Tag Archives: Kent Ballard

An Unconventional Winter

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by Kent Ballard

Don’t ask me anything about global warming. I don’t understand the science behind that idea. It’s logical that nine zillion cars and power plants could have an effect on the earth’s temperature, like most scientists say. What I don’t get is equally credited climatologists pointing out that one good volcanic eruption, like, say, Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in ’91 can, in four days, put out an equivalent amount of every nasty gas into the atmosphere that humans have for six hundred years. Is this our fault or not? If it is, we need to change our habits. If it’s not, we can do nothing about it.

Me, I don’t know. We’re gonna get what we’re gonna get.

They say the earth is slowly getting warmer. The fine print at the bottom of some of these articles also states we’ve been getting warmer for three hundred years, ever since the end of “the little ice age” around the time of the Renaissance. That was before the Industrial Revolution and the age of coal power. Me, I don’t know. I can’t remember back that far.

But I do know that last winter was supremely nasty here in the Midwest, as well as other parts of the world, and this winter hasn’t been any better. Last night we were to get three more inches of snow. We got seven. Poor Boston has been buried by snow since Miley Cyrus went nuts. The last time I checked Zach’s town was getting an unwanted renovation by the glaciers crushing it. People are waging guerrilla war against their neighbors for stealing shoveled-out parking places. The city fathers are worrying where to pile all that snow they do manage to scrape up off the streets. I’d suggest driving it out and dumping it on the Atlantic Ocean, since it’s frozen too, but they never listen to me. Or maybe they’re scared of forming real glaciers that would then move inland. The rest of the country has had a good laugh at the mayor of Boston pleading with citizens not to leap off three and four story buildings into snow piles. That sounds perfectly sane to me when your doors and windows are buried up to the second floor. How else are they supposed to get around? At least they’re not as crazy as New York, which declared a blizzard was coming (it didn’t) and ordered all citizens to stay off the subways—and still left them all running, empty–throughout the “snow emergency.” Great city management there, de Blasio. The Algonquian Indians had their act together better than that.

I left the city life in 1998 and moved as far into the hinterlands as possible. It’s great out here. But winter brings a different set of problems. One of the best pickup trucks I ever owned was a two-wheel drive Ford F-150. Good styling, great interior and options, 5.0 liter high-performance engine that would pass anything except for a gas station. It helped me move here. The next winter it was gone, replaced by a 4×4 pickup. The winter after that, our Chevy was replaced by a Jeep. Places to put accumulated snow are not a problem for a county that never runs plows save for the state highways, and I’m miles from any of them.

We’re too far out for luxuries like city water and gas. We burn propane from a 500 gallon tank for our gas heater and pump our own water from a 184 foot deep well. My electricity literally comes through the forest, not down the road and along our driveway. This is all fine and good until storms or icy, sagging tree branches snap the power line. No electricity, no power to the water pump. No power to the electronic ignition for the gas furnace, or power to run the blower. It can become pretty quaint here in the wink of an eye.

Many of my friends have told me flatly they would not live where I live because the nearest burg that passes for a town (a dozen or so miles away) does not deliver Chinese or pizza out this far. I point out that even if they did, the tip would cost far more than the food. And a pox on anyone who would order food delivery in this weather anyway. The poor college kids or men and women working two and three jobs to make ends meet shouldn’t have to risk their necks to save you a trip to a restaurant that’s only four blocks away. Shame on the people who do that.

So what do we do when the 21st Century vanishes at the speed of light? We side-step and go back to the 19th. Sitting next to my gas furnace is a whole-house wood burning furnace. There’s also a wood stove in the basement and a fireplace in the living room. We’ve got deep cycle batteries—always charged—and DC to AC inverters. Those run the computers and a few lights. I’m putting in solar chargers this summer. We’ve a lovely collection of kerosene lamps. That giant wood furnace runs hot enough that we need to open the windows if I stuff too much wood into it, and my Coleman camp stove has cooked many a meal while sitting on the electric range. We store a ridiculous amount of water in the basement in rinsed-out two liter pop bottles, all treated and sealed and far from any sunlight. In short, it’s pretty much business as usual, except when I pour a mug of water and place it in the microwave to make a cup of tea. I won’t admit the number of times I’ve done that over the years.

