SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY – Ramparts of Civilization

May 25, 2020

Back To The Future : America Resumes Manned Flight

It’s not particularly a good time for assessing the legacy of President Barack Hussein Obama. The ever developing story of his administration’s corruptive efforts to first prevent, and eventually, as they felt impelled to protect their legacy, to disable the administration of his successor President Trump is not exactly going to shine historical glory upon him or his crew. Given the number of sleazy and potentially criminal acts, some in the inner circle are at risk of having to write their memoirs from a jail cell. The mainstream press, that coated their devotion to President Obama beneath the absurd cover story that the administration was “scandal free”, now labors to dismiss the actions and revealed facts that may point instead to the worst political scandal in American history, an attempt at an orchestrated coup. Obama’s disdain for the populist Trump heralded a magnum opus in the Obama Administration’s repetitive pattern to use and abuse the power of multiple agencies to intimidate and subvert their opponents’ ability to resist or defeat Obama’s progressive agenda. No amount of positives will overcome the negative effect on legacy this core corruption will reflect.

That said, one seemingly contrarian decision in 2010 by President Obama to eliminate monopolistic government control and the massively expensive and suffocating bureaucracy accompanying it is producing spectacular dividends and will likely project a positive American story for decades to come. Reviewing the American space program, President Obama cancelled the Constellation program, designed as a manned flight successor to the space shuttle, and determined to leave both the innovation and the risks of manned flight away from the bloated NASA agency and into the hands of fledgling private companies. The decision was met with howls of derision from both within the NASA community and the halls of Congress, so intensely wedded to the distant successes of NASA and the myth that the challenges of manned flight were “too big” for private companies to take on. It is not clear that President Obama recognized anything more than that the Constellation program would spend billions and billions over budget, and he had other more pressing uses for that money in other governmental bureaucracies. Regardless of the motives, the decision by Obama to redirect space toward private enterprise has brought incredible results, innovation, and on May 27, 2020, the first attempt since the last shuttle flight in 2011 to return Americans to space on a bonafide American craft. If all goes according to plan, Space X’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, propelled atop the Falcon 9 reusable rocket, will transport Astronauts Robert Behnken and Doug Hurley on a mission to the International Space Station, safely deliver them, then autonomously return to Earth. So will begin the return of America to manned space flight, and this time, with multiple private enterprise competitors and massive projected commercial interest, a permanent and uninterrupted place in space travel.

The commercial angle is of course at the heart of the future permanence of space flight. The enormous success of the American Apollo program to develop a reproducible craft for Moon exploration held the publics’ attention, and their support for the massive public expenditure, right up to the point where it was proven feasible and subsequently reproducible. Public interest waned rapidly as six successful moon landings took place, separated by one spectacular failure in Apollo 13 that still showed the “can do” spirit. The subsequent Spacelab, Apollo Soyuz Rendezvous in Space, or the incredibly sophisticated Space Shuttles, eventually interacting with the International Space Station could hold public interest for only so long. The ominous danger of manned flight in space always lurked, and with the deaths of 14 astronauts in the Challenger and Columbia accidents, the willingness to publicly invest in the cost of linking people and spacecraft seemed unreasonable and without purpose. With the July, 2011 Atlantis Space Shuttle mission completed, America, the one time undisputed pre-eminent champion of innovation in space travel, was required to sit back and watch the Chinese develop a successful manned program aiming for the moon, and to perpetually rent at exorbitant prices, seats on the Russian Soyuz for their astronauts.

May 27, 2020 will be back to the future through the vision of an immigrant American named Elon Musk. This quirky but brilliant engineer has retrograde engineered visions of seemingly impossible concepts into multiple companies that produce plausible and potentially economically viable realities. Tesla is the realization of a mass produced reliable electric vehicle designed to outperform the gasoline engine. The Boring Company seeks to reduce urban traffic congestion while maintaining the concept and empowering freedom of individual transportation, while Hyperloop seeks to apply the speed of air travel to ground transportation. Neuralink boldly looks to cure brain injury, and with it begin an evolutionary synergy between humans and artificial intelligence. Space X was founded in 2002 by Musk to a life long existential vision of his to create a spacefaring civilization and extend humanity beyond Earth to Mars. The first challenge, the ability for a company with little means and no real experience to build an economically viable rocket, seemed impossible given the massive expenditures required for a single launch to project any reasonably sized payload into space, much less Musk’s vision for manned interplanetary flight. The then current manned platform, the Space Shuttle averaged 450 million dollars a launch. Such spectacular costs and the even more spectacular expenditures to innovate a rocket from scratch seemed beyond a private enterprise, much less most countries.

Musk is not wired to accept reality as the only option. Allowing innovation and creativity to intermingle with failure, Musk and the Space X team progressed from rocket blowouts to reusable rocket assemblies in fifteen short years, reducing the cost of transporting thousands of pounds of payload into orbit, at a 10 fold reduction in launch costs for each flight. Suddenly Space X had become a profitable enterprise and an attractive option for satellite launch. Other commercial enterprises are soon to follow, but nobody has backed up vision with success as has Elon Musk’s Space X. The United States, accepting a private enterprise competition more likely to accomplish a return to manned flight then a reliance on government budgets for their own inconsistent and exorbitantly expensive attempts, challenged Boeing and Space X to deliver on development of a safe manned space travel vehicle. Boeing, the once giant in manned space exploration, has thus far failed to deliver on a crew capsule riding atop an already available rocket. Space X has engineered a completely unique rocket assembly and crew cabin capable of reusability and autonomous flight unlike any in the world. On May 27, 2020, a successful flight will secure Space X as the new leader in mankind’s future in space.

Musk is not prepared to stop at low earth orbit. His original dream is establishment of a colony on Mars, and a safe and reproducible means of delivering economically thousands of pioneers to the planet in a yet to be developed super craft named Starship capable of transporting 100 people at a time. NASA’s directive is at least to achieve a return to the moon by 2024, and is developing its own monster rocket, the SLS, to achieve the gravitational escape velocities required to deliver people and cargo to the moon. The likelihood of a government project accomplishing this goal in any where near the timetable or remotely within budget has proven time and again beyond all realities. Currently, with a successful flight on May 27, don’t be shocked if NASA piggy backs on their new space partner to get things done. Using the magic dust of American private enterprise and know how, Space X is predicated on an old American concept, freedom to fail and ultimately prevail without someone constantly telling you, it can’t be done.

Thank you President Obama. You got something right after all.

March 25, 2018March 25, 2018

People We Should Know #33 – James Lovell

James Lovell performing navigation aboard Apollo 8
attrib. wikipedia

March 25, 2018, is Commander Jim Lovell’s 90th birthday. He is of course part of a very small group of people who know what its like to be placed upon an ignited, controlled bomb weighing over 6 million pounds fully fueled and delivering over 7.6 million pounds-force through a 33 foot diameter circle achieving a speed at full throttle of 7500 feet per second. He is one of three men who have ever travelled to the farthest point reached by humanity beyond the earth – 248,655 nautical miles. He saw 269 sunrises in space and spent about thirty days in space over four missions.

Yet, there is one career attribute that James Lovell holds uniquely among all other space farers. He is the only man who has circumnavigated to the moon twice…and never placed his foot upon its surface. The first time was part of the plan. The second, a failure of mission, that will always be an exemplary triumph of leadership. It is the compelling story of dealing with ultimate adversity and facing the fact head on that a personal pinnacle of a storied career would never be achieved, makes James Lovell , on his birthday, Ramparts #33 – People We Should Know.

