Why Gunsmiths Love Revolvers

A gunsmith is a special type of mechanic. He swaps parts in automatic pistols. He smooths the action of a shotgun. He redoes the hot bluing on grampys old shotgun. He refits a new stock on a gun that got damp and warped during that nasty hurricane. But there's one kind of gun a gunsmith loves. A revolver. Revolvers require lots of labor to keep working right. They need trigger jobs. They need replacement cylinders. They need barrels removed, forcing cones redrilled, threads cut, and the barrel reseated, properly. They need sights replaced. They need grips fitted. They need their finish redone. They need cylinder timing jobs. They need cylinder locks replaced and refitted. So much to do on a thing that looks simple, but has more moving parts, exposed, than an automatic does. Of course, the ones most damaged by use are daily carry weapons, and the ones most damaged by firing are the popular magnum rounds like the .357 and the .44. Turns out that the pressure of moving a round one way and the firearm the other stretches the top strap over time. Eventually the gap between the cylinder and the barrel widens. More and more gas leaks out. This causes high pressure gas erosion of the steel. It is also dangerous to the operator and anybody standing nearby.

 

What does all this work cost? A standard full sized automatic pistol suitable for daily carry in a holster is around $600. Cheaper ones exist too. So do more expensive ones. A suitable revolver with smiths comfortable working on them, which generally means a Smith and Wesson rather than a Ruger or Taurus, is around the same starting price. However, gun smiths charge around $100 per hour, sometimes more. A trigger job to smooth the action properly is several hours of work, plus parts. Fitting new grips to the hand of the user is also several hours, plus more work if the customer isn't happy with the first fitting, needing more new parts to get the exact shape and carve that out of hardwood, which needs to be presentation grade walnut in most cases. Ivory was banned, after all. The more the firearm is fired, the more the torque against the rod will deform it, making the torque worse and stretching the top-strap more. You either replace the gun or you replace the cylinder and rod. That's where you start getting into serious money. That's thousands of dollars in work.

 

Yes, gunsmiths love customers with revolvers. It puts steak on the table, buys them a car for the weekend, pays off the mortgage.

Jefferson Vote

This weekend the local county board of supervisors will have an open public meeting to discuss joining Jefferson state movement. This is separate from the Silicon Valley 6-states plan. Jefferson encouraged that other plan. Southerners think that the North is a waste of time and taxes. The North has most of the state's water. The South doesn't know that, because ignorance is their raison d'etre.

I will be at the county during this meeting, shelving books. It made me think what sort of things I'd like to see the new state allow. 

1. Fix the levees.
2. Dredge the sediment out of the reservoirs.
3. Resolve the pike in Lake Davis, finally.
4. Agree to fund jobs programs at the community colleges, and agree which jobs are worth funding and which aren't. (ie machining not medical billing)
5. Authorize new category of vehicles, Experimental. Discard safety regulations requirements during testing phase. Require vehicle painted in Orange and operator to wear a helmet.
6. Reduce safety standards and allow access exemptions so buildings can be used without needing to build wheelchair ramps everywhere.
7. Upgrade hospital emergency rooms in every county so emergencies don't require life flights.
8. Construct small refineries or local fuel storage in every town over a certain size.
9. Local power plants and grids.
10. Basic self defense rights to carry a weapon everywhere.
11. Shoot human predators.
12. Campground managers.
13. State currency based on gold or rice.
14. Accept Eurostandard diesel engines.
15. Scooter reciprocity, 49cc exemption expanded to 125cc with over the counter exam and retest in 60 days for full scooter license. Offer motorcycle rider training in every county fairgrounds, cheap.
16. And I'm against this but its inevitable: legalize pot.
17. Ban safety labels. The gene pool needs chlorine and a few generations without safety will fix our Idiocracy tendencies.

I think these ideas would fix most of what is wrong with California. We can't fix the drought, unless you're completely insane, but restoring the reservoirs will make up the difference in water supply so that's the only sane solution to drought, a common and frequent problem in this state since the Ice Age ended. But at least we don't get hurricanes like the East Coast.

Conservation Solutions Blocked

There are good solutions available to solve energy conservation. We don't do them because vested interests have prevented them, to protect their profits or agencies.

 

Right now most of America's gross domestic product is going to pay the national debt, and most of the trade imbalance is buying oil. If we decrease the amount of oil we use, we decrease our national debt and correct our trade imbalance. 

 

When fracking becomes more common, America will be the largest oil producing nation on earth. Everybody will want our oil, and we will export it because we won't have much choice. Too much of the US debt is owned by hostile foreign nations. They can hurt us by selling our bonds cheap, dumping it is called. That would devaluate our currency, the Dollar. Then it would buy less imported stuff, and our exports would sell for less, too.

The above map shows existing oil and gas fracking territory, with new territory available too, not always shown. The Monterey Shale is west of the pink and red areas in California, or overlaps with it, flowing up the Pacific coast from LA to north of San Francisco. Right through Big Sur and Carmel and Monterey and world famously pretty coastline. It will be ruined by oil drilling. Same with the Gulf of Mexico. Fracking there will extract lots of oil, and leaks will poison the shrimp. Get your shrimp while you can because someday the prawns will be poison.

 

Fracking is going to happen. We need the oil. Gasoline is going to get really expensive. Big cars will cost a fortune to fill the tank. Electric cars are $65K. Claims of cheap ones coming haven't happened yet. Much of the cost is the battery, too.

 

The only small fuel tank cheap vehicle unlikely to be stolen are crappy little scooters and small engine motorcycles. I keep harping on this because it is a rational solution. No magic batteries required. No magic at all. It's light weight so doesn't need much fuel to move you and it up to speed, which is usually not very fast anyway. Faster than you can pedal a bicycle, at least. Real scooters, like a Vespa, cost around $150 in materials and $50 in labor to manufacture, with another $50 to ship to the customer. That's all. The rest of that $3000 is profit to the manufacturer and seller.

 

A scooter is all about simple operation and maintenance. Twist the handle to go faster. Use your body to lean into corners. Squeeze the brake to slow down. Park it beside the bicycles. It's easy.

 

Once someone makes them in the USA, cheap, then more people will buy them. And the upside of dividing California is the slime CARB officials down in LA can't complain about smog in Nevada County so they can't force us to use "clean green scooters" that cost 10x as much as they should. We can have cheap ones. And mechanics to fix them. And parts sold at the local auto parts stores, because that's how they should be. Not a ripoff. Cheap. A $400 scooter made here is an affordable solution to transportation so Moms doing the school run can still afford the gas. Conservation should be affordable, not a penalty, not a personal sacrifice that builds resentment.

Fire Season

It is fire season. This being California, it stops raining in May and doesn't rain again until October, on a normal year. Right now there are two major fires burning near Redding, producing heavy smoke across the north end of the Sacramento valley. There is also a large wildfire near Plymouth, which is just south of El Dorado County border in the foothills, around 80 miles away. And there's another fire just Southwest of Yosemite in El Portal. We even have a website to keep track of the fires, because fires are the thing we care about, almost as much as rain. We don't give a damn about New York City. We care about fires. You may have seen some of these on TV, especially the big fires in Eastern Washington and Idaho.

 

After the fires go out, the roots of the vegetation that held the hillsides together are burned up, so when the rains come, the hills slide and erode. The fire heat is so intense it actually makes the surfaces of exposed rock pop loose, called Spalling. The additional eroded sediments are carried into streams and rivers, filling up reservoirs so they don't hold as much water as before. Eventually the reservoir turns into a meadow with a concrete waterfall on one end, otherwise useless. The people who counted on the dam to catch big rainstorms will see the surges of water flood downstream and wash away the levees and their fields, flood their homes, destroy things.

 

If we had a beneficial govt, they would clear the sediment behind the dams and maintain the levees using our tax dollars, but instead they funnel it elsewhere. Corruption always hurts California. We have expensive natural disasters which require work to prevent, and we need our taxes paying for that work, not Eastern social experiments. Very important.

 

This morning the smoke was heavy on the ground, visible between houses and across the narrow valleys. Above it were clouds, not raining, just there, grey, and apparently responsible for the lightning strike fires in Yosemite. These may be more lighting fires this afternoon. We'll see.

The Post American Experience

California is going to divide. It is the only sane way to bring the state govt back under control. Discard all the nonsense laws, make new states to make new laws which can be sane instead of contrary and nuts. America is insane too. The ones who voted in the current powers have wrecked everything they've touched, and it is permanently broken because that's how law works. Precedent. America is totalitarian now. America is going to divide up to end that behavior because there is no other way to do it. The powers won't impeach to end this trend, they won't correct the abuse or throw the crooks in jail for violating actual laws. The corruption is completely open at this point.

