Month: April 2015

The alarm bells are ringing loudly in California about the diminishing supply of potable water in its reservoirs, underground aquifers and of course the miniscule snowpack in its mountains. Many communities are totally out of water and are depending on water trucks to deliver what they need on a daily basis. The water truck companies are doing a booming business loading up water from sources still within the state that haven’t been tapped dry for about five dollars (USD) per truckload and selling it for five hundred dollars.  This makes no sense to me and it can’t last long. But, folks there are desperate, and it’s only going to get worse over time.

While desalinization plants will take care of people living on the margins of the sea, it will do little for inlanders until pipes are laid and other required infrastructure is put in place at enormous cost. Because the California breadbasket feeds much of America, I’m pretty sure that everyone in the country will have to share the cost burden in the form of new taxes. This is all well and good for California, but what about the rest of the arid southwestern USA?  And, what about the rest of the world who are about to be in the same situation, as their snowpack from remote mountain sources and related rivers dry up?

As an old desert rat, I learned to carry a sheet of transparent plastic in my backpack to create an emergency solar still for harvesting water vapor from the air when my canteen was empty with no prospects for a quick refill. This method is tedious, and sometimes frustrating, particularly when the daytime temperature requires that you transpire at least a gallon of water per day. With this in mind, I did a quick search today to see if the air-to-water technology had been commercialized and improved upon. Indeed it has. A variety of companies are now making products that do this as long as you have the money to buy them (they are very expensive), and the electricity to run them.

I did, however, find a website that has the instructions for building an inexpensive, do-it-yourself device that is good for supplying any homestead that has access to electricity such as solar panels or wind turbines. Here is the URL for the detailed plans:

http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Atmospheric-Water-Generator/

 Bottoms up!

Subject # 1: Russia and China are wasting their money building up their navies

Everyone seems to be worried about the Chinese and Russian efforts to build more aircraft carriers and submarines. I’m in favor of it, because it is a total waste of time, money, and effort that they would otherwise spend on ICBMs or more nuclear weapons.Why am I so sanguine? Because, the march of high technology in the USA is inexorable. While the shipboard combat laser system and the electromagnetic railgun which are now being fielded have had a lot of exposure in the news media, other amazing developments are occurring. As an example, take the Robotic Ghost Ship. It was designed to autonomously keep track of stealthy Russian, Chinese and Iranian submarines including very quiet diesel boats. Without a human in sight, it can follow them around, dive deeper, go faster, and sink them as required. Here’s an image: 

 Pretty nifty, huh? The program was dubbed Anti-submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, or ACTUV. But, you haven’t seen anything yet. This sub is actually obsolete; the latest and greatest advances are the ‘Duck’ and Wanda, the flying fish. Both are developments of the Flimmer program (for “flying swimmer”), Here are images of the prototypes being tested today: 

 The ‘Duck’; the final version will fly fast and far, and dive deep. It then attaches to the hull of any enemy sub or surface ship of interest, or simply trails behind discretely.

And here is an image of Wanda: 

 Both of these robots can either detonate or set off an internal pinger which is very loud. The Upward Falling Payloads program seeks to put robot pods on the ocean floor and then allow them to lie in wait for years until triggered by either an event or a command, then they wake from their deathly sleep and rise to the surface to release their payloads(as an example).

Subject #2 Freedom of the Press

Most people don’t realize that a free press is truly the best protector of any democracy. It compels both political and military entities within the democracy to ‘behave’ and conform to the rules established by popular votes of the people. Currently, the Internet is being abused as a delivery vehicle of the ‘true’ facts of any critical situation, and instead is being adapted as another weapon of warfare: that of providing so much misinformation that the population is confused and paralyzed from taking any action at the polls or otherwise to correct the situation. A prime example is the adulation of Vladimir Putin by the average Russian. He actively crushes dissent, and from the beginning of his reign, set out to destroy the truly free press in his country (the Communists and the Nazis also did this, and it gave them the freedom to proceed to kill millions without consequence). This scheme is an absolute requirement in his and his associates plan to reestablish Russia as a global power, when in fact, it is the world’s gas station, with little economic activity and free small enterprises similar to those that are the mainstay of other cooperative democracies.

 

Now, it is coming to light that both Russia and China have vast cyber warfare  operations, including legions of ‘Trolls’ that are paid to submit comments that are derogatory to any web-based article that casts them in a bad light. This keeps the citizens at home uninformed, dumbed down, and happy. It also stirs up the populations in the societies that they are attacking or trying to manipulate, resulting in social uprisings in formerly peaceful settings. It occurred to me the other day, that little is being said about those e-mails we all receive that blasts politicians, religious groups, social organizations, and bloggers that are honestly trying to grapple with presenting the ‘facts’ and developments in the  internecine warfare going on around the world. I am certain that this distortion of events, outcomes, and positions of the players, is also a massive state-sanctioned effort performed by low-paid employees. So, delete those emails; don’t pass them on, even if they state that the object of the discussion or images has been ‘confirmed’ by independent websites as the ‘truth’. 

Don’t help them tear our societies apart by becoming one of these unpaid Trolls: