Jack Oswald once told the Digest it’s a mistake to be thinking about simply shifting from an energy-starved world based on fossil fuel reserves, to an energy-starved world based on clean energy.

“What we need is energy abundance,” he said. “If you have enough energy, you don’t have to think twice about pumping the water of some some gigantic Lake Tahoe two thousand feet further up the mountain, and using that proven system for energy storage…”

The only thing worse than pumped storage is all the other schemes for energy storage to correct the gaping flaws in intermittent energy.

Jack Oswald plans to improve on Mother Earth’s evolved means of dealing with the abuse of Mother’s powerful captor, the old divil Sun who will one day devour her.

The limitation that Electrofuels seek to overcome is the problem of photosynthetic inefficiency. Few plants utilize more than 4 percent of available solar radiation, and the theoretical limit has been placed at around 10 percent, no matter what efficiencies are developed through microbial engineering. By contrast, solar PV systems have captured up to 25 percent, and one day will do more.

Yet, liquid fuels have a place – both for reasons of energy storage and energy density. Electric cars have proven a tough sell, and one reason is range anxiety and the huge cost of battery-based energy storage.

Intelligence and ingenuity, forethought and foresight like that of Jack Oswald takes time to overcome the cupidity and stupidity of the wind and solar crowd that are taking a detour from reason and thus aiding the fossil fuel purveyors and deniers.

For Oswald’s ideas on improving on Mother’s evolution see:

http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/…

We inhabit a water world of vast energy sources and choose to seek out scarce, expensive and troublesome sources while poisoning the water so it is undrinkable.

We can do better and must if we are to survive.

Best,  Terry

As every damn fool knows, humans or Norse gods or both (I can never remember which, being a recent convert) were created from the corpse of an ice giant and a cow.

Now scientists, our modern Frankensteins, have created Bossie, the micro cow.

Doing it in the Dark: Fuel from thin air, and beyond light

Making isobutanol

“Where the hydrogen coming from?” asked a number of astute readers at the time. And for sure, it was coming not from water, but from hydrogen gas. Which is generally made from fossil fuels (though it can be made renewably).

So, how is this latest news from UCD an advance of the storyline? In two ways – one, we haven’t seen the requirement for hydrogen gas: water seems to be able to provide the hydrogen. Secondly, we note that the targeted products that Bossie can make include, to date, isobutyraldehyde and isobutanol.

http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/…

Well, only small children, the Koch brothers, Exxon and other malevolents would be scared out of their wits by that but think about some other enemies of the environment.  Hey, I am not against small children but just reporting.  Even our enlightened youngsters seem to be against abortion and population growth.  Go figure.

But there is the possibility our modern Dr. Frankensteins will turn their attention to milk and meat, hence the name Bossie, to the horror of the organic food hoaxsters.

Heh heh.

Best,  Terry

Before I even spoke to G. I knew he had been a prisoner of war.  I knew nothing else but that.  

It had been long ago that he had spent much of his youth in a German concentration camp but that had left an indelible mark G. would carry to his grave.  Though I worked alongside G. for many years, I never knew more except that he was German.

It couldn’t have been more different than with a boss I worked for for a short time who had been a prisoner as a child of the Japanese along with his missionary parents during WWII. You had to know him well to hear any brief mention of the experience.  

Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were in worse condition than Amanda Berry when they emerged from at least nine years in captivity at the home of Ariel Castro…

The sources said DeJesus and Knight were gaunt and had closely cropped hair when they were freed.

http://www.ndtv.com/article/wo…

As just a wild guess, Berry’s youth may have saved her from the worst.  Her daughter seems to have been treated well by the psychopath.

Putting all captives in the same box is much the same as claiming to know anything about people on the basis of their imaginary race.  I have wondered if maybe DeJesus might have suffered more with longer lasting consequences than even Knight since Knight’s life was apparently already a living hell before her captivity.

A woman hired as one of a group of counselors for some abused women and girls in a notorious case would sit and listen with wide-eyed horror and interject only occasionally with such helpful phrases as “ohmigod.”

At least that counselor listened.

I think few do.  The iconic original counselor, Sigmund Freud, considered his clients greatly inferior, bubble-headed beings since they were women.

