For all the talk and theory, money is nothing more than a medium that helps humans value each other's time.

Some months ago I wrote a letter to the editor about fixing the government's finances, where I discussed how the money we trade with is created:

Under the present monetary system, money is created only when someone borrows it.

Usually, the federal government borrows a little money from the Federal Reserve, and the banking system expands this “seed money” 10 times (or more) by making loans.

Due to the failure of the banks to lend, the government has had to step in as “the borrower of last resort.”

Recently someone on a web forum thought Occupy Wall Street [OWS] protesters who advocate an audit of the Federal Reserve were stupid, because "The Fed is doing nothing illegal."

My response was that we can't really know whether the Federal Reserve Banks are operating legally without an audit, as the Federal Reserve system is rather secret about their operations. Furthermore, the limited audit that Senator Sanders got passed found that the U.S. central bank had some questionable behavior during the 2008 financial crisis, including the creation of an entire National Debt's worth of money that was given to connected financial institutions - 16 trillion dollars, according to the Senator's page.

The key point in my response were these lines:

If you have a dollar bill in your pocket, it's only there because someone borrowed it from a banker. The bills are printed by the Treasury and purchased by the Federal Reserve at cost [4 cents?]. If you have a quarter or a dime or a Susan B. Anthony dollar in your pocket, the Fed bought these from the Mint for face value.

Sharing The Truth About Money

This is how I came to be thinking about the occupation of Wall Street, currency, and modifications to currency... How could the very core of the system for concentrating wealth and economic power be effectively conveyed?

I think a stamp would do it:

This Bill Was BORROWED From Wall Street:

Ideas are seldom truly original, so I searched on "occupy wallstreet currency stamp" (no quotes), and learned that people are just starting to put messages on currency. They're calling it Occupy George. While the sentiment is right, their specific messages are entirely non-helpful.

Instead of focusing on the central defect of the modern banking system - that private banks create the economy's money supply by making loans, starting with the seed money created by their 12 "Federal" Reserve Banks - they're muddying the issue with meaningless messages about division of wealth that don't lead to an obvious solution.

Yes, wealth is rather concentrated in the present day. But some people work for their millions, while others game the system. Increasing taxes on the people who've been especially successful will only perpetuate the L-Curve distribution of income because it does NOT address any of the curve's CAUSES. Incomes are best balanced by creating a level playing field for all players in an economy, NOT by forcibly taking and giving.

A core element in motivational speaker Zig Ziglar's philosphy was that "you can get everything in life that you want, as long as you help enough other people get what they want." Instead of getting jealous that someone was in the right place at the right time, and worked to make the most of an opportunity, the present protests need to focus like a laser on individuals and groups that game the system.

Transitioning to a monetary system that uses money created by the national or state governments, as advocated by the American Monetary Institute and others, would do a lot to end the need for the present protests.

Currency Validation

I have a few dollars in my pocket, and a red pen. This Bill Was BORROWED From Wall Street. Ahh, much better. $5's have much more blank space on the reverse than $1's. I think I will order a rubber stamp.

Perhaps the petitioners on Wall Street could set up a station for "currency validation". Paper money is actually made of a blend of 25% linen and 75% cotton.  Currency validation pens change color if the bill is made of wood (paper), and the Secret Service has a helpful page for spotting counterfit currency. If the currency checks out, volunteers could stamp the bill as genuine: This Bill Was BORROWED From Wall Street.

Moving Beyond Protest

Fortunately, there's no need to beg Congress to fix the laws to free us from the Federal Reserve's yoke. I'll be covering this strategy in my next post. Put your email in the box to the right if you'd like notification when this gets posted!

He had a bit of a "homeless" look to him. A cart full of stuff confirmed my impression.

Everyone else in the cafe was sitting in a chair doing whatever they were doing - eating, drinking, checking email, etc.

I thought about telling this man that his constant laps around the room were making him stand out. If he'd just sit still and read his book for a bit, he could enjoy the air conditioning, and wouldn't draw nearly as much attention to himself.

Today, outside the same store, I noticed this homeless man again near the bottle & can recycling center.  A few minutes later he was back 'at work', picking up trash and pushing in chairs.

It occurred to me that the worst part of being unemployed, homeless and living on the street would definitely be the boredom.

One of the problems with the market economy is that a certain percentage of the population is basically unemployable, for a variety of reasons. Mental illness, health problems top the list, and others just never learned a skill that's marketable.

Make-work projects are those from which little value is created. The classic example of a make-work job program is paying one person to dig a ditch, and paying a second person to fill it in.

To me, a 'job project' is something that puts people to work doing things that ought to be done anyway. There are always weeds that need to be pulled, public structures that need a fresh coat of paint, graffiti vandalism painted over, etc.  I imagine a program where the crew chief would take whoever shows up and put them to work doing whatever needs to be done.

There could be big jobs projects too. The maintenance and building of bridges and other forms of infrastructure is one possibility. The American Society of Civil Engineers grades the United State's infrastructure at a D- (just above failing).

On the other hand, direct government employment may be the only solution to some of our most serious long-term unemployment problems: structural unemployment.