Though born in Ohio, James Lovell was essentially a Wisconsin boy, raised in Milwaukee and educated at the University of Wisconsin Madison. His first and overriding interest was flight and rocketry, and to assure his interest be realized, he applied, was accepted and transferred to the U.S. Naval Academy. Upon graduation he attended flight school and received his naval aviator wings in1954 . In 1958 he was selected for Pax River Test Pilot School, met future astronauts Wally Schirra and Charles Conrad there, and graduated first in his class. By this time, the world’s attention regarding flight had been shifted from the level of the atmosphere, to space itself with the successful launch in 1957 0f Sputnik by the USSR. The best military test pilots were considered the appropriate candidates for selection for the first humans in space in both the US and USSR, as they competitively lurched toward rocketry capable of such achievements. As has been told in Tom Wolfe’s epic tale of test pilots and the early space program, The Right Stuff, some test pilots like legendary Chuck Yeager did not feel the pull to leave the active piloting of an atmospheric vehicle for the passive ride offered of a pilot on a rocket. But rocketry was in Lovell’s blood, and he applied for astronaut status. His test pilot school comrade, Wally Schirra made the first cut to be part of the Mercury 7. Conrad and Lovell would have to wait to become part of the Next 9 for the planned Gemini program. Lovell achieved his childhood dream of riding a rocket into space on December 4th, 1965 as part of the Gemini 7 mission with Commander Frank Borman spending 14 days in space and over 200 orbits of the earth, achieving a landmark controlled rendezvous with another craft in space, Gemini 6. He returned to space in 1966 aboard Gemini 12 with eventual moon walker astronaut, Buzz Aldrin, spending time outside of the vehicle, and successfully docking with another craft.

It is difficult to recall a time when the US space program was achieving on an every three month basis another space milestone, but such was the pace of the last half of the 1960s as both the US and USSR jockeyed to be the first to land on the moon. The extreme dangers associated with constant tests in space advancing untested technology eventually caught up with both countries. In the case of the US, it was realized in the horrific fire aboard Apollo 1, ending the lives of astronauts Grissom, White, and Chaffee on the launch pad. A pause in the accelerated schedule for Apollo took place for 20 months while the cause of the fire and adjustments to the command module were made and tested. This had a significant effect on crew selections, and Lovell became one of three crew members of the first human manned craft to orbit the moon, Apollo 8, electrifying the entire world on Christmas Eve 1968 with a poignant reading of biblical Genesis as they were orbiting the earth’s lone terrestrial satellite. Apollo’s 8’s spectacular success led to rapid progression to the eventual moon landing of July 20, 1969, of Apollo 11. Lovell, having been part of the crew first to the moon, looked to his turn to set his feet upon it, and was scheduled for the Apollo 14 voyage as commander of the mission in 1970. A crew re-ordering moved Lovell up in the Apollo series to Apollo 13, and his chance to be the first man twice to the moon, with it.

So set the stage for Apollo 13. On April 11, 1970, James Lovell led a team of Fred Haise and Jack Swigert into the command module and a launch towards the moon took place, thrusting Lovell into history. An initial two minute shut down of part of the Saturn V’s main stage brought an initial concern to the commander but it was adjusted for, and the flight continued uneventfully, successfully leaving earth orbit, docking the command module, with attached Service Module, to the LEM (lunar lander), and heading for the moon.

55 hours into the mission, disaster struck out of nowhere. Initiating the stirring fans for the oxygen tanks in the Service Module, the astronauts were suddenly disturbed by a loud bang, multiple alarms, and oscillations of the vehicle that worsened by the second. 205,000 miles from home, they were faced with a terrible reality, the Command Module’s power and oxygen was rapidly declining, and the source of the catastrophe were ruptured oxygen tanks visually leaking life giving oxygen at a rate that left at most 130 minutes to certain fatality. Lovell and the ground team at Johnson Space Center in Houston realized the only hope for survival would be closing down of the Command Module and transferring the three man crew into the LEM, built for two, as a life raft.

The blown panels and ruptured oxygen tanks of the Apollo 13 Service Module are visible as the module is eventually jettisoned.

Critically the distance from earth was such that a direct abort of the mission and return was impossible, and the injured craft would have to be to the moon and slung around it to return to Earth. Within a few minutes, the mission had gone from Lovell as the crowning achievement of his professional life with a landing and walk on the moon, to a survival mission in a severely crippled craft with huge challenges in a successful return to Earth. At best, could the craft be cajoled into several more days of diminished power, reduced oxygen, rising carbon dioxide and with minimal understanding as to whether the Command Module, the only means of re-entering safely on Earth, could be resuscitated satisfactorily for the critical re-entry and landing.

It was at this moment of supreme failure and danger, that Lovell shone beyond all commanders previous. His crew struggled psychologically and physically with the miserable conditions of the craft, with temperatures maintained at 39 degrees, and Fred Haise developing a serious urinary tract infection. The LEM was not designed for either the oxygen demand nor the carbon dioxide production of three men for longer then a day and a half, and they would need a minimum of three. Alternative air scrubbers were fashioned on the fly. Circling the moon at a heightened apogee of orbit resulted in the need for course corrections, that Lovell and his crew by care timed burns navigated by dead reckoning, with a mistake likely to send them bouncing of the earth’s atmosphere to certain death. The command module, the only means of safely returning to earth would at the appropriate time have to be restarted, the LEM and Service Module safely ejected, and a heat shield that had been juxtaposed to the exploded service module hopefully undamaged. From the catastrophe of April 14 to the re-entry of April 17th, Lovell kept the crew and himself focused on the task at hand and never wavered. The dream of the moon was gone forever. It was to achieve the near impossible that interested him now, and with an 82 second extension of the expected re-entry radio silence time, it was not clear to anyone on the ground Lovell and his crew had pulled it off, the first successful intra-space catastrophe and recovery mission.

Lovell did pull it off, and the aborted mission to the moon , despite its failure, remains one of NASA’s most spectacular collaborative successes. The courage, quick thinking, leadership, and steadiness of Lovell, absorbing and implementing one of the best engineering recovery processes ever achieved by an organizational mission team is one for the books. James Lovell never got his third shot at the moon. The NASA moon program ended prematurely with Apollo 17 in 1972, and 46 years later we have yet to go back. James Lovell at 90 years of age may have missed out of being able to put his foot in moon dust and gaze at the earth from another planetary body, but he can look with pride that he is remembered for his achievements in failure above those that were part of successful missions. Getting everybody home when it looked impossible is a singular achievement of this long ago era. If we soon head back, Apollo 13 will be one of the steps that made it possible.

On his ninetieth birthday, Ramparts salutes Commander James Lovell as Someone We Should Know #33.

January 3, 2016

Space – The Frontier Re-Opens For Business

In a universe of wrong headed decisions, President Obama was credited by Ramparts in 2013 with recognizing the power of competition and free markets at least once in his Presidency, and allowing private industry to attempt to restore America’s capacity to lead in space. In 2009, the President re-ordered the space budget to allow private industries to have their attempt at being a successor to the Space Shuttle for low earth orbit transport. The critics contained some legendary explorers such as Jim Lovell and Neil Armstrong, who vociferously objected to the many future concepts being out of the control of a unifying agency like NASA. Their doubts were informed; successful rocket programs like USA’s Saturn and Russia’s Soyuz had been the exclusive provence of governments and private concepts were conceptual only.

