Objective, Good government is defined by nature herself

Concerning the idea of objectively-defined Good government, the big questions on your minds is now, probably, Accepting the position that Inquiry, Independence and Acceptance are in fact the fundamental principles of the laws of humanity, How do they define the Good Government? The answer is that the constitution must require government to act in defense of human nature (universal, individual rights of human nature), but not of human bias, and must restrain it from all other actions (being against human nature, i.e. civil rights).

From these three pillars extends the natural laws of equality of suffrage (including government by full majority), of privacy, identity, and property, and of equality in taxation and services, just to name a few of the complete and comprehency system defined by it. Just to kick off the discussion, I will allow these pillars to cast light on problems with the current (and therefore also past) American democracy, with all due respect to her superiority in many other aspects of government.

Inquiry, Independance, Acceptance brings the natural laws of:

Equality of Suffrage
1) Equality of suffrage does not exist within any nation on earth, including the USA, even with the women's suffrage and black suffrage movements successes. How many people are ignored by the government regarding her policies? Furthermore, how many representatives and how many laws do NOT represent the expressed will of the majority of the population? I answer, "Most of them." for all three questions.

Privacy, identity, and property
2) Familiar with the IRS? So much for privacy. Ever heard of identity theft? And where did property rights go with the property tax, easements, squatter's rights, and paid nationalization? Why is the law so problematic concerning intellectual property rights, patents, and piracy?

Finally, taxation and servies
3) Obviously, the current American system is hardly equal or fair to any substantial degree on these issues.

"To fear to face an issue is to believe the worst is true." Ayn Rand

Politics Institutional Issues arise from considerations of political idealogies

I should first note that no government executes the will of the people, but only the rule of the mob ("the most energetic faction" or coalition of factions). The reason for this is that no effort is made to ensure that the election results correspond directly and definitively to the majority of the people (entire eligible voter population), nor is there any question to the assumption that >50% constitutes the proper majority for a democracy. So before I even speak of the virtues of the various political categories of factions, at least two "cans of worms" have already been opened,. While many are already prepared to protest the direction of this discussion, but alas these and a few other major institutional issues are NOT without perfect solution. Encompassing a very large and uncomfortable questioning of fundamental beliefs and assumptions, each must be addressed separately with the trust that they will all eventually converge to a consistent, clear solution which likely differs greatly from all previous experiments in the rule of the people. Before speaking about the merits of each factional class/group, we must resolve the institutional problems which set the conditions under which they must rule. People can only be successful when they understand and abide by the natures of their environments. So how do the people assure the superiority of their voice to both the faction and the elite officers of government? Obviously, we must begin with an open system of comparing the voice of the votes with the voice of the voters (all eligible to vote), positive identification and immediate, almost-transparent reporting of the votes of the people. Again red-flags are flying, doubtless because such ideas are unconsidered, and examples of various kinds of abuses are most readily remembered. I assure you that these have all been considered and resolved to a negligible threat level while preserving the freedoms which we Americans hold so dear. While this discussion naturally opens a diverse and intimidating host of issues, problems, and fears, the solutions unlock far greater wealth, happiness, security, and freedom. For an understanding of the nature of democracy, consider the most basic one which consists of three people: Two black people and one white person; to hell with those who would immediately think racism in a thought experiment which allows any two races to be substituted. Let's say that the two black people develop a stronger friendship with each other than with the white person. Assuming everyone votes, politics clearly breaks this system. A 2/3 majority here is both insufficient and unjust, because on any neutral issue for one black person, there will be a tendency to side with the other black person, in exchange for an IOU when the situation may be reversed. From this situation, we witness the birth of politics and the problems which plague all modern governments. In larger groups, 50.01% of the votes is hardly a majority, and still prone to abusive and unjust factional rule, or mob rule. Regardless of the "law of the land" or the positions of the leaders, rule is currently executed by the strongest "mob," with chants, protests, organized violence, theft, and even murder, regardless of their influence upon the "official" government. As diversity grows, factional power dissipates, and as the voter population grows, the significance of >50% shrinks to that of the two vote scenario, neither one by itself constituting anything near a majority. Honestly, being in 49.9% of the non-majority population does not feel like minority status to me. The law must require a majority of all eligible voters in a diverse voting population, and that majority must well exceed 50%. The two-thirds voting scenario introduces 75% and the passing academic mark for acceptable correct response is typically 70%, so that seems like a natural minimum. The living people must be heard above the echoes of the dead, and even their silence must drown out the shouting of the mob. They must be allowed to identifiably and equally (with equal influence) speak as they wish in elections, and join together into common purposes while preserving privacy and the secret ballot. The principles which advance this purpose carry great and diverse implications as they splash into all other areas of politics and law. There is no justice or harmony without these principles. Next time, I will consider the idealogical positions with respect to the films, The Power of the Nightmare, and The Century of the Self, and other quotes and thoughts which come to mind at the time.