... People who cannot find jobs because they lack relevant skills of any kind best fit the definition of "structural unemployment." It seems pretty clear that neither policies that change job search behavior nor policies that expand spending in general are very suited to this group.

http://web.archive.org/web/20090423213059/http://william-king.www.drexel.edu/top/prin/txt/controv2/un12.html (emphasis added)

Paying for it all...

Many people's first objection is probably about the cost: "Who's going to pay for this?",

As I alluded to in my recent letter to the editor, the government's most important job is managing the money supply.

While there is a case to be made that the government can't be trusted with something this important, practical experience shows that private banks have failed to facilitate an equitable distribution of money in the economy.

If the government were to create more of the money supply, this could be spent directly into circulation. Right now, the only fraction of the money supply that it creates are coins, which are purchased by the federal reserve at face value and distributed to the banking system.

Imagine having the money to do a task properly...

A few months back I saw a crew of two men spraying something into the blackberry bushes that grow between the creek and the trail. I said that I'd just moved to Oregon, and asked what they were spraying for. I learned that  Blackberries are considered noxious weeds in Oregon, and that the city has to spray to keep the vines from completely overgrowing the trail.

After two weeks there was a band of defoliated blackberry vines about 3 feet thick. 20 feet of blackberries with green leaves were behind this band.

Instead of having the city pay to spray a large amount of herbicide on these bushes, why not have work crews completely clear blackberries out of the entire 20-mile trail? This is much more expensive than two guys with a herbicide sprayer, but the job would be done right.

The war against blackberries can probably never be won, but at least this section of trail would be blackberry free for a while.

Perhaps blackberry trimming isn't the greatest example of what could be done but for lack of funds.

Many existing jobs are actually make-work

The number of people incarcerated for victimless crimes has exploded in recent decades. While it's important to be able to segregate problematic members of a society, a large percentage of the prison population are more political prisoners than genuine potential hazards. The largest portion of these "political prisoners" were put there by the so-called "war on drugs".

Prison is extraordinarily expensive, much more so than any job project I can think of. The cost of a jail bed averages out to about $62/night. Eight hours of work at $7.25/hour (current minimum wage) is $58.

Much more value is created by putting someone to work than locking them up.

Rather than locking someone up for petty offenses (of which many are economically driven), society would turn a lose-lose situation into a win-win.

Education is another example of a sort of make-work program. While education itself is very important, the government currently spends $billions more educating children than it needs to.

Young people are currently subjected to entirely too much schooling. Accelerated learning methods allow just about anyone to make exponentially more years of progress in a single year than in the present system. See my recent post about the fellow who was trying to get a young man to care about school.

Putting people to work

An estimated 14-million people are currently unemployed, and millions more are working less than they'd like. The government needs to step to the plate, and provide  money to put people to work.

Some final thoughts from someone with more certifications in Economics than I:

... Nothing could be more foolish right now than policies that reduce government spending or increase taxes. We have nearly 14 million unemployed people in the United States, a number that undoubtedly underestimates the true magnitude of the problem since it ignores discouraged workers and the underemployed. Despite this, Messrs. Obama, Ryan, and Geithner tell us that we need to make sacrifices. Seriously? The American people already have, and what they are asking us to do will simply make it worse. ...

Why You Should Learn to Love the Deficit: Federal Budget Fallacies

The constant talk from the mainstream media about the "debt ceiling" is rather irritating, and this letter sorta flowed out of my fingertips. The Arizona Republic saved it most of a week to put in their Sunday paper.

One of my signatures for message boards is "learn the rules so that you know how to break them properly". This means that we must understand the systems that we interact with to maximize our personal freedom.

The present debt ceiling uproar is a completely contrived crisis. Most of the members of congress are completely clueless about what they're arguing about.

This was my effort to help people "learn the rules" about finances:

GOP, Dems don't understand banking

Can we please get past all the hot air about the government's finances?

Everyone is talking as if the logic applied to household and corporate finances applies to the government.

The formula for household fiscal solvency is "spend less money than you make."

The government gets different rules because it's the one that's supposed to make the money that households spend.

(continued inside)

Under the present monetary system, money is created only when someone borrows it.

Usually, the federal government borrows a little money from the Federal Reserve, and the banking system expands this "seed money" 10 times (or more) by making loans.

Due to the failure of the banks to lend, the government has had to step in as "the borrower of last resort."

Just as fifth-graders are never put in charge of a school's budget, neither should Republicans and Democrats who fail to understand banking get to play with matches.

Fire them all: Republicans for being stupid about meaningless lines in the sand, and Democrats for playing along. - James Knochel, Prescott

The first comment said, "I like this LTE! Good job, James. We could use people like YOU in Congress instead of the yahoos we're saddled with."

My Response:

Thanks, Boomer. The problems we face are rather simple, when distilled down to their essence.

Money is nothing more than a medium that allows humans to exchange their labors.

Gold used to be the western world's standard form of money... People would dedicate their lives to extracting it from the earth.

Gold extracted with human labor was traded for mining supplies created by human labor... Gold spread from the mine into every corner of the economy.

Gold-as-money had it's problems, of course. The gold rushes (California, Alaska, etc) flooded the economy with extra gold...

Then someone figured out how to extract gold from the earth with Caterpillars and chemistry instead of shovels and slush boxes. The process of disconnecting the government's currency from gold started during the Civil War, with Lincoln's Greenbacks... progressed with FDR's gold freeze... and ended with the de-pegging of the dollar under Nixon.