A paleontologist told his class that all paleontologists were lumpers or splitters.  Every paleontologist would love for the lumpers to be right because it’s so difficult to deal with constantly growing numbers and complexity of fossil species.  The trouble was, said the paleontologist, the splitters were far more intelligent.

It seems to me to be a work requirement for counselors to be rigid, deaf lumpers.

Best,  Terry

 

I used to ask teachers of the learning disabled how they would have liked to have Albert Einstein in their class.  Two knew it was a trick question.  The rest…

When Hermann Einstein asked the principal of Albert’s elementary school what studies he thought it would be best for Albert to pursue, the principal replied it didn’t matter since Albert would fail at everything.  While Einstein was plotting means of escaping the torment of his elementary schooling, he was thrown out of the school.

Einstein had the most terrible of all learning disabilities – he was autistic.  I reject the notion of including those afflicted with diseases of the “autism spectra” as autistics.  Most notably Asperger’s syndrome, that is rumored to afflict Bill Gates, may indeed be very difficult to deal with but how does a disease that manifests itself in teen years compare to a disease in which most of the victims never learn to speak?

Einstein’s reputed high IQ score must have been obtained through one of the many non-verbal IQ tests.

Temple Grandin, an autistic professor, writes with superb clarity about the condition but includes in her “visual learners” a man such as DaVinci.  DaVinci’s incredible depth and breadth of knowledge was not remotely comparable to Einstein’s laser focus that allowed little distraction.

An IQ test may be considered a test of neatness and shallowness more than intelligence says your wretched informant who always scored very high in that sad state of affairs.

Maybe if I hadn’t dawdled occasionally over which of the two right answers was the one the dimwitted authors of such tests wanted, I could have scored even higher.  At least I could be certain to outscore those deeper sorts who really struggled with such a conundrum.

My mother, to her dying day, was still angry about starting school in a class with Hispanics – she thought the town was divided between Finns and the enemy Norwegians and had no idea where those others came from. Speaking Finnish nearly exclusively, the only thing my mother had in common with the Hispanics was that neither knew much English but at least the Hispanics could speak to each other.  They were put in what today would be the “short bus” class.

In my own view, the dimmest of the dim are those who proclaim IQ tests are proof of racial superiority by idiots who have no idea what race is.  

Race is not, is not, is not ethnicity.  It is biology but those proclaiming IQ tests prove the imaginary white race is superior to all but the totally non-existent yellow race offer powerful evidence they have less intelligence than Darwin’s race of butterflies.

What then is a test of intelligence?

Knowing an IQ test, as a measure of intelligence, is bunk might be a good start.

Best,  Terry

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/n…

True.  Just as African slaves should have been given a little more freedom gradually instead of all at one time, we could have saved that awful messy business with the South.

Ginsburg, one of the most liberal members of the nation’s high court…

Words have the meaning Humpty Dumpty would impart to them when Ginsburg is called liberal.

I am not the only one who noted during her confirmation hearing that Ginsburg, once a great champion of women’s rights, was perfectly happy to pull the ladder up after her when she ascended to a new level.

Does anyone need more proof?

Best,  Terry

http://www.philly.com/philly/n…

This is the first report I have seen that is a little more than canned hash on the horrors faced by Michelle Knight in her still young life.

ELIZABETH SMART, kidnapped in 2002 at the age of 14 and rescued nine months later, has said that her strong family relationships and community ties helped her heal from the horrors inflicted by her abductors.

So I feel great worry for Michelle Knight’s recovery.

Well you might.

Left unspoken and unanalyzed is the treatment by cops and prosecutors and judges – in your name, that preceded the dozen years of captivity and brutalizing by a psychopath.

“I just wish that my daughter would reach out [to me] to let me know she’s there,” Barbara Knight told the Today show Wednesday.

–

Lord, the cluelessness of a woman who expects her daughter, who has been to hell and back, to make the first effort at reunification. And who presumes her daughter is “angry at the world,” as if she’s some kind of snippy adolescent.

The rest of us can be released because we have identified the designated scapegoat.

Charlie Gallagher reminded me [of another case] when I called to chat with him about the Cleveland case. Gallagher is the former assistant district attorney who prosecuted Gary “House of Horrors” Heidnik, who kidnapped, raped and tortured six women in his North Philly basement.