NASA, the government agency that had led a revolution of manned space exploration that culminated in multiple landings on the moon in the early 1970s, had spent the next forty fumbling with various near earth projects with reduced budgets and increasing risk adverse decisions. The Space Shuttle was NASA’s only follow through on innovative projects, but it proved budget devouring and unstable, with a statistical catastrophic risk assessment of 1 in 60 flights proving uncomfortably true, with loss of the Challenger in 1986 and the Columbia in 2003 prominent in the 135 flights. Having built five vehicles estimated at over a billion dollars apiece, 2 were lost for a total vehicle failure rate of 40% and a mission failure rate of 1.5%, easy enough to sink any other experimental craft. Added to this ominous statistic was the reality that this re-usable spacecraft proved exceedingly expensive to re-use, with a planned for 50 flights a year turning out to be closer to 4 flights a year, resulting in an astronomical cost for the life of the program of over a billion dollars a flight. Beautiful as it was, such costs accompanying such danger in a craft limited to a 150-600 miles in space maximum range was not feasible to continue beyond its thirty years of existence.

The answer in 2009 was not clear to anyone – except Elon Musk, and a progressively competitive group of visionaries. Innovation has always been the province of visionaries and Musk is the most visionary of visionaries, having created Pay Pal and Tesla as two examples of visions ‘people’ said could never be successful. His most audacious leap was a company called SpaceX and he sees space as not only a commercial venture but the source of mankind’s eventual salvation. If Earth is potentially not sustainable someday, then Mars may be where we evolve as a sustainable species. Such over the horizon thinking has not kept him from decerning the answers to some of the current most vexing issues in space travel and industry, dominated most by its overwhelming cost. The SpaceX view has been to achieve affordable and reproducible private solutions to the science problems of space, and he has fashioned an enviably American sheen to the innovation. In developing the moon project, the consideration of re-usable boosters proved impractical, and success was eventually achieved through massive rocketry, rockets in multiple stages capable of only single use. Each rocket was felt to require building from scratch with new parts as the old ones were disposed of in the previous flight. In 2015 dollars Musk noted a multi-stage rocket capable of escaping the atmosphere required at minimum 60 million dollars of single use expenditure, with 70% of the cost involved in losing the first stage booster. Musk identified this as the fatal flaw in any commercial enterprise as only governments can possibly absorb such waste. He from the start considered reusability foundational and the SpaceX rocket creations have been ultimately designed to solve the reusablity problem.

Given the massive forces at work on a rocket it was thought that the idea that the boosters could be recovered and reused was a pipe dream. The first attempts to land the booster seemed to prove out the difficulty:

The team at SpaceX was not deterred; nor could they afford to be. Unlike a government agency with few timetables and minimal budget limitations, SpaceX had real private competition. Jeff Bezos, a billionaire with deeper pockets than Musk and every bit the visionary, succeed in November in doing the improbable with his Blue Origin rocket booster, returning it intact to Earth.

Certainly the comparisons between the two rockets weren’t apples to apples. Bezos’ rocket was designed for an atmosphere launch of people to 62 miles, with a lifting power of 100,000 pounds of thrust and a top speed of Mach 1.5. SpaceX Falcon 9 is designed for low earth orbit above 100 miles, achieves over a million pounds thrust, and reaches speeds above Mach 5.5. From such speeds it needs to return in a different trajectory without collapsing, right itself and control decent and land an infinitely heavier, thinner, and taller rocket full of explosive fuel. Orders of magnitude more difficult, but after all, Blue Origin had achieved a landing and the visionary Musk was potentially second best. But through such challenges, real progress takes place.

On December 21st, 2015 Musk realized the space dream that had existed from the days of Jules Verne:

And now the game is on. Private innovation has cracked the code of re-usablity with Musk annoucing the Falcon 9 sustained no damage with re-entry and is ready to be used again. The possiblity of a platform tens of millions cheaper than traditional vehicles for space makes a profit possible, and a profit drives more smart companies into the mix.

Thanks to Elon Musk, innovation is bursting out all over, and America is back in space to stay.

December 6, 2015

Saving the World : 2 Degrees Celsius

COP 21 - Paris Global Climate Conference 2015 photp : 24heuresactu.com — COP 21 – Paris Global Climate Conference 2015
photo : 24heuresactu.com

The world is meeting in Paris to discuss great threats to world stability and civilization, and it has nothing to do with the ongoing calamity in Syria, or the recent slaughters in Paris or San Bernardino. The enemy is temperature – specifically rising temperatures – and the red line that the civilized world is willing to stand behind, to marshal all its resources, to form the greatest coalition the world has ever known to defeat the agreed upon greatest threat to the world we have known – is two degrees Celsius. Climate change in all its described forms has progressively flexed its muscles the last 30 years on the concept of global warming, and the assurance that despite the multiple thousands of periods of global warming intervals in the past, this period of warming is special, human caused, and inexorable. According to the missal, the world is warming out of proportion to every other climatic period, and the selected point of no return is 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The solution is to be government mandated regulation to save us from ourselves, and will require the greatest redistribution of wealth from private individuals to government coffers ever known.

The warmist in chief is the President of the United States, who has determined that the trends in warming are responsible for such defuse events as drought, hurricanes, economic downturns, and even terrorism.

“What we know is that — as human beings are placed under strain, then bad things happen,” Obama told CBS Friday. “And, you know, if you look at world history, whenever people are desperate, when people start lacking food, when people — are not able to make a living or take care of their families — that’s when ideologies arise that are dangerous.” – President Obama

The collected mass of sycophants in Paris will battle the rest of us who wish the world’s destruction by willing the world to accept the settled science. CO2, the trace gas, is the underlying satanic culprit having increased measurably over the last 100 years from the high two hundreds to 400 parts per million. CO2 of course is problematic in that it is an essential gas, critical to all living plants securing the means of making sugars through the process of photosynthesis making as byproducts oxygen and water, essential for all living animals. It is unfashionable however in that it is created by the greatest discovery for human individualism ever known, the identification of the byproduct of hundreds of millions of years of decaying organic matter forming carbon fuels. Carbon fuels have permitted the capacity of humans to live in hostile environments, develop economic vitality, achieve individual comfort, create fantastic inventions in transportation, plastics, medicine, and information that have forever changed the world. What carbon has done that can not be forgiven for, is creating a world of individual choice and initiative, and therefore, variation in outcomes between peoples. This has proved more potent than any of the egalitarian philosophies meant to defeat individual choice, fascism, communism, and religious totalitarianism.

The final weapon available to the statists is to declare all the usual weapons of freedom, common sense, objective fact, and circumspection inviolate. Despite the highly questionable sources of temperature measurement and the unfortunate lack of measurable warming over the past 18 years, now cloyingly referred to as the global warming hiatus, the continued alarm demands the painting of a future of sea levels 5 to 7 feet over current, massive droughts and increased weather severity, starvation, and wars. It is the language of religious revelation, defining man as an original sinner that unless deflected from his sinful course, will invite the coming of the Apocalypse, engaging the end of man. This was according to the prophet Al Gore, to have happened by 2015, but the prophecy has had to be discarded to a later date, because the climate did not cooperate with the alarmist projections. So now the red line, the projected timeline is 2050, with the world by changing its entire economic and political conceptualization, will slow the current warming of 0.89 degrees Celsius over the last 100 years under the arbitrary tipping point of 2 degrees Celsius.