Same weather, but different places and different problems. As I look outside today, I swear it’s absolutely beautiful. A professional photographer would have a field day here. I live in a picture postcard. But I also know my wood is running low, and sooner or later I’ll have to don more outerwear than a space station astronaut, grab the chain saw, fire up that 4×4 truck, and go cut more firewood. Yup, we’re out of propane. We called over a week ago, but this winter has the drivers for the Podunk Gas Company running their tails off. We didn’t call in time. But fret not. It’s 74 degrees inside, thanks to cast iron, expensive chain saws, and the fact that I live in the middle of hundreds of thousands of tons of fuel. All I have to do is go get it. And hey, we’ve still got electricity…at least for now. Piece of cake.

Animals get weird after a long, deep snow. It’s a little-known fact in modern times, but during the westward migration more than one wagon train was snowed in and starved to death. When rescuers finally hiked in with provisions, they found that long after the humans had frozen to death the horses and dogs were still alive. It’s damned near impossible to freeze either one, unless it’s a chihuahua or a poodle. And both of them would be eaten by the coyotes around here anyway. I pick my dogs for cold-weather hardiness and size and I have four of them. Why so many? The coyotes would eat one. Maybe two. But they won’t attack four. I’ve found coyote stool in my yard and driveway. It’s interesting in the summer to sit out at night and listen to them howl, but when food disappears they take on a much darker character. The deer have been browsing the bark off small trees. Squirrels and raccoons have been making do as best they can, including stealing dog food off the porch when the dogs are out somewhere in the forest with me.

I took this job as guest columnist six months ago this week. Then, it was fall and we were all still relaxing in more balmy temperatures. Zach had recently had shoulder surgery and I offered to stand in every other week to help his wing heal. We talked about it becoming permanent, or at least as permanent as anything else on the Internet, but I’m really not much of a columnist so this will be my last entry. When we started, Zach suggested “around 1000 words” for a column. I think the shortest I ever turned in was 1200 or so, the longest over 3000. It takes me nearly 400 words just to say “hello” sometimes. Not all that professional, folks.

But it’s had it’s bright spots too. Four different times now I’ve talked to publishers over the phone who informed me they were adding extra pages to their magazines to print my articles in their entirety, not one word edited out. That’s simply unheard of. Publishers don’t do that. ‘Cept they did, four times for me. I guess it takes me a few words to get warmed up. Or get around to the point, depending on your view. I admit it. I’m long-winded.

But I hope you got a little information or maybe a smile or two from all the hair-pulling I’ve done here not to write major feature articles in a small blog column. If Zach ever gets stuck on the MTA or breaks his hand jumping out a three story window onto a two story building, I might drop in again someday. But for now, it’s back to my excessive verbiage in longer feature articles. Zach’s healed up well enough to take over fully now, and I thank him for this opportunity and thank you for putting up with me.

And now…I gotta go cut more firewood.

Far Worse Than We Thought

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by Kent Ballard

There’s not much I can say about parents who insist on their children wearing crash helmets and body armor when they ride bikes while neglecting their childhood immunizations. Sure, piling up a bike can dent your head or scrape your knee. But the diseases stopped by safe and routine immunizations can kill a child, and not only that child but everyone else he manages to infect. Typhoid Mary (or Timmy) took a stroll through Disneyland recently and the butcher’s bill has yet to be calculated. Kids can ride out the measles. They’ll be sick, have a nasty fever, itchy spots and all that. But measles can kill any adult who’s never been exposed to them. It’s a safe bet we’ll be hearing more about this in the near future.

I don’t know about you, but if I had to forego the advice of medical professionals and trust, say, somebody’s wise old grandmother or a B-list TV personality, I’d probably go with grandma. Jenny McCarthy may have started the anti-vaccination movement which has now been discredited several times over, but without the sheer stupidity of many thousands of parents who listened to her it never would have become the problem it is now.

The parents who refused to have their children immunized should be tied into chairs and forced to watch Penn and Teller’s brilliant YouTube explanation about childhood vaccines. Leave them tied there for a week or so, however long it takes for the truth to soak into their cement skulls. Forget medical journals and hundreds of thousands of written words of research. What Penn and Teller did in around three minutes is the strongest case made for having children vaccinated I’ve ever seen.

But while McCarthy’s advice was both ridiculous and deadly, she did have the laudable goal of reducing the number of autistic children born in the United States. It’s hard to knock her for that, even if she inadvertently created another deadly public health problem. More children are born autistic every year. For some time the reason for this was a mystery. It certainly wasn’t the fault of the children themselves, and study after study could find no fault with the parents or anything they had in their environments.