Life

You cannot die until you can fight. You cannot fight until you can live. You cannot live until you can love. You cannot love until you can accept. You cannot accept until you understand. You cannot understand until you suffer without fear, and enjoy without expectation. You can forsake neither fear nor expectation until you judge, not your mortality, but your mind, even your soul as sovereign over your entire being. Likewise with suffering and enjoyment, you must judge that every individual has the same power to judge for their own selves; for every action, there is a re-action, and without consequences, there is no judgment, no sovereignty, no life and no peace.

You cannot live until you accept death. All who die shall rise again in immortality and eternal glory, and the power of the grave shall lose its hold upon the children of men. This is the only way to salvation and everlasting happiness.

Ayn Rand, Anthem, and the word "I"

Her philosophy resonates with me, a physicist, an Elder, an engineer, and a philosopher. I always knew that something was missing until I studied Athem, and realized that Russia had not even approach the highest crimes: knowing and hating nature. I recently heard a popular song with the chorus, "I hate myself for losing you." I made the connection primarily because of the use of the words, "miserable," "I," and "mirror." Athem speaks of Unity... looking at his own reflection and admiring his own face, but this singer looks at her own face's reflection and despises it in misery. So I realized, that the much greater crime is not to avoid the word, "I," as was the theme of Athem, but to know it and hate it with that knowledge. In order to hate oneself, one must say the word "I." Without this step, the next greatest crime is not possible, hating others. With this crime, people use force to effect their agendas upon others, even to their mutual destruction. Finally the greatest crime of all is to hate nature herself .. to know nature and to hate it, even to wish to change her judgments at will .. walking off a cliff and hating the gravity which pulls the body to the ground while desiring that gravity were no more. In a word, "fantasy" is the love of the unreal, which places man against nature herself in a futile rebellion to his own destruction.Thus, knowing and loving the word "I" is only the beginning of the journey, but absolutely essential to the progression in learning and loving others enough to allow them to love themselves as you do. First "Love the Lord thy God as Thyself," and then "Love Thy Neighbor EVEN AS thyself" or I said much better, "Love Thy Neighbors equally to the end that they may love themselves EVEN AS thou lovest thyself" that all may act according to the natures of each. And such love continues to nature, that thou lovest her as she is, desiring nothing contrary to her nature. I believe that the end of the journey is to fully know and love the natures of self, others, and nature. My greatest thanks to Ayn Rand for providing me the tools to better see good and evil in their most basic forms.

Andy Landen
Houston, TX
(832) 477-8327 [cell]
"To\nrest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of\none's enemies- that one has no rational arguments to offer." - Ayn Rand

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." - Elbert Hubbard

"To rest one's case on faith means to concede that reason is on the side of one's enemies- that one has no rational arguments to offer." - Ayn Rand

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."- Elbert Hubbard

Growing gap between the rich and the poor

I do NOT know if the saying is true that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, but I do know that if it is true then it is founded in two pivotal economic principles: Bad debt/investment, and bad budget.

