not see your local news media
discussing such real problems, but pontificating on pabulum.
Everyone thinks we "won the cold war". Nothing could
be further from the truth. We just traded one kind of threat for
another, and one set of "perceived foes" for another.
Worse, the new "foes" are not necessary chess players and
rational. So actually the "cold war" heated up and
entered a far more dangerous, illogical, and unpredictable arena.
But on the part of many of our leaders and much of our news
media, there is still a great attitude that the American people are
children who must be kept in the dark about how bad it really will be.
And they must particularly be kept ignorant of the fact that it is not
a matter of IF it will be that way, but WHEN it shall be that way.
The only thing in contention is when it shall happen.
Today
there are a great many nations and groups just waiting for us to
exhibit a substantial weakness. Saddam Hussein is not dead, and
neither is Bin Laden. Even the leader of Venezuela wishes us
bad. Right or wrong, the Chinese now control both ends of the
Panama Canal, and much of Panama itself in a quiet penetrating sort of
way. Many of those hostile nations and leaders already have
provided intensely trained and conditioned agents and teams already on
site right here in the U.S., and already with the WMD they require.
Russian Spetznaz teams have been in here for decades, along with arms
caches including nuclear weapons. Castro for decades ran
guerrilla and agent training in Southern Mexico, and not all the
millions of illegal Hispanic border crossers infiltrated into the U.S.
were simple peasants trying to find work to support their families
(most are, but certainly quite a few are not). There are several
thousand Castro agents in here for sabotage, destruction of key
facilities, etc. -- and when did you hear that on your news program or
read it in your newspaper?
We
are going to pay a frightful price to learn again an age-old military
lesson: When in war against an implacable and unrelenting foe, you
must finish him when you get the chance -- or he will live because you
let him, and he will surely finish you another day. Bush should
have let Schwarzkopf finish it against Saddam Hussein, or at least let
him finish off the Red Guards keeping Saddam in power, instead of give
in to those who wished to "keep Saddam Hussein alive to play off
against the Iranians". Since Bush did not do that, in the
future U.S. cities and the U.S. population will pay for that mistake
with untold millions of American lives, right in our cities
themselves, and the order for their destruction will be and in fact
already has been issued by Saddam Hussein.
Read
Laurie Garrett's latest book, Betrayal of Trust, if you read nothing
else this year. Particularly note the great BW warfare
capabilities the Russians had built up in enormous BW research
centers, even after signing treaties etc. not to do so. And note
that a majority of those highly skilled Russian BW scientists
"disappeared" into other, foreign BW research and
development centers in foreign nations -- nations implacably hostile
to the U.S. Draw your own conclusions as to what has been done
with those scientists and those programs in those hostile nations,
what they have already produced, and what has already been
clandestinely introduced into the U.S. and is maintained on site and
ready for action.
And
also read what Garrett reveals about the collapse of our national
health programs and therapeutic methods. I believe you will be
shocked, but it is quite true.
So
the next great strategic war will likely just suddenly explode as the
cities and population centers of weakened America erupt with a
holocaust that boggles the very mind of man. We have not seen
anything like it in our entire U.S. history.
In
the presence of such a sobering situation presaging a coming
holocaust, it becomes ever more important -- indeed, of the utmost
importance -- to recognize and dampen growing "triggers" for
those ominous events before the events and the holocaust themselves
get "triggered". The escalating energy crisis and oil
crisis, of course, is a giant trigger that has been growing for some
time and is now growing more rapidly. And yet our scientific
community sails sublimely on with "business as usual" as if
nothing untoward is happening.
Go
search the NSF website. Go search the NAS website. See
what "energy programs" and "energy research" they
are backing or funding. You will get the shock of your life when
you do, if you are aware of the impending disasters and their
triggers. And then go look at the CIA site, and the DIA site.
And the sites for the National Laboratories. Oh yes, you can
find some smoothly "watered down" presentations of the
importance of anti-BW measures. And yes, there will be smooth
statements that "indeed we have a WMD threat". Now try
to connect the programs you find on those sites, with possible
solutions for the "triggers" that will evoke those very
strategic threats and giant national disaster. Try to find the
"energy trigger" and dire warnings of the huge threat it
represents. You will not find it. Nor will you find
anything really worthwhile being done on it. It's as if the
system itself is somehow paralyzed from the neck up.
One
is reminded of a picture of a big ostrich with its head firmly under
the sand (I have a clipart of that, which I sometimes use in private,
very hard-hitting presentations). That's the system position as
it presently "regards the energy crisis threat and the oil crisis
threat."
Now
do a sample search of our leading scientific journals. Try
Science, Physical Review, Nature, etc. Hey, it's business as
usual there! There are no appeals for new and novel solutions.
The sharp young grad students and post docs are just as tightly
leashed as always. As if there is no giant energy crisis, no
energy threat, no energy "trigger", and no giant holocaust
roaring right at us. And in the lot of them, you will not find a
single highly creative, highly innovative effort against the energy
crisis, except for the AIAS papers published here and there (in
Physica Scripta, Foundations of Physics, etc.). That's by a
group that receives no funding, gets no support or grants, and must
struggle against the entire system. Again, it's business as
usual in the scientific community at large. We must trust them,
it would appear, for they are our leaders! They are
"looking out for our best interests". And if one
really believes that, I have a highway bridge down the road that I
will sell them at a very reasonable price....