The most important thing to realize about the present monetary system is that government only has a token degree of control over the Federal Reserve system.

Sure, the President appoints a president and five members to the Federal Reserve board in Washington, and the Government gets the Fed's "profits after expenses."

[The single largest expense is the Federal Reserve's dividend to its shareholders. I wish I could buy a share of the Federal Reserve through E-trade, but that's a different letter.... :]

Private Bankers decide who is an acceptable candidate for their bank, and after appointment they're free to screw things up for the next 4 years (chairman) or 14 years (board members).

Look at all the damage Allan Greenspan did... Shouldn't he be in prison by now? "Whoops, sorry 'bout that stock market bubble, and that housing bubble. Hope you guys can figure something out..."

There have been several court cases with rulings that the Federal Reserve is NOT a part of the government: "The [Federal Reserve] Banks are listed neither as "wholly owned" government corporations under 31 U.S.C. § 846 nor as "mixed ownership" corporations under 31 U.S.C. § 856."

See "Is the Federal Reserve System a Governmental or a Privately controlled organization?":
http://www.monetary.org/federalreserveprivate.htm

A few articles that are worth searching for:

Money and the Crisis of Civilization
I want the Earth plus 5%
A Bailout for the People

I've little interest in running for office: I am but a "fool" who points out that the emperor was swindled by his tailor.

Hopefully people will print my letter out and send a copy to their representative.

-James Knochel

Another response said that "democrats have their lines in the sand too."

I said that they both sides need to realize that they're arguing over sand, when they should be debating over how to build desalinization plants and aqueducts to green the desert.

Will sanity ever win out in politics? Probably some day. Maybe within the decade? Who knows.

It's best to just enjoy the show.  :)

I was at a local cafe this morning with my laptop. A 60-something year old man sat down at a nearby table with a pair of teenagers - a 15 or 16 young man, and a 2-3 year older young woman. The young man had red hair. I couldn't help but overhear the lecture.

It wasn't a stern lecture - the gentleman just wanted to share some helpful advice about doing well at school. Take notes, review notes, ask questions.

This is a great strategy, if you care about the subject. But it's exceedingly difficult to care too much in a standardized school environment. Even if the 'kid' tried to implement the advice, I'd be stunned if the effort continued past the first week of school.

That's how it always was for me, anyways: "this year I'll have good habits", but it'd never last. I spent 16.5 years getting formally educated. Most of that time was spent coasting, doing the bare minimum for most of the classes I took...

Anyone can learn just about anything, if they care about the topic. There's a quote about how it only takes is an hour of concentrated study a day to become an expert on just about any topic in a year.

If I'd been the one offering a possibly troubled young man advice, I would have started by asking what he's interested in. What's exciting, what does he look forward to?

At least that way the money spent on coffee wouldn't be wasted.

Since 'Teslabox' is about the structure of genius, I figured maybe I should blog about it.

Today humanity's greatest challenge is dealing with Mother Earth's curveballs... Floods, Tsunamis, and Earthquakes can all dramatically upend the lives of affected people, anywhere on the planet.

Rather than throwing together a response to the disaster-du-jour (of the day), we should have ships on standby that are prepared and ready to lend assistance to the people who need it.

www.SendTheEnterprise.org.

***

One of the challenges of living on Planet Earth is that disasters happen all the time.  Sometimes these take the form of severe weather - hurricanes and tornados, blizzards and flooding. Other types of natural disasters include earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. Whenever part of the planet is affected, humans organize to help our neighbors survive and recover.

But pulling together a relief effort can be problematic. Sometimes we humans are able to respond quickly. Chileans handled the aftermath of their 2010 magnitude 8.8 earthquake very well. Othertimes responding to a crisis is more of a challenge. Haitians had real problems responding to their Jan. 12, 2010, magnitude 7.0 quake:

Nineteen days [after the earthquake], only 32 percent of Haitians in need had received any food (even if just a single meal), three-quarters were without clean water, the  government had received only two percent of the tents it had requested and hospitals in the capital reported they were running "dangerously low" on basic medical supplies like antibiotics and painkillers. On Feb. 9, the Washington Post reported that food aid was little more than rice, and “Every day, tens of thousands of Haitians face a grueling quest to find food, any food. A nutritious diet is out of the question.” (src)

One of the differences in our ability to respond to a disaster lies in the development level of a country - Chile is politically stable, while Haiti has been a political basket case for the last few decades.

But sometimes developed nations also respond poorly when the unexpected happens.When BP’s Macondo well was flowing freely, company and government officials didn't know what to do. People everywhere were running around in a state of confusion. The oil gushed for months, and there was no strategy to contain or mitigate the effects of the oil on the environment. Neither BP nor anyone else was prepared for the magnitude of the gusher. One of the few tools available was spraying chemical dispersants to keep the oil from floating in slicks on the surface, but these chemicals were quite toxic as well.

Crude oil slowly seeps into the Gulf of Mexico at a thousand different locations every day. Bacteria consumes the oil when it reaches the water, which prevents seeped oil from ever reaching shore. I thought, “if there are bacteria in the gulf that eat crude oil, and those bacteria need oxygen to consume the oil, wouldn’t adding oxygen to the water help the gulf clean itself?”

