R3volution: Independence Day

Independence Day!

Living Historian Patriot poses

before Faneuil Hall, Boston.

The statue is Samuel Adams,

Patriot, Son of Liberty and

signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Today we celebrate that great moment at which the Continental Congress declared that the 13 colonies "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states", thus creating the United States of America. They voted for "Independency" on July 2, 1776, but adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Different founders traveled to Philedelphia over the course of that long, hot summer to add their signatures to that sublime document, bringing the total who pledged their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor" to 56.

John Adams, who was probably the most influential of those who pushed for independence, wrote to his wife Abigail on July 3, 1776:

"Yesterday the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater perhaps never was, nor will be, decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, "that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.

"I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will triumph in that Days Transaction, even although We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not." --3 July 1776, Letter of John Adams to Abigail Adams. The Adams Papers (2007), M.A. Horner, Ed.

Adams wrote that it was Posterity that would gain from this decision, even though the founders might well "rue it" because, by signing the Declaration, the Founders were committing treason against King George III, and if things should go badly, they would be hanged for it.

The price of Liberty is always dear, and the Founders knew it. Thus, they understood the seriousness nature of the pledge they made to each other, and to Posterity, when they said:

"And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor."

Today, many of us, John Adam's posterity, are watching in dismay as the Liberty that our Founders put their lives on the line to preserve is being dismantled. We are now on the express train to tyranny , shedding the precepts of Liberty that we inherited from the Founders. Thus, and most cogent, is this quote that appeared at the end of the HBO miniseries, John Adams:

"Well, posterity, you will never know what it cost us to preserve your freedom. I only hope that you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it." --John Adams

We are that posterity, and it is our duty to protect and defend the freedom that our Founders paid such a dear price to obtain for us. This charge is laid upon us in the Declaration of Independence itself:

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."

We have been drifting into tyranny, and the abuses and usurpations of our Constitution by our own government have been thus far sufferable, but soon--how soon we do not know--the petty power of our nonrepresenting representatives will have indelibly altered our Republic, and the abuses and usupations will become the absolute despotism that the Founders warned us about. Now is the time for the peaceful R3volution of the word and the pen and the vote. We must do it now, or our children will find themselves contemplating another kind of Revolution entirely.

We are, as Edward Cline so eloquently reminded us last week, The New Sons of Liberty, should we choose to rationally confront the Crisis that is upon us.

Long may Lady Liberty live and endure!

R3volution: Taxation, Property Rights, and Tea Parties

". . . we cannot be happy without being Free, that we

cannot be Free without being secure in our Property,

that we cannot be secure in our Property if without

our consent others may as if by right take it away."

--Abigail Adams, 1774

There are those whom I have heard disparage the American Revolution as being solely about "taxation and money" rather than about "freedom." When I hear this, I always want to ask such people what their definition of freedom is, though I don't always have the opportunity.

I suspect that such a person would answer that freedom is the ability to act without compulsion, to choose one's behavior. Indeed, freedom is the ability to speak, to write, to act without fear of interference from authority or government. If this is the case, then taxation--the act of taking a citizen's property by force in the name of some collective good--is at the heart of the argument for liberty, as Abigail Adams understood when she undertook to write to the English historian Catherine Macauley in 1774 about the just cause of Liberty for America, saying:

". . . Suffice it to say that we are invaded with fleets and Armies, our commerce not only obstructed, but totally ruined, the courts of Justice shut, many driven out from the Metropolis (Boston. EHL), . . . all the Horrours of a civil war threatening us on the one hand, and the chains of Slavery ready forged for us on the other."

Abigail Adams profoundly states the relationship between liberty and property in the opening quote above, from a letter she wrote to the American scholar Mercy Otis Warren in the same year.

There are also those who disparage the modern revolutionary Tea Party movement, saying that it is "only about taxation" or more frequently of late, stating that the 4th of July Tea Parties are "not about taxation", but that they are "about liberty." To them I would answer, as I did last night at the Bernalillo Libertarian Caucus, that the Tea Parties are about unjust and confiscatory taxation, which makes them profoundly "about liberty." A person who can make no choices about the disposition of his property, and who is forced to work to support a government for nigh unto half a year under threat of prison, has no liberty to lose. Further, if a government official wishes to "spread the wealth around" as Obama said, taking by force wealth from individuals who created it in order to "redistribute" it to those whom he deems more deserving of it, then he is enslaving some individuals to those "more deserving" others. As Lord Acton put it: "A people averse to the institution of private property is without the first element of freedom." (Quoted without full citation in The Freeman online).