“Of those women, only one was reported missing by her family,” says Gallagher. “The rest lived on the streets. They weren’t going to be missed.”

Michelle Knight was not living on the streets, was not even allowed to be counted among the missing, was apparently tortured further by her psychopath captor for the lack of concern for her absence compared with the others.

This reminds me of a vaguely remembered memo by an innocent man freed from prison after many years by evidence that needed only to be examined.

After the celebrations ended and the balloons were all popped and the bands stopped playing and the crowds dispersed, the man was left isolated in a small, barren apartment with little to occupy a now lonely, friendless, restricted and useless life.  He began to have thoughts he was worse off than when he was in prison.

Best,  Terry

The saddest story out of Cleveland is the third strike and out.  

Rachel Maddow gave some truly frightening figures on missing the other night.  

One that would have been in no official figures was the third woman rescued.

But how could she have been raped because we know from medical authorities rape doesn’t result in pregnancies and the one that wasn’t missing and is now becoming visible (and probably the worse for her) was pregnant five times and had it beaten out of her as the Good Book prescribes.  

She is reported to be deaf from the beatings which could be very good in her case.  She is also getting drugs for derangement but probably not the kind which could help most without hurt.  That would be illegal.  She will need the bad stuff real, real bad I reckon when Drudge gets onto the reason an earlier son was taken from her.  Or maybe he already has.  How would I know unless Rachel tells me?

There is some real good news.  The hero with the bad teeth and dirty t-shirt don’t need no stinking money.  He has a great job as a dishwasher.  One might think he could use money for a dentist but with all the money he is raking in as a dishwasher he probably needs no teeth to chew his food.

Best,  Terry

You can throw away your gas cans, your flashlights, your batteries, your power lines.  

The world is saved.  Hallelujah.

The fabled bolt box that can store lightning bolts in a thimble and make talk of intermittent energy as defunct as a flat earth has been patented.

Patent filing claims solar energy ‘breakthrough’

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/201…

In science-challenged U.S. only a patent application has been filed but elsewhere patents have issued.

Inventor Ronald Ace said that his flat-panel “Solar Traps,” which can be mounted on rooftops or used in electric power plants, will shatter decades-old scientific and technological barriers that have stymied efforts to make solar energy a cheap, clean and reliable alternative.

“This is a fundamental scientific and environmental discovery,” Ace said. “This invention can meet about 92 percent of the world’s energy needs.”

Not only is Ace – a truly accomplished inventor – an unparalleled genius but he is supremely modest as well.  It is obviously nonsensical to talk of a missing 8% when limitless energy is available to all.

John Darnell, a scientist and the former congressional aide who has monitored Ace’s dogged research for more than three years and has reviewed his complex calculations, has no doubts.

“Anybody who is skilled in the art and understands what he’s proposing is going to have this dumbfounding reaction: ‘Oh, well it’s obvious it’ll work,'” said Darnell, a biochemist with an extensive background in thermodynamics.

There you have an official imprimatur that is even superior to Papal bull.

Best,  Terry

No good deed ever goes unpunished.

H. L. Mencken

I never met the man but knew him well.  It is not likely you would know him even had you been acquainted with him for years.  You would have to grow up in America’s Outback to know him.

I heard only the briefest mention of the story from Dad, who owned the Shamrock.  The Shamrock was where the cowboys and Indians, the working class and the top millionaires drank.  

Dad knew everyone in town except the middle class.  That bunch dawdled over a cocktail at Hunter’s Lodge with its own geysers and duck pond in the time a regular at the Shamrock would put down half a quart of whiskey.  Dad wondered how Hunter’s could make any money.

One time I came into the Shamrock and there were three millionaires together on stools at the end of the bar.  That was when a million was actual money. The millionaires were getting free drinks on the house from working stiffs spending their last dime and maybe the baby’s milk money.

I asked Dad why the millionaires were not buying for the house too.

The answer was obvious.  I can be dumber than whale blubber at times.  The regulars could brag forever about buying the drinks for the millionaires.  If the millionaires bought, they would be just showing off.  Even the most desperate down ‘n outers don’t like to be insulted.

Those days all the regular people were Democrats and so were the top millionaires though the latter would not have liked it known.  The very few Republicans were the dawdling drinkers at Hunter’s.