I typed up a brief proposal with supporting links, gave it a catchy title, and put it up on a few sites. Feedback was generally positive. To give a short summary, To Save the Gulf, Send the Enterprise advocated using the USS Enterprise’s nuclear reactors to power air compressors for oxygenating the ocean. These air bubblers would have provided oxygen for the oil-eating bacteria, thereby mitigating the damage done by BP's blowout.

One of the readers suggested that perhaps pumping air down to the depths of the ocean wouldn’t work like I thought it would, and that a better strategy would be to oxygenate the water and pump warm oxygen-rich water to the plumes of oil instead.

USS Enterprise at sea

While I got thousands of people to look at my idea, thousands of competing ideas were being floated at the same time. Furthermore, the USS Enterprise was recently renovated, is currently getting ready for its next 6-month cruise, and the Navy is not likely to give up their fastest supercarrier 3 years early.

The proposal also suggested tooling up a factory for the new super-efficient Mighty Pump. How many months would it have taken to get the Enterprise (or any other ship) fully
outfitted and ready to respond? A lot of custom fabrication work would have been required.

Now that BP's well has been capped, the need to use Naval resources for the cleanup of the Gulf of Mexico has diminished. But there’s always a next time, a new disaster that needs to be responded to.

The U.S. Coast Guard managed the response to the recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. While the Coast Guard is very good at what they do (witness their strong, capable response to the aftermath of  Hurricane Katrina), the scale of the disaster was more than they could handle. Whatever resources the Coast Guard has were used - boats, airplanes, etc - but for the most part they supervised BP's response.

Some people asked where the U.S. Navy was. While the Navy did send a couple pieces of equipment, the Coast Guard was in charge of the operation.

The Navy has a huge workforce (3.00 / 2) (#7)

And boats, and loads of equipment of all kinds. The military is, in general, experts at getting in place ad hoc infrastructure, which often includes containing various problematic elements like oil spills. It's the only place to go if you need lots of manpower on short notice, and they have some expertise even though they're not experts on oil spills per se.

Because of the availabity of labor and equipment, the military is the primary first responder in most countries' disasters. While the Posse Comitatus Act prevents the US Armed Forces from participating in domestic law enforcement activities, the National Guard is frequently ordered to assist in disaster response by the affected state's govenor.

The USS Carl Vinson was diverted to Haiti in response to the January earthquake, where it
desalinated water and otherwise assisted in relief efforts:

USS CARL VINSON, At Sea (NNS) -- The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) departed the waters near Port-au-Prince, Haiti Feb. 1 after rendering humanitarian assistance to the victims of a massive 7.0 earthquake that struck the Caribbean nation Jan. 12.

Arriving on station less than 72 hours after the quake,
Carl Vinson immediately rendered assistance. Over two weeks, Vinson and its embarked 19 helicopters flew more than 2,200 sorties, delivering more than 166 tons of food, 89,000 gallons of water and 38,700 lbs. of medical supplies to earthquake victims.

Additionally, Vinson's helicopters conducted 476 medical evacuations (MEDEVACs) and the ship's doctors and corpsmen treated 60 patients in its medical ward.

"I think our Navy team did some great work here for the people of Haiti," Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group Commander Rear. Adm. Ted Branch said. ...

-USS Carl Vinson Departs Haiti; Carrier Rendered Critical First
Response (emphasis added)

Instead of diverting a warship from its usual duties, why not have an aircraft carrier that's always ready to go? While it'd be neat to convert the USS Enterprise into the planet's first all-purpose disaster response ship, it's not available for at least three years. But the Kitty Hawk supercarrier is in storage for possible reactivation, and the Ranger and John F. Kennedy supercarriers are on donation hold to possibly turn into museums (they are presumably in decent condition). The Forrestal and a few others are shells waiting to be dismantled, sunk for an artificial reef, or used as live-fire targets.

Retired supercarriers have several advantages over other types of ships as disaster response vessels:

• Aircraft carriers are versatile. With lodging for over 5,000 sailors and guests (such as marines), they're a full-service floating city.
• Aircraft carriers have their own fleet of helicopters. Because disasters frequently compromise the affected region's transportation infrastructure, heavy-lift helicopters are extremely useful for the response effort. An aircraft carrier can deliver, launch, fuel and and service dozens of helicopters to any shore in the world's oceans.
• Aircraft carriers are relatively fast ships. The John F. Kennedy and the Kitty Hawk could move at up to 33 knots, the USS Enterprise cruises at 33+ knots, and Nimitz-class carriers cruise at around 31.5 knots. A typical cargo ship travels at 20-25 knots.

Stand-by Disaster Response Vessels

Win Wenger was the inspiration for the original idea of using bubble fences to oxygenate the ocean. When he heard about my plans for this followup, he said the following:

I like VERY much your idea of converting former warships, especially such carriers, into stand-by disaster relief vessels. In fact, one should stand by in an Atlantic port and one in Hawaii or other Pacific port. With that established as their role, they could have tents and non-perishable relief supplies already packed away on board ready to roll, with arrangements in their port cities to be able to load on at the last minute the more perishable medicines and foods as well.