Staying together isn't working. We must divide and fix things locally. What will America be like, divided instead of United?

1. Trade tariffs across state lines. Many states have been screwing with each other for decades this way. This just makes it more formalized.
2. Resource wars and hoarding. Water and food are coming from certain states and flowing to others. Costs will change.
3. Exporting critical goods for a profit overseas instead of selling locally. 
4. Ending many bureaucracies which only existed as political payoffs by crooked elections, and sort of linger on. Dumping millions of otherwise useless people out of govt payrolls will drastically change the places money is wasted by govt.
5. Infrastructure spending, roads and bridges in particular, will finally receive more attention, though interstate borders will get tricky.
6. Smuggling across state lines will slow down commerce. Regional agreements and inspection stations will rise, and more govt will shift to border controls.
7. Decentralization of processing will be important. Many more power plants and refineries will be built, with local control. Fracking production more likely to stay domestically available, and exploitation reduced since workers can be locally retaliated against if poisoning happens instead of flee for China. Motivation for clean oil extraction obvious.
8. Anywhere growing food will do food preservation and processing for max profit rather than ship elsewhere. Tariffs on food imports will stabilize prices for producers.
9. Local machine shops for parts, rather than relying on imports with uncertain tariffs will employ many workers and allow specialization to local demand.
10. The National power grid will end. State power grids and city power grids will become the new normal. Rural blackouts will be the rule, not exception. Selling power across state lines will require various treaties and agreements.
11. US dollar ends. Its been doomed since Quantitative Easing started, since that's Inflation of the money supply. New currencies will replace the Dollar with something based on actual value , like bearer bonds for commodities. Not threats.

Getting used to all these things will simplify life for many people, a less complex society with a reason for a lot of jobs, instead of laws to prevent them like today. With lower spending on the bureaucracy and agencies that attack commerce for their own existence (EPA), what is actually necessary will be found, eventually.

There are potential upsides, however. For one, without current Federal abuses, states can decide what they allow rather than be told what they won't and be left to enforce them. FAA rules are strict. So are crash standards. In the Western States, I can see both getting relaxed. We still have dirt airstrips, if you didn't know. And lower crash standards means those light weight ultra efficient diesels the Europeans have would be legal here, and we'd double our fuel economy without all that weight. We could also drop the crash requirement for test vehicles, meaning we could avoid the trap of the Big 3, now Big 2 automotive companies, and maybe allow those operating here to try test vehicles on the roads too. Give them a bright orange and black X-plate, a license plate that starts with an X for Experimental. Require a helmet on operators, so its inconvenient and uncomfortable rather than an easy loophole to safety standards. States becoming the dominant and enforced source of laws rather than some distant prick in Washington DC who answers to nobody, that changes things. California leads the way by dividing itself. If the states follow along similar lines, so much the better.

Stanford Energy Fantasy

You have to appreciate the humor value of fantasy energy projects created by people who don't work for a living, or build actual things, only teach, living on someone else's budget. They used to joke and call Stanford the "Leland Stanford Junior College". Stanford does have its accomplishments, but its not exactly well known for its civil engineers. And designing public utilities is very much a civil engineering project. So here's my comment on the above article.

 

It's a NICE dream. The idea that there's unlimited calm, clean, renewable energy powered by magical batteries that don't exist but that's okay, right? Because... well, its not clear on that point.

 

What isn't understood by the man in question is that there's a LOT more energy costs than he realized. And that liquid fuels are efficient ways to power vehicles, compared to batteries.

 

One of the biggest costs is pumping fresh water to LA so they have water to drink and flush and wash off their driveways during this drought. LA residents really like wasting water to show they're better than the place where the water comes from. This is a point of rage between the state regions. We in the North hate the South for this reason. Hate is the right word, too. But focus on the positives.

 

Yes, there's sufficient strong reliable wind blowing out of Alaska down the California Coast. However, wind turbines only work well when the wind is extremely stable, without gusts, without turbulence. Gusts and turbulence BREAK wind turbines, viciously, but people who live in Stanford offices don't know this. You have to know a wind turbine mechanic, and I do, to know all the ways they break. You COULD run very large turbines on top of the various coast range ridgelines, though those will certainly kill migratory birds and raptors, which breaks a LOT of really important environmental laws, kills birds and bats very much illegally, and these laws a Stanford professor SHOULD be aware of and following, but somehow doesn't. Somehow he's oblivious to laws he should favor. Funny how that is. This is exactly the sort of hypocrisy that professors typically exhibit, and we know that hypocrisy is evil, remember? But set that aside. For now.

 

You could put up a lot of really big wind turbines, and hire about four or five thousand people to look after them. Twenty-five thousand turbines will cost a fortune, and the turbines will cost a fortune a year to maintain, and the energy has to be transmitted, in the proper phase because out of phase wind turbines actually remove energy from the grid, and that's not an exaggeration. Like I said, I know a wind turbine mechanic. It's a real problem. When these get out of sequence, they reduce the power supply, not increase it. People who sell wind turbines don't tell you this, however. That's a serious issue you should think hard about. The other thing they don't tell you is that you need 3 times the height of the turbine between it and the next one to reduce turbulence which wrecks them and reduces maintenance costs.

 

Social costs of air pollution? What? When the general public are all smoking dope or sucking down cigarettes? No. That's ridiculous. CARB bans offroad motorcycles on the highways. No 2-strokes on the road, other than the little 49cc scooters. And even those are likely to be banned at any time by opinionated bigots who hate the poor, the people likely to ride scooters because they can't afford a car. Those are the ones who ride in other states. The poor. Often people with a DUI, a drunk driver who has lost their drivers license. Those are the ones with scooters and can't afford to buy electric cars for $65K. And drive further than 12 miles to their jobs, so can't bicycle to it. They must have an affordable way to get there and get home, and for most, public transit won't work.

 

Solar panels on the rooftops? Yes, yes that will happen. When the price is RIGHT, cheap enough, and the power grid is so unreliable it is worth paying to install panels and setting up the switches so there's batteries charging so when the grid crashes for an hour or two or ten, you still have your lights and your fridge and freezer, which is such a large part of civilization, right there. Libraries will be more valuable then. A book takes very little energy to read. Good thing I'm becoming a librarian. But yes, solar panels on rooftops makes sense, and I think it will happen when it makes financial sense.

 

Better, hybrid solar panels, using a cooling system to preheat water going into hot water heaters, and thus cool the solar photovoltaic cell so it doesn't burn up, and exchange the valuable heat for a more useful format, like hot water to heat your home or bathe in. Bathing is important to civilization. And cooling is important and beneficial to PV solar reliability and home heating.

 

They don't mention electric trams which they should. Overhead grid wiring is scalable in the way that batteries aren't. They use those for trams and buses and many different kinds of commuter trains.

 

The numbers of plants they've listed is sadly absurd. For one, they want 72 geothermal plants. There's ONE in California, and it doesn't work. The one I know of that does work is steam vents east of Reno. And that's in Nevada. You need a working volcano to have a working geothermal site, and that's a tall order. Just drilling down into the crust is naïve and wrong PROVEN to be wrong by extensive documentation at the test site at The Geysers. The one where the power generation stops working shortly after trying the injection wells. Why? It is because rocks are insulators.

 

3400 tide turbines. Really. That blocks off most coves, destroying the coast. Unless these are free floating turbines, which only kill anything that goes through them, rather than requiring dams on coves and running the tide water through the turbines. And 5000 wave buoy generators. Those work by being lifted and dropped by passing waves. Maintenance costs on the cables are serious.

 

1200 solar concentrator plants. That's a lot. There's two in California right now. 1200 means putting them so many places they become a serious threat to aviation. Its the LIGHT, extremely bright, and blinding even at high altitude. The existing ones are FAA regulated. The moving mirrors also require lots of maintenance, and water for the steam boilers which power the turbines. Its not a free lunch. You have to pay a bunch of specialists to keep it working. Men with families, retirement funds, pregnant wives and babies. That means schools and hospitals.

 

All of these methods are tradeoffs, with big costs. There's no mention of the pumps to push water around the state, and those use a huge amount of energy. There's no mention of the impact of dividing the state on these expensive plans. There's no mention of how many businesses flee the state rather than be taxed to pay for them, or the loss of the poor and middle class for the same reasons. If the state is only rich people, paying for all this, how will they pay for it if there's nobody else here? And why would they?

