Wednesday 8th March 2023

“Nikola Tesla is 79 years old, and he is one of the true geniuses of this time. Nevertheless, twenty-odd newspapermen came away from his Hotel New Yorker birthday party yesterday, which lasted six hours, feeling hesitantly that something was wrong either with the old man’s mind or else with their own, for Dr. Tesla, serene in an old-fashioned Prince Albert and courtly in a way that seems to have gone out of this world, announced that:

1. He had discovered the so-called cosmic ray in 1896, at least five years before any other scientist took it up and twenty years before it became popular among scientists, and he is now convinced that many of the cosmic particles travel fifty times faster than light, some of them 500 times faster.

2. He has found a way to produce a direct electric current by induction and without the use of a commutator, which is something the experts in electricity have considered impossible for the past hundred years.

3. He has invented an “absolutely impossible” machine which will impart vibrations to the earth which, with proper receiving apparatus can be picked up anywhere on the earth’s surface, and that this mysterious machine will allow scientists to explore the deep interior of the earth, will enable practical geologists to discover gold, coal and petroleum, and at the same time will give ships the means of navigating without compass or sextant.

Dr. Tesla has 600 to 700 patents to his name. He invented the rotary field motor, and is admittedly the seer and father of all modern electrical development. As has been his custom for five years now, he arranged his own birthday party, drank only hot milk as his part of the celebration, and made his announcements with the superb certainty of a man who knew what he was talking about, even if none of his guests did.

He said, among other things, that he expects to have $100,000,000 within two years, and he revealed that an earthquake which drew police and ambulances to the region of his laboratory at 48 E. Houston St. in 1887 or 1888 was the result of a little machine he was experimenting with at that time which “you could put in your overcoat pocket.”

The bewildered newspapermen pounced upon this as at least one thing they could understand and “the father of modern electricity” told what had happened as follows:

“I was experimenting with vibrations. I had one of my machines going and I wanted to see if I could get it in tune with the vibration of the building. I put it up notch after notch. There was a peculiar cracking sound.

“I asked my assistants where did the sound come from. They did not know. I put the machine up a few more notches. There was a louder cracking sound. I knew I was approaching the vibration of the steel building. I pushed the machine a little higher.

“Suddenly all the heavy machinery in the place was flying around. I grabbed a hammer and broke the machine. The building would have been down about our ears in another few minutes. Outside in the street there was pandemonium. The police and ambulances arrived. I told my assistants to say nothing. We told the police it must have been an earthquake. That’s all they ever knew about it.”

Some shrewd reporter asked Dr. Tesla at this point what he would need to destroy the Empire State Building and the doctor replied:

“Five pounds of air pressure. If I attached the proper oscillating machine on a girder that is all the force I would need, five pounds. Vibration will do anything. It would only be necessary to step up the vibrations of the machine to fit the natural vibration of the building and the building would come crashing down. That’s why soldiers always break step crossing a bridge.”

His early experiments in vibration, he explained, led to his invention of his “Earth vibrating machine. Tall and thin and ascetic face, his eyes sunken but …. humorous under protruding brows, he was cagey about describing what his new machine is, although he believes it will be “the chief thing of my many inventions posterity will thank me for.“ — Earl Sparling

“Nikola Tesla, At 79, Uses Earth To Transmit Signals.” New York World Telegram, July 11, 1935.

What true love is:

“My parents were married for 55 years. One morning, my mom was going downstairs to make dad breakfast, she had a heart attack and fell. My father picked her up as best he could and almost dragged her into the truck. At full speed, without respecting traffic lights, he drove her to the hospital.

When he arrived, unfortunately she was no longer with us.

During the funeral, my father did not speak; his gaze was lost. He hardly cried.

That night, his children joined him. In an atmosphere of pain and nostalgia, we remembered beautiful anecdotes and he asked my brother, a theologian, to tell him where Mom would be at that moment. My brother began to talk about life after death, and guesses as to how and where she would be.

My father listened carefully. Suddenly he asked us to take him to the cemetery.

Dad!“ we replied, “it’s 11 at night, we can’t go to the cemetery right now!”

He raised his voice, and with a glazed look he said: “Don’t argue with me, please don’t argue with the man who just lost his wife of 55 years.”

There was a moment of respectful silence, we didn’t argue anymore. We went to the cemetery, and we asked the night watchman for permission. With a flashlight, we reached the tomb. My father caressed her, prayed, and told his children, who watched the scene, moved:

“It was 55 years... you know? No one can talk about true love if they have no idea what it’s like to share life with a woman.”

He paused and wiped his face. “She and I, we were together in that crisis. I changed jobs ...” he continued. “We packed up when we sold the house and moved out of town. We shared the joy of seeing our children finish their careers, we mourned the departure of loved ones side by side, we prayed together in the waiting room of some hospitals, we support each other in pain, we hug each Christmas, and we forgive our mistakes... Children, now it’s gone, and I’m happy, do you know why?

Because she left before me. She didn’t have to go through the agony and pain of burying me, of being left alone after my departure. I will be the one to go through that, and I thank God. I love her so much that I wouldn’t have liked her to suffer...”

When my father finished speaking, my brothers and I had tears streaming down our faces. We hugged him, and he comforted us, “It’s okay, we can go home, it’s been a good day.”

That night I understood what true love is; It is far from romanticism, it does not have much to do with eroticism, or with sex, rather it is linked to work, to complement, to care, and, above all, to the true love that two really committed people profess.”

Peace in your hearts.

Author: Unknown

Insect_Declines.png

Why I’ve pulled the plug on my electric car.

As I watch my family strike out on foot across the fields into driving rain and gathering darkness, my wife holding each child’s hand, our new year plans in ruins, while I do what I can to make our dead car safe before abandoning it a mile short of home, full of luggage on a country lane, it occurs to me not for the first time that if we are going to save the planet we will have to find another way. Because electric cars are not the answer.

I can’t even roll it to a safer spot because it can’t be put in neutral. For when an electric car dies, it dies hard. And then lies there as big and grey and not-going-anywhere as the poacher-slain bull elephant I once saw rotting by a roadside in northern Kenya. Just a bit less smelly.

Two out of three roadside chargers are broken or busy at any one time

Not that this is unusual.

Since I bought my eco dream car in late 2020, in a deluded Thunbergian frenzy, it has spent more time off the road than on it, beached at the dealership for months at a time on account of innumerable electrical calamities, while I galumph around in the big diesel “courtesy cars” they send me under the terms of the warranty.

But this time I don’t want one. And I don’t want my own car back either.

I have asked the guys who sold it to me to sell it again, as soon as it is fixed, to the first mug who walks into the shop. Because I am going back to petrol while there is still time.

And if the government really does ban new wet fuel cars after 2030, then we will eventually have to go back to horses. Because the electric vehicle industry is no readier to get a family home from Cornwall at Christmas time (as I was trying to do) than it is to fly us all to Jupiter. The cars are useless, the infrastructure is not there and you’re honestly better off walking.

Even on the really long journeys. In fact, especially on the long journeys. The short ones they can just about manage. It’s no wonder Tesla shares are down 71 per cent. It’s all a huge fraud. And, for me, it’s over.

Yet the new owner of my “preloved” premium electric vehicle, fired with a messianic desire to make a better world for his children, will not know this. He will be delighted with his purchase and overjoyed to find there are still six months of warranty left, little suspecting that once that has expired — and with it the free repairs and replacement cars for those long spells off road — he will be functionally carless.

He will be over the moon to learn that it has “a range of up to 292 miles”. No need to tell him what that really means is “220 miles”. Why electric carmakers are allowed to tell these lies is a mystery to me. As it soon will be to him.

Although for the first few days he won’t worry especially. He’ll think he can just nip into a fuel station and charge it up again. Ho ho ho. No need to tell him that two out of three roadside chargers in this country are broken or busy at any one time. Or that the built-in “find my nearest charge point” function doesn’t work, has never worked, and isn’t meant to work.

Or that apps like Zap-Map don’t work either because the chargers they send you to are always either busy or broken or require a membership card you don’t have or an app you can’t download because there’s no 5G here, in the middle of nowhere, where you will now probably die.

Or that the Society of Motor Manufacturers said this week that only 23 new chargers are being installed nationwide each day, of the 100 per day that were promised (as a proud early adopter, I told myself that charging would become easier as the network grew, but it hasn’t grown, while the number of e-drivers has tripled, so it’s actually harder now than it was two years ago).

There are, of course, plus sides to electric ownership. Such as the camaraderie when we encounter each other, tired and weeping at yet another service station with only two chargers, one of which still has the “this fault has been reported” sign on it from when you were here last August, and the other is of the measly 3kWh variety, which means you will have to spend the night in a Travelodge while your stupid drum lazily inhales enough juice to get home.

Together, in the benighted charging zone, we leccy drivers laugh about what fools we are and drool over the diesel hatchbacks nonchalantly filling up across the way (“imagine getting to a fuel station and knowing for sure you will be able to refuel!”) and talk in the hour-long queue at Exeter services about the petrol car we will buy as soon as we get home.

We filled up there last week on the way back from Cornwall, adding two hours to our four-hour journey, by which time Esther wasn’t speaking to me. She’s been telling me to get rid of the iPace since it ruined last summer’s holidays in both Wales and Devon (“If you won’t let us fly any more, at least buy a car that can get us to the places we’re still allowed to go!”).

But I kept begging her to give me one last chance, as if I’d refused to give up a mistress, rather than a dull family car. Until this time, a couple of miles from home, when a message flashed up on the dash: “Assisted braking not available — proceed with caution.” Then: “Steering control unavailable.” And then, as I inched off the dual carriageway at our turnoff, begging it to make the last mile, children weeping at the scary noises coming from both car and father: “Gearbox fault detected.” CLUNK. WHIRRR. CRACK.

And dead. Nothing.

Poached elephant.