Near the ports where these vessels are stationed, volunteers from among local National Guard units or equivalent could be trained in basics of relief work and on call at a moment's notice, a ready-made delivery service for relief in countries whose government and infrastructure have been overwhelmed as in Haiti and Pakistan. This could easily get relief to the site of the disaster several days faster than otherwise, saving half or more of the lives now lost in the days immediately following such events, while creating an infinitely better morale situation for the survivors.

Supercarriers are large enough to stock for all types of disasters. Aside from helicopters, tents and non-perishable relief supplies, the ship should be equiped with air and water pumps, unmanned submarines and other equipment for responding to an offshore oil well blowout. The air pumps could be used to implement the original fish-farming proposal while the ship is in its home port.

WW: Both our present wars have made heavy use of helicopters and with the one war shutting down, there is a current surplus of helicopter pilots whose skills our armed forces might want to keep current against possible future contingencies. Seems like these various elements might be made to fit conveniently and economically together.

I recently mentioned the idea of using supercarriers as disaster response ships to a 30-year Navy veteran, a pilot who landed planes on most of the carriers. His first response was that it takes an incredible number of sailors to man a supercarrier, which costs a lot
of money. Carriers are very good at what they do, but very expensive at the same time. Removing the carrier air wing would save 2,500 men, but he thought it’d still take maybe 1,500 sailors to man a ship. But he could see the merit of the idea, and
suggested focusing on one of the mothballed carriers.

WW: As to the number of sailors required, that's with combat in prospect. A marginal, semi-retired vessel on a humanitarian aid mission, with international figures and news media along for the ride, could operate the boat safely with a skeleton crew a very small fraction of that 1500 sailors whose salaries would be costing anyway were they parked off duty somewhere else in port. Skeleton crew and maybe part of that a training crew for the Navy.

To defray costs, easily-cleared sectors of the very same vessels can also serve in their home ports as fee-based museums and as restaurants, theaters and conference centers, under strict requirements of being immediately pack-away and cleared at a moment's notice.

Disaster response is always expensive. Putting a ship that's currently floating around doing nothing, such as the Kitty Hawk, back into active service by preparing
for inevitable disasters to come is a wealth-building strategy. Thousands of people can be put to work manufacturing needed equipment, retrofitting the supercarriers, sewing the tents and creating all the other supplies.

Wealth is only created by humans doing work that solves problems. Plenty of labor is curerntly available, all that's needed is a little leadership to put these millions of people to work.

WW: Your idea certainly is prudent, and appears well worth doing. Sooner or later and probably sooner, our turn will come and it will be many thousands of American lives saved by such stand-by arrangements, not only the human beings living in other parts of the world. Thank you very much for your suggestion.

Finally, Win Wenger also had this to say about cleaning up the gulf:

WW: As to the kind of disaster duty cited at the beginning of this topic, clearing the spilled oil from the Gulf, would the power from one of our many nuclear-powered submarines suffice for operations?

That would seem to be a much less of a big deal to arrange than an aircraft carrier though I certainly like the idea of such a carrier bringing massive and immediate relief to situations like the tsunamis, quakes and fires we've seen the past several years and the massive floods currently underway in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China and parts of Europe. Even by itself, what a difference the Kennedy, so provided, could be making right now for us in Pakistan!

My Navy-veteran aquaintance said that even though it's neither simple nor cheap, converting a ship into a stand-by response vessel could happen if the order came down from high enough. I sent a copy of the original proposal to my Congresswoman, but she's in her first term, and has other things to be concerned about. I don't have the president's ear, or any contacts at the Pentagon.

But I know something about running a website. I bought the domain name, and I can write letters to newspapers and promote the idea online and off.

Do you know anyone that could turn this idea into reality? Yes or no, tell everyone you know: When disaster strikes, send the Enterprise, http://www.SendTheEnterprise.org/.

I'm not taking donations at this time, but if you'd like to support this movement you can purchase one of my ebooks. Proceeds will offset the costs of running this site.

Sincerely Yours,

James Knochel
www.teslabox.com

A lot of people really liked the idea. One commenter suggested that instead of blowing bubbles into the depths of the ocean, warm surface water could be oxygenated and pumped instead. Pumping air below a couple hundred feet would have required much more energy than pumping water.

When the oil volcano was gushing, the bubblers would have been concentrated in rings around the wellhead. BP's well has now been capped, but there are still plumes of oil that need attention.

Mother nature will slowly take care of this task, but it will happen faster if the Navy is put on task. The fleet's submarines are each powered by a portable nuclear reactor, and the Navy certainly has a few spare reactors sitting around.

Once most of the oil has been consumed, the pumps can be used to treat the 'dead zone' that appears at the mouth of the Mississippi river every summer:

Summer rains wash nutrients, dissolved organic matter and sediment out of the mouths of rivers, into the sea, sparking large phytoplankton blooms. ...

Enhanced phytoplankton blooms can create dead zones. Dead zones are areas of water so devoid of oxygen that sea life cannot live there. If phytoplankton productivity is enhanced by fertilizers or other nutrients, more organic matter is produced at the surface of the ocean. The organic matter sinks to the bottom, where bacteria break it down and release carbon dioxide. Bacteria thrive off excessive organic matter and absorb oxygen, the same oxygen that fish, crabs and other sea creatures rely on for life.