There are also those who say that the original Boston Tea Party was well and good, because it was taxation without representation that the Sons of Liberty objected to, whereas the taxation that the present Tea Parties object to is taxation imposed by the consent of the governed. However, I do not believe that citizens are being represented by our nonrepresenting representatives. Mine, at least, (and I suspect that the lot of them) are in hock to their parties, their party national platforms, and the special interests that finance their extremely extravagant elections.

We the People get barely a second thought, except at so-called "townhall meetings" like the one that Senator Udall (D, NM) held at Albuquerque the other day, at which any questions and comments in opposition to the Dems national platform were immediately shut down. The Engineering Geek attended and called it 'Udall's Town-joke'. This was in the same vein as with President Obama's elaborately staged and scripted Town Hall meeting on the "credit card crisis" at Rio Rancho High School in May. The nonrepresenting "representatives" must be putting on a show for each other at these staged events, because they certainly did not fool many of the people there.

Thus I was gratified to open the Albuquerque Journal today and read what Christopher E. Spade of Cuba, NM wrote in a Letter to the Editor entitled Tea Parties Renew Our Fight for Independence:

" . . . We are again being taxed without representation.

"When members of Congress vote for legislation without first reading that legislation . . . we are not represented.

"When members of Congress move to stifle exploration and development of domestic energy sources . . . in spite of the fact that a majority of Americans favor domestic energy development, we are not represented!

"When members of Congress vote for bailouts for failed, badly run companies . . .and thus put the taxpayers at risk, we are not represented!

"When members of Congress consider new regulatory power over what may be broadcast over open radio stations . . . in clear violation of free speech guarantees . . . we are not represented!

". . . When members of Congress vote for confiscatory tax rates on the entrepeneurs who create the jobs and wealth of this country . . . we are not represented!

"There is another revolution on the horizon. Only this time, it will be at the ballot box."

(The Albuquerque Journal, Friday, July 3, 2009, Section A, p.11).

Thank you, Mr. Spade for saying it far more eloquently than I could!

We are not being represented.

Go to your local July 4th Tea Party tomorrow.

The Albuquerque Tea Party will hold an Independence Day rally on July 4, 2009 from 4-6 PM on Alameda St NE, right near the Balloon Fiesta park.
ABQ Tea Party RallyJuly 4, 2009 4-6 PM, 4509 Alameda NEAlbuquerque, NM
Come as you are - patriotic!

The theme for this Indepedence Day Rally is "The Spirit of '76!"

It is time for us to take to the streets and let our nonrepresenting representatives know that we see through their sham democracy.

We want the Republic back, and the political power to rest where it rightly belongs, within each of us, at liberty to live our lives without interference from the government.

For if we do not, then soon we will be in the same straits as the people of Boston, circa 1774, with "our commerce obstructed" and the people "reduced to want" and "made dependent", as Abigail Adams observed in her letter to Lady Macauley.

We begin the R3volution in our streets this July 4th, and continue it at the ballot box come November 2010.

The Very Large Array

NEARLY WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

The Boychick is hosting his cousin D., in from Illinois for a two-week visit.
The first week was a tour of the skate parks of the Greater Albuquerque area, but at the beginning of the second week the Engineering Geek and I decided that, not to be outdone by Camp Aunt Madge, we needed to take at least one educational field trip somewhere else in New Mexico.

The guys said a decided "No" to Fanta Se and the museums, Old Town, or the Salinas National Monument. But they said "Okay" to the Very Large Array, which is officially part of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Featured in many films, it was the setting for much of the action in the movie based on Carl Sagan's novel, Contact. I don't know if it was the big machines or the movie that hooked them, but off we went on a jaunt to to the Plains of San Augustin, where the radio telescopes are.

I insisted that we take the back roads, South NM 14 to Mountain Air, and then U.S. 60 to Bernardo and Socorro, Magdalena and the VLA. Here is a view looking south to Chupadera Mesa from Torreon, NM. Chupadera blocked any outlet of Glacial Lake Estancia into the ancenstral Rio Grande, creating salt flats as blow-out dunes. But we were headed for the other big, ancient lake bed in West-Central New Mexico.

A view of the two arms of the VLA from the photo stop on US 60. What is amazing is that each of the dishes is the diameter of a major league baseball diamond, but here they are, almost lost in the immensity of the Plains of San Augustin, an old glacial lake-bed.