Until now. And what has been discovered is beyond worrisome. It’s absolutely terrifying.

Stefanie Seneff is a research scientist for MIT. She worked in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence before turning to biology. She’s had papers published on everything from cardiovascular disease to Alzheimer’s. In layman’s terms, that woman knows her stuff. Not too many people can be accurately described as brilliant. Ms. Seneff is one of those people.

Around seven months ago (June, 2014), Stefanie Seneff was asked to address a wellness organization in Groton, MA. No one was certain what her topic would be, but anything coming from her would be well-researched, timely, and highly interesting. But with her opening sentence, a hush fell over the assembled throng and she had the riveted, undivided attention of every soul in the room.

She said, “At today’s rate, by 2025, one in two children will be autistic.”

They said there was dead silence for a moment, then a murmur raced through the crowd. Surely they had misunderstood her. What did she say? Is she joking? No, no, no, this can’t be real…

It was. Those were her professional projections. Half of all kids will be autistic in ten years. And she went on to identify the real culprit behind this.

The Monsanto Corporation’s flagship weedkiller “Roundup” began to be heavily used in 1990 and has become more popular every year since. Seneff produced a chart showing the use of Roundup overlayed against the rising incidence of autism. They match almost perfectly. Even a mere glance at the chart indicates a dramatic correlation. She went on to describe MIT’s findings proving Roundup’s active ingredients were far more deadly and long-lasting than Monsanto’s claims, and that even what they referred to as “inert ingredients” in Roundup were anything but. Not only that, she proved exposure is cumulative. We’re all exposed to it daily, regardless of where we live, and we’re exposed often enough that we can’t shake it, can’t rid our bodies of it. It accumulates within us.

“But I live in the city”, you say. “I haven’t even seen a farm since my third grade class trip.” Okay, I have a few questions for you—Do you eat? Do you drink water? Do you have any bloody idea how many products contain corn and soybeans? Your pet’s food even contains both. Any meat you eat (and feed your children) was raised on corn and soybean meal in its feed, too. And after Roundup is sprayed on a field, where do you think it goes from there? It doesn’t just evaporate. The first rain will melt it into the ground. All rains after that press it deeper into the earth and spread it through the nations aquafiers. Millions upon millions of tons of grain are planted, grown, harvested, and sold from fields sprayed with Roundup. Helpfully, Monsanto sells a wide variety of seed to farmers that is “Roundup-Ready,” meaning it can be planted in a field that’s just been soaked with Roundup and will be immune to the poisons therein.

This isn’t the farmer’s fault. Monsanto assured everyone—including the FDA—that Roundup was perfectly safe. To the farmers, it’s just a great weedkiller, no more, no less. Their advanced knowledge of chemistry is probably on a par with any other profession. And you can “go organic” all you want. You’re still going to get thirsty sooner or later and the majority of all bottled water comes from a regular city tap somewhere. Or you might even take a shower or bath.

I live in farming country. Most farmers buy that stuff by the barrel anymore. Huge farms buy tanker trucks full of it. And very few involved with the sale, shipment, or use of that product knows what you know now…but word is spreading fast. Roundup is good, but not that good. And there are other weedkillers that can be used in modern agriculture. But Monsanto is not a humble mom-and-pop country feed and grain store. It’s a multibillion dollar industry giant with lobbyists, deep pockets, and heavy political clout. Roundup is their cash cow. They won’t go down without a fight. There will be investigations, more studies, hearings, and several setbacks before any kind of ban on Roundup and its satellite products can be put in place. But you’d better start supporting one now.

By the way, Monsanto was named “The Most Hated Company in America” several times. Don’t expect them to use their sense of public decency and the common good to kill one of their most profitable products. They’ll protect it at all costs. They will buy scientists, researchers, Congress if need be.

Here are a few things to remember: the number of children with autism has gone from 1 in 5,000 in 1975 to 1 in 68 in 2014. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, has been found in the breast milk of American mothers at “dangerous” levels, 760 to 1600 times higher than the allowable limits in European drinking water. Americans have ten times the level of glyphosate in their urine than Europeans. Why the comparisons with Europe? They had the good sense never to legalize glyphosate for widespread use, only in very limited applications, most by goverment-trained and regulated agencies. And we are eating it, drinking it, literally bathing in it every day.

Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” brought an end to the use of DDT, but that took years. Roundup, in ten years, will leave this nation with 50% autism, and if that happens no one can predict the cost, or even if our nation could survive such a catastrophe. Think about that for a moment. Just think about that…and what it could lead a desperate and failing society to do.

Obsession

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by Kent Ballard

I accidentally came across a strange subject while researching another article recently. It was the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine. I thought it was odd that the writer was still talking about it in the present tense. Damned stupid writers anyway. What do they know, I asked?

Quite a lot, in this case. I read a few lines and the more I read the weirder things got. I thought I knew all about the story but came to discover I knew almost nothing. I knew that legend was a big deal in the past, but figured everyone had sobered up by now and that we all looked back and laughed about the tiny blip it made on the American conscious a hundred years ago.

Wrong.

 Did you know there is an entire industry build around that legend? Do you know an estimated eight thousand people every year–most of whom have no business wandering around in a desert–still search for that bloody mine to this day? People have killed total strangers over it. They’ve dropped big rocks on them from above, set booby traps, or just shot them in the back and let them die face down in the Arizona sand. The only ones who have found untold riches so far are the dead people recovery teams drag out periodically.

I figured most of that nonsense went on over a century in the past. Nope. They hauled Jesse Capen out boots-first just two years ago. He’d told coworkers that he was going to spend another weekend hunting for the Lost Dutchman’s Mine and never reported back to work. The sheriff’s department searched for him, then a few relatives looked for him when the authorities gave up. Both parties asked all the other folks who were in the vicinity risking heat exhaustion, looking for the same mine. No one had seen him. It was around two years after his disappearance (when a professional rescue team was called in to helicopter yet another would-be billionaire to a hospital) that somebody finally found Jesse. His body was wedged into a crack running down the side of Superstition Mountain. The only way he could have gotten there was from above. They saw no reason to think foul play was involved. Apparently Jesse got tired of tramping around the mountain and decided the entrance to his mine was surely up along the side of it somewhere. He was not an experienced climber and did not have the proper equipment for it. They find people like Jesse every few years.

The article went on to explain that the legend of the Lost Dutchman’s Mine was just that to most of us, but for a certain percentage of the population it’s a curse. Because some people can take an interest in the very real Dutchman—his name was Jacob Waltz and he was actually German—and that interest will grow within them like a cancer cell. They want to know more. They read about Adolph Ruth and Dr. Thorne and the Peralta family and the more they read, the more fascinated they become. They read there are several maps in existence, all claiming to be the correct one, and they read over and over the verbal directions Waltz supposedly gave a nurse, and they come to believe not only does all that gold really exist, but that they alone can find it. Like any obsession, nothing can stand in its way. Divorces, broken homes, abandoned children, real fortunes lost, even the threat of death itself will not stop them.

A doctor once told me there are some simple rules in life. Never become too bored or too angry or too lonely. That’s pretty good advice. To that I would add never become obsessed—by anything. An obsession is not a keen interest. Many skilled modelers have built ships in bottles, but none have starved to death doing it. Or spent the family fortune. Or became unable to feed their own children.

Psychiatrists would argue there’s a great difference between an addiction and an obsession. But at some point that becomes immaterial. To my way of thinking they become the same eventually. We all know what a homeless street addict will do for his next fix. Anything. In darker moments we learn (and try to forget) that addicted soccer moms and upstanding businessmen will do exactly the same if need be. Unless they’ve seen it first-hand, most folks don’t realize the power gambling addictions have over people. I certainly didn’t until I met a man engulfed by one. What happened to him—and his family—wasn’t pretty.

Obsessions are damnably wicked, and on several different levels of wickedness. They can strike without warning and their victims never understand they themselves are being consumed by one. Most are temporary obsessions, like the guy at a party telling everyone over and over about “the best damned movie I ever saw in like, forever.” Yeah, sure, okay. In two months he won’t be so hyper about it. But other people will develop obsessions that will last the rest of their days.