-Mississippi Dead Zone (emphasis added)

So what if it's expensive? Wealth is created when people work to solve problems, doing research, building supplies and equipment. Wealth is squandered when people sit around unemployed.

This proposal is by no means complete, and a lot of research still needs to be done on how to best clean up the gulf. But we can start building and deploying compressors and pumps to treat the water today. Scientists and engineers will figure out the best ways use the equipment.

This project is more than a cleanup - it's an investment in our future.

My memories of going to sleep as a child are of tossing and turning every night in bed.

My parents bought my brother a waterbed when he outgrew his twin bed. I thought I'd fall asleep quicker in a waterbed than my old mattress, so I pestered my parents endlessly until they relented and bought me a waterbed too. It didn't help.

I learned about self-hypnosis, lucid dreaming, and "mental imagery" when I was 17 years old. One style of self-hypnosis calls for relaxing the physical body, then relaxing the mind. I was fascinated by the prospects of "internal senses".
I tried to relax in chairs and on the bed (such as for a "nap") as best I could, but the only relaxation I experienced was fleeting. I'd feel good for a half a second, then I'd notice feeling good and I'd pop out of the relaxation and be stuck in my overly tense body once again.

Some of the web pages on dreaming (1999 or so) and books that I read talked about a "drifty-dreamy" hypnagogic state between sleep and wakefulness. I tried to relax as best I could in bed. I always passed out before I noticed anything.

I left for college the next year, and developed something like lupus (lots of inflammation). I thought I had an RSI, but the P.A. and M.D. at the campus health center said there was nothing wrong with me that a little exercise wouldn't fix. I didn't believe them, so I started my own search for answers.

Many years passed, and I eventually I ended up in the hands of a capable Osteopath who specialized in hands-on therapy. I told him my story: head trauma when I was 17 y.o., swelling and pain in forearms, etc. He did his thing, and over a course of about a year he gradually helped my body's structures move back into their proper place.

Other disciplines look at a bone that's out of place as if it's a problem. One maxim from early Osteopathy was that "muscles move bones, and nerves control muscles". So rather than directly popping a bone back into place, a skilled osteopath will evaluate a patient to see what causes a structure to be malpositioned.

The good doctor likened a case such as mine to peeling an onion: stored trauma comes off a layer at a time.

One night after a few months of regular treatments, I opened my mouth to brush my teeth and noticed that the constant clicking noise in my jaw (TMJ) was no longer present. I opened and closed my mouth a few times in disbelief. The clicking had been with me for about four years at that point...

I also noticed that I no longer had to "try" to relax in bed before I passed out - most nights I quickly fell asleep.

Good sleep comes from having a balanced body, and hands-on therapies are one way to restore balance.

One practice that can really be beneficial are specific mental exercises that alter the brainwaves to produce a state more conductive to sleep. These can take many forms, such as self hypnosis, binaural beats, meditation, and mental imagery exercises.

One good practice that can be done in bed (or in a nearby chair) is to review the day that's just passed. What did you do and what outcomes did you get? How did the action you took advance the long-term projects that you're working on?

If you did something that were not entirely beneficial, change the action in your mental review so that you got better results. While your mental adjustment doesn't change what actually happened, practice of the desired outcome helps you make better choices in the future.

After reviewing the day, plans can be made for the day to come. Then say mentally that you're going to count from 10 down to 1, and by the count of 1 you'll be deep asleep, allowing your other-than-conscious mind to integrate the day's lessons and preparing for the day to come.

Sometimes insomnia is simple, sometimes it's complex. There's always something that can be done to help an individual find refreshing sleep.

[addition 11/13/2011] Many people find that the Radial Appliance helps them find relaxation and rest (can I say it that way, without the FDA coming down on me?)... Furthermore, sometimes people don't rest because they're hypothyroid - synthroid [T4 only] is a poor treatment for hypothyroidism. Will have to visit this topic again in the future. Until then, if you're an insomniac please sign up for my free reports on the Radial Appliance site.

-jjk

60+ days have passed since the Deepwater Horizon's explosion and sinking. BP company engineers have been working continuously to stop the oil, but all efforts to plug the gusher in the gulf have failed. Efforts to contain the oil are ongoing, but the best case scenario calls for the well to run until the relief wells are completed in August.

In short, people are becoming aware that BP's Big Problem in the Gulf of Mexico is probably the most epic environmental catastrophe of the past 1000 years.

If only the Enterprise was available to help.

While I admire the engineers working to stop the gusher for their methodical and careful approach, I am not impressed with any of the existing efforts to remediate the uncontained environmental damage.

Cleaning up the untold millions of gallons of oil already leaked is a decidedly comedic affair. They play the TV-watching public for fools, as if cleaning a beach at this point in time will help. Furthermore, there are reports from the front lines that some cleanup crews arrive for the TV cameras or government overseer and leave as soon as they're not needed to maintain BP's facade.

All "feel good" efforts to clean the beaches in the Gulf of Mexico should be stopped immediately. Not only are they pointless, they put human lives in decidedly unhealthy conditions.