Three radio recievers pointing to the eastern sky. The foreground shows a blow-out dune of lake sand and silt, deposited here more than 10,000 years ago, during the Pluvial (wet, lake) period of the Wisconsin glaciation.

And the politicians think they discovered global climate change?

The guys walk and discuss whether or not the radio receivers could be made into senders, in order to make contact with whatever might be "out there."

This summer, the receivers are in the "C" position, the axis of the Y formation being pretty short. This gives them more resolution for detail, but a narrower "view" of the part of the sky they are "looking" at. Here one receiver is "looking" at a different point than the other two.


The radio signals are a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we are accustomed to "listening" to, but computers make images of the radio sources, using color to show doppler shifts created by movement.





Each receiver has four orienting/tracking motors, and its own air-conditioning unit to keep the temperature low, which filters out earth-based "noise" in order to better received the faint radio signals from space. Standing under them, one can the faint hum of the tracking motors that keep the receiver oriented to a fixed point in the sky as the earth turns them toward the west.

They are huge, and yet gracefully beautiful in proportion to the vastness of the Plains of San Augustin.

The axes of the Y configuration in the the most outstreached "A" form, would cross the whole Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, stretching in Virginia, Mayland and Pennsylvania. But that is not the logest axis. The VLA is part of a continent wide Very Long Baseline Array, 3,000 miles long. You can "see" detail from very far away with the VLBA.

And of course, the farther out you look, the further back in time you see. One image captured at the VLA showed Quasars 10 billion light years away. The light left them 10 billion years ago. Before the sun was born, and the earth was formed. Space-time is inconceivably immense. And growing bigger every second . . .

What great vision our technology gives us . . .

R3volution: Adam Kokesh

Last year at this time, I wrote about the Declaration of Indepedence. I wrote about the document that 56 men signed at the risk of their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. The document that founded the United States.

This year, I am writing about the Revolution that must be renewed in this country to restore the Liberty that our founders pledged their lives to protect, and the rising leaders whose passionate commitment to our liberty can inspire us all.

I begin by posting a speech by Adam Kokesh, who will be running for Congress in New Mexico's 3rd Congressional District.

Here is his speech at the Revolution March:





As with Thomas Paine, we are arriving once again at the Crisis, and "the times that try men's souls" are nigh at the door. Adam Kokesh is one who can and will lead us through this crisis with a passion for Liberty. This is no sunshine patriot.

This July 4th, I will stand with him, in love of Liberty.

TANSTAAFL: The Sum of the Laws of Thermodynamics

"If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."
--Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1915)

The Magicians won in Congress yesterday.
It was expected, because I believe that the set called Pols is overwhelmingly populated by people who live in unreality so massive that it is rapidly approaching maximum entropy.
They do not accept the laws of thermodynamics, especially the second law, and therefore they believe that there is such a thing as a free lunch.
Would that they would collapse in utter humiliation. Instead, as we live in dangerous times, I fear it is the economy of this country and all that it has built that will do the collapsing. Unfortunately.

For the benefit of our scientifically illiterate Congress, I present the laws of thermodynamics translated into a form that even a Pol can undertand --if and only if he doesn't try to think and chew gum at the same time.

A most basic law zero has been stated:
0. When two objects or systems A and B are in equilibrium with each other, the energy that flows from A to B will be the same as the energy that flows from B to A.
Translation: There is a game.

Now on to the original three.

1. The Law of Conservation of Energy: Energy out cannot exceed energy in. You cannot get more than 100% efficiency.
Translation: You can't win the game. (You can't get something for nothing).

2. The Law of Entropy*: Any process in a closed system will increase the entropy of said closed system. Any process in an open system will increase the entropy of the universe. The entropy of the universe can never decrease. Loophole: You can have 100% efficiency only at a temperature of absolute zero, meaning you can't get 100% efficiency.
Translation: You can't break even.

*Entropy (S) can be defined as the tendency of a system towards disorder. The second law thus says that a closed system will accumulate disorder, and that an open system can become ordered only at the expense of the universe. Thus, as a bumper sticker I got when I passed P-Chem states, "S happens."

3. The Law of Absolute Zero*: It is impossible to reach the temperature of absolute zero. Thus the loophole above is not real.
Translation: You can't even quit the game.

*Absolute Zero is the temperature at which there is minimal molecular energy so that energy cannot be transferred among systems. Absolute zero, defined as -273.15 degrees C, cannot be achieved artificially or naturally (the third law).