I like most impassioned people. But a passion for a thing is not an obsession. An obsession will cloud a human mind to reality. Burt Rutan and Chuck Yeager are passionate about flying. Richard Feynman was impassioned with physics and his bongo drums. But the killers at the Charlie Hebdo offices were obsessed with images of Mohammed. The difference is not the strength of their feelings and convictions, but in the power of our own minds to warp themselves beyond reality and into the wastelands of vicious inhumanity. If you start dwelling on a subject and seeing things in it that no one else can see, it may be time to fall back and reexamine your beliefs. It’s possible you may be a pioneering genius but it’s far more likely you’re becoming a fanatic, especially if the idea of using force to make others see things your way becomes logical to you.

The prospectors searching Superstition Mountain as you read this are not terrorists, but I wonder what their families could tell us? Not all of it could be good. I’m sure there are folks who picnic on that mountain and laugh about Jacob Waltz’s legendary mine, but how many others have gone around that invisible bend where they can no longer see home? Or care about it and those they walked away from? Gold has always been mildly interesting to some people and a form of crystal meth to others. But unlike the faces of meth addicts, we can’t photograph people’s hearts and minds. We can’t see the gradual derangement over years, sometimes slow, sometimes with terrible speed.

There are worse obsessions than gold fever. Not many, but a few. Some obsessions are dangerous to everyone now. Hate and stupidity can travel at the speed of light thanks to computers and smart phones. If you don’t think it’s possible to lose intelligence, ask Jesse Capen what he was doing up there on that cheap rope before it snapped. Everyone said he was a nice guy, a warm and friendly man, a good co-worker. A guy just like us. He wasn’t born stupid.

He simply became obsessed.

Jackboots In The Post Office

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by Kent Ballard

The Christmas season was never a time to go to the Post Office. It’s an annoyance at best and a dreadful, thankless chore at worst. But this season my visit became something much darker.

Friday was one of those days that hit us all once in a while. I was busy and pinched for time. I had to hit the hardware store, Post Office, and then rush back home to meet a friend who was coming to visit. They were widening a public sidewalk corner in the tiny little town near my home. With the forethought and planning of any small town the minor construction they were undergoing managed to not only tie up a major state highway but also a federal highway that often takes the spillover traffic from the nearby Interstate. I don’t think I could have done a better job of disrupting traffic if I’d been hired to do it by the governor. At least I’m sure they’ll build a sidewalk that will last for the ages, a sidewalk that will someday be measured as one of man’s enduring efforts like the Great Pyramids or Mount Rushmore. It’s certainly been taking them that long.

After plodding through the traffic backup I made the hardware store and was in and out in a flash. Then I had to negotiate the barricades and yellow flashing lights again, along with their amazing town construction workers, all expertly trained to sleep while leaning on shovels without falling over. I pulled into the parking lot of the Post Office and went in. I didn’t have a stamp for my letter. My wife had taken off with our stamps safely in her purse and all I had to do was tell the nice Post Office person I wanted to mail this envelope (a common letter), pay them, tip my hat, and come home.

The USPS has been going broke for as long as I can remember. I don’t know why they just don’t charge more and become solvent. I’ve read where postage in other countries is considerably higher, and often when visitors come to the States they remark about our low postage costs. An even better idea would be for the USPS to triple or quadruple the cost of third class mail. We’d then either get a lot less junk mail or they’d be rolling in money, probably both. Anyway, after waiting my turn in line I got to the sole woman behind the USPS counter who was waiting on the public. The counter was set up for two workers, but I’m sure you’ve encountered similar “conveniences” yourself, either at your Post Office or your bank, where they spend fifty million dollars to tell you how much they value your business while cutting workers and lengthening your time in line. Few people will change banks and where ya gonna go for another Post Office?

When it was my turn I stepped forward and put the letter on the counter in front of the woman. While digging in my pocket for change I said, “Hi. I just need to mail this. My wife has the stamps and I want to get this out today.”

The woman did not share my sense of urgency. Fair enough. She didn’t need to. All I wanted her to do was her job.

“You don’t have a return address on this. You need a return address.”

Did you ever feel like a bumblebee that just flew into a brick wall? The woman gestured to the counter along the wall, indicating I could go over there and temporarily be out of her hair for a moment while I wrote my return address on the envelope. She was only working at one speed (glacial) and processing customers as if they were all putting her to extreme difficulty. If I’d taken my letter and done as she said it’d be another ten or fifteen minutes before I worked my way back to her. I’m not normally rushed, but those minutes were more important to me than the normal creaking flow of her day. I did not have a pen on me, nor did she offer me one.