Bad debt includes credit cards (their APR is usually much higher than most investments, even for those with flawless credit). Bad investments include items which either inherently depreciates quickly or which presents too great a risk of doing so for the investor; the automobile being an excellent example of an item which inherently depreciates very quickly. Debt and investment are opposite sides of the same coin (no pun intended). Every debt incurred is an investment, credit card debt typically tending towards unsound investments.

A bad budget simply involves spending more than one earns, or accepting too great of a risk that the earnings may be too little and/or that the financial obligations may be too great. For example, a job in sales offers a variable income which may not meet the expenditures for the current lifestyle, which would need to change as often as the income, in order to match it. A leveraged investment (as is common the commodities market) can easily acquire losses which exceed the income over the time period covered by the existing resources/collateral. A problematic vehicle may require far more maintenance costs than may be supported by the given income. Maxing out credit cards or obtaining large mortgage obligations may bring interest charges which force expenditures beyond the strength of the income to bear them.

Evolution now harms mankind

Successful, intelligent, creative individuals seem to prefer much smaller families (0-2 children per family), while poor, superstitious, confused individuals seem to propagate without reserve either with an abundance of out-of-wedlock children, or 5-10 children per family). Evolution favors those who reproduce more viable children, and education and wealth seem to side against evolution, so the genes which will prevail in our species will not be the intelligent, skilled, successful ones, but the opposite, struggling under adverse conditions. Thus evolution brought the potential for extraordinary power to mankind, but the realization of these powers seems to have intrinsically predisposed our genes to disappear in the presence of the reproductively more dominant

Connection with nature through the heavens

The most powerful connection with nature is in seeing a full night sky of stars, but large cities create so much light pollution that residents are lucky to see only a few stars and only if they are really looking for them. Disconnected from nature on a daily basis, they manage daily with terrestial pleasantries while forgetting the celestial wonders. Restoration of the night sky is not that difficult with sky caps, which greatly increase security by also minimizing terrestial shadows. Here is an overview: http://www.dancaton.physics.appstate.edu/NCDarkSkies/AASstuff/AAS-2002.PPT

Improving the transportation network

Government is missing the mark in America for improving the transportation network on both the long-distance and local scales. In the local area, commuting solutions are required with a reformed network of express busses and vans. Patrons register pick-up and drop-off locations so that the vans know where to go on a in-vehicle GPS map. The vans pick-up the commuter upon receiving the requesting call (without delay) and transport him/her while picking up others on the way to an express hub. The express hubs have busses leaving on the hour and the half hour to other express hubs throughout the city with no stops in between. This is meant to hop commuters over large commuting distances (of at least 5 miles) and thus remove cars from the roadways during rush hour

The long-distance network invites the use of high-speed trains between major cities. It increases the country's interconnectivity. Patrons drive their cars or commercial trucks (with noncombustable materials) onto an electric or fuel cell (no burning of hydrocarbons in tunnels) train. Vehicles are secured and passengers ride in the train's passenger cars. The train enters an underground tunnel slightly larger than the train's outer hull and propels itself with air (pressure) to great speeds on tracks using suspension dampened wheel on all sides of the tunnel for guidance. Each set of tracks guides the train from jumping the tracks and the walls of the tunnel act as re-inforced guiding. Obviously an extensive network of air masks and fire suppressors must guard against sabatoge by combustion or other air problems. The issue of safety of non-passengers with respect to air flow at the tunnel entrances probably requires fences, large openings, camera surveillance, and armored shielding on the front of the train. Building safe tunnels is expensive, and the cost has not been evaluated, but it seems the best way to protect against derailment issues, unintended train collisions, and crosswind. Windows would be sealed closed, of course. The tunnel would be straight as possible for minimal stress on train and tracks.