The statists came close to grabbing global economic power with the 1995 Kyoto treaty, but the ludicrous goals proved too onerous for established economies, and emerging nations saw it for what it was, a removal of their individual striving and improvement. Every several years another attempt to own the future presents with massive governmental participation in world conferences, and now we have Paris. The rational development of strategies for cleaning water, cleaner air, and efficient management of resources is not on the docket. It is the need to own the future, and President Obama, so visibly deficient in managing every other tidal historical force, will go to the wall to own this future with the other statists who find the present world an untidy caldron of individualism, inequities, and uncontrollable initiative.

The statists never quit, until they own your future, and they will change the narrative until you believe, and finally submit.

May 16, 2015

The Wright Brothers and the American Way

The First Controlled Powered Air Flight - Orville at controls, Wilbur alongside December 17,1903 — The First Controlled Powered Air Flight – Orville at controls, Wilbur alongside December 17,1903

At the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, a fragile looking craft is nestled among the imposing rocketry, massive jets, and space capsules that catalogue man’s drive to free himself from his earthbound status and soar like the hawks and eagles. Made of spruce wood and muslin fabric, crisscrossed by bicycle wire, and supported with landing sleds, it looks like a glorified box kite. It is, though, the 1903 Flyer, the machine developed by two insightful bicycle mechanics from Ohio named Wright – by which all the other craft became possible. It is the alpha craft of sustained, controlled flight, and there is no more important relic in the museum.

The story of how this craft came to be, and the special nature of the geniuses behind its development, is the subject of David McCullough’s latest book, The Wright Brothers, and once again, McCullough has brought us a tremendous read. The two time Pulitzer Prize winning historian, now 81 years of age and himself a national treasure, continues to refine his biographic look at epic Americans, the real people behind the larger than life stories, and the thread of ‘Americanism’ that makes them an ongoing recognizable part of the nation’s unique story. McCullough’s Wright Brothers, are the Americans described by Alexis De Tocqueville – religious, modest, small town diamond-hard workers, who are humble, reserved, yet proud and capable of great vision. Their success is distinctly American, taking the hard truths of difficult problems, making them their own, and inevitably conquering them, when so many others with more advantage failed. McCullough, like the careful craftsman he is, doesn’t try to tell the story through others, but relies on the brothers’ own notes and letters. McCullough is a storyteller, not a psychoanalyst, avoiding the modern deviations and contrivances of modern biographers, who pretend to be able to understand their subjects’ states of mind and prejudices. McCullough does not ask you to like or not like The Wright Brothers personalities, only to follow their unbending will as they meticulously conquer earth bound gravity, and foster a revolution in man’s place on this planet. McCullough recognizes better than most, America’s unique philosophic foundation centers the idea that opportunity should abound for all men equally regardless of their individual circumstances. From such cauldrons of self confidence, unfettered opportunity and an inherent industrious nature, America has produced its Lincolns, Edisons, Reagans, and Wrights.

The Wright brothers, Wilbur and the fours years younger Orville were born just after the American Civil War. in which the nation was directed toward rebuilding and focusing on its future. This was the age of civilizing the hostile and unknowable world. Railroads conquered the difficult terrain to connect the continent. The light bulb brought activity and awareness to the dark hours, and electricity heretofore unharnessed power. The combustion engine drove the economy, reducing distances, powering agriculture and eliminating hunger, and providing work for millions. The Wrights were witnesses, and assumed a natural providence to it all. Their father, a bishop of one of the many sects of the Protestant wave of individual integrity and initiative that underlies the revolution, engendered in his children the balancing act of personal humility and faith, and competitive need to contribute to the civilizing culture any way God led them. Achieving the broad education of life as well as in depth foundations that high school provided at that time, the boys were confident they had the tools to understand and self educate as needed, and never sought a college education. They applied their intuition and industriousness first to publishing, then transportation for individuals through a successful bicycle business, all the while, absorbing the world around them. When hearing of the attempts by others to solve the millennia long quest to conquer gravity with air travel, the passive transport by hot air balloons restricted by the vagaries of wind direction did not appeal to them so much as the infinitely more difficult concept of individually controlled flight – flight occurring at the spontaneous whim and the premeditated direction of the individual desiring it.

The Wright brothers took to solving the problem of flight much in the way Edison undertook his creations – insight was created by logically understanding the failures that would lead to success. Having read much of the available literature on aeronautics, they determined success lay instead in their own meticulous build of a knowledge of flight from personal observation. Hundreds of experiments and thousands of hours of unreimbursed work followed, starting with observations of birds and their tactics of flight, kites, then gliders, materials and environments that might be conducive to flight. As Wilbur looking back at the process of discovery put it, the key intuition they brought to understanding bird flight others failed to grasp was the process of dynamically controlling flight, not anatomical characteristics of birds conducive to flight. In other words for Wilbur, it was about the bird, not the wing. For the Wright brothers, the human pilot would have to be the bird, making continuous flight adjustments, not the passive inhabitant on a flying wing. Progressively, they combined their experiments into larger and larger gliders, that took the science of aerodynamics and added the control of pitch, roll and yaw to the pilot through the capacity to “induce” the wing to respond to the need by warping to turn or the rudder elevator to lift or dive.

The experiments lead to a glider craft large enough to support a human directing the glider, and the brothers realized they would need a laboratory where they could, unmolested, make the mistakes and adjustments and test them repetitively in ideal conditions. The key ingredient for gliders was wind, and the most predictable continuous wind on a massively large unimpeded space allowing for soft landing failures was oceanside. They discovered the outer banks of North Carolina through the US Weather Bureau, and the result was Kitty Hawk, North Carolina and the dunes of Kill Devil Hills the launching ground to the immense flat beaches of the outer banks that would be their laboratory. In 1901 and 1902, the brothers performed glider experiments that led to sustained flight and impressive control, but when the wind died, the spontaneous flight died with it. As noted by others, a barn door could ‘fly’ if projected from a height. It would only be recognized to be flight if the barn door once projected towards the ground had the means of changing direction and restoring itself to height again, and reproducibly. The ultimate step would be powered flight, directed by the individual, not the elements, and by 1903, the Wright brothers felt they were there.

Wilbur Wright demonstrates a controlled turn on a glider at Kitty Hawk - 1902 — Wilbur Wright demonstrates a controlled turn on a glider at Kitty Hawk – 1902

The brothers were not twins, but worked so intimately together over a lifetime, that they seemed like a single organism. They studied their experiments together, fought over results together, and suffered in the harsh conditions of Kitty Hawk together. The one thing they didn’t do together was fly, for the dangerous conditions were such that they wanted assurance that at least one of them would be able to carry on if there was a tragedy in the course of flight. Progressive work on the problems of powered flight, including the means of propulsion, lead to advances in craft design including use of a wind tunnel to test, unique propeller design, and a light weight first of its kind aluminum engine to drive the propellers. With the moment of powered flight seemingly close in December, 1903, the brothers flipped a coin as to who would be the pioneering pilot, and Wilbur won. The first attempt on December 14th, 1903 by Wilbur was unsuccessful due to conditions with an aborted flight of three seconds causing minor damage to the craft. Unfailingly humble and consistent in their approach, the next acceptable flight environment was on December 17th, 1903, this time with Orville at the controls. Wilbur intelligently positioned a camera to record a successful flight and an assistant, John Daniels, snapped the shutter that froze in time one of the most famous moments in history, the photo seen at the head of this article. In the first recorded powered flight under directed control, Orville travelled 120 feet in 12 seconds, a speed of 6.8 miles an hour, at 1035 am, landing safely. The brothers alternated 3 more flights that day, the longest Wilbur’s 59 second flight over 800 feet that cemented Kitty Hawk as the birthplace of airplanes.

