Government is not a business

This letter appeared in the Daily Mining Gazette and is reprinted here for your enlightenment:

Candidate Romney claims that his qualification for President is that he is a successful businessman. What he does not seem to understand is that government is not a business. A business produces products or services for a profit for its shareholders. A government provides services paid for with taxes collected from the citizens and businesses. If the government were a business it could privatize the Defense Department. Following the Romney business tactic, the Pentagon Corporation could sell our surplus aircraft carriers to China, as Russia did. We do not need seven nuclear aircraft carrier task forces when no other country has more than one. We could level the playing field, sell off some of our ships and pass on the profits to the shareholders. That’s what businesses do.

If that meant laying off a lot of sailors, taking away their pensions and medical benefits and dumping them onto the distressed labor market, so be it. What matters to business is dividends for the shareholders.

Business thinks in terms of short term gains and quick profits. Governments think long term. It takes years to plan a bridge, for instance, and no private corporation is going to take that long range view. If Michigan’s distressed highway department sold my company the Portage Lake lift bridge, which is already nearing the end of its useful life, we could charge a toll, make a profit for our investors, skip maintenance costs, and when the bridge no longer functioned, sell it for scrap to milk every last dollar out of a depleted asset. So what if the folks who had no bridge couldn’t cross the waterway? That’s their problem. We can go elsewhere, buy some other bridge, and do it again.

That’s why you do not want to elect a businessman to be president. It’s the wrong mind set.

Fatal change in Republican demographics

It is clear from the current state of the Republican party is that it is a white man's party that excludes or is at war on women's issues: opposed to freedom of reproductive choice, and opposed to equal pay for women. From the looks of the GOP convention audience, except for a few Pacific islanders, it's an all white bunch. Yet consider that the whites are now the minority race in the United States. The majority are of other races. And the majority of the population is female. the Republicans are out of touch and out of step with reality. The Republican party does not represent today's American people.

Add to those errors, Romney has flipped flopped on all the issues. While he was governor his state lost thousands of jobs. He was in favor of abortion rights and set up a health plan which is the model for Obamacare, yet now he is against it. Romney is a flip-flopper who will change any policy so he can sail with the wind. He is determined to get rid of Obamacare, to cut off funding for Public Broadcasting, Amtrak, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Department of Education, and his running made wants to cut Pell grants for education.
Yet Romney isn't touching the bloated Pentagon budget. When I was a lad, it was called the War department, which is its roper name, but it's now euphemistically called the Department of Defense. This sacred cow is untouchable. To criticize the spending on billion dollar airplanes that are unsafe to fly is to invite criticism that you are not in favor of our freedom. The country was put on the wrong course when Bush made an unprovoked attack on Iraq, which is a war crime under the definitions of the World Court, and went to war on borrowed money thereby adding to the huge national debt.

 If Romney and his hatchet man vice president choice are elected I fear for the Republic.
Visit the Daily Mining Gazette web page and look for Harley Sachs for my published letters to the editor..

What's your name?

You may have many names but you should use only one. If you have several names getting Googled can lead in many wrong directions. My name is Harley Luther Sachs, a.k.a Harley L. Sachs, aka Harley Sachs, aka hlsachs and I could conceivably H. Luther Sachs. For instance, if you go to Amazon.com and want to buy one of my books, if you go to one of my names you'll find ony about six titles all of which are out of print, though might be available used somewhere. But if you go to the other Harley Sachs name, you'll find the entire current list ob about 27 titles. Lulu.com has the custom paperback list of 31 books, a couple of which are combination bargains like four Mystery Club novels in one volume. So what's your name? Just be consistent.

A Cashless Society

MS#1679/586  words

The Cashless Society

a column by

Harley L. Sachs

The latest news from my old classmate in Sweden is that they are a cashless society. All transactions are done with debit or credit cards. Banks have no tellers. Currency and cash are obsolete. This is now. Let’s see where all this can lead to here in America:

For the Ididerod every dog has a microchip under the skin so no one can switch dogs. At a US hospital every newborn baby is tagged so when a woman tried to steal a baby she got only as far as the ward door before the alarm went off and all doors were locked. No more switched dogs or stolen babies. In this retirement building our wandering Alzheimer’s residents cannot leave their floor without triggering an alarm.