“Is that a law? Can’t you mail this without a return address?”

“Hmm. I could mail it. But you need a return address.”

“Well, if you can mail it without one, go ahead and do that, please.”

“You don’t understand. I could mail this, but you really need to put a return address on it.”

“Is it a federal law now that every letter has to have a return address?” And then I caught her expression. For no understandable reason this civil servant was now glaring at me with something akin to suspicion. What was this woman’s problem? Something changed in the air. I was not sure what. Was she just overwhelmed by her own bureaucratic importance of having the only USPS public window in twenty-five miles? Had she finally exhausted her ability to wield such astonishing power?

I didn’t know. It finally dawned on me that I didn’t care either.

“If there’s no federal law requiring a return address, I’m going to mail this as is without one. I don’t have the time to…”

BAM! She slapped a meaty fist on the counter, snatched up my letter, spun around with surprising speed for someone of her size, and marched back into an office behind her.

Behind me, a housewife waiting in line softly said, “Well, what’s wrong with her…?”

I kind of shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It’s just a letter.” Then I looked back in line and offered, “Sorry to cause a hold-up. I don’t know what her problem is. I just need to mail one letter.”

Presently the squat woman came out of the office followed by a man. She pointed an accusing finger at me and said triumphantly, “He’s the one!”

The one WHAT? I wondered. What had I done? Nothing. Nothing at all.

This was interesting. Had I broken some obscure federal law? Could I expect an FBI SWAT team to launch grenades through the door and club me into submission? Whadda hell was going on here? The man looked at me as if I was a Nazi paratrooper just dropped in to conquer his portion of America. This made no sense at all. And whatever their dog and pony show was really about, they were hindering every postal customer there. Including me. I didn’t know what raised their hackles, but it was now evident that whether I liked it or not I was in the middle of some kind of Twilight Zone game. Did you ever surprise yourself and decide you’d had enough?

“You need a return address on this.”

Wrong thing to say, Homer. “You need to train your help. I just asked her if that was a law. She said it wasn’t.”

He laid the letter back down on the counter. Trying a different tact, he said more pleasantly, “No, it doesn’t have to have one. But if it doesn’t have a return address it could get lost in the mail and we wouldn’t know who to return it to.”

“I’ve got faith in you.” This was becoming a pissing contest.

“It’s for your own protection,” he deadpanned.

“I’ll take my chances.” I was on the verge of becoming…postal.

“It could get lost.”

“I’ll write another.”

I found myself engaged in an silly exchange over…what? Why were these two government time clock punchers behaving this way? Why were they very strongly trying to get me to comply when there was no law to comply with? Were they vaguely threatening me? It sure seemed like it. But why?

Nope. I wasn’t playing their game, whatever it was. I had a dollar bill crumpled in my hand. I tossed it onto the counter and stared back at the Postmaster.

He said, “It’s really for your protection…”

I didn’t say a word. Just stared at him.

He bent down and literally whispered something to the office penguin. Whispered, mind you, as if saying some loathsome, despicable thing. She looked back at him. He nodded. She stepped ahead and picked up my dollar and–as if nothing unusual had transpired–she rang me up and handed me my change.

I muttered thanks and turned for the door. Once past it I looked back and they were still staring at me. What in the world? It seemed as if they were doing their barnyard best to memorize my looks, height, weight, my every feature.

When I came home I was still mystified, still wondering what had taken place in such an otherwise obscure place like the local post office. My guest arrived and I told him, “Dave, the weirdest thing happened just a while ago…”

I told him about the little mystery I’d encountered while in town. He chuckled and said, “Yeah, leave it to you…”

That only turned my fires up. “Leave WHAT to me? I ASKED them if it was legal, or if a return address was required by law! Hell, by their own admission I wasn’t breaking any law! Why all the guff over something as unimportant as that?”

Dave made a mocking frown at me. “You disappoint me, Kent. I thought you kept up with all the news about our heroic war on terrorism.”

“Huh?”

He sighed. “You ever hear of the Patriot Act? Do you remember when that wacko sent powdered ricin in the mail to a few congressmen? You won’t get a cell phone because you don’t want spy agencies pinging you every five minutes,” he laughed, “but you didn’t know about some of the other ways they track you?”

Terrorists? Ricin? Congress? I stood there blinking.