In
short, the system is not only blind but sleeping. I personally
think that psychologically it has gone into something like
"mammalian displacement activity." Or, it's like that
ostrich with its head in the sand -- with it's you-know-what hanging
out up there in the breeze and totally vulnerable. So the system
-- the entire, massive, taxpayer-funded system -- is not going to save
us. Unless strongly nudged by the congress, it isn't even going
to try, at least with respect to the "triggers", and
certainly with respect to the "energy trigger".
So
it would seem to be even more important now for private citizens to
try to their utmost to stave off and avoid the coming depression
brought on by economic collapse due to the oil and energy crises.
That is necessary to stave off the resulting strategic holocaust
that will be triggered -- triggered by the escalating energy crisis.
To do that, one must exert every effort possible, to the limit of
one's human capability. One cannot count on "Big
Science", "Big Government," etc. to save us.
They simply are out of it. As a simple example, it is
fashionable in some circles to tout nuclear powerplants as being the
decisive answer. After all, immediately after the Kyoto accords
Japan announced it would build some 20 new nuclear power plants.
Well, we could not even get a single new nuclear powerplant built,
tested, and on line before the economic collapse of the Western world
(and much of the rest of the world) occurs -- and in its offing, the
world holocaust and Armageddon occur.
It's
a sad situation. Every power line and every electrical load is
and always has been powered by electrical energy freely extracted from
the seething vacuum by the source dipole, once created in the
generator or battery. All the hydrocarbons burned, fuel rods
consumed, dams and windmills built, and solar arrays built, do one
thing and one thing only: they turn the shaft of that generator in
order for the generator to make a magnetic field inside itself, and
then expend that magnetic field energy upon its own internal charges
to separate them and make that source dipole.
That
is all that generators do, and that is all that batteries do.
They make dipoles, nothing else. They themselves do not use any
of their available energy to add a single watt to the power line.
Eerily,
our scientific community in more than a century of building electrical
power systems, has not yet even discovered what actually powers the
power grid and all the electrical loads. Yet the basis for it
has been well-known in particle physics for nearly a half century now.
We
truly do have the blind leading the blind. They are even
unaware (though Heaviside discovered it in the 1880s) that from the
terminals of every generator and every battery, there pours out an
enormous stream of EM energy, extracted from the vacuum by that source
dipole's broken symmetry. Indeed, the dipole extracts and
outputs trillions of times more energy flow -- real, honest-to-God EM
energy flow -- than the feeble circuit intercepts and catches to use
in powering the system.
So
who in our taxpayer-funded scientific community is working on the real
problem? On catching more of that enormous energy that is
already available from every generator and battery? And then not
using half of what is caught to destroy the source dipole and cut off
the free flow of energy from the vacuum?
Nobody.
Not one. Any scientist who dares to mention extracting usable EM
energy from the vacuum, today and now, is at best suspected of having
too many nips of the wine bottle, and is at worst viciously attacked
and condemned. As we said, it's business as usual, and the
ostrich's head seems very firmly embedded in the sand.
If
the real energy research job is to be done at all and if the nation is
to be saved and survive at all, it would seem that it must be done by
the private sector. By private individuals. By private
"patrons" who fund the real work ongoing by a very few
researchers, against very large odds. It must be done and done
very rapidly by a relatively few individuals, with some foresight and
with an intense amount of very hard work. Otherwise, it will
simply not be done and we will all discover the full horrors of the
Armageddon that has been prepared for us. Otherwise, we
will not see 2010 before the guillotine falls, and most of
civilization lies in ruins, as will much of the biosphere itself.
Anyway,
right or wrong that's the way I see it. So we just do it like
the old Chinese proverb: For a journey of 1,000 miles, just keep
putting one foot in front of the other. If one doesn't relent no
matter what, then one day one will find oneself at the end of that
trip -- or dead along the way while trying.
In
the more modern vernacular, there it is and it needs doing. It's
the right thing to do. So one "just does it".
One does it for the children. And the children's children.
If one fails, so be it. But if one succeeds, and I think we
will, then it will all have been worthwhile. Again, because of
the children, and the children's children.
Though
I do not wear my religion on my sleeve or inflict it on others, I am a
religious person. I believe I will be held accountable for my
every act -- including those I should have done but did not do.
At least, to the best of my ability, win or lose, we will try to give
an accounting to the Supreme Judge that we did our best.
And
we'll remember the blues and the lessons to be learned from them --
but not dwell too much on them. Because we have to just keep
putting that one foot in front of the other....
Cheers
and best wishes,
Tom
From: Tony Craddock Sent: Saturday, November 04, 2000 10:54 AM To: Tom Bearden Subject: Light Relief
HOW TO SING THE BLUES, by Lame Mango Washington |