With the tall tales of so many pretenders, the tragic and at times pathetic failures of so many more educated and infinitely more financed, the immense achievement of the brothers took some time to become known and believed. Their innate desire for privacy and isolation didn’t help, but their confidence and pride in their accomplishment eventually led to opportunities to show others, and the fact that flight had been conquered by two obscure bicycle mechanics seemed to fuel the achievement internationally. Over the next years the Wright brothers and their updated Flyers would amaze international audiences of thousands and lead to record after broken record of sustained and controlled flight that was the envy of many other designers. More importantly, the achieving the unachievable cracked the ice forever on creativity, and within ten years the capacities of flight were exponentially expanded, to hours of flight, thousands of feet of elevation, and hundreds of miles an hour. Materials changed, uses changed, propulsion changed, and the fragile little flyer that lifted of the dune at Kill Devil Hills in December, 1903, soon became unrecognizable. The principles the Wright brothers had meticulously revealed, however, remain the universal foundation of all human flight, and are still apparent in the pilot seated in the ultralight craft of today.

The Wright’s story does not end in perfect glory and McCullough does not belabor the foibles of human pride and tragedy that interfere with a perfect ending, but Orville at least lived to see the concept of safe flight turned into a routine event for average people. The story of the providential shift of history achieved by unlikely people from unexpected directions has been the beautiful outcome of the American experiment, and the Wright brothers are one more example of what happens when people determine their own destiny, and drive their own ambitions. We are steadily heading to a country that wants to foster communal concepts of equal outcome, not equal opportunity, and the result will be millions of lost creative attempts to advance civilization. We don’t need a country that tries to determine how many bicycle mechanics are needed to best serve society’s needs. We need a society that stands back and allows bicycle mechanics, if they desire, to try and soar like eagles.

February 14, 2015February 15, 2015

The Grand Secret of the Whole Machine

The newtonian contemporary Scottish mathematician John Arbuthnot, an intellect in his own right, and a man who would become famous as the individual who introduced the characature ‘John Bull’ to the world as the symbol of Great Britain, looked upon the creation that was Isaac Newton in awe. Reviewing Newton’s masterpiece, Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Arbuthnot declared that Newton had done no less than reveal “the grand secret of the whole Machine”. So quotes James Gleick in his wonderful biography of Isaac Newton as he helps put in perspective a genius that may never have come before or since.

Isaac Newton is one of those incomparable and unrepeatable creations in the human story that defy all explanation. Newton came from dust, and dust he would become, but it was indeed cosmic dust that was not the stuff of normal men. Born in 1642 in the tiny hamlet of Woolsthorpe Manor in County Lincolnshire, far from the center of any environment that would possibly be expected to be formative to his colossal genius, Newton somehow found his way in forty short years to the center of adulation among the greatest of men. With his father having died before his birth, and his mother abandoning him to relatives, young Isaac was a stranger to human kindness and learned to internalize his thoughts from his very first years. Exposed to relatives who assumed he at best would be a farmer, he was given the rudimentary school education of farming, including some simple math that would occasion a farmer. Newton hated the very idea of farming and in his intense isolation began a lifelong habit of recording his every thought on paper provided by the school. This was one lonely, lonely twelve year old boy. He wrote in his private torment, recording the scorn of others –” what imployment is he fit for? What is hee good for?” and his own lonely sadness – “I will make and end. I cannot but weepe. I know not what to doe.” Not exactly the confidence of a king philosopher.

The family, noting the isolated nature of the boy and recognizing at least this was no farmer, arranged for Newton to take the education of the clergy. An appointment to the College of the Trinity at Cambridge was achieved to have Newton enter as a sizar, a position at the college whereby a person with no means could obtain an education by being a servant to the other collegians at Cambridge of greater means or nobility. His family gave him little money, but did gave the obsessive Newton a greater gift – the gift of 140 blank pieces of paper and the ink to fill them. And fill them he did, soon with ballooning observations questions and data tables well beyond any expected to link to his classic education. The library at Cambridge became Newton’s brain, the notebooks he so meticulously recorded his laboratory for a science he was beginning to invent – nothing less than the meaning of everything. Newton questioned everything, and at a time when he was preparing for the clergy in the College based on the concept of the undivided Trinity, a fair amount of heresy. The legend of the mental capacity of the obsessive student grew and Newton was eventually accepted into the college, passed examinations in mathematics and eventually made a scholar. He read Euclid, Aristotle, Descartes, studied Kepler and Galileo – the philosophers that only a spec of humanity would be exposed to due to the rare concept of the book and the printed word. But Newton did not read them to emulate them, but to see beyond them.

The notebooks grew and grew, and through the 1660s and 1670s Newton was literally inventing an entire philosophy of observation and experimentation that would change the world and man’s place in it forever. And almost no one knew. The brilliant thinking and experimentation that would become epochal treatises on Optics, Fluids, Calculus, and the very basic truths of the universe were intermingled with other thoughts on Alchemy and Religion that Newton valued equally, but wanted no one to see, and no one to criticize. It would take one of the venial sins, vanity , to bring Newton out in the open and unleash upon the world the elements of incomprehensible genius.

In 1675, Newton joined the Royal Society, and began to divulge the extent of what he had been keeping from others. The first tentative organized thoughts on paper, a treatise on Hypothesis of Light and Color, and he came up against his first real politic. The Society was filled with other men that felt they were eminent philosophers, men like Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, who were concerned the upstart Newton was impossibly knowledgeable and had to be piggybacking on more educated men’s work, particularly their own. To a sensitive isolate like Newton, who knew the extent of his experimentation, observation, and logic, the words stung like acid. He reacted by withdrawing contact with the Society and the other philosophers.

It would take Halley’s Comet to bring him back for good. In 1681, the comet described by Halley and the Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed were communicating with Newton their thoughts on the natural explanations of what had always thought to have been a Devine occurrence, the transient glory of the celestial phenomena of the comet. Newton cagily let Halley know that he thought he had the answers they had been looking for, but was not about to expose himself to the intense ridicule that his earlier, less in depth musings had ensnarled him. Halley and others encouraged Newton to be definitive, and the world has never been the same.

In 1684, Isaac Newton published a definitive series of observations, the Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, that sought to explain the actions of the comet of Halley and with it, every object on earth, the moon, the sun and stars. In short the laws that governed everything. Newton’s laws, as they became known , defined the influence of every physical object in existence upon every other, and the incredibly mysterious force that explained their mutual influence, that of gravity. In Newton’s olympian treatise, the answer to Galileo’s observations and Kepler’s measurements, the tides, celestial bodies, and the very presence or absence of matter was explained – and it was natural, and predictable. The incredible bomb that was unleashed on the learned world was nothing less than a supernova. The very private hermitic man newton was now the most public of men. As the world progressively was learning that knowledge meant power, Great Britain was the possessor additionally of maybe the most powerful of men. A French philosopher made aware of all consuming knowledge of Principia stated in awe of Newton, “Does he eat, and drink, and sleep? Is he like other men?’ Halley called it the “splendid ornament of our time” and “incomparable”.