Oscar Wilde

My thoughts on Oscar Wilde:
His quotes are to me like the tinkering of bells, making much noise about every passing wind, but hollow in reason, evidence, and inspiration. The voice of warning is useless when the terrain is not well-lit.His life only exemplifies to me a man angry at society's ills, but ignorant on the proper course of action. Like an animal, upon seeing one trap in front, backs into two traps to the rear and falls victim to a worse fate, so is the life and tragedy of this man, Oscar Wilde.

It is by the life of a man that his philosophies are best judged, for if his reasoning is sound then so will be his life, but if not, then his life will fail, as an example to all who would follow afterward.
“A sarcastic person has a superiority complex that can be cured only by the honesty of humility.” Lawrence G. Lovasik
"Neither irony or sarcasm is argument." Samuel Butler, Rufus Choate
"A sneer is the weapon of the weak." James Russell Lowell
"Edged tools are dangerous things to handle, and not infrequently do much hurt. " Agnes Repplier
“What I lack in decorum, I make up for with an absence of tact.” Don Williams, Jr.

For those who would censor these thoughts or others, I say that it is better to learn wisdom than to complain about ideas that needlessly bother you. I hear your censorship, and freely and openly refuse you.
"Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real. Somewhere in their upbringing they were shielded against the total facts of our experience. They were only taught to look one way when many ways exist."Charles Bukowski
"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."Oscar Wilde"Fear of ideas makes us impotent and ineffective."William O. Douglas
"All despotisms should be considered problems of mental hygiene, and all support of censorship should be considered as problems of abnormal psychology."Theodore Schroeder
"All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions."George Bernard Shaw

Police imposters

Message from Andrea, wife of a policeman. Yahoo Answers screen name: Nationalist

Any type of impersonation is a pathological crime. The most common scenerio involving police impersonation are men who abduct & rape women broken down on deserted roads. Most of the imposters do this for reasons of masculine inadequacy. Both putting on the uniform & the act of rape supplement their lack of virile feeling & they typically form a pathologic attachment to fantasies of being powerful. Police wannabes are usually too obsessed to obtain police jobs according to criminologists & psychiatrists who have studied & treated imposters.

Also important to note is that the largest percentage of these crimes are on stretches of deserted highway. While it may seem a smart or easy crime it infact is very hard. Police officers personally know every officer they work with. Upon sight of someone dressed as an officer they would issue an arrest, as that is a crime itself. If one is using impersonation as a means to commit other crimes it quadruples their change of incarceration. They also must have thousands of dollars worth of equipment to even vaguely pass as an officer including a city or county marked vehicle. Even harder yet would be to dupe the victim into believing they are a cop. Police have a certain demeanor & though you may not think you know how a cop acts, you would notice how one doesn't.Officers are squeamish on the subject due to the pathological & personal nature. It's creepy and they also may wonder your motives for asking.

Hope this helps!
Andrea

Gaining speed for a car collision

It is said that if a (non-frontal) collision with another car appears imminent and unavoidable, then the wisest course of action is to "put the petal to the metal" for maximum speed. The myth mostly concerns collisions at intersections typically at angles of 90 degrees.

The idea is that while the increased speed does in fact cause more damage, it also increases your inertia (resistance to a change in velocity) and thus yields the smallest accelerations and decelerations from an impact with a car of a constant mass and velocity. As we all know, survivability is a strong factor of acceleration/deceleration.

Would you test this myth to determine if faster collision speeds in non-frontal collisions with automobiles are actually safer for those in the faster car? It is obviously more dangerous for those people in the slower car, but then again, the myth only concerns the safety of the occupants of the primary vehicle.

Momentum (p = m*v) is a function of velocity too, but faster speeds may not mean more collisions, because the path will be less prone to deflection. The scenario of most interest is that you are traveling through an intersection and you see a car coming at you from the side (perhaps running a red light) like from a side street at an intersection (seemingly out of nowhere).

This happened to me once when a car (facing me and in the intersection) made a left turn on my green and hit the driver's door. Stopped him cold and spun his car 90 degrees counter-clockwise, but my car (about 45 mph) hardly deflected at all and I retained complete control as I braked to a full stop. I think that this myth might be true. In general, the fast you are going the better it is for you.