Today all are Republicans because the Democrats chose to go upscale and even the dawdlers don’t want to know them.  The Democrats don’t even know how to talk to regular people anymore.  Listen to any Democrat.  All you hear is middle class.

Middle class folks in a town in America’s Outback would never adopt a wild burro.

The wild burros were saved from being shot to save the area around the Grand Canyon. With the extermination of so many predators (except Republicans), the invasive burros threaten destruction of what little there is in desert country.  

PETA and less violent sorts don’t want no killing and so the quandary.

The adoptive father of the wild burro is single (no wife would allow a wild burro to be adopted), probably retired but never made much money anyway, drinks a lot, lives on a dirt road in a rundown house with falling down barn or shed or something with too little land to support a turkey, let alone a burro, but wants to do some good for once in his life.  

Make that past tense.

When the animal abuse people and prosecutors and judges got on the case, there was no out for our hero but to shoot himself.  There are no hero abuse people.  Praise the Lord there are guns for heroes.  Nobody is going to take those away.

Best,  Terry

Con artists arrive in all manner of disguises.  The iconic P. T. Barnum was a harmless street peddler compared to T. Boone Pickens, who sold the second most powerful person in the the most powerful nation on earth his fossil fuel poison that T. Boone called [heh heh] Clean Energy.  

The con continues to spread and broaden and deepen though some have produced evidence that natural gas (it is not a fossil fuel decreed Nancy Pelosi when she invested a bundle in T. Boone Pickens’ Clean Energy) is dirtier than even coal.  It gives a whole new meaning to making firewater that Indians are now participating in selling to the forked tongues.  

Even then the crooks like P. T. Barnum and T. Boone Pickens play second fiddle to earnest advocates selling cancer cures.  

Radium Water was sold as a tonic after Madame Curie’s discovery of radioactivity that created a sensation.  One fellow was said to keep plugging the stuff on the radio until his jaw fell off.  The skeletons are still hot.

Who can forget Dr. Jude – ah, er, umm – it’s on the tip of my tongue – with his rats cured of cancer by starving the cancer cells?

But why go through long drawn out starvation when you can simply nuke the cancer cells?

a new study introduces an unlikely microbial helper, specifically the Listeria bacteria, which was shown to effectively deliver radiation to even the most severe forms of metastatic pancreatic tumors without harming the healthy tissue.

http://www.medicaldaily.com/ar…

Of course, of course.  New wonder drugs are always harmless.  I was there at a meeting hearing about the first therapeutic Listeria vaccine when people were dying from the bacteria hiding in cantelopes.  I told people that the bacteria was weakened to a harmless state by having Chicago cops beat it up.

Quite truthfully, I have a lot of hope for this Listeria vaccine though arming the Listeria bacterium with a nuclear weapon seems kinda worrisome.  There’s a story behind that too.  A non-nuclear armed competitor has first dibs on pancreatic cancer with the old fashioned kind of vaccine using the beaten-up Listeria.

“We’re encouraged that we’ve been able to achieve a 90 percent reduction in metastases in our first round of experiments,” said Claudia Gravekamp, co-author and associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Does not the college have a most appropriate name to go with bringing a nuclear-armed bacteria to light?

More to come.  I promise you that.  

The promoter’s name is a most famous one: Thomas Moore. I bet you thought he was dead centuries ago.

Best,  Terry

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-20…

Urologists, will you now apologize to all those you did terrible harm to and even killed in the interests of making more money?

Will famed basketball coach Jim Boeheim lose his license to malpractice medicine because he is a famous basketball coach?

Will famed investor Warren Buffett, who has made more money investing in stocks than any human ever, now admit he was panicked into extreme measures to cure a perhaps imaginary disease that most men his age have?

The answer to all the above is “No.”

The dead and injured cannot be cured.  Maybe some men, like a great senator from Louisiana, find it is very sexy to wear diapers and can now do it openly for life without remonstrance.

Your wretched informant, who ranted here, there and everywhere about the medical malpractice of doctors, hospitals, labs, reporters, advertisers remains a wretch as always. The bank accounts and assets of the others remain secure because the malefactors are too numerous, important, beloved, powerful and connected to sue.

“Time marches on.”

Best,  Terry