The ideas that were created in the mind of Newton were so far ahead of their measurable existence in science, that he began to become progressively both legend and target. And the brilliant man became venal as the attacks surged. What of this Gravity that requires Infinite Space and Infinite Time? How can something just Be, and work in a vacuum? From across the channel came a new ferocious and formidable antagonist, the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. Newtonian principles appalled him – “the fundamental principle of reasoning is, nothing is without cause!”, Leibniz thundered. Even more adversarial, Newtonian proofs were stated utilizing a new mathematical technique Newton described as Fluxions which bore striking resemblance to Leibniz’s own calculus he had recently described. Newton was again accused of being a sophisticated plagiarist. This time, he came out with all barrels blazing, and declared his model of calculus proceeded Leibniz by decades, and it was instead Leibniz who was the usurper of Newton’s creative genius. The fight raged and became international as the newly outward looking Britain was willing to support its hero against continental reactionaries like Leibniz. The truth was imperically that in a world of extremely poor communication, the two geniuses likely came up with calculus simultaneously, and independently. The new Newton however never again retreated to his isolation. He took on the persona of the premier intellect in the world, became President of the Royal Society, and fought off others as he once was offended to be treated.

The death of Newton in 1726 was treated as no event to that time in the history of Britain. For the first time a commoner was buried among the royal elite in Westminster Abbey. Newton the Legend grew and grew over time as his laws held up to three hundred years of progressively more accurate scientific investigation. It was not until a genius of equal vision, Einstein, secured the gaps of reality that Newton could not explain, the actions of the very largest and smallest bodies that would not respond to the perfect nature of gravity, instead influenced by the very nature of time and space effected by visible light. In a time of extremely limited tools of discovery, Newton had taken thought journeys with the limiting feature only the vast capacity of his visionary mind. He saw himself as recognizing the smooth pebble from the many rough, on the shores of a vast ocean of untapped knowledge. He is quoted as humbly seeing his advances as the natural progression of human thought – “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”. But Newton knew what he had conceived, and what he had achieved, and knew himself to be every bit one of the true giants. Newton’s clergical soul saw himself as revealing the infinite and bountiless beauty of the Creator Himself. He knew with gift of Devine inspiration, he had discovered the Grand Secret of the Whole Machine.

December 28, 2014

Who Knew? – The American Oil Revolution

In all the stories assumed to be the Christmas miracle story of 2014, the story no one predicted was the resurrection of the American economy on the muscular shoulders of the American oil industry. On the gas pump above frozen in time like a faded photograph are the gasoline prices when America was the number one producer of oil for the world, before the OPEC oil embargo, the piling on of taxes on the energy sector, the mythic concept of Peak Oil and the fading of carbon as an available source of fuel and energy, and the concern about global warming converted to “climate change” (with the unexpected lack of global warming) and the rising CO2 emissions. A colossus of current events, however, are driving down energy prices to the point where, inflation adjusted, we may see prices comparable to the ancient levels, with the resultant spectacular boost it will provide the economy through inexpensive available energy and to the individual in freedom of transport.

In the millionth example as to how progress in society is best achieved through the power of individual initiative and creativity and not plodding government bureaucracies, the American Oil Revolution is a prime case study. Left to the nanny state mentalities of the modern government agencies, no revolution would have come about. Since 1990, on the basis of the dogma of carbon energy as the enemy, western governments have progressively looked to stamp out oil and coal initiatives because of the propped up science “connecting” global warming as an anthropomorphic phenomena and rising CO2 emissions as the world became progressively developed. The Kyoto accord looked to remove carbon as the fuel for economic expansion in the first world economies, allowing the developing world to “catch up” and to create a veneer of ‘sin’ associated with man’s progress as individuals. This argument was buttressed by the concept of Peak Oil – the world’s supply of oil was finite, and as we had found all there was to find, the inevitably scarcer oil resource had to be adjusted for by “good” technologies yet to be invented and aggressively put in place of oil. As expected, technologies artificially propped up by governments before their technical time, like wind and solar, created associated boondoggles, enormous waste of investment, lots of dead birds, and essentially no bump in net energy (energy creation/energy expended = net energy). As oil was yesterday’s fuel, the American government willfully restricted access to known oil resources on public lands, to assure the narrative and reorder societal behavior.

Leave it to those Texans to save us once again from ourselves. On private lands, experimentation on so-called inaccessible oil locked in rocks began in the 1990s and took off in the first decade of the 21st century in the form of fracking – the process of pressure injecting sand and water to create channels of oil flow in oil tied up in eons of rock. As the government struggled to contain the action on private lands, the progressive success of the process spread to areas of the country long considered dead to energy production – North Dakota and Pennsylvania with the stunning result that not only could the oil be captured safely and economically but in quantities that soon put the Peak Oil argument to shame. Hundreds of millions of years of organic detris preferentially distributed in the continental expanse of North America at levels only conjectured about became accessible, and the miracle was on.

And so the miracle of the United States surpassing once again Saudi Arabia as the number one producer of crude oil in the world. The effects of such a stunning turnaround are yet to be fully evolved. The initial downstream effect has been a glut of oil and natural gas that has created a dramatic downward pressure in oil prices. WTI Crude Oil per barrel was $54.73 per barrel on December 27, 2014. On September 6th, 2013 it was 108.12. This 50% reduction in the price of crude oil has been resulted in the fracturing of the continuity of OPEC, the brazen effort by Saudi Arabia to maintain production highs to try to “starve” the American oil producers who require a higher oil extraction price, and the secondary effect on the dictators in Venezuela, Russia, and Iran that have funded their extremism and revanchist expansionist policies on a steady high oil price. The benefit to the energy consumer, the individual in prices at the gas pump and the producer of goods and services in the reduction in energy outlay, is profound. The benefit in removing oil as a weapon used against western society is equally profound.

And yet, the lingering issue of carbon emissions and the resultant CO2 effects on potentially precipitating climate change. What good could possibly come from the entrepreneurial efforts of independent thinking Texas oil men when the world’s climate is at stake? The answer? — never doubt the creative intellect of the individual free to solve problems without an overbearing tiller of an oppressive bureaucratic regime. The next coming miracle may be EOR-Enhanced Oil Recovery. It turns out those Texans have not only resorted to fracking, but for decades have been thinking about the so-called exhausted wells they already own. The traditional drilling process extracts only about 30-40% of an oil field’s available oil before it is “exhausted” by the lack of pressure to retrieve the residual 60% of the oil left behind. It has always been cheaper to simply find another oil field to drill. The estimated 100 billion barrels of oil remaining in US wells after exhaustion of the well has been waiting for technology to deliver a solution. As fracking was to shale rock, EOR is to exhausted wells. The process of extracting the retained oil may be best solved by the utilization of — wait for it – CO2. That’s right, the “evil” gas CO2 created by man’s energy demands particularly by coal burning plants may be the savior of attaining oil from exhausted wells. CO2, in a liquified state, injected under pressure proves to be a unique solvent freeing retained oil for well to once again produce.

Samuel Thernstrom in the Weekly Standard describes in a must read article a process where the billions of tons CO2 emissions created by coal burning plants could be captured and sold to the oil industry for EOR extraction, thus increasing available oil and reducing CO2 emissions into the atmosphere by injecting them back into the ground where they came from in a perfect dance of environmental and energy policy.

All proves possible again when you rely on the instincts and genius of the individual seeking to advance the world he or she lives in.

I don’t know if the amazing revolution in energy back to attainable carbon will be the final answer to continuing the process of achieving a more civilized and kinder world to more and more of the world’s population. I do know however, time and time again, the answer will be found in the fertile mind of an individual who, released from the oppressive weight of a government that thinks it knows the future, will bring the future to us all.