BTW, on the damage from the kinetic energy, your car will absorb the damage and spread it out over a larger area with higher speeds. Additionally, with more momentum, there is less deceleration, thus the faster vehicle incurs a smaller change in velocity. It thus absorbs less kinetic energy damage than it might otherwise be expected to absorb in any given high speed collision (assuming no collisions with immovable objects or flights off of very high cliffs, etc.).

Minimizing water absorption while traveling in the rain

I just did some very simple physics calculations (at the end of this message) and it appears that the simple movement of the bodies clearly yields let's water absorption with increased horizontal velocity. I believe that your results and "busting" of this myth are explained by 1) puddle splashing, 2) large lateral motions of arms, legs and head, and 3) the curving of the body w.r.t. the vertical.

1) Splashing water brings fallen water up onto the bottoms of the clothing,
2) Large lateral motions introduces a big surface area for catching more water.
3) A bent head and curved/slanted body greatly increases the area for the rain to fall on without substantial decreasing the forward surface area of the body.

My equations show that for speeds slower than the terminal velocity of water, the area on top should be minimized with the smallest vertical profile, while speeds in excess of this yield less water absorption as the body is tilted to increase the top surface area and thus minimize the frontal surface area.

This myth is not busted, and should be repeated with these three points addressed. I suggest that you conduct the run portion by:
1) Minimizing/eliminating the splashing, 2) Minimizing the movement of arms, head, and legs (range walk as they say in the Army, or in other words a very fast walk lacking the wild characteristics of running), and 3) Keeping the body straight vertically. I personally run through the rain with a mind to minimize splashes, minimize exposing extra surface area, and keeping my body fairly vertical.

The equations are as follows:

Q = rho * v, rho is the water density in air (constant), Q is the rate of absorption per unit of surface area, v is velocity

t = D / vx, t is the time for the trip, D is the fixed distance of the route, vx is the velocity of the subject in the direction of travel

m = Qy*Ay*t + Qx*Ax*t, m is the total mass absorbed, x and y subscripts refer to the directions of horizontal and vertical, respectively. The first term is the mass of water absorbed from the falling rain, while the second term reveals the mass absorbed from running into it.

m = (rho*vy) * Ay * (D/vx) + (rho*vx) * Ax * (D/vx) with substitutions from above equations

m = rho*D * (vy*Ay/vx + vx*Ax/vx) = rho*D * (vy*Ay/vx + Ax), thus small vx (walking slow increases the left term and gets you wet, while walking fast minimizes it and leaves you drier).

Current energy issues

Concerning fission, there exists Helium-4, but Helium-3, having only one neutron, would be *extremely* unstable and any discussion of it would seem impractical; such a nuclear core would deteriorate in femtoseconds or faster. I have commonly heard of Hydrogen-3, also called Tritium, in discussions of fussion, so my guess is that this is the correct reference. Now, Tritium, also called heavy water, because it is usually harvested in that form, has enough mass to assist the process in slamming the nuleii together for fusion. The increased mass provides more momentum which resists the nuclear deflecting forces. Now continuous fusion has been around for at least a decade, but the duration of fusion has always been far too short to net positive returns on power. The reason for the brevity of the fusion process is that the incredible energy release quickly overpowers our ability to maintain the required pressures and temperatures. BTW, scientists have always projected fusion to be 50 years from the point in time at which they are asked the question about its viability. I just chalk it up to them saying that they don't know but they are seeing very slow progress.