I called Jaguar Assist (there is a button in the roof that does it directly — most useful feature on the car) who told me they could have a mechanic there in four hours (who would laugh and say, “Can’t help you, pal. You’ve got a software issue there. I’m just a car mechanic. And this isn’t a car, it’s a laptop on wheels.”)

So Esther and the kids headed for home across the sleety wastes, a vision of post-apocalyptic misery like something out of Cormac McCarthy, while I saw out 2022 waiting for a tow-truck. Again.

But don’t let that put you off.

I see in the paper that electric car sales are at record levels and production is struggling to keep up with demand. So why not buy mine? It’s clean as a whistle and boasts super-low mileage. After all, it’s hardly been driven...

I have a grandson (or two) like this.

Geez there is a never ending stream of misinformation coming from reputable sources.

From the activities of most individuals and organisations there are two functions omitted with tragic consequences. Those two functions are ethics and quality control.

Ethics enables you to select and undertake only those activities that will aid your own and others’ survival.

Quality control performed on your products or services ensure you improve your standards and actually deliver that which you intended.

ETHICS

One can look around this society and see ample evidence of a lack of ethics being applied in the actions of individuals, corporations, governments and international bodies.

This is a monumental tragedy in the making. A civilization wrecking catastrophe. For you cannot create a prosperous, enduring civilization composed of unethical individuals.

One of the foremost constitutional theorists of the founding generation, John Adams, observed, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

He wasn’t the only Founding Father to hold this view. Indeed, James Madison wrote that our Constitution requires “sufficient virtue among men for self-government,” otherwise, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”

Less than 200 years later, with the ethic level of the individual and therefore society plummeting we have a position statement adopted by the US government that has the specific intent of suppressing the survival potential of other countries.

US imperial planner, George Kennan, an architect of the first cold war, wrote in 1948, “Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.“

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1948v01p2/d4

And this is the forerunner of the current doomed efforts by the US to retain its position as the only world super power by undermining Russia with its sponsored and ultimately futile proxy war in Ukraine.

No wonder some regard the powers behind the US government as the principle terrorist organisation on the planet!

Medical research is not immune from unethical behaviour. From a blog post from 2017:

“A pooled weighted average of 1.97% of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices.

In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices.”

https://www.tomgrimshaw.com/tomsblog/?p=16135

Where did we lose our moral compass?

Look no further than psychiatry. For behind every bad condition will be found a psychiatrist.

In 1947 the then president of the World Federation of Mental Health, Brock Chisholm, said, “The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are the belated objectives of nearly all Psychotherapy.”

If you cannot tell right from wrong then anything goes and those doing wrong are immune from censure. Until the hammer falls and their untimely demise ensues as it inevitably does for unethical behaviour.

QUALITY CONTROL

In some organisations an element of quality control is employed on the production line but rarely to the extent it should be and most often not applied to the actions of executives and staff.

The necessity to perform an after production check was brought home to me with a thud in two of my areas of endeavour.

One was software development where experience taught me that it was incredibly conceited of me to assume that just because I had written the code that it would perform as desired. I needed to run the code to check that it worked.

Another was when painting a balustrade. I would be on one side of it painting both sides then lean over to look at the site out of view and despite my best efforts at painting surfaces not in view I would inevitably find missed patches, dribbles and thin bits that needed going over.

I observed that you cannot guarantee something was done unless you inspected it post production.

In my experience most people do not perform a post production inspection. I recall my wife saying many years ago to our children, “It’s not clean just because you passed a rag over it. It’s clean when the surface has no dirt on it!” This why inspection is important.

If you want to increase your personal satisfaction in a job well done, take to doing post production inspections in all areas of your life.

WHAT’S THE PRODUCT?

The single best aid to applying the data in this article is prior to engaging in any activity to develop the habit of asking yourself the question. “What is the product I wish to attain with my efforts?”

If the product is majorly beneficial then it passes the ethical test.

When your actions are concluded, if the product attained matches the product desired then it passes the quality control test.

If not, some remediation is required to close the gap between desired and attained.

The elimination of dissent and the marginalisation of scientists sceptical of the establishment’s scientific and medical agenda will destroy the scientific process - unless reversed. Find out how the concept of ’scientific misinformation’ has been deliberately spun to make it the primary weapon aimed at protecting the interests of the status quo. As well as what we can do about it.

“When do we deploy the new variant?” Hancock asked.

Until next time,
dream big dreams,
plan out how to achieve them,
be continually executing your plans,
enlist people to your causes,
travel and/or read widely, preferably both,
all the while observing what you observe
rather than thinking what you are told to think,
think well of your fellow man,
take time to help your fellow man,
he sorely needs it and it will help you too,
eat food that is good for your body,
exercise your body,
take time to destress,
and do the important things
that make a difference -
they are rarely the urgent ones!

Most of the content herein has been copied from someone else. Especially the images. My goodness some people are talented at creating aesthetics! The small bits that are of my creation are Copyright 2006-2023 © by Tom Grimshaw - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use. Also for entertainment and educational purposes. All rights to the original works go to those that hold them, no copyright infringement intended. All material used falls under fair use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998). (for commentary, criticism, education and satire)

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