December 1, 2013

The Savior of Private Enterprise(?)- Space

Space X Dragon capsule supplies ISS - space.com — Space X Dragon capsule supplies ISS – space.com

President Obama has maintained a consistent vision of converting America into a socialist utopia. Though he objects to the moniker ‘socialist’ , he has delivered an unceasing attack on the pillars of private enterprise through tax policies and regulation that create no doubt as to his ideological bent on the forces that brought America to economic greatness. The country’s priorities have been reset from economic vitality and defense supremacy to social investment, wealth redistribution, and marked retraction in defense expenditure. He has done what he could to suppress private sector financial creativity, energy exploration, small business enterprise, and most spectacularly, health care, in an effort to assure the ultimate direction, and with it power of determination, comes from the government.

In one industry, however, President Obama deserves credit as an economic visionary. Either through personal lack of interest in the subject, or the desire to remove the resources of the government from huge expenditures for which he could discern no social value, President Obama in 2009 declared a revolutionary privatized strategy regarding space exploration and development. Since 1961, the vision of the national government was for steady progress in manned space exploration, with the moon landing achieved by 1969, reusable space shuttle by 1981, and a permanent space station by 2000. The assumption was that the manned missions would progressively point outward toward the planets, with returns to the moon and ultimately Mars and the other planets envisioned. Given the spectacular costs and engineering support required for such goals, it was assumed that only a national consensus project could achieve the economic wherewithal for such undertakings.

President Obama declared, however, with the coming retirement of the space shuttle, that the national government would divorce itself from direct manned orbital flight, and would rely instead on private corporations to achieve the capacities to secure safe low earth orbit flight, satellite launch, and space station re-supply. The problem was, of course, no such capacity in the private sector existed, and the result of the policy was a howl protest from well informed traditional supporters of NASA, such as former astronauts Neil Armstrong and Jim Lovell.

Four short years later, we should give the avowed socialist President Obama a private enterprise medal. A remarkable amount of progress has been made in the private sector, led by the particular entrepreneurial genius of Elon Musk (see Ramparts People We Should Know #21 ) and Space X. Space X has already achieved successful cargo delivery reproducibly to the space station, and the commercial exploitation of manned flight for both tourist and orbital ventures are progressing nicely. New companies such as Orbital Sciences Corp., Bigelow Aerospace, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic and Sierra Nevada, as well as established aerospace companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin are preceeding to goals of successful manned space flight, and not just to low earth orbit. The directions each are taking are diverse, aggressive, and ultimately unbound by the typical stultifying bureaucracy of governmental creation usually dominated by congressional bias. The Washington Post has an exceptional overview of old versus new space development that is worth exploring fully to grasp this exciting development, as we live through so many other disappointments of the current economy.

The President deserves credit for stumbling upon a prime example of how trusting the arena of ideas and the process of private market competition can lead to dramatic improvements in human development and life quality. And if he’s not careful, might just make America an economic leader in the current century as great as the last. Were he only to have such stumbles in the other areas of our moribund economy. In reflecting upon the overarching principles of human behavior versus utopian ideal, we once again turn to Winston Churchill for some prescient words:

“Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot. Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon.”

January 27, 2013

The Global Warming Deniers

Polar Bears can rejoice; the world is still trying to come to their rescue. The meme that was projected by Al Gore’s alarmist documentary An Inconvenient Truth was that the arctic ice packs were diminishing at such an accelerated rate that polar bears were finding themselves abandoned on diminishing ice flows, starving and ultimately threatened with extinction. It was a heart tugging image that has grown to represent the need for major world action to stall or delay warming by converting modern society in regard to distribution of resources and energy use. The world did meet and determine aggressive action was necessary. In 1997 over a hundred countries signed the Kyoto Protocols pleging the first world economies to self induced wrenching change in the use of energy and created a potential spectacular carbon tax process to appropriately ‘educate’ the miscreants. It positioned the world for a complete change in economic process and decision making and the concept of globalist leadership under the guidance of the United Nations and enlightened politicians like Al Gore seemed to be a inevitable outcome. The science was termed ” indisputable”, “a consensus”, and ” undeniable” and the few sceptics still left were considered heretical, neanderthal, dangerous, and were collectively labelled Global Warming Deniers.

Then, a funny thing happened. For whatever reason, the earth determined to cool over the last 15 years rather than warm, playing havoc with the idea that increases in carbon dioxide, the naturally occurring gas critical for all plant life, should drive increasing temperatures. Computer models that drove the science’s undeniable conclusions were found to have the fatal flaw of manipulated information and insider fixes to maintain the “consensus” in the face of increasingly contrarian data. The number one outcast, the United States of America, whose Senate embarrassed then Vice President Gore with a 95-0 rejection of the Kyoto treaty, and was deemed that greatest contributor to global warming, turned out to reduce its carbon emissions more dramatically then any Kyoto signee, by paradoxically finding huge new sources of carbon fuel in the form of natural gas. Science, so conveniently pigeon holed by those who wished to ‘control’ the message, unexpectedly showed larger influences of solar discharges and ocean currents on temperature than the man made influences projected by those infamous computer models. Even Kyoto believers were left to hedge their bets on their own countries participation, given the draconian effects on their economies, and minimal effects on their actual carbon emission production.

Suddenly, it has begun to look as if the true Deniers are those who continue to blindly accept global warming “truths” in the face of more and more science to the contrary. Denialism has become owned by the original zealots of global warming theory, who refuse to connect with the new reality as more and more is known about earth climate change and Man’s puny influence upon it.

So why should the polar bears rejoice? Because the modern Global Warming Denialist turns out to be after a much bigger goal than saving the planet. The modern Denialist wants the economic change of global warming scientology and the trillions that potentially will come with it to pay for all the social change they hope to make permanent. The President of the United States has become the Denier In Chief. President Obama declared in his second inaugural address that:

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.

Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms. The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But American cannot resist this transition. We must lead it.

We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries. We must claim its promise. That’s how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure, our forests and waterways, our crop lands and snow capped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

The denialism suggesting that storms, drought, and fires – the elements of eternal damnation are raging and worsening flies in the face of all legitimacy, but being a denialist is not about being legitimate. To compare the resent rainfall reductions with the calamity of the 1930’s Dustbowl, the diminishingly infrequent Category 1 hurricanes compared to the monster storms of the first half of the last century, and the environmentalist’s efforts to reduce logging allowing for overgrowth and decay of forests now more susceptible to fire, doesn’t cross this denialist President’s mind. And now we find in the nomination process of the new Secretary of State Kerry, that in a world of great danger and diminishing American influence, he promises to be the Secretary of State for Climate Change. With far flung problems in the Islamic world, Russia’s new belligerence, China’s aggressive desire to shape Pacific economies into a Co-prosperity sphere more to their liking, the projected Secretary Kerry has found his calling in combating “life threatening issue” of climate change.

You might ask yourselves, what drives such denialism? As always – follow the money, follow the money, follow the money. The President seeks to complete the leftward lerch of the United States toward a more socialist foundation, and he is spending trillions to do it. Tax policy based on a country’s producers through leveraging their income can only take you so far. No, the Big Kahuna is in societal taxes, such as Value Added tax structures and the Carbon based tax invented by Gore. The theme goes like this – only through drastic means can we save the planet, and only a government will ever be able to decide if the planet has been “saved” enough. The radical agenda turns out to be denialism to the forces of realism and cumulative data, because the real money will come from globalist owning of economies.

This President and this Secretary of State will try to re-inforce the fantasy of progressive warming catastrophe so as to get their hands on the economic levers that will pay for all the other righteous processes they hope to make permanent. To save the Polar Bears, we are going to have to demolish our way of life and our freedoms, and those in charge will every thing in their power to help us get there.

October 20, 2012

Re-Acquainting with our National Treasures – the Museums

The national capital of the United States is not only the citadel of governance for the world’s most powerful democracy, it is also the repository for an incredible diversity of treasures of art, science, culture, and history. The city itself was designed as a jewel of urban expression by the famed architect Pierre L’Enfant, presented in 1792 as an ideal of a world class city laid out on a marshy elevation north and east of the Potomac River, at a time when most of the country’s population was hundreds of miles away from the District of Columbia’s wilderness. French born, L’Enfant was every bit a revolutionary American, who had served as an engineer under Washington, was wounded in the war, suffered with him and the troops at Valley Forge, and later was present for the general’s ultimate victory over Cornwallis. He saw the fledgling nation as a eventual world power and saw no fantasy in designing a world power’s capital stage, with massive boulevards, epic public buildings, and beautiful gardens and squares. The capital he left us is every bit the work of art, and on its grounds contains treasures of incalculable value and diversity.

Prominent on the National Mall are its magnificent art museums, among so many I would humbly like to highlight two great art repositories, the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery. The Corcoran Gallery sits at the west end of the mall juxtaposed to the White House grounds and contains a spectacular display of great American artists of the country’s expansive beginnings. The great portrait artist of the revolutionary period, Gilbert Stuart, is best known for capturing the strength and humanity of our nation’s fathers, no more prominently displayed then in the wonderful Washington portrait of the president seen above. Excellent representations of the American wilderness glorifying American exceptionalism with religious overtones, as a chosen land, abound the walls in great works by Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church. Bierstadt’s Corcoran Peak reminded Americans that the Rockies were every bit as epic as the Alps. Church’s Niagara captured the epic scope of the great falls and reflected the pristine beauty and power of the American wilderness as representative of the country’s power and inexorable drive. The ultimate in scale, imagery, and symbolism of America’s special connection with its pristine, savage wilderness is Bierstadt’s Last of the Buffalo, an homage to a disappearing innocence when the horizon, and the bounty was limitless.The Corcoran collection extends into other great examples of American painting genius such as Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, and Whistler, but does not neglect European masters such as Gainsborough and Rembrandt. It would be the premier display of artistic greatness were it not for the overwhelming spectacle of the collection on the opposite end of the Mall, the National Gallery of Art.

The National Gallery of Art defies a proper adjective for its bounty in fantastic art. Thousands of absolute masterpieces line the walls from the brilliance of American Winslow Homer to three exquisite Vermeers. The very majesty of the collection may be in the Mellon family’s greatest gift to the nation, Leonardo DaVinci’s Ginevra de Benci , a painting in my mind every bit as special and beautiful as the Mona Lisa herself. The National Gallery had in 1995 maybe the most spectacularly popular art exhibition in history in providing in one place the entire collected works of Johannes Vermeer, and the representations present currently of this enigmatic Dutch master are worth an hour alone of contemplation. The play of light in its complexity on the every day female subject exemplified in Vermeer’s classic, A Woman Holding a Balance, knows no equal in art. The Americans are also spectacularly represented with the early portraitists such as Copley and Stuart, the chroniclers of American life like Caleb Bingham and James Whistler, and bookended by the brilliant 19th and early 20th century work of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent. Homer’s Breezing Up displays common American courage and fortitude in the everyday lives of Americans against the violent environment of the sea. Homer framed America in quiet dignity overwhelmingly influenced by his absorption of the selfless examples of everyday Americans caught up in the brutality of the Civil War yet able to rise above it, and it showed in every subsequent painting. Singer Sargent was a modern painter caught in a 19th century traditionalism that eventually exploded out of his portrait work into emotionally tense works such as Street in Venice where a young woman catches the not so innocent stares of young men with a latent sexuality more appropriate for the 20th century than the Victorian principles ruling the nineteenth. Singer Sargent dissolves the puritan impulse forever in the languid Repose, the subject cascading over the boudoir couch in satin finery, her mind distant to the presence of the artist studying her.

The bounty that is the National Gallery continues over six centuries of European and American art, from Giotto to Gauguin , Raphael to Rembrandt. Though absorbed for hours over each visage like a boy in the candy shop unable to choose, I still managed to focus on a few artists I have been anxious to see in person. One in particular that brought particular pleasure was J.M.W. Turner, the well known 19th century English painter with extraordinary gifts. An artist who grew out of the romantic stylings of Byron and Beethoven to presage the luminescence and abstraction of Impressionism, Turner imparts a special emotional longing from the viewer. In Keelmen Heaving In Coals By Moonlight, an intense impressionistic lightshow is brought to bear with the furious red glow of the coals juxtaposed on the pewter metallic moonlight, and ghostly ships appearing and disappearing out of the mist. Fantastic. The art alone would take a lifetime to see and absorb it all, but the Smithsonian collection along the Mall is of equal import and diversity in treasure. From Natural History to American History, the Museum of the American Indian, Arts and Industries, and the Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian spans the American experience. The visual highlight for me on this trip is the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. The entry alone, contains three epic giants in the history of flight – the Wright Brothers Flyer, the Spirit of St Louis, and Apollo 11 – from the first controlled flight to man’s conquering of the ocean by air, forever shrinking the planet, to escaping earth to land on another celestial globe. All in the same room and all within 66 years. For whatever reason, I feel the most connectiveness with the little monoplane that carried Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic in 1927. This was no decade long monumental commitment of a nation to achieve a goal. This was a 24 year old postal service pilot, who rigged a design out of a small American entrepreneurial aircraft company, had them build the craft over a few months, flight tested it by flying it cross country to break the record at that time for solo transcontinental flight, and on the same mission hopped over the Atlantic in 33 consecutive solo flight hours with no backup, no escape plan, and no previous indication of success for such an undertaking. This spectacular little plane would go on to achieve thousands of hours of flight, but the first one is seared in our memory, and our national mythology.The museum has superb examples of passenger service flight, from the original passenger carrier the Ford Tri-motor to the workhorse of the mid-century the DC-3 to the modern Boeing 747. It shows in close up fashion the story of combat craft from the Sopwith Camel of World War I to the German Messerschmidts, Japanese Zeroes and American P-51 Mustangs of the Second. The history of rocketry is noted with Minuteman missiles and V-2 rockets, as well as the critical contribution of Russian aerospace from Sputnik to Soyuz. The journey is endless from Tomahawk cruise missiles to Saturn V engines, LEM lunar landers to Space Ship One, the first private service passenger ship to space. Its a visual feast for the air afffectionato and the perfect bookend to the museum extravaganza on the National Mall.

This brief survey does not scratch remotely all that there is to explore in the national repositories celebrating our civilization’s watershed achievements. each venue offers days of study and a lifetime of reading. Consider the story of the electric light bulb or the electric guitar, the harvesting of hydroelectric power, the prayers of the Navajo, the invention and outgrowth of the gasoline engine, the crafts of the native Americans and those who suffered in servitude, the portraits of all the nation’s chief executives, the dresses of the First Ladies. On and on and on in magnificent promotion of what it means to struggle, to seek, to conquer, to create, and ultimately to triumph in the never ending celebration of life well lived.