Obamacare Plan Subsidy Illegal

If you haven't yet heard, the Supreme Court struck down the illegal funding of Obamacare yesterday. Specifically fee subsidies in states which do not have their own exchanges. Every state that didn't create a health exchange computer site does not qualify for the subsidy. Since Obamacare is 3x more expensive than prior healthcare because govt ruins most things, it is largely unaffordable without the subsidy. This means that all state residents who aren't qualified for subsidies anymore are likely going to dump Obamacare, and will get taxed by the IRS next year despite paying until now, which will makes them very angry. As congress wasn't allowed to read the bill, thanks to a certain b17ch from Napa "You can read the bill after you pass it". If a Republican had said that? There would have been actual riots. But Democrats get a free pass to commit Totalitarianism. 

 

It amazes me that the communists and totalitarians running this country have accomplished so much to destroy the authority of centralized govt. The very idea of it is becoming a joke. This is why I think the USA will divide into self governed states with trade agreements between them. That Federal demands have crossed the line into absurdity. At some point we just won't pay any attention to the nitwits back East. The trick is blocking the IRS from collecting taxes in our states, so the Federal govt stops being funded. I wonder if a state can tax an illegal tax, since constitutionally, and I'm not joking here, only states have the right to tax, not the Federal govt. They tax by pointing guns at everyone, and at the small scale they call that armed robbery, don't they?

 

So if you're living in a state without its own health exchange (and you would know because you signed up under that), be ready to see your health plan subsidy vanish in next month. Ironically, California did build an exchange, so it still gets one. 

 

If Obamacare is repealed by the outrage of something like 43 states who are overpaying for coverage, the subsidy will be gone when the law is gone so compliant states lose out too. Law is law, and the congress isn't going to vote in an amendment to fix what they never wanted in the first place.

If you voted for him, are you going to vote another like him into office again? To keep the failures coming? Don't you have any shame?

Siberia

Easternmost Russia is Siberia. Its a land of swamp, short trees (all under 29 feet tall) and volcanoes. There's also bears, the big ones that eat people. Siberia is an interesting place because other than dirt roads, it is largely undeveloped. In Long Way Round and the middle section of Mondo Enduro, Siberia is the part of the trip around the world that wrecks your vehicle, stops your forward travel, ends your journey. Unless you get creative. Both trips did, which is why they eventually succeeded in their journeys around the world.

As a Californian who has been to the PNW and to British Columbia and to the Yukon and Alaska, what I've seen of Siberia, both on film and on Google Earth, I can see potential there. Despite being heavily treed, both Alaska and Siberian forests are useless, so ignore those. They are thin short trees, and you'd get one or two 2x4s and that's it. And those would warp as they dried. Useless as lumber, but Siberia has other values. For one, they have good machinists and backwater engineers. They are used to building useful structures in less than ideal conditions, meant for use in harsh and abusive conditions. And they don't throw a tantrum when they break during the worst of times, because stuff breaks. If Siberia weren't controlled, very distantly, by Putin, and traded to the Pacific rather than via train back into Russia, there could be useful trade back and forth. The big problem is that Putin does officially control Siberia. If they became their own republic, then things would be different, and a land rush might occur, especially since its pretty much open. Maybe not this century, but someday it would be a place to summer not completely overwhelmed and crowded like the Oregon Coast or British Columbia. Rich people always need somewhere to summer. Siberia might be it, one day.

Warming is Crazy Religion

There are people in this world obsessed with material objects. Others are obsessed with being somewhere else. Others are obsessed with doing what others tell them to. These are common religious observations, even if people don't admit to them because they aren't generally described as such.

(Human Caused) Global Warming is a religion. Everybody who says otherwise is a zealot, a crazy person to be avoided, have their sharp objects be taken away, and needing clinical sedation by a licensed mental health practitioner. As soon as you try and tell a Warmer that climate change is natural, and that climate is always changing, and that its been warmer and colder before this, and that current weather is not caused by people, they throw a temper tantrum and explode at you. And their religious observances are so similar to Jim Jones' People's Temple nonsense, something I remember first hand since 3 of my classmates left for Guyana and were murdered by their parents with poisoned Flavor Aide (generic Kool Aid) from which we get the grim phrase "he's drinking the Kool Aid" and "Would you like some Kool Aid?" to describe insane religious cultists. The AGWs are the same. They want to kill absolutely everyone, and warming is just the excuse. I think they believe in this Annihilist religion because they got old enough to realize they'll die someday and its really bothering them, so they'd like to take everyone else with them when they go. This is more common than you'd think.

As a geologist, part of my studies included learning about historical climates, all the way back to the beginning of the planets accretion 4.6 billion years ago. The planet has been through some weird stuff. It went ice-ball before life, over a billion years ago. Looked really stable then too, but then supervolcanoes erupted near the equator and the soot increased the solar absorption and melted the ice and we had oceans again. There are traces of this in Australia, if I remember correctly.

During the early years of the planet, the moon was very close orbit. That detail in that horrible dinosaur time travel TV show by Spielberg was correct. What they didn't include but should have is that with the moon closer, the tidal effects were magnified so tides would have been something like 90 meters rather than the usual 5-6. That means tidal flats would have been miles across in many places, and drastically influenced the advantages of air breathing for sea creatures. Modern tides are not caused by people either. The moon is drifting further and further out and in a billion years or so it will fling off our orbit and go wandering around the solar system till it either hits something or becomes some other planet's moon or becomes a planet itself.

In recent geologic history, over the last 3-4 million years, the impact of the Indian subcontinent with Asia changed wind patterns in Mongolia which is the planetary high pressure and low pressure point. No, I am not joking. It is the literal origin of winds due to various geographic features. Somewhere had to be. It probably moves depending on the current shape of the continents. This change in the winds caused storms out of the warm Indian Ocean to start depositing snow on the newly risen Himalaya mountains and the Tibetan Plateau, which quickly turned into glaciers, then an ice sheet, then started reflecting sunlight off the planet. It is likely that the sun's output dropped as well, yet another factor in climate that we don't control. But you can't tell a Warmer that. They think solar output is a Republican Conspiracy, hurting women and children most. Nutbars.

By 133,000 years ago, modern humans had evolved. We'd grown up in swamps in Ethiopia, after a surge of deforestation forced us out of the trees and required us to walk upright and carry things with opposable thumbs. There was a long period of evolution before this as hominids, including tool and fire use for 3-5 million of years depending on your anthropologist and the various tenuous evidence. The important thing is we evolved into our modern forms as meat and plant eating, tool using, intelligent, language using omnivores long ago. We did this during an ice age, and then there was a warming period and we moved around. Then the ice age came back and we survived it. Then there was the Toba supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago in Indonesia, an eruption similar to Yellowstone, only much bigger. We went from 2,000,000 people to around 2,500 people. This is called the Genetic Bottleneck, and we lost a lot of our species variation, leaving those remnants in reasonably sheltered Africa, where 24/26th of the human genome still lives. The last two bits of it are white people and Asian people. We're the ambitious ones that weren't content to just stay in Africa and sulk. We went everywhere. Eventually. India and Australia and the Phillippines were initially settled by Africans. Later invasions muddled the genetics. The important thing is that those two strains of our genome moved into close proximity of glaciers and evolved to survive there, learned the tricks and became capable of more aggressive adaptation to their environment than those who stayed behind in Africa and spent a lot of energy fighting each other, farming, hunting, and dealing with serious infectious diseases, malaria, and other parasites. Our ancestors had it rough.

Eventually the planet warmed up very suddenly 19,500 years ago, by 10'C, and the ice started to melt. We aren't completely sure of the cause, but it wasn't people. It wasn't coal burning. It wasn't people driving cars. It wasn't the crazy stuff spouting from the Warmer zealots and cultists who have to blame people for hot summer days.

At that point there was so much ice in glaciers and ice sheets that sea level was 80 meters lower than today. When the ice melted, some of it went out to sea, but others were caught in lakes, sometimes blocked by glaciers, such as lake Missoula. When the water level got high enough, the glacier would break off the tip and suddenly the water flowed down, all at once. This is the origin of the Missoula Floods, and it happened dozens of times, about every century, until the ice melted and the glacier retreated. There was so much ice that it took 10,000 years for it to melt. The last bits of glaciers are still up on many high mountains, but the ice sheets are long gone, and mostly were by 8,500 years ago. Since this warm and wet period, the entire planet has been drying out, which is to be expected after melting most of the planets glaciers. This has happened before, several times in the last few million years. And the glaciers always came back. They will come back again too.