All three laws can be summed up as: TANSTAAFL! There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

And I end with another quote:

"Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don't have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolism; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.
--Seth Lloyd, Nature 430 (2004) p. 971

The Energy Web

I have been reading a lot of science fiction and survival novels this summer. I re-read Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon! and George R. Stewart's classic, Earth Abides. I re-read the first book of S.M. Stirling Emberverse series, Dies the Fire. On Tuesday, I was browsing in the bookstore, looking for a new thriller for which I had read a review, when I came across a new "end of the world" story by William S. Forstchen called One Second After. About the aftermath of an EMP attack on the North American continent, I could barely put it down. So now I am reading that along with the more hopeful novel of a libertarian revolution, Heinlein's immortal The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

I am re-reading and reading these kinds of books, because I have been thinking about the complex web of interactions that makes up a civilization. My original scientific training was in ecology and evolution, such scientists do a lot of thinking about how energy moves through ecosystems via species interactions (such as predation) from the photosynthetic primary producers on to the primary consumers, secondary and tertiary consumers, and how it fans out to the scavengers at the edges. We call this the "food web" but it is really about the movement of energy, gathered by plants from the photons of the sun, and stored in carbon bonds, that are broken by combustion in a process called cellular respiration, which is the process of breaking those bonds in order to move the energy into more easily spendable ATP molecules, which are the energy currency of living cells.

Thus I was excited but not surprised when reading the Forstchen book to come across this passage:

"The web of our society . . . was like the beautiful spider webs he'd find as a boy in the back lot after dawn on summer days, dew making them visible. Vast, intricate things. And at the single touch of a match, the web just collapsed and all that was left for the spider to do , if it survived that day, was to rebuild the web entirely from scratch." (One Second After, p. 260).

Our whole advanced civilization is built of the gossamer webbing of energy interactions, fueled by the ancient photon energy stored in the carbon bonds of fossil fuels. We have not yet found an alternative source of energy that is as efficient a supply of power by which to run our complex web of interactions, except nuclear energy, which we have made prohibitively expensive and difficult to deploy through regulation.

Today, Congress is voting, and may well make those fossil fuels by which we run our civilization prohibitively expensive by a tax system they call cap-and-trade. We currently have no quickly deployable alternative that is ready and able to run a complex, industrial society.

For example, think about medicines, as the protagonist does in One Second After:

"The medicines. Yes, they were out there, someplace. . . . but the factories that made them were in the cities, and the cities had no power, and the people who worked in the factories were hunkered down or scattered refugees . . . And even if the factories did suddenly turn on, the [medicine] was processed from genetically altered bacteria in labs . . . a thousand miles away. The bottles it was then loaded into? Perhaps made in Mexico and trucked to the lab a thousand miles away and then loaded back aboard climate controlled trucks, and taken to airports and priority shipped in containers specially designed, those containers perhaps made in Mississippi. And so it went." (One Second After, p. 259).

And so it goes. For every single thing we ordinarily depend upon to make our lives possible in such numbers. Do you know where your water comes from? For most of us, pumps that require power are used somewhere in the process of getting it from the source to our homes and factories and places of business.

What about food? It takes energy to produce food in the abundance necessary for an American farmer to feed his family, and 20 additional people somewhere in the world. Energy is required to run the tractors for planting and harvest, and to produce the insecticides and herbicides and fertilizers necessary to have transformed farming from a subsistence operation to one that can feed the world. It takes more energy to process the food, to make it safe for human consumption, and to transport it to our cities and towns.

And so it goes for every single thing we use to make our living on this planet.
Living is not free. Not for the birds of the air, not for the bees in honey, and not even for the lilies of the field, that do indeed 'toil and spin' using that photon energy captured from the sun to make glucose which they then use up in the business of living.

The difference between them and us is this. In the natural food web, the efficiency between each node averages out at about 10%. This means that when a plant captures the energy from the photon into the carbon bonds in glucose, 90% of the energy is lost. And the same thing happens when the grazer then eats the plant. And again when the predator eats the grazer, and so forth across the food web.

However, by the design and use of technology that converts fossil fuels into energy-- technology being the human ecological niche--we are now able to get average efficiencies of 30 - 40%, which means that we can support a much more intricate web than we were able to as hunters and gatherers.