I've corralled Irvin Lipp, who drives me and a few wire photographers out to Elmer's. (He tells me ruefully that he has history with Mother Jones, having once been a flack for Dupont.) The shoreline is packed with men in hats and gumboots and bright blue or white shirts. Nearly all are African-American, all hired from around New Orleans. They tell me they've been standing in these exact same spots for three days. It's breathtakingly hot. They rake the oil and sand into big piles; other workers collect the piles into big plastic bags, and still other workers take them to a plant where the sand is separated out and sent to a hazardous-waste dump and the oil goes on for processing. Then the tide comes in with more oil and everybody starts all over again. Ten dollars an hour. Twelve hours a day. When I joke with one worker that he should pocket the solid gobs of oil he's digging up to show me how far beneath the sand they go, he stops dead and asks me if BP's still trying to use the oil they all collect. "Aw, I knew it!" he says. Another leans on his rake to ask me, "Have they at least shut the oil off yet?" He randomly picks three spots in a three-foot-wide expanse of sand that he's already raked clean and drops his rake in an inch deeper to show me how the oil bubbles up from underneath. He can't count how many times he's raked this same spot in the 33 hours he's worked it since Thursday, but one thing he's sure of, he says, is that he'll be standing right here tomorrow and the next day, too.

-It's BP's oil (emphasis added)

Maybe someone can help me understand why BP hires people to remove tarballs when there's another supertanker's worth of oil coming inbound? And what's the point of sending fishing dinghies to corral floating crude oil? Somebody should have a talk with them about scale.

Rolling Stone Magazine has a good analysis of how the disaster developed:

BP is the last oil company on Earth that Salazar and MMS should have allowed to regulate itself. The firm is implicated in each of the worst oil disasters in American history, dating back to the Exxon Valdez in 1989. At the time, BP directed the industry consortium that bungled the cleanup response to Valdez during the fateful early hours of the spill, when the worst of the damage occurred. Vital equipment was buried under snow, no cleanup ship was standing by and no containment barge was available to collect skimmed oil. Exxon, quickly recognizing what still seems to elude the Obama administration, quickly shunted BP aside and took control of the spill.

...

The company applied the same deadly cost-cutting mentality to its oil rig in the Gulf. BP, it is important to note, is less an oil company than a bank that finances oil exploration; unlike ExxonMobil, which owns most of the equipment it uses to drill, BP contracts out almost everything. That includes the Deepwater Horizon rig that it leased from a firm called Transocean. BP shaved $500,000 off its overhead by deploying a blowout preventer without a remote-control trigger - a fail-safe measure required in many countries but not mandated by MMS, thanks to intense industry lobbying. It opted to use cheap, single-walled piping for the well, and installed only six of the 21 cement spacers recommended by its contractor, Halliburton - decisions that significantly increased the risk of a severe explosion. It also skimped on critical testing that could have shown whether explosive gas was getting into the system as it was being cemented, and began removing mud that protected the well before it was sealed with cement plugs.

-The Spill, The Scandal and the President (emphasis added)

But pointing fingers doesn't help anyone. It's more productive to be solution-oriented than looking to cast blame.

Mother Nature has the most effective oil-remediation strategy of all. Oil-eating bacteria regularly consume crude oil that seeps into the gulf every day.

But the volcano is releasing more oil than the bacteria can handle. These bacteria need oxygen to process the oil, but the volcano's hydrocarbons readily bind with oxygen that's already present in the water.

Save the Gulf With Oxygen

Anyone who has a fish tank knows that the water must be aerated to keep oxygen levels high enough for a tank full of fish to survive. This is accomplished with the humble airstone. When coupled with an air pump, surface area of water in direct contact with air increases dramatically, thereby speeding up the process of replacing Carbon Dioxide with Oxygen.

In nature, fish live in oceans, lakes, ponds, and rivers. These bodies of water all have large surface areas and sometimes large currents as well. This serves to oxygenate the water so that fish survival is possible. However, in an aquarium, the surface of the water is greatly reduced. Therefore, artificial ways of oxygenating he water must be accomplished through aeration. There are several ways to aerate your aquarium and these methods will be discussed in this article.

-Properly Aerating Your Aquarium

The amount, rate and spatial concentration of crude oil released from such an event overwhelm the natural mechanisms of oil dispersal and breakdown, producing the significant ecological effects that we observe.

-Natural Oil Seeps and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster: A Comparison of Magnitudes

Oil doesn't consume oxygen especially quickly, but natural gas does. BP's gusher is much more than crude oil - millions of cubic feet of gasses are also being released. These gasses rapidly consume all available oxygen.

"how serious is the oxygen depletion problem?" ... "Very Serious" ... "How much biodegredation appears to being observed for the oil plumes?" ... "There is a tremendous amount of oxygen consumption in the plumes.  We have measured respiration rates in the plumes, above and below the plumes, and at control sites where plumes are not present.  The respiration rates in the plume are at least 5-10 times higher than we see anywhere else."

-Hide and Seek

Turn the cleanup operation over to the United States Navy

The BP executives' primary responsibility is to their shareholders scattered across the world. The U.S. Navy's shareholders are the people who live in the United States. One concise proponent of the Navy's involvement made this case:

The navy has a huge workforce (#7), Wed Jun 02, 2010 at 10:32:39 AM EST

... And boats, and loads of equipment of all kinds. The military is, in general, experts at getting in place ad hoc infrastructure, which often includes containing various problematic elements like oil spills. It's the only place to go if you need lots of manpower on short notice, and they have some expertise even though they're not experts on oil spills per se.