Warmers see dry lakes in the desert and in their delusional ignorance, imagine the world is going to dry out and we'll all die. And they find comfort in this. They see wildfires, caused by aggressive firefighting preventing the burning of ladder fuel by natural summer lightning storm-caused fires, and the lack of humans duplicating the effort as they've done for thousands of years because the cleared ground gives you more habitat for deer and rabbits and edible plants, at least here in California. These fires severity is caused by people, but the fires themselves are natural. We don't cause lightning. We cause severe fires. Of course, there's efforts to restart the forest brush clearing using fire fighters and volunteers from the prisons, exchanging labor for a shorter sentence. Trying to fix the mistake caused by some bureaucrats back in 1925, who complained that clearing brush under trees was expensive, so why not just put out all the fires? Within a decade the forests were clogged with unnatural levels of brush. Before people, lightning burned down the brush before it could get tall enough to reach the treetops. Now brush fires get into the treetops, called a Crown Fire, which burns down the whole forest rather than merely the brush around the trunks but leaving the trees alive and healthy. This isn't climate change so the Warmer cultists ignore it. They could be doing useful work clearing the brush and saving the forest, but that's not as easy as blaming everyone, and its meaningful and useful, and Warmers don't want meaningful work. They want blame, accusation, an excuse for hatred and genocide.

Warmers are Luddites, the same kind that used Christianity as the excuse for murdering the Gnostics in the Dark Ages. Warmers hate others succeeding. This is why they attack industry, why that attack societies too poor to afford the fancy clean energy. They don't even have sewers yet, but the Warmers won't accept that these poor people must be allowed to gain sufficient technology, even dirty technology, to improve their living conditions and eventually pay for cleaner technology. You don't uplift the poor by making the rich poor. And that's exactly what the Warmers are doing. Taxing rich people, keeping it for themselves, claiming its for the poor. Warming taxes are just another scam by con men exploiting the religion pretending to be science. Especially considering the names of the current exchange owners, Blood and Gore. The same Gore that promoted the Human caused Global Warming religion in the first place.

If you blame people for nature, you can get money from them to "fix it" and since people can't affect solar output and didn't cause the existing climate, and pretend that variability, which is absolutely normal because climate stability isn't normal, is caused by people so if it gets better, they can say their efforts fixed it. Sort of like rain dancers claim that they make it rain. Its really the very same thing. AGW is rain dancing. Blame the heat on people, charge people money. If it stays hot, people need to pay more. If it cools off, you succeeded. See? And you get rich tricking them. People are suckers. PT Barnum said it best: "There's a sucker born every minute."

Zap Scooter

On the way out of the library on Saturday, I spotted a scooter. I went over to look at it, because I'm an enthusiast of these ultra efficient non-pedaled vehicles. I thought it was a Vespa at first. Then I got closer and realized it was a Zap Bikes scooter.

 

Zap is electric, and it turns out that's what it was. Zap is originally from Sebastopol, about 10 miles west of my home town in Sonoma County. They've since expanded to production in China and moving into Santa Rosa, which is about 5x bigger. The bike is actually nicely made, with sturdy parts. My problem with electric bikes is the batteries. They wear out, and normal gasoline scooters, even cheap 2-smokes, are more durable, cheaper, and cost a tiny fraction as much to operate compared to electric. That sounds ridiculous, I'm sure, but its not the cost of recharging off house power where the cost comes in. Its the cost of replacing the battery after about 200-300 recharges because discharges damage the battery, in a sort of half-life, only its about 20% life every time you discharge the battery more than half. And that's easy to do. This is true with electric bicycles too. And electric cars. But this depends a great deal on the battery material used.

 

Still, it was nice looking, and the owner was probably coming uphill from Nevada City, which is across Hwy 49 and down a short street, a few blocks away basically. I can easily see this being a rational choice locally, provided the owner keeps the trips short. Considering there's a hill between Nevada City and most of the supermarkets, but its a slow road and fine. Wish I could show a video of the way this place looks in 3D. BlogSpot needs the ability to offer maps from google maps. Same company, so why not? Sigh. In any case, with the hills here, even a 49cc scooter like you'd ride in flatlands anywhere don't work well here. Its too steep. The upside of an electric with a sufficiently strong motor and good enough battery is they have torque. So it works here. I'm not sure this is better than being strong on a regular bicycle, but if you aren't super-strong and can afford it, this is an option.

Victorians

The twin towns where I live have a hill between them. This was a gold mining town until 1937 when the mine finally closed, so it attracted some interesting people. It is the original setting of Paint Your Wagon (the musical, not the movie which was filmed near Bend Oregon), and Friday the 13th was filmed up the hill from the library where I volunteer shelving books and fixing audiobook discs and DVDs. Most of the money was stable enough that after various fires burnt down the tent cities, then the rough cabins, then eventually the houses, they rebuilt with brick, stone, and the finer materials available to show of their success, which at the turn of the 20th century meant a mix of Victorians and Craftsman houses. Both towns are full of them, everywhere. Since this was also before them fancy horseless carriages, not all of these homes had carriage houses, though many do out back. This means the front of a Victorian House is a house, not a gaping garage door. One of the things I agree with James Howard Kunstler about is that a house fronted with a garage is ugly from the street. That's like putting the dumpster for a restaurant in front because its more convenient for the garbage truck. Ugh.

This being gold mining territory, there are barely sealed off mine openings all over the place, including in town. The hills are very steep, and the miners walked to work, often carrying tin lunch pails with pasties inside. This is where the mine deliberately recruited miners from Cornwall because its the same kind of territory: hardrock granite with gold bearing pegmatites. And the mines are deep. Two miles, 12,000 feet down. With water draining out of the local streams and rivers and flooding the mines, so they were constantly pumping water to keep access to the lower reaches. For the time, this was a very high tech operation, and the money associated with gold mining was very good. Thus miners and mine owners could afford very nice houses in both towns of Grass Valley and Nevada City. After Franklin Delano Rooseveldt seized all the gold then doubled the price to pay off Federal Debts but ignore private debts and inflation and the ruined economy, then encouraged men at gunpoint to work on public works projects at pennies per day like actual slaves, sometimes to death, war was a relief. And after the war was over the mines were still closed, but the towns were still here, and those who went off to war came back with skills in radio and the new Television, and a yen to build switching systems which later became the modern ultra high tech picture in picture windows you see in the evening news and football games. That's all from Grass Valley Group electronics. Yet again, money to own and update those fancy Victorian houses with the highly ornate wood details, the steep streets with no real parking, and the resulting very close knit community on the hillside.

GVG electronics is closed down, the last dreg bought out by Ze Germinz, and the local competitors aching for multilingual Chinese translators for minimum wage, strangely unable to find those. Funny, right? Without electronics, which largely collapsed with the Dot.com mess back in 2000, there isn't much going on for jobs here, and if not for the people retiring, this would be a ghost town. But Bay Area Baby Boomers are retiring here, because there's so little violence (it is 96% white), its very small so you really can know everybody (combined population of both towns in 12,000), and all the retirees are pretty wealthy, or wealthy enough to be comfortable. Those who live here can afford to choose between the big house on the hill, the nice house in the suburban neighborhood, and the charming Old Victorian in town with no parking. If you choose the Victorian you can't have 5-6 cars. You can have one in the carriage house, one on the street, and might consider a scooter to get around town on the weekend because the tourists use all the parking.

Yes, there are tourists. Lots of them. This old gold mining town, Nevada City in particular, is so compact and steep and well maintained and weird that its worth visiting. Weekends are full of motorcyclists partying and heading up 49 as this is the last real town of any size with significant lodgings before you vanish into the heavily forested road north climbing for a couple hours before reaching Downieville and the Sierra Buttes near Yuba Pass. From there, a motorcyclist can go East and South to Truckee or East to Reno or north to Grayeagle and West down the Feather River Canyon on 70, or up to Lake Almanor, McCloud and Mount Shasta and up to Ashland or down to Redding, Red Bluff, Hwy 99 and the Sutter Buttes. Lovely roads for a weekend ride. We're also relatively close to Tahoe. A city slicker from the Bay Area can ride up to Nevada City on a Friday afternoon, get a beer and a meal, stay the night, take 20 east and on and off 40 through Old Donner Pass, which is very pretty, down to Truckee and then take 85 south to your chosen loop of Lake Tahoe, which is stunning. More than you've heard. Its so amazing it looks fake. So yes, this is a good stop for a tourist who wants to cool off and de-stress from the craphole that is the Bay Area. If the Bay Area opts to convert their highways and bridges into toll roads to pay for their hilarious mistakes and blunders, its entirely possible there will be similar fees for roads here someday. Or perhaps not. Folks here are a lot more independent and don't like govt telling them what to do. Any pot grower will privately admit that regulation will ruin their profits. So does legalization. But its coming.

