Killing General Aviation

The June 2009 issue of Kitplanes has a very relevant editorial by Marc Cook, entitled "Airport Security: Out of hand and getting worse". He concludes the article: "If you had a master plan to kill general aviation in this country, I can't think of a better one than to combine obscene and ineffective security rules with a brutally bad economy". I couldn't agree more!

As a kid, I lived on a bluff overlooking the Elko, Nevada Municipal Airport. I used to ride my bike to the airport and just look around. One afternoon two Mustangs flew over the city and landed. I easily persuaded my dad to quickly take me to the airport. He grabbed his camera and us kids piled in the car. In those halcyon days anyone could wander out on the ramp and see the planes. Here are pictures of the two Mustangs as proof. One of them was the "Red Baron" of Reno Air Race fame.

In addition to the profane costs of flying that have devastated general aviation for decades due to the monopoly of FAA certification, we now have to deal with the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration. I bet if those names were translated into Russian or German their letters would be NKVD or SS. But hey, that's the price we pay for living in a free country!

More Slogans

I came across this tidbit in the Mesa, Arizona CAF Museum on a box of matches: Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer. One People, One Nation, One Leader. They called it the fuhrerprinzip. W called it the unitary executive. One wonders what Obama will call it? I hope I live to see the end of the evil done in the name of nationalism.

The Biggest of the Big Lies

This is a whopper of a lie. Who could even imagine that the sun, which is the dynamo that drives our climate, is at a 100 year low in solar activity? You would never know from the rubbish that masquerades as news. Google "sunspots" and find out for yourself. Lack of sunspots is correlated with cooler, wetter weather. Direct, observational data of sunspots goes back over 400 years and the sun is currently very quiet with over 200 days without sunspots in 2008. No one understands the physics that drive these solar cycles, yet we are to believe global circulation models that predict anthropogenic global warming when the biggest input into the models is not understood by scientists!

An Improbable Place

Lambayeque, Peru is a very improbable place, or at least it was very improbable that I visited the very factory that makes King Kong. Here is a picture of some that my in-laws just brought back from Peru. Yum Yum.

One Gram

Part of the reason that I became an engineer was to solve or at least contribute to the solution of some of mankind’s problems - like the alleged energy crisis. However, after I graduated from engineering school and when I gained a little more wisdom and years, I learned that there weren’t really all that many bonafide technical problems facing mankind. And most certainly there is NOT an energy crisis.

Wrap your mind around this fact. Fat Man, the plutonium bomb that the US dropped on Nagasaki released the binding energy of one (Yes, Virginia ONE) gram of plutonium, “one third of the weight of a penny! A number of kilograms of plutonium were in the bomb, but the amount that actually released its binding energy and created the fireball was one gram. E (twenty kilotons) equals m (one gram) times the square of the speed of light.” (McPhee, John, The Curve of Binding Energy, pg 163.) I am not advocating nuclear war or weapons, but I use this fact to simply demonstrate the awesome amount of energy that can be harnessed from the atom.

I consider the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a war crime perpetrated by Truman et al, but that is not my point. My point is that nuclear energy (binding energy found in the nucleus of the atom) can provide mankind with abundant energy for peaceful uses. All of mankind, all abundantly supplied with energy. I have already addressed the non-problem of nuclear waste in an earlier blog.

So, providing energy to mankind is not a technical problem yet to be solved. It is a moral crisis confronting the opinion and policy makers (did I repeat myself?) in the industrialized countries. Will they continue to deny the world abundant, cheap, clean, peaceful nuclear power in pursuit of their green elitist utopian fantasies? Or will they finally have a gram of compassion for the world’s masses? That is a problem that no engineer has been trained to solve.

Stupid criminals

A recent search for “stupid criminals” on Google yielded 1.75 million hits. Americans really seem to love the proverbial stories of idiots whose shoe size is larger than their IQ. Here is a typical one: “An employee of the Lucky Buffet noticed a strange sight on arriving at the restaurant. There were legs hanging out of a vent over the grill! 45-year-old Billy Jordan had tried to enter the restaurant the night before by climbing through the ductwork, but became stuck and stayed there for ten hours. Hillsborough County Fire Rescue workers used a rope to pull Jordan back out through the roof, after which he was arrested for burglary.”

Maybe we like these stories so much because they make us feel smarter. Well, duh, they make crayfish feel smarter! But what about smart criminals? Do we every hear about them? Another Google search for “smart criminals” produced 13.3 millions hits but the first 2 pages of hits weren’t really about smart criminals, but simply more stories about criminals who did dumb things and eventually were apprehended.

I submit that there are really smart criminals and lots of them out there. They are so astute that the crimes they commit are not even crimes, but necessary features of society. I have in mind the banksters of the federal reserve.

For example, having Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury is like having convicted sex offenders running the national rape crisis hotline. These banksters have stolen trillions(!) of dollars for the benefit of themselves and their friends and it isn’t even a crime, but a necessary part of “getting the economy working again” and “providing liquidity to help the economy”. Murray Rothbard has written lucidly and extensively about this gang of criminals. His writings and many other explanatory articles can be found at http://www.mises.org/.

Feddle Gummint

A good friend and colleague got the pink slip on Tuesday. He was very surprised, but seems to be coming to terms with it. He did get paid for 2 weeks plus a relatively (these days) generous severance package. There in lies the rub. Here is what he said, “Would you believe that they're going to take out 38 percent for taxes! (25% federal, 5% state, and 8% FICA.) Where's the stimulus?”

This has always amazed and angered me. The rotten IRS makes companies withhold at a higher rate on final checks, such as a severance check. Talk about kicking a guy when he is down! Why isn’t the regular rate of withholding enough? Or how about letting those who lose their jobs have their severance without having to pay any income tax? How would that be? Couldn’t Obama sign an executive order instructing the IRS to go easy on those who lose their jobs? How hard could that be? Bush signed executive orders creating Gitmo, denying American citizens their rights, and setting up secret torture prisons around the world. Obama has ordered attacks on Pakistan by unmanned Predator aircraft and struck down a rule that prohibits U.S. money from funding international family-planning clinics that promote abortion or provide counseling or referrals about abortion services. Tax money for foreign abortions yes; some slack for the long suffering American taxpayers, no way!

AIG gets $170 billion in bailout money that still has not saved the company, but Joe Sixpack gets screwed out of his severance. My friend won’t get that extra withholding back until he files his tax returns a year from now, if ever. That’s criminal!! Government by the banksters, of the banksters, and for the banksters!! So help us God!