Sometimes I think that our leaders are like lemmings, inexplicably leading us to to a very real and very deadly collapse of technology for reasons that they (and we) do not understand and cannot fathom. The cap-and-tax scheme will reduce the efficiency by which we transfer energy for living throughout our civilization. And the costs, defined in dollars, will be shouldered by all of us, from Nancy Pelosi in her private jet, to the day-laborer driving that 1970's era clunker to the job site.

We will pay more for food, for transportation, for heat and light, for life-saving medicines and for life-giving water. And this economic suicide, like all economic disasters, will hit the working poor first, and hit them harder. Just as the English working mother of the industrial revolution had reason to bless James Watt for the power that provided her with clean cotton underwear every day, so will the American working mother have reason to curse Congress for taking that power out of her reach, condemning her and her children to lower standards of sanitation, nutrition and comfort. She will be forced to choose between heat, light, food, and/or medicine.

Our amazing energy web, delicate and beautiful, can be collapsed very quickly by the irrational actions of Congress. Nature's learning curve is far more steep.. It is human beings who will suffer.

These people in Congress are not benevolent. They live for a momentary gain, and do not consider the future of tax slavery and misery to which they condemn their own posterity. They are like lemmings running blindly over a cliff.

And it will not matter one iota in the vast reaches of planetary time. The climate cycles of the planet will continue to wax and wane in great temporal cycles. Species will come, and species will go. Earth abides.

The Cap and Trade Sleight of Hand

If it's Wednesday, then the issue is Health Care. Right?
And it is. ABC is doing an infomercial for Barack Obama and the Dems health care initiative.

And this is a major problem. Last night the Engineering Geek and I were at the Independence Grill making signs with New Mexicans for Liberty for the protest that will take place outside of our local ABC TV affiliate--KOAT. This will take place on the corner of Commanche and Carlisle in Albuquerque for you locals. They will gather (I have to work, but the EG will be there) at 6 PM and you can stay as long as you want.


I must say that the Engineering Geek gets pretty creative with his signs. I made one that said:
"If you liked Pravda, you'll love ABC!" The EG looked at it and got out a red sharpie and made the letter 'C' in ABC into a hammer and cycle, Soviet style. (Yes, I know, anyone born after about 1985 is unlikely to even remember the Soviet Union).
His own sign says: ABC: In bed with the Feds!


But I digress. The socialized medicine initiative is big, it is important, and it is NOT being voted on this week. What is?

Cap and Trade.

David Copperfield, move over! Obama is a master of misdirection. While he is getting the patriot organizations all geared up about healthcare, he and the Dems are hoping to get Cap and Trade passed in the House on Friday with minimal fuss. Thus the summer, Friday schedule.


Cap and Trade is a way to commit fiscal suicide, causing great increases in energy prices that will hurt everyone throughout the economy, but will have minimal effect on global temperature. (I have posted my thoughts on the issue of Global Climate change here and here. I do not agree with Al Gore on this issue. The science is not at all settled, nor does it dictate specific political action). The Heritage Foundation analysts say this about Cap and Trade:

" Though the proposed legislation would have little impact on world temperatures, it is a massive energy tax in disguise that promises job losses, income cuts, and a sharp left turn toward big government.
Ultimately, this bill would result in government-set caps on energy use that damage the economy and hobble growth--the very growth that supports investment and innovation. Analysis of the economic impact of Waxman-Markey projects that by 2035 the bill would:

--Reduce aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) by $9.4 trillion;
--Destroy 1,145,000 jobs on average, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by over 2,479,000 jobs;
--Raise electricity rates 90 percent after adjusting for inflation;
--Raise inflation-adjusted gasoline prices by 58 percent;
--Raise residential natural gas prices by 55 percent;
--Raise an average family's annual energy bill by $1,241; and
--Result in an increase of $28,728 in additional federal debt per person, again after adjusting for inflation."


For more information, follow the link above. The real purpose of this bill is to provide the federal government with more revenue, although this is short-sighted. With whole industries destroyed and double-digit unemployment, who will have the money to pay more taxes?
Congress--to put it bluntly--doesn't understand that money represents productivity and wealth. They think it's magic.


In any case, the sponsors are very unlikely to bring the bill to the floor for a vote if they think there is substantial opposition. Thus, few are talking about it.


Call your nonrepresenting representatives. Make sure they know that there is opposition out there. Let them know that you are watching both hands.
Pay great attention to the man behind the curtain.
Don't let them pass another unread bill in the middle of the night!




Hat Tap: The Gates of Vienna.