It is common to see bicyclists who like their hill climbs on the roads here at the end of the week and the weekends. Thankfully, cars are used to it so crashes are quite rare. We even have those "take the lane" signs for cyclists in certain narrow sections, and they do, and cars don't run over them. You have to be very fit to ride here, but you can ride here safely. So we get a lot of bicycle tourists. Their parking needs are a place for their carrier vehicle with the rack, then they get around, including to restaurants near the B&B (with a $4K carbon fiber race bike of course $300/night is fine!). Then again, I rarely see them outside the restaurants so perhaps they walk to those. Still, a great place to ride.

I see young people, old people, divorced working women, old men, and college students on scooters fairly often now. Great place for it. With the twisty roads and lack of parking, they're a great way to get around. You still do your grocery run in the car, and that means you still need a car, but that's once a week kind of thing.

I think that eventually the housing bubble will burst fully and home prices will eventually reflect the ability to pay a mortgage. Since most wages here are Minimum, which is $9/hr., that means a house needs to be about 1/3 the take home pay of two adults making only Minimum Wage, essentially a married couple. Marriage is a man and a woman living together and raising children. Other partnerships offer a lot more free income, and thus can afford a nicer house. There's a few polygamous group marriages I've spotted, and multifamily multi-generation homes also around. They tend not to be very stable, however, and you need stable finances for a mortgage. The Victorians are going for the local premium price due to location in town and most are restored at this point, with insulated electric wires and new plumbing to replace the old rotten leaking pipes full of sediment and rust. Soft flooring is usually a sign of rot, and more work needing to be done. Same with doors that swing open or shut, meaning the building is tilting. You get that in old houses. But they are very pretty, and driving through neighborhoods of Victorians is a joy to the eyes. We just don't do craftsmanship and detail work anymore, and we should. When all jobs are minimum wage, and we're headed there, you may as well do a good job to protect your employment. Because at minimum wage, you're infinitely replaceable. It is ironic that work quality must rise when pay is the lowest.

Teardrop Trailer

The great thing about ridding yourself of "stuff", is you can start figuring out your own minimum life requirements, what you can actually stand. And when these basic requirements are really small, you can tow a teardrop trailer behind your car from place to place. Maybe park it somewhere fancy, maybe a campground, maybe the back yard of a friend willing to rent you the space and hookup external power cord for comforts.

 

Yes, a teardrop trailer is the size of a tent and you can't stand up inside, which is really annoying when you get dressed in the morning, but it has metal sides, keeps the rain out, and a kitchen stove and sink hides under the lid off the back. Not super comfy, but better than a tent in most other ways. Can be air conditioned or heated if done carefully. Can hold your Laptop for movies and communications. What do you still need?

 

A bathroom. A shower. Somewhere to wash clothes. A proper kitchen with a roof, though technically you could pitch a tall tent over the kitchen you can stand under and keeps the rain off and the bugs out of the food. Give it a flue. Most people put a propane bottle on the front platform, or even a storage bin of stuff to help counterbalance, but I've seen bicycles and even a motorcycle up there before. A scooter will work too. Pot growers would probably want to paint their trailer something more subdued, and put an enduro bike on the front, so they can park their 4WD or truck rather than waste gas when they can't afford to. An artist would probably enjoy one, allowing them to park wherever folks are friendly, or on BLM land with a permit or up in National Forest, same thing. There's a lot of legal places you can tow these to camp in.

 

This teardrop trailer is interesting as the smallest possible you can still use. And light enough to haul behind a common sedan. This designer built it for less than $2K. That's very affordable for a home you tow behind yourself. With less than 44% of American adults actually employed anymore, the other 56% struggling to survive could probably use these to escape the terrible economy they voted for so overwhelmingly in the last two elections. Hope and change, remember?

 

I think a teardrop is the very most basic level of towable shelter, and they're great for that. I'd personally rather have one I could stand up inside, has an indoor kitchen, and a bathroom. And I'd like much more serious insulation. I recently lived in an apartment that was 740 square feet, which was big enough, but the neighbors stomping and screeching and thumping really ruined it for me. If I had separate walls it would be fine. Especially getting enough light. I like light during my day. Murky darkness wears on me after a while. I'm not cut out for Portland or Seattle or Northeast snowstorms. Make sure your home is big enough you don't go crazy, or that you understand this kind of living space is temporary, enough to motivate you to build a proper house. Learn the Uniform Building Code, and find out the costs for permits etc where you live, in case you opt to buy property and build a house. In the old days, you used to be able to file papers with the US Forest Service and they'd lease you land for 99 years and you built a cabin with minimal taxes on it for the duration. You and a friend put something together. Maybe cut down local trees with a chainsaw to build an actual log cabin. Those were better times. More capable people, less whining about safety regulations by people everyone should ignore, especially because it drives those people nuts when you do.

$160K Airstream luxury trailer. No trash live in these.

If you have an SUV or truck, which can tow something bigger, look into a used trailer and rebuild the inside. A rehabilitated trailer with better insulation than standard, new interior and fixtures is going to be better quality when original. Restoring Airstream trailers became a popular thing for the wealthy idle rich, those 1% trust babies pretending to be lumber jacks or sheep herders because the like the way it looks, and grow beards even though it makes them look dangerously unhinged because all their friends have beards. I don't understand that, but I'm getting older. Being generation gapped is a modern reality. Bigger trailers don't have to be heavy. Quite a few are built with aluminum panels rather than steel or wood, which when coupled with fiberglass greatly reduces the weight. A big one like the above airstream is heavy, and needs a serious tow vehicle, usually going for the 5th wheel (overhead hitch) rather than the pictured trailer hitch. Those are more stable on the highway and easier to tow.

 

Another option is the A-frame pop-top trailer. This has overlapping insulated fiberglass shells which pop up and latch together, making more living space inside, yet fold down for much easier transportation. This is more comfortable and secure than a traditional canvas pop-top or the old school Westphalia VW campervan. Remember those?

Not comfortable, but better than sleeping in your car. And slightly fashionable too, like a Vespa. They also tend to overheat because they are air-cooled, and make a terrible sound when their oil burns up. Bad rings and blowing smoke are another trait of VW buses. Most Japanese vans would be a better choice to convert. Like a Mitsubishi people carrier with the seats swapped for furnishings and a sink.

 

The hardest part of any of these is the money. And the next hardest part is where to park it when not in use, and even more, where to park it when you're camping inside. I know I'm curmudgeonly, and opinionated. I wouldn't have a blog if I had no opinions. Would you live in one of these if you lost your job, or your career required you to be more mobile but didn't pay well enough to afford those Motels and still make a profit? Yeah, sucks. I know. So would you live in one of these?

Book Review: Bloodstar (Star Corpsman 1)

Interesting hard scifi, complete with the traditional FTL, but non-traditional aliens, which I found interesting. In this series, alien life is very common, but not all of it talks to each other much. Most planets with water under their frozen surfaces have life under the ice. The author writes about medicine, and the advantages of nanotechnology to battlefield medicine. Very interesting stuff, actually. Normally, medicine is pretty dull stuff, lots of the same things over and over again, and not much changes. It is reasonably easy to learn because it doesn't change. It is easier to understand than programming computers. There's only one body, after all.

It is pretty interesting to have a story where the main character is a doctor, and rather than be focused on shooting people with space guns, they fix people shot by them. That's very different. And I rather enjoy it. Of course, I'm a mature person so a lot of the traditional topics of scifi bore me. And I understand better than most that we've living history, so someday people will still be people, even with different technology and different patterns of living. Its a big part of why I'm so passionate about geography.

One of the setting details is the return of the ice age. I'm so pleased to see that in a novel that doesn't suck. Anthropogenic Global Warming fanatics irritate me like pot smoking hippies, flat earth society, militant vegetarians, and all those other religious cults based on money and abuse. He even mentions building the new UN building on the ecuator because the ice in New York has made living there too miserable.

When I finish this one, I'll listen to the sequel.

Russians Shoot Down Passenger Jet

The initial report is a Russian fighter jet shot down a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet over Ukraine.

If so, this is a tragic loss of life over a warzone, and if deliberate is not just an act of war but a war crime.

Asked for his response, the current American president stated: "I'm not sure an actual tragedy has occurred." Yah know... even Jimmy Carter, the previous standard of presidential incompetence, had more decency to him than that. If the current guy actually said that, why is there pushback on impeachment?

A later report claims that a surface to air missile controlled by the Russian Separatists in Ukraine shot down the passenger jet. This is important, and not confirmed, because the Russian separatists have insisted over and over they didn't have the anti-aircraft missiles, that they never did, so its possible someone else, say the Russian Military forces across the border, or possibly the Ukraine loyalists, did. We don't know. We know that flying aircraft over Russian Airspace is asking to be shot down. That Russia is unstable. That its govt is unstable. That its weapons are sort of out of control, and who knows who is firing them off, or what they're aiming at. We know that Putin used special forces demolitions experts to bomb apartment buildings in Moscow to gain a political excuse to attack Chechnya and Soviet Georgia, and massacre Ossetia. All they had to do was kill a few thousand people in the apartment buildings in Moscow. And that's fine, right? Good communists! Loyal, dying apartments collapsing communists are glad to die so Putin can kill even more, and seize territory, right?

