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Back to the Forum Archives We had a power grid failure a while back. We had no electricity. Everything we depended upon for our day-to-day living stopped working. Welcome to the good-old-days. These are those wonderful days that fools love to get nostalgic about. Kick back and enjoy cooking over a camp stove if you're lucky, a candle if you're not, reading by candlelight, bathing in cold water, going to bed early, drinking warm beer or martinis, etcetera. If it had lasted much longer we would be back to outdoor toilets. I'm old enough. I can remember going outside to crap on a cold winter's night. I had to do it again in Korea. It ain't fun. It ain't the good-old-days. It's the bad-old-days. But, so what? The smoke has cleared. The power grid failure is history. It was a bad dream and most folks have already forgot about it. We are back to business as usual. However, I can assure you the power grid has not forgotten. This will happen again and again. Think how much fun it will be when this happens again next winter. There will be even more nostalgia to enjoy. Look at your apartment. Where will you build the fire to keep warm? At least you'll have plenty of ice. In this recent outage, the Federal Emergency Energy Management Association was standing by to help. No one asked for help. They were probably afraid of getting buffoons involved in the works. In this grid failure we discovered, via the news, that a few of these political leaders are somewhat astute, but many more of them are just plain fools. The finger pointing was quite comical as managers and politicians vied with each other to find a goat. Will we treat the next failure as intolerable and do something about it? I doubt that. As always, we will be solving the wrong problem at the wrong time. I doubt if we will ever really solve the energy problem. The barndoor is open and the livestock has escaped. Our congress is thinking about passing an energy bill now. Ain't that just swell? They will probably get around to acting in a year or so. Meantime, we'll probably just hunker down and accept periodic power outages. We will adapt bit by bit until we are living most of our lives in the good-old-days just like great grandpa and grandma did. The truth is, the rabble can put the political folks out of office anytime they please. So, to retain power, the political hacks act to appease the rabble with short-term quick-fix rewards. Except for lip service the long term has been completely ignored. Because of that we have ended up in and operate from a constant crisis mode. In that mode we spend most of our resources putting new patches on old patches. A classic example of this is our current so called oil crisis which is really an ongoing energy shortfall. Any government operating from ethical principles would have moved to resolve this problem when it first arose, in the fifties. Instead, our government goes to war to ensure the oil supply. For Michigan, Ganholm has a very easy short term political solution. She is going begging to the feds to get a handout to compensate the losers for this power outage. Where in the world does she think that money will come from? This is pure nonsense. We have known this was coming for decades. We, every citizen and business, should have been prepared. A few were. I was. Most of us were not. That is not the taxpayer's fault. Why should I, a taxpayer, be screwed to cover a fool who was not prepared? Now it's temporarily over and everyone has forgot it. And most of us are still not prepared. We are still doing business as usual. It's going to happen again. It's going to happen more and more frequently. The ones who were not and still are not prepared have no one but themselves to blame. They have no right whatsoever to ask for handouts from the feds. It is these losers who screwed up and they will do it again. To be sure, the government at all levels has screwed up too, but, knowing that, the citizens still should have been prepared. Only an intellectually blind person could not have seen this coming. Getting federal handouts is way off the mark. Sooner or later, if this goes on, even the tax and spend feds will run out of money. The well will go dry. Unless we solve the real problems, disaster will overtake us. It's not just the power grid, our entire infrastructure is shot. We have been operating in crisis mode for four decades. One astute person, I think it was on ABC news, saw the real problem. The crisis is not just about electricity. It's about our entire infrastructure. It's also about all energy. That includes electricity, oil, coal, and gas. It also includes nuclear fission. Every one of our fission plants is a Chernobyl waiting to happen. These problems are all related. They are all the result of short-term vote-buying solutions from political monsters. It is not the result of one party or another. It's all of them. These scum have pandered to the rabble to buy votes for four decades while our country's capital assets fell apart. Let's look at the power grid for example. It is obsolete. The power grid is and always has been vulnerable. We don't need to fix or rebuild it. We don't need an infrastructure that can be sabotaged by our enemies or destroyed by the incompetence of the power companies. We need a new concept of power. We need to get rid of the power grid. We need to rethink and re-engineer our whole notion of energy, how we produce it and how we distribute it. We need spot power that we can place where it's needed without connecting it to a monstrous complex unmanageable grid. At this time, the most likely answer to that is small contained nuclear fusion plants. If we had been doing steady research from the time we were first aware that we had an energy shortfall problem, we would probably have it. I am sure of that, because I know that scientists and engineers can solve problems. That's what they are good at. They are too unimaginative to be good at much else, but they do solve technical problems. For sure, they cannot solve political problems, but then neither can the political beasts. So what? The oil companies see this grid failure as an opportunity for gouging. What did we expect? The only thing that will stop this is to get rid of our dependency on oil. However, in addition to the ignorance of the rabble we also have vested interests that keep us from addressing our problems honestly. For example, Bush is not about to initiate a program that might put his wealthy cronies at financial risk. He is not about to start a program that would turn them against him by finding alternative to what creates their wealth. There has been no long term planning on our infrastructure since Eisenhower (1953-61) initiated the interstate highway project. Even that was never completed. For the past forty years, we have been putting patches on patches until there is nothing left to patch. Our patches fall off before we finish putting them on. The San Francisco Bay Bridge is falling down, Michigan's Big Mac is disintegrating, and anyone who owns a car knows about our highway system. Most water and sewer systems were built from fifty to one hundred years ago. They are all rotting. Oil shortages have got us into foreign adventures and wars time after time. We cannot continue this way. We need to look for new solutions. That is something we have not done since the turn of the century. Our last significant scientific development was nuclear fission. We are still building roads the way the Romans did it. Oh sure, we have better tools, but we have not changed the concept at all. There is no basic research going on in this country that I know of. We need sound planning and solid research. We need good laws
to support that. This is something only the superior intellect
is capable of. Aristotle and Plato called this type philosophers.
We need to change our education system to produce this type of
altruistic intellect. We need to bring the rabble up to a level
that they will know enough to see what their long term best interests
are and act to bring them to reality. The rabble have to become
rational enough to bring the thoughtful intellects to power.
The rabble must begin to care about what becomes of their children
and the future of the culture. Education is how we do that. Of
course education is another obsolete part of our system which
is in abject failure.
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