The U.S. Post Office is nearing the capability to photograph every piece of mail it handles. They say they only photograph some of them now. But they have conveyor belts they can place mail on and it shoots them through a camera very rapidly. They have software that can read and store names and addresses. That way, if the FBI, the Department of Homeland Insecurity, or even a local cop gets interested in someone they can call the USPS and ask them, “Where is this person’s mail going and who mails them?” And you will never know anything about it. The NSA didn’t ask your permission to read your emails and search engine queries. They didn’t ask how you felt about them listening to your phone conversations. The USPS didn’t ask you about this, either.

They can track everything you send and everything you get in the mail. They can tap the same information from FedEx and UPS too. Law enforcement requests for USPS information are skyrocketing (see below). It costs them nothing. You pay for it. And that’s why the people in one post office wanted me to put a return address on my letter so very damned badly and why it looked suspicious when I refused. At least to them. I suppose they saved every minute I was there on videotape and flagged that, too. I should have combed my hair.

This business has gone on long enough. I’m tired of every government mouthpiece constantly screaming TERRORISM! TERRORISM! at me when I’m in far greater danger from bee stings or tripping over my own big feet. I’m tired of secret judges on secret courts handing out surveillance warrants like Life Savers on Halloween. I’m tired of my own government using the weak straw man of TERRORISM! to shred my Bill of Rights more every day.

I’m not the first to write about this. You’ll find the links below quite interesting. I’d hoped that maybe, somehow, I’d blown this out of proportion in my mind, that a bored clerk in a post office merely wanted to do something to break her monotony, or perhaps even that I was rushed and came to an incorrectly harsh judgment. I hoped that right up until I read these.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/28/7084135/usps-mail-cover-surveillance-wider-than-thought-49000-pieces

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/snail-mail-snooping-safeguards-not-followed-108056.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/us/us-secretly-monitoring-mail-of-thousands.html?rref=us&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=U.S.&action=click&region=FixedLeft&pgtype=article&_r=1

Where No One Has Gone Before

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by Kent Ballard

 

I surprised myself last week while watching the NASA coverage of their Orion test. The first day was a nasty reminder of all the times when the world and I waited through countless holds. But on the second day, at around T minus 20 seconds, a miracle happened.

I became young again.

Young enough that it was all still a mystery. So young that the unknown no longer held any fear. I was young enough to challenge the universe on its own terms and I was confident of victory. We could face this great thing. And we could beat it.

But the glow of those engines has died out now, and I’m back on Earth. What I see is not encouraging. We’re not only fighting the universe here. We’re fighting ignorance and superstition and mankind’s eternal curses of greed and stupidity. And no amount of engineering can help us.

When I was a small child, very few people believed it would ever be possible to land a man on the Moon. You would still get laughed at for saying you thought differently. We not only landed a dozen men over several missions, we took cars with us and drove around on the damned thing, a uniquely American way of conquering any new land.

You’ll get laughed at today while talking about starships. Never mind the fact that we’re now investigating the Alcubierrie Drive, a dead ringer for the legendary Warp Drive that powered four generations of fictional ships around the galaxy. And if you try to talk to people about the EmDrive, all but a very tiny handful will have no idea what you mean. If you explain that it means thrust from electrical power only—a reactionless, fuelless thrust—if they have any grasp of physics they’ll simply tell you it isn’t possible. But it is. We’re working on that too. And the Chinese are very interested in it as well. Both nations have small working models that produce thrust and are scaling them up. Other nations will follow soon.

Still, the uneducated moan and wring their hands about all that money spent in space. They’re fools and always have been. Not one cent has ever been spent in space. All that money was spent here in our economy and it went to develop new chemicals and materials, processes to miniaturize things, new kinds of batteries and power sources, computers that are cheaper, faster, smarter, and smaller. NASA employs many more plumbers and bulldozer operators than astronauts, more bricklayers and electricians than physicists, and they give more paychecks to janitors than to people working on new propulsion systems. And they do it all on much less annually than one battle cost in Iraq or Afghanistan and they spent a helluva lot less blood buying all that too. The United States has now spent over nine trillion dollars supposedly fighting poverty. We have more poor now than when we started. But for the same expenditure we could have had a world that looked more like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001—and with more employment and better employment for everyone.