So the claims in Ukraine? Wait and see what the truth turns out to be. It might be Russian missiles, fired by Russians, sneaking across the border. The Separatists might get blamed in order to end the border war before the Russian Formula 1 race coming up in the next few months, since that would affect revenues for tourism, and cancelling the race would hurt Russia's reputation. The Russians really don't want the world investors dumping their stocks, but you'd be a FOOL to own any investments in Russia. Putin is nuts, or pretending to be. Either way, the result is instability, and that's bad for investing.

Update: Apparently, the separatists have enough control of anti-aircraft missiles that not only have they shot down a passenger plane, they've shot down a Ukraine air force jet. It is likely that the Russians (Putin) is supplying the weapons, and its known that Putin provided the training for the separatists to operate anti-aircraft missiles. So the real question here is: should Ukraine and much of surrounding Russia be considered a No Fly Zone?

Divide California Paperwork Submitted

Tim Draper, a silicon valley billionaire, has submitted the paperwork to put dividing California into six states onto the ballot this fall. He needed 800K signatures, but provided 1.3 million. This indicates the idea has more traction than people thought.

 

The idea behind it is govt in California is too big and indifferent to look after actual resident needs. In particular, trying to enforce laws which make sense in one region but is utterly useless or harmful in another can finally be fixed by creating new state lines. The state lines are a legal identity in the first place: one law on one side, another law on the other. Counties aren't funded well enough, nor do they have the ability to stop obnoxious lawmakers in LA from ruing life in Eureka. Dividing the state into 6 corrects this problem. We'll have all new problems, instead, but at least the new problems won't be the same old hopeless ones. New problems, local problems, can be fixed when the solution has to be local too.

 

I don't think the sub-states will give a damn if Congress approves the new lines or not. Once it passes on the ballot, it's law as far as the parent-State is concerned, and figuring out the budget and tax laws will be the interesting next step.

 

Considering my current residence in North California is a weird state which includes lake Tahoe and my home town out near the coast and most of the active wine country with Jefferson border north of me, full of poverty, and Sacramento part of this state, the city nobody really wants. We also end up with Davis, Napa Valley, Sonoma, Alexander Valley, Bodega Bay, Marin County, and Point Reyes. The tax revenues from Marin County and Tahoe will provide plenty of cash for the state, provided they don't spent it all on welfare crapholes like Vallejo and South Sacramento. Those are towns needing dedicated arsonists.

 

Jefferson contains the two largest dammed reservoirs, and three of the biggest rivers. They also have the most pot growers. And one of their stated goals is legalizing pot. For them, not getting arrested, and growing dope openly, by large volumes, is declaring war on the Mexican smuggling cartels. Serious dope production would strip most of the money out of Mexico, and they'd fight it if they can. But they pretty much can't. Jefferson is too far from Mexico for cross border corruption to work, and any Mexicans caught will be slaughtered. The folks living up there have no compunctions over that sort of extra-legal correction of border patrol corruption. The border patrol lets the smugglers in, the locals kill them when they show up. I wonder what the death toll will end up being? And are the Mexican mob killing drug growers in Colorado this summer? Or are they going to steal their harvests first, so the killing hasn't started yet? In any case, Jefferson is all about the Agriculture, and legalizing the illegal kind. They've got control of the downstream water supply and could easily insist on cutting releases into the Sacramento River in order to refill Shasta and Oroville reservoirs, leaving the rivers very low south of Marysville. I wonder if Sacramento would send troops north to Oroville and try and seize the dam by force? Probably not. Sacramento is all about the bribes. I don't think those will work.

 

Silicon Valley is welcome to suffering with San Francisco and Berkeley and Oakland in its borders. The arguments should drive lots of rational people out, and the massive tax increase will prove too much for the welfare dependent. Since the water there comes from other states, they are going to find desalination a really important detail. And rue the toxins in the San Joaquin Delta where they pump water near Antioch and around the Bay to Oakland. Hayward and San Jose and the Peninsula get their water from Tracy, which would now be Central California, the Forgotten State. The Salinas Valley remains in agriculture, and the new state holds Big Sur and Monterey and Carmel. In theory, its lots of potential money and jobs and taxes.

 

Central California has Stockton and Fresno and Merced. Its got Yosemite, so they can make some tourist money. And they've got the Train To Nowhere. Perhaps they'll restore their passenger train system and stations again. Heavy Rail passenger trains like the ACE (Altamont Commuter Express) would work along all those towns on Hwy 99. Lots of orchards and quite a few serious reservoirs and the San Joaquin River. They also have free reign to cutoff LA's access to the Owens River, in the eastern part of the new state, which means they can develop agriculture there again. The Long Valley used to be a serious place for growing crops, like Salinas. The agricultural state should focus on what its good at, and how to deal with its water supply, and whether to pump its water to LA or not.

 

Western California, which runs from San Luis Obispo into LA and Riverside, and up into the San Bernardino Mountains, would retain its essential character. They will just have to pay FULL PRICE for water, instead of making the rest of us pay. I expect that price to be quite dear, sufficiently expensive to drive the illegals out of the state, which should cut LA's population by about 2/3, and thus reduce their water demand the same amount. That solves much of the problem. Since we already know that the Border Patrol ignores illegals crossing, I suspect it will be necessary to have border patrol guards and inspectors in every state, and after illegals get shot, they'll find it safer not to come here at all. Maybe LA housewives, if there's such a thing, will look after their own damn kids and clear their own damn bathrooms and cook their own damn food. I've never seen or met a Mexican housekeeper up here. As far as I can tell, that's an LA thing. LA can pay full price.

 

South California, which ironically contains most of the Mojave Desert, Palm Springs, and San Diego and Imperial Valley, needs to renegotiate on their Colorado River water access. If they get it, good for them. San Diego is so alien to me it really feels like another state already. This is where the drug smugglers rule, and the border patrol take long siestas, their entire jobs, their whole careers, letting the aliens waltz across to steal jobs. Not just from me, but from those who came here legally, raised families, and became semiskilled farm labor, like those in the vineyards who are third or fourth or tenth generation American citizens whose ancestors were Mexican once. They don't want competition over wages on the fields they've been working for generations. The voters in Central California will decide. Then negotiate with South California for transportation options.

 

Congress ignoring the new states will impact the senate, of course, since redrawing the districts and having new elections based on the new districts will need to happen right away, making for some odd changes at the House of Representatives too. Nancy Pelosi said "You can find out about what's in the bill after you vote for it" (how she forced Obamacare into law) can expect to have to choose which state she's in: Vallejo-Napa or Oakland and understand that once she chooses she may be out of the job. As many fuzzy hippies as there are in North California, there's also some grim multimillionaires who think she needs to be kicked to the curb with the rest of the trash. Redistricting has a huge impact on survival, which is why her evil political party is so ruthless about it to retain power, and when you consider that the majority of the state of California is utterly republican, the danger to her is real. More dangerous if she somehow stays in power since that may result in some unusual response to correct. No idea what that would be, but when a problem presents itself, folks find solutions. California is about crushing dreams, after all. That Jiminy Cricket wishing crap is LA BS.

 

If California succeeds in dividing, and finally settles down into rational govt instead of mocking itself with incompetence, other states will follow. And there's been quite a few of these movements over the years.

 

• Eastern Oregon has nothing in common with damned Portlandia. A Portland-Vancouver city-state would probably make both the states they're pulled from breathe a sigh of relief.
• Eastern Washington has nothing in common with Seattle. Seattle is too much like Berkeley, and Eastern Washington just wants to see the Apple Harvest.
• Most of Nevada finds Las Vegas to be ugly, disgusting, and just another suburb of LA.
• Colorado wants to divide the Western Slope from Denver, and the plains part of the state thinks they'd like to divide too.
• West Texas and South Texas need to be different states from Dallas North Texas and East Texas, which is nearly Louisiana according to folks who have been there. Austin Texas is sort of like Berkeley politics, which offends most Texans. Shoving that into a state full of oil wells and rednecks would be a great joke on them.

So yeah, it would happen here first, but we'll see other states follow and pretty soon there would be a hundred states, and DC can try and manage Puerto Rico. Good luck with that. I don't care. I'm only interested in local issues, local problems, local solutions.  