Furthermore, the Navy doesn't care about costs, whereas BP only spends enough to keep their little kingdom intact.

The Navy knows all about operating fleets of gigantic ships. BP knows something about drilling holes in the ground. Leave BP in charge of the relief well, turn cleanup operations over to the United States Navy, and send BP the bill.

There are many strategies for cleaning up spilled oil. Skimmers are being used, and manufacturing for Kevin Costner's new oil/water separating centrifuge has begun. These efforts should continue. Crude oil-containing water can be pumped into supertankers and separated on land, as was done in Saudi Arabia years ago.

But the most important remediation effort hasn't been used anywhere yet. Win Wenger has an old proposal for using underwater bubble fences to farm fish. The bubble fences keep the fishies corralled in their pens, and also encourage the growth of phytoplankton for the fish to feed on. Massive air pumps can and should be deployed to introduce large amounts of oxygen to the plumes of undersea oil.

The only problem left to help facilitate Mother Nature's oil cleanup is powering the banks of air pumps that will be needed. Even though there are new pumps that are better than existing designs, it will still take a tremendous amount of energy to pump air 200-5,000+ feet below the surface.

"Several people have asked whether there is a way to introduce oxygen into the deepwater to correct any significant oxygen deficit.  We don't know yet whether that will be necessary because we don't know whether oxygen will reach stressful low levels (<2 mg/L).  However, it could be fairly difficult to do aerate the water at the depths (1100m) we are seeing oxygen depletion. So I'm not sure that is a solution to deepwater oxygen problems."

-http://gulfblog.uga.edu/2010/06/how-things-change/

So much for that idea?

To Save The Gulf, Send the Enterprise

This is where the USN Enterprise comes in. Enterprise is the Navy's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. It was just retrofitted, and the crew is currently preparing the ship for deployment. The U.S. Navy has plans to send the Enterprise on two six-month cruises before decommissioning it in 2013.

With 6 reactors generating 310 Megawatts of thermal power, Enterprise is the world's largest floating nuclear powerplant. No other ship or generating system anywhere has the power needed to oxygenate the oil plumes in the Gulf of Mexico.

Building a Better Pump

While there are already pumps that would probably be capable of getting a flow of bubbles down to 1000 meters, all existing types of gas compressors are barely acceptable for the task. Fortunately there is a new engineering-complete pump design that, with a few tweeks by engineers familiar with salt water environments, would be extremely valuable for gulf cleanup operations. Whether the Navy decides to pump air or water, Raphial Morgado's new Mighty Pump (MYT, for Massive Yet Tiny) will be a valuable tool. Morgado says that his pump is the only existing design that offers pressure, volume and flow in a single package.

After licensing the design, the U.S. Navy's engineers can refine the pump for their purposes and the military-industrial complex can quickly establish a production line. The Mighty pump only has 22 parts, so manufacturers will be able to get these new pumps into production quickly.

Converting Steam to Compressed Air

A neat feature of the MYT design is that two pumps can be used back-to-back. One pump is attached to the Enterprise's steam catapult lines and turns pressure into rotational motion. The other pump is attached to the rotating drive shaft and generates compressed air to pump underwater or to drive other MYT pumps at distant locations.

The Enterprise Can Stop Hurricanes

Concerns have been spreading online that a tropical storm may carry the oil inland, which could make the situation in the gulf exponentially worse. There is an as-yet untested method for reducing tropical storm intensity that uses the same air pumps as in the proposal outlined above:

Nearly all the energy which drives a tropical disturbance comes from warm surface water. Eliminate the warm surface water in the immediate path--or in the breeding grounds--of a hurricane, and you eliminate the hurricane.

A low-cost, low-energy way to eliminate the warm surface water, where it would otherwise soon be feeding a hurricane or other tropical disturbance, is to cause the water to "turn over." This is done by pumping compressed air down toward gulf or sea bottom and releasing it. The cooler waters come to the top and the hurricane loses its energy over them to become disorganized squalls.

Where are such cooler bottom waters available? Virtually everywhere. Even the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is littered with blobs of ice. Ices of (natural) gas hydrate and methane ice (melting point 45 degrees F) occur to such an extent that some have been investigating how to extract that methane ice as a fuel resource (The Washington Post, August 11, 1997, p. A3). And the Gulf is one of the warmest open bodies of water on the planet (and one of the most frequent spawners of tropical disturbances).

-Hurricane Stopper Invention: Proposed system for stopping hurricanes, typhoons, and tropical storms

Time to Correct Course

BP is doing everything it can to plug their well and save their company, but everything isn't enough. The U.S. Navy needs to immediately be put on task to organize and deploy resources in the gulf, including skimmers, supertankers, centrifuges, and bubble fences.

Portable nuclear reactors are the best way to power this massive infrastructure, and the U.S. Navy has the only portable nuclear power stations available.

Tell everyone you know: send the Enterprise, for it truly is our only hope.

(update: a followup to this article has been posted: When Disaster Strikes, Send the Enterprise)

WordPress does all the work, and I just make some content. Should have done this years ago.

-james