Breakthrough technologies do that. When personal computers were new, there was a worry about the economic disruption a “paperless office” would cause. People believed secretaries everywhere would lose their jobs. (Yes, I know, but they really believed that.) What actually happened was computers made countless thousands of new jobs that didn’t exist before and you cannot find a secretary today without at least one computer monitor on his or her desk. One did not eliminate the other. They made each other stronger and more efficient.

People who would boldly go anywhere first have to deal with the others who laugh at them. Cold fusion became the fodder for late night talk show jokes. Fleischmann and Pons died discredited, unable to find work anywhere in the enlightened world of academia that blackballed them. And while cold fusion has been replicated many times over, it hasn’t been officially invented yet because no one has found the secret to starting and stopping it when they want. Therefore it does not exist—but universities around the world keep on doing it and studying it because the riches of King Solomon’s mines await the first team to control it. But they study in secret for the most part. They don’t want to be laughed at, the second-worst imaginable thing in academia, and they don’t want to rock any boats, by far the worst sin. Also some of them could be killed. Controlled cold fusion would wreck the oil industry overnight and set the world economy on its ear. You’d better believe that this work is not only very real but also very dangerous. If you were totally without morals, how many people would you kill for several trillion dollars?

I was listening to some forgettable comic making fun of NASA recently. He said they should make their minds up about asteroids. On one hand, they’re claiming that one could fall on us and kill us all, and on the other they’re talking about lassoing one and bringing it closer to Earth. What gives?

He’s probably not stupid, merely uneducated. I would enlighten him by showing him a map of the Earth, carefully pointing out the gigantic craters left behind by asteroid strikes, and ask him if he’d mind being under one when it hit? And if he did, who would he go crying to in order to save his ass? The Department of Homeland Insecurity? His police department? The Post Office?

Then I’d ask him if money meant anything to him, and point out that a great deal of money is now being invested in robotic devices to mine asteroids in space. Asteroids are like candy. They come in many different flavors. The right kind of asteroid is worth a ridiculous sum of money. How much? It’s been estimated that just one small (thirty yards or so across) S-type asteroid contains over a hundred pounds of gold and platinum, and about one and a half million pounds of other metals like iron, aluminum, titanium, lead, nickel, and other expensive things. The people who no longer laugh at this, and who are investing money today, figure that 241 Germania—a common enough asteroid—contains mineral wealth equal to $95.8 trillion dollars on today’s market. That’s equal to the annual GDP for the world. Bold people are going for a piece of that.

I’d point out too that by taking this wealth from space, no little bunnies or pretty trees would need to be bulldozed away. Those metals can be taken—and will be taken—with no scarring of the Earth, no poisonous mining runoff, and no need for decades of expensive land reclamation projects that might or might not ever be completed. We may not live to see starships, but we will buy things made out of metal from space because those products will be cheaper than Earth-mined metals.

And don’t write off starships either. If the past century has taught us anything, it’s not to laugh too loudly at the impossible. Be honest with yourself. Who would have ever believed in nukes, lasers, or smart phones? Or that two of the three would be developed by private enterprise? Or that the other one would be considered one of the greatest engineering feats in history but only used twice? The point is, don’t scoff at technology and never try to predict it. You’ll always be wrong.

My youthful feeling the other day was bittersweet. Sure, I was one of those kids who idolized the early astronauts and could rattle off every nut and bolt that made up a Mercury or Gemini capsule. But I also bristled at—and fought—the idea that it was all a Cold War stunt. No, space meant more to me than that. It still does. But the old enemies still exist, and I find myself fighting the same ignorance, the same luddites, the same refusal to see what this means to our species. Human history has barely begun, but we wrote another line of it last Friday…no thanks to them.

In the end it means the survival of humanity, that we won’t all be taken out helplessly by a rogue asteroid, solar flare, some virus from hell, or our own stupidity. That’s worth fighting for, even if that day seems so terribly far away. And on a deeper and more spiritual level, it means new hills for people to hike up simply to see what’s on the other side. We need both. We need the security of knowing we can take hits, terribly brutal hits, and still be around. And without our curiosity we would no longer be human. If we should ever lose that we’ve lost everything, including any hope we ever had.

For me, the end of the space program will come at that time when people think no more about hull designs or propulsion systems or radiation shielding, when the great thing before them is that next hill or that next curve in the river ahead. Because at that time, we will never again run out of hills and rivers to explore, new places to go, new lands to seek.

We will be more free than humans have ever been before. We will be free forever.