Catalyzed Aluminum Oxidation

Thermite is chemically powerful. It stores immense energy with very common materials, namely aluminum metal and iron oxide. The oxide provides the oxygen to the aluminum which enables the reaction to run extremely hot without requiring external air, so it will work underwater or in a closed space if need be. This mostly gets used in military applications, but there's a few industrial applications where it can be used for welding or demolitions. There's even a type of welding that uses explosives to mechanically join thick plates of steel by bashing them together. I spent two years learning welding, and I learned some metallurgy in the process.

The limitation of thermite is the process only goes one way. And its very hot, an out of control reaction you start, then run away while it consumes its materials until the oxidation is finished. The US military uses slabs of aluminum to power their emergency radios for nuclear bomb launches, which makes a really weird noise btw. The radios, I mean. Not the bombs. Aluminum used like this oxidizes in the air, turning into powder, into dust. It falls off exposing more to the air to oxidize and releases electricity in the process. And lots of heat. But its very reliable and requires no external power source beyond a battery to start it going. You can't reverse this process because you can't pull the oxygen off the aluminum metal. Which is a real shame.

I'd been pondering this question since shortly after learning just how few types of rechargeable batteries there are. And learning that most sit in either acid baths or brines. Acids allow for easy exchange of hydrogen and hydroxide ions with metals via anode and cathode, so you can add or remove electricity very methodically, and those batteries stop working when they dry out. This is why you can often fix a bad battery that stops working after you overheat your engine by popping the top and adding some bottled water till it fills back up. Recharge and boom, it works again. Had this happen when someone who should have known better did that, and saved myself about $140 with a $1 bottle of water. Just like that.

I have to wonder of the aluminum electrolysis reaction will work in water, and if it requires either acid or a salt-brine of some kind to catalyze the reaction. Buffer it down so it won't overheat, won't run away and melt what its been put into, won't tear the water into hydrogen gas and explode, and will allow you to put electricity back into it to return it to metal, and charge it back up. In essence, what combination will turn thermite from a burning explosive into a battery. A battery with materials so common everybody on earth could have a vehicle powered by this, and have plenty of those materials left over. As it happens, Iron and Aluminum are extremely common elements. You find them in most soils. Clay is aluminum oxide with some silicates and other stuff, but pure clay, used to make electronics is also the raw materials for sapphire and ruby. And still aluminum oxide. Aluminum 2, Oxygen 5. Strip out the oxygen using electricity and you get aluminum metal. Its that stripping which needs to be reversible and done on demand without overheating. That's your battery.

The energy density, depending on the buffering efficiency, is still better than lithium, so you'd need something like 1/3 as much battery pack to get the same amount of useful power as a lithium battery. If the buffering catalyst is stronger, the battery runs cooler but needs more bulk for accessible power. I think we do need to accept that batteries need cooling. Heat sinks. And possibly heaters. Their chemical reactions do release heat. Not as noisy or noticeable as an internal combustion car engine, but heat just the same.

I hope that somebody is doing these experiments, methodically trying to find a catalyst that works for aluminum oxide. There's really no real need for iron in this equation, just a source of oxygen to react with the aluminum metal and back again. If I had a chemistry lab, I'd do it myself. Probably starting with reading up on physical chemistry so I can understand what's going on, then run some simulations, and test the likely ones to see if they actually match or if the data in them is wrong.

If a military had discovered this trick, they'd likely keep it secret for an advantage, though at this point, we're looking at interstate genocide using fracking, causing cancer, earthquakes, and eventually killing millions for those last drops of expensive oil. Isn't a super-battery a better strategic move that saves lives and prevents wars, and lets us leave the oil in the ground? And our water untainted? This is why I hope the solution isn't already discovered. Ignorance is better than sadism.

Other than electric cars, and electric buses, you could also use these batteries for electric delivery vehicles, for electric bicycles much lighter than current ones, since it would fit inside the frame, and new computer batteries for laptops and cellphones which should last all day or week on a charge, and no charge memory. It's not lithium or cadmium.

The brine solution might be something as simple as boron in water, which readily breaks apart into ions and would transport well, but doesn't generally bond with aluminum so should allow it to be a two way reaction instead of forming a new boron-aluminum mineral, something we try to avoid with a battery. Boron is the active part in borax soap. Another option would be sodium, from table salt. Sodium chloride might work well with aluminum, but I'd probably want to research any minerals those form. If there's a mineral, then its a stable outcome, which would cause the reaction to stop working as the crystal grows, meaning it would stop being a battery and "wear out" eventually. Not a desired outcome. A professional chemist, one not completely bound by their own narcissism (I have worked with professional chemists for years, and yes, that's a serious character flaw of that field), might know some shortcuts, or be willing to mathematically examine it. Electronics is all about the weird tweaks of chemistry, after all.

Maybe there's some tweak for this century's equivalent of the incandescent lightbulb filament? Only this time, it saves a billion lives. That's what electric vehicles could do, best case. Electric tractors to grow food, remember. When the oil runs out, we lose a lot of food production. And algae that makes diesel fuel is just asking to fill out drinking water and oceans with fire. Not a bright idea. This is safer. This is less destructive. This would save more lives.

Divide Already

I want to be kind here, but the news this evening sure is all about how things have never been worse since Carter was president, completely reviled by the public and the world, and war actually going on. And things are worse than that, under the current indifferent office holder.

 

The foolishness in the East is not completely unique. The West has its foolishness, of a completely different kind. After we go our separate ways, and are left to develop on more even footing. When the West can actually invest in infrastructure and laws we can actually AFFORD instead of how some Massachusetts prick finds convenient to their own needs and standards. We don't salt our roads. Our cars don't rust out in 3 years. We care a great deal about water, and wild fires, and landslides. We don't care at all about hurricanes, and we don't really have ice storms. We do get intense rain and landslides. And sometimes, in a few places, floods.

 

I'd like to see the state vote on dividing. On voting to divide. Figure out what the lines are next, but vote to divide first. The poor are really stupid, and they'll assume that the Federal govt will give them Welfare either way. They will be poor and desperate either way. Whether they live in one huge California, or one of 6 California fragments. Or even three Californias.

This is the most rational division. Give or take a county here or there. It would mean re-negotiating water rights. LA gets to be LA, all by its lonesome. Hollywood can finally control a state exactly the way it wants to. And Jefferson can be sufficiently large, with counties that have ALREADY voted to put this on the ballot. Yes, their plan has holes in it, but like Ukraine, they're voting to leave California because the state is both unmanageable and indifferent to rural concerns. Because racists in LA and racists in Hollywood and Racists in Oakland and racists in Berkeley and racists in Fresno and racists in San Diego and racists in Orange County... lots of racists. Everybody has a motivation, an angle, someone to hurt in order to help themselves, a finger to point to. Division enables this, but sticking together has only created more racists, more power struggles, more incompetence and gridlock and abuse.

 

California will be improved by dividing and finding its destiny. The downside of Jefferson is its all about growing dope, and auctioning off the water at a much higher price, to pay for everything else. With control of the two largest dams in the entire state, and three of the biggest rivers (Sacramento, Feather, and Yuba), and a huge amount of money from the rice growing region. If the central state wants a pile of money for port access, then the north will get its own port to export rice through. There's already hostility from one county to another, when people do actual business. Northerners like me hate Angelinos for stealing my water and taxes. They have better roads than we do, and they make sure the illegals can vote. Several times. Because voting illegals keep all the money in the state going there. Divide the state and suddenly the cheating votes won't mean a thing to us anymore. The anger will end. The hostility will be over. New lines will allow us to be better neighbors, and ignore the crap they do. It won't be our problem anymore. Their choices are not our responsibility when there's a border between us.

 

And maybe the rest of the nation will see how dividing helped us settle down and end the hatreds between us, be removing power by racists over their chosen hatreds. All those haters in New York City won't be able to tell us what to do in Reno or Spokane or even in Marysville. Twin Falls has nothing in common with Hollywood. We don't need to hear the opinions of Actors about how to deal with vicious mother-eating grizzly bears. And the hint: its not giving them big hugs. Or understanding their feelings. This is why Hollywood needs to stick to what its good at. Or isn't good at anymore. Remaking movies endlessly suggests they aren't good at it anymore.

Look at the blue spots, and look at the everywhere red. America is divided, and everyone in the red areas feels cheated by those in the blue. Now remember where the food grows. There's some in the Mississippi River Valley, and some in a few other places. But mostly? Notice any correlation between color and food supply? Think of all the ways the libs won't have to work when all the field hicks are living their chosen way, not polluting the perfect leftist cities. The ones that have to buy their food from those redneck hicks they openly despise. I wonder what they'd charge? Or if leftist money is worth a thing when push comes to shove?

Something to think about.

Drug Related Desperation in California

Thanks to the local economy being crap, and pay being minimum wage, with no benefits offered for long periods of time, and the most common insult being "folks stay here for YEARS" (at minimum wage with no raises), and many jobs listed are for the sole purpose of scaring the existing slave employee into working harder. I still see jobs listed as room and board only, no pay. There's a reason for this: drug production. There's a lot of pot farms here. And the people running these pot farms screw over everybody for money. Their employees who only get a roof and a meal in exchange for their work, which is exactly what a slave got before the Civil War. So modern pot farmers working for room and board are slaves. Those who negotiate better get some of the pot they grow, and sell it on to a dealer in the Bay Area, where people have an endless appetite for drugs to deal with the horrors of living there, which consists of people on X, drunks, hookers, murderers, serial killers, serial rapists, lesbians, gays, hipsters, gangers, ex-cons, escrow agents, telemarketers, politicians, pizza delivery boys, job exporters, fraudsters, bioweapons designers, and lawyers. Those are the worst. So people unfortunate enough to live there use a lot of drugs to forget what they're surrounded by. All that racing ambition, all that desire to do something more. If they weren't so ready to stomp down everybody to climb a little higher, the place might be bearable. Oh well. Can't fix what's broken when 10 million people prefer things this way. Wage slaves are also slaves.

Around here there are frequent home invasion robberies, but the important detail is the homes invaded are always drug dealers or pot growers, and the invader is usually an unpaid worker who'd put a lot of time in, promised money, then kicked out without pay, or with less pay. Sometimes the dealer/grower is killed. Sometimes they're tortured. I suspect many of these cases aren't reported, since both parties are breaking the law. And don't kid yourself. While there are some permits for growing "medical" marijuana, there are very few actually issued, so most growers are felony committing, and murder is just an additional penalty to add to a lengthy prison sentence. There's pot growers down in the outskirts of Sacramento, and along the foothills down the length of the Sierras to the mountains above LA, and back north and west. Realistically, there's too much land growing pot these days, and while there's a big appetite for it in San Francisco and Oakland and San Jose, if there's too much product, the price falls. This makes the growers unable to raise the funds they expected, so they have to cut their expenses. And things tend to be tight so often this means giving up necessities or not paying your workers and dealing with their revenge. And the eventual home invasion, torture for the money/drugs location/combination/PIN, and murder. And that's the primary crime in this region. Drug related. These people are armed, without a permit, driving crappy old 4WD trucks with serious offroad tires. Wearing nasty clothes. Heavily tanned from working with the plants all the time. Some don't bathe enough. Others are starting to catch on to the need for soap. They live on the Ridge, all the way up to Bowman Lake, halfway between Donner Pass and Downieville, a rough region between the Feather River and Interstate 80, the Yuba River and so many low forests, deep canyons, hidden places. Its the boonies, very much like West Virginia, and if booze were illegal they'd be moonshiners because there is no industry otherwise. The clearcut days are over. The jobs from clearcutting all the trees in your home are over. That's the big problem with the Bubble Economy. Eventually the exploitation ruins it, and the resource is gone or the money goes out of it. And all you get left are people without jobs. Left behind with nothing better to do than have kids they can't afford to feed, and prey on each other.

The people in that lawless desperate region, the Ridge, are big fans of Survivalist resources, and use those to help themselves survive and thrive in their chosen illegal method of making cash, namely growing and selling pot, which isn't quite legal. These are the big fans of solar power, because they can set up sneaky pot farms on stolen land. These are the reason that BLM has guns and bulletproof APCs. They learn how to pump water without being tied to the grid, to water their pot plants. They learn how to modify vehicles to travel on roads too rough for regular cars, to get to their hidden pot fields. They learn how to camp, quietly, hidden, while tending them. They defend their pot fields from thieves, observing and waiting for the plants to ripen, then harvest at the right time this Fall. And every year, the pot is worth a bit less. So those who get pot harvested and packaged for sale are under serious threat of bankruptcy. Even when everything goes right, they can still lose money on the sale. They have too much competition, and drug dealers, buying this product, find themselves in volume discount territory, but with increased risk of arrest by having too many customers, and risk being both turned by police, or shot dead by competing dealers, or organized crime assassins. The dope dealers face a lot of risk.

Those growing mediocre or low grade pot that doesn't sell to picky dealers find themselves motivated to make "honey oil" which is essentially liquid hash hish. This is sort of like turning fresh blackberries into pies or jam. Its value added drugs. I'm sure that's how the processors see it. Narcotics officers see the people burnt by the honey oil FIRES, which burn down apartments and houses. A local motel, less than a mile from here, had both honey oil processing AND a meth lab AND caches of hidden guns, money, and packaged bricks of drugs ready for sale. Everybody involved with that was arrested, and the owner of the motel hired new people with orders not to rent to anybody local. The trouble with local homes if drugs end up being processed in ridiculous places. A house up my street here melted its own pipes dumping Meth chemicals down the toilet, and the stink got the Environmental Health inspector to visit. The folks dumping the drugs ran for it, and got away too, since "false name, paid cash" was how they rented in the first place.

I knew a guy who'd bought a house in Tracy on a NINJA loan as income property then rented to a Chinese couple. He was Chinese himself and figured it was the thing to do. Turns out that couple grew pot in the bedroom after sealing plastic over the windows to keep in the light, and there were weird marks on the carpet. He was baffled that he'd been so thoroughly fooled by their cash rent payments, and claims a friend with a sniffer dog checked and found nothing after they vanished, however I could tell he was lying about that part. They'd been growing drugs. He just didn't want his house seized under existing narcotics laws. Some significant percentage of homes in Elk Grove are rented for the express purpose of growing drugs or brewing meth. The crime there, and home invasions are the key sign of this, has turned Elk Grove from a nice if slightly boring commuter town south of Sacramento into a hellhole where you can get shot crossing the street. Like Stockton, only less noticed in the media.

All things considered, a crap economy leads to these desperate and risky drug production and sale problems. Too much cash involved, and too many murders result. A person living in an area like this needs to have a visible job, a not too nice car, not too nice stuff, and no suspicious lights or smells. When I worked in downtown, I went for a walk and spotted several pot gardens within a few blocks of my job on Main Street. I suspect if I flew over this town in a small plane I could see plenty more, and the local Sheriff has said there's too much of that going on around here he can't make arrests for, thanks to the fuzzy definitions of a medical marijuana law. This is what happens when gasoline gets so expensive, and jobs so scarce, that people with roots in the ground and can't leave, can no longer make a living commuting down the mountain. The bigger the troubles in the Middle East and Russia, the higher the price of oil, the more people facing desperate choices. For them, making Marijuana Legal only keeps them out of jail, but bankruptcy, which drove the law breaking in the first place, remains a serious threat. The desperation is still there.

I am just an observer to this local and state problem. I've witnessed things, and wonder about what's beyond a strangely hanging tarp, or why some manzanita likely to catch fire isn't cleared along a section of road, or what's beyond in an obvious clearcut, or why there's activity in a disused orchard. You see stuff when you look beyond the distraction. I don't know how these people actually feel about their almost legal job growing dope. I don't know how they'll feel about the risks they took when the price crashes, and they have to pay taxes after it is made legal. I figure that's inevitable, even with Gov. Brown against Potheads, something he said to the point being they should move to Washington State if they want to get high.

When Gov. Moonbeam is fed up with hippies and wants to talk about construction contracts, California is a different story from the advertising. I'd like to talk to him about reservoir silt, and levee repairs, and disaster planning, and how to use the water we've got for best effect, so there's both salmon AND agriculture jobs growing food we can export. We need both. I'd like to talk to him about getting campground managers and reopening the campgrounds so the tourists will come and spend money in our wild places and show their friends how great California is on vacation. The way it was 30 years ago. I suspect he'd like that too. There is a balance possible, after all. We have really nice weather here.

It comes down to keeping people lawfully employed, rather than desperate, miserable, and murderous. This shouldn't be so difficult. I wonder if the pot farmers who mostly aren't getting paid to tend plants owned by someone else, would take jobs planting and tending trees in high erosion areas after fires come through, replanting clearcuts and then tending to them to keep those saplings growing till the roots hit ground water and can grow without them, pay them to succeed rather than follow the law and fail. Because laws are written by idiots, not experts. If these jobs paid to succeed, those who must live in the boonies can work legally. Instead of go bad and eventually murder people for money, which is what a Home Invader really is, after all. Armed burglary with the intent to kill. They have those every couple weeks, that get reported. Who knows how many don't? Most of the crime in this area is drug related. All of it desperate, and everybody who gets caught wasn't thinking things through. They didn't realize the little law they broke would become big ones soon enough. It kinda snowballs.