On the oil issue, most of the world has been mapped with crude images (pun intended) and most of the significant, easy oil reserves are known. Now deep sea (past the continental shelves) has not been imaged or drilled very well and much of the land has also been practically ignored. It is kind of like taking large pictures of the whole sky and then looking deep into the sky at all of the places where you expect to see life (based upon rough theories of the development of life), and then (incorrectly) saying that you've found most of the life in the universe. Whenever someone talks about oil reservoirs, ask how their sizes and capabilities have been assessed for their numbers/claims. Do they include the proprietary data held secret by the oil companies as they implement their strategic business goals? I should think not. Do they include shale oil, oil sands, or oil on protected lands (say thank you to the environmentalists)? Protections on Alaska, and the entire region around Utah are being lifted as we speak. Do they include more difficult oil reservoirs, where 100 wells are required for the same production that one well used to generate? This is the situation for the new oilfields in northern Canada.

Now as far as shale oil, the method of extraction is mainly heat, but also pressure. The crude is brought to such a high temperature that it exits the pores of the fractured rock in a gaseous form, not necessarily as natural gas alone, including diesel, kerosine, gasoline, hexane, butane, and methane. All of these forms are easily separated and processed, according to the current petroleum needs. It is all a matter of chemically combining or splitting the carbon chains via organic chemistry, or of stripping off the hydrogen from the chains to generate hydrogen gas. Natural gas may be converted into gasoline or diesel (at a small expense) and vice versa, with the option to convert most of any of the forms into hydrogen gas for a hydrogen economy (see the hydrogen car or fuel cell). So the petroleum is extracted as a gas, but not necessarily "natural gas" and with a small expense, the desired form of "crude oil" may be synthesized from the purified shale oil extracts; the technology and methods have existed since the 1980's (when fuel prices went "through the roof" for a time) and are in use today. The only element of development these days is efficiency.

BTW, according to a recent article, the US shale oil reservoirs are estimated at around 97% (or higher) of the world shale oil reserves, and 7 times the crude oil estimates for Saudi Arabia, but again some knowledge affecting those numbers is guarded and additional knowledge from better and expanded geological imaging and interpretation both increase those numbers on a daily basis.

The question isn't when we run out of oil, but when the price of oil becomes uncompetitive with other energy sources (hydrogen not being a source, but a storage mechanism). My question is when are we going to start (safely) recycling our nuclear fissile fuel and thus slow our nuclear waste generation, which typically contains between 97% purity (military) and 99% purity (civilian) reactor fuel minimum requirement?

Correcting the calendar and time conventions

Noting the odd convention of the leap year, multi-base (non-decimal) definitions of time units with seemingly arbitrary multiples which aren't always integers, and discrepancies between the conventional time for the average year of 31,557,600 seconds per year and the correct time per year of 31,556,925 seconds per year, one might resolve these very small temporal discrepancies in the time conventions by restructuring the standards of time so that one year measures the period of revolution of the earth around the sun with little need for corrections (every four years) and that each unit, like the metric system is a multiple of ten as opposed to the 60s per minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 4.4 weeks (constantly varying, but never an integer number, between 4-5) per month, 12 months per year, 52 weeks per year, etc.

With 31,556,925 seconds per year (365.25 days) in 2000 and 31,556,981 seconds per year (365.25 days) in 2100, the latter standard will be good for the next 200 years as an average to the year 2200. With 365 days per year, an extra 57.48 seconds is added to every day, yielding an average day of 86,458 seconds (86,400 currently). A new second can be defined as 0.86458 old seconds to yield 100,000 seconds in a day, which can be divided into new decimal based time units of 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour and 100 seconds per hour.

Given 365 days, we could follow the lunar cycle, with 13 months in the year, where each of the first twelve months has 28 days and the thirteenth month has 29 days. Or if we have an aversion to the number thirteen or to changing the number of months in a year, then we could define 5 days per week would yield 73 weeks, thus 12 months per year would allow 6 weeks per month for 11 of those months, with 7 weeks in the 12th month. These considerations have been made with the restrictions that the length of the day must remain relatively the same and that the year must extended to maintain itself from year to year without any need for leap year corrections, and that all units of time should been even multiples of each other with the preference of base ten numbers and a secondary preference of numbers similar to standard conventions when the primary preference is not ideally applicable.