Moose and other animals, even gophers are collared in the wild and tracked. If a collared animal dies, it can be quickly found. Some criminals wear such bracelets and you can put one on your wandering kid.

Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, claimed he had an identity chip embedded by the government. Well, why not everybody?

Our building has done away with exterior door keys. Every resident has an electronic fob to open the exterior doors, a fob that is programmed so if it is lost or stolen it can be instantly deactivated. Such fobs are used for commuters’ cars that go through toll gates without having to stop. They trigger an automatic withdrawal of the toll fee from the driver’s account. The record also shows when the car passed which gate.

In some states there’s a plan to put your entire violation record on the magnetic strip of your driver’s license. Why not also your entire medical record? A woman I met carries hers on a flash drive necklace.

The obvious next step is to embed everyone with an ID tag that is also their ATM entry. No need to carry, forget, lose, or have your cash card lost or stolen. It’s part of your body, and if someone cuts it out it won’t work without the pin number.

 This is absolutely possible. All the information is stored and accessed in the cloud. Every transaction you make with Amazon.com goes into the cloud. If your Kindle gets overloaded, you can store the extra books in the cloud to retrieve later, and Amazon knows all the books you’ve bought.

The grocery store where I have a so-called member’s club card, knows everything I eat and drink. They can use this information for stocking the stores for certain neighborhoods and age or ethnic groups. The police used credit card purchases to track down the source and buyer of materials used for making a bomb.

Think of the implications beyond what Sweden already has. Embed the ATM bank card in a chip. In my short story “Therapy.com” everyone wore an embedded “peanut” that tracked them. So identified, no one could be mugged without the cloud knowing who was there are the time of the crime. Spouses would know where their partner was and who was with them in what motel room. Lost or kidnapped children could be found immediately.

Think about it: a cashless and cardless society where every transaction is known and every person’s location is tracked. Think of the implications for illegal immigrants and for legal tourists. The implications of this next technological step are profound. Sweden, here we come.

This is going to be tough on beggars who don’t take credit cards. No more “change, Mister, please. Anything helps.”

The topic candidates all avoid

The Subject No One Dares Discuss

a letter by

Harley L. Sachs

So here we are in the midst of a presidential campaign and there is one issue none of the candidates dare talk about: our militaristic state and its bloated budget. The United States has a military budget larger than the next ten countries combined. The United States exports more arms than any other country. Clearly we are in the death business.

There is endless argument about cutting entitlements, primarily for the sick and elderly, e.g. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, but nothing about reducing our military outposts all around the world, nothing about cutting the Pentagon budget which cannot even be audited. We are engaged in wars abroad, wars in countries that were not a threat to our freedom, and our military forces are psychologically and physically broken with more suicides of desperate, hopeless, and damaged troops than ever before. But it goes on.

George W. Bush got us into these wars without provocation, which is a war crime and waged those wars on borrowed money. In all previous wars we paid a war tax. One way to cut back on this madness is to make a law: no war without a ten percent across the board war tax and universal conscription, men and women. Faced with that situation, the public would refuse. Instead, probably fearing that the public would revolt, the government has activated the National Guard and also hired private contractors, a.k.a. mercenaries, to maintain our military presence abroad..

Of course, the military-industrial complex employs a lot of people but is the death industry where you want your tax money spent? When do you say to the candidates “Stop”? Worried about death panels? They are in Washington and are called the Pentagon.

Writing tip: dialog and syntax

Every character in a book or script  has a unique rhythm and syntax. The way people speak reveals their character and helps us as readers know who's who. Some samples:
"What do I want for lunch? You're asking me?"
"Do youse guys wanna pasty?"
"Sure and I couldn't eat a pig in a blanket without a beer, boyo."
"What should I eat to lunch?"
"Y'all want some hominy and grits? That what my Mama makes."
etc. etc.
You should be able to detect nationality and regionality in the vocabulary and syntax. . In real conversation, people seldom speak more than three sentences, and often they are incomplete, phrases, fragments.
I once tutored a Hawaiian swimmer in basic English and discovered that he didn't know what a complete sentence was. He spoke only in phases and fragments. Put on paper, it wouldn't pass muster.
In my latest book, "White Slave,"one of the characters is a Swedish girl, Sonja, whose speech is a translation from Swedish, so she makes some typical errors. I had to think what she would be saying if it were Swedish and then translate it to her limited English. BTW, "White Slave" has an introductory price only on the Kindle list for 99 cents. In a few weeks that offer will end and the price will go back up to my standard $4.95. Act now and you can see how Sonja speaks.

Column of water-powered car to be published

Northern Express will publish my column on the water powered car in the Labor Day issue, but you can read it already. Scroll down.. If you have a tip on another technological subject, let me know. Post a comment..

The USA's military police state budget.

Notice how none of the politicians dare touch the Pentagon budget. Ryan and Romney want to cut entitlements for the sick and elderly but the biggest entitlement of all is to the military/industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us against. Does the United States need seven nuclear carrier units when no other country has more than one? Our military budget is greater than all other industrial countries combined. This is madness. Does the USA have to station troops in seven hundred places around the world?
 Military strength does not make the country invulnerable to attack. 9/11 demonstrated that .a suicide squad of fifteen men could attack the country from within and turn the whole society on its ear, making this a police state. Because of those fifteen, of which perhaps only five knew the intention was to crash, not just hijack the planes, we must now be screened at airports, have a no fly list, have our mail (including this blog) snooped by the National Security Agency, etc. etc.
Historically, weapons developed at the end of one war become the weapon of choice for the next. In the Civil War the bombardment Napoleon developed was supplanted by the machine gun and the trench. So the French build the Maginot line which was useless against the airplane and the tank, which became the weapons of choice in WW II.  .But  WW II style carpet bombing of North Vietnam did not defeat them. The dog fight has been undone by missiles which are cheaper and now by drones which do not risk the lives of the pilots.
Eddie Rickenbacker (sp?) proved that the battleship of WW I was obsolete compared to the dive bomber. So now we have an obsolete fleet of aircraft carriers and billion dollar jet fighters when a band of near barbarians making roadside improvised bombs can stall our army in Afghanistan.
So why do we still spend so much money on obsolete military junk? The Pentagon budget is huge and all politicians are afraid of cutting it. The military is a sacred cow, and the military might of the country was useless to prevent the 9/11 attack.
. The future of warfare will be drones patrolling all the world's skies. So let's begin by taking troops home from Germany, Australia, and other places where they do not protect our freedom. Our greatest threat to our freedom is our own paranoid government that uses the mantra "to protect our freedom" while making wars against states that were not a threat.
Drones and cyber wars are the new weapons. Putting money into military hardware, e.g. tanks, planes, and ships is a waste of our precious resources.
Bring the troops home. Put them to work on our decaying roads and bridges.
Never stop asking the politicians why they don't cut the Pentagon budget.

Romney's political suicide

Selecting Paul Ryan whose radical views are anathema to most Americans may mean the death knell for the republican Party. Ryan would dismantle Social Security, handing it over to the Wall Street plunderers, kill Medicare with a voucher program putting Americans at the mercy of the insurance companies, and cut taxes for the super rich while sticking it to the Middle Class. I'm sure he'll ge the vote of the one percent, but that is not all of the people or even a majority. This attempt to appease the right wing of the epublicans, who do not like Romnyy, into his fold is a short-sighted and fatal appeasement. Cold there be a worse choice? Bachmann or Rice,maybe. Wooing the lunatic fringe of the party shows lack of backbone and foresight. Romney is no leader. Shades of Thomas Dewey!

I never knew Manatees could be so sexy

Just read Bob Burgess's little book Naughty Mermaids. He's dived with them in their winter river quarters and his book includes pictures. Manatees love to be tickled and scratched. He got kissed by a Manatee and they are quite amorous. I can see why people love to play with them in the rivers. The Manatee is an endangered species because they are often struck by boat propellers. Naughty Mermaids was a deal, only 99 cents, and fun to read.

Why novel writing is such fun.

Some people who write novels plot them out in intricatre detail, a story board like a comic book or movie, scene by scene. I think that's boring, for it's like paint by the numbers. It's all laid out with no ssupence for the author.
Some of my novels, eg. "The Mystery Club Solves a Murder" and "Ben Zakkai's Coffoin" and "Murder in the Keweenaw" began as dreams. The dream provided the situation and in order to find out what happened next I have to write it. (I woke up too soon to reach the climax of the dream/story). Each scene in a long story begins with a situation. Something happens, and that sets up a new situation. This page-turner structure is a bit like the old Perils of Pauline serial in the movies. I guess I learned how to do it with with an old pen pal. He would write a chapter and end with a cliff hanger, then hand it back to me for the solution and I had to make it a genre story of his choice and use a specific word. Later I had a radio show where I took three words on the air and made up a story for the radio listeners, using those three words.
So I start with a situation. I try to write a complete scene every morning when I sit down to write. This may be 800-1000 words, a good chunk of writing for a single session.. But when I complete that scene I may not know what comes next and to find out, I have to return to the project the next morning to see what happens next. It's like experiencing my own soap opera. And it is huge fun. My rhythm for this generally runs about 55,000 to 60,000 words, perfect length for ereaders. That's how I wrote "White Slave." The situation: Ed Sutherland fell overboard from the yacht Miss Chief at the end of "The Mystery Club Solves a Murder." So what if he didn't drown? I had to write the book to find out what happened to him and how he survived. Fun fun fun. I set the book up for the Kindle at only 99 cents as a loss leader introducgtion to my other work.

Tri-Met and health care costs

I'm a so-called Ride Ambassador for Portland's public transportation system called Tri-Met,. There are big changes coming which include increased fares, reduced service, and a new streetcar line. Ending this Fall will be the so-called free rail zone in which people could ride the light rail or the streetcar for free in the downtown area. Other aspects of management or mismanagement aside, the heavy bufrden of the health insurance has Tri-Met in a bind. Years ago when the system was flush management foolishly set up lifetime health coverage for employees after they had worked for ten years. I know of no other company that does this.
Historically, health insurance was introduced during World War II when there was wagfe and price fixing. Employers like Kaiser shipbuilding set up a health plan to retain workers, and Kaiser Permanente remains as a major local health provider even though there is no longer any Kaiser shipbuilding. The point is, employer provided health insurance is a relative new invention.
It doesn't work that way in European socialist countries. I have small pensions in Denmark and Sweden for years worked abroad and I get the tax returns every year. In Denmark the income tax has an 8% health tax, just as we have social security tax in this country. Everybody is covered and it's a single payer system. No employer is dictated to by a health insurance company that says you can't hire a diabetic, or a smoker, because they are expensive in the health care department. In this country the employer's group health plan dictates who can or cannot be hired.
It's time we took the burden of looking for and administering health insurance off the backs of employers.
One disturbing fact that has recently emerged is that in the USA there is less upward mobility than there is in Denmarkand Sweden where I have worked. That anybody can be successful and rise out of poverty to become a CEO or the President is a myth here. Once in poverty in the USA you are stuck.
Our form of greed capitalism is out of control, so the 99 percent are stuck and the 1% super wealthy don't care. They have brainwashed the American public into thinking that socialism equals communism and that a so-called "nanny state" is a failure. The failure is here.
No system is perfect and there will always be someone who games the system to exploit the loopholes, but what is a country for? Its people? Or an oligarchy? I'm for the people.
In Denmark and Sweden college is free, paid for out of the taxes, and there are apprenticeship programs for people who do not seek an academic career. I went to college in both countries. I have had a student debt, but in the USA the current generation of young people is in despair over the high cost of college. They acquire debt they will never pay off to get degrees that do not lead to a career or a job. Colleges, to boot enrollment, have dummied down and offer silly courses like "Interpersonal Relations."
I guess it has to get a lot worse before people cry out "Enough!" and change things.

Now I'll get off my soap box and go get breakfast... Thanks for reading this.

I'm always looking for leads to good stories. Also stories that the mainstream ignores. For instance, the reason the Russians stand by Assad in Syria may be because there are 50,000 Russians in the country, many of them brides of Syrian students who studied in Russia. If Assad's secular government goes, it may be replaced by Islamists, and that could be tough on those Russian wives. But to a happier story:

The NEw York Times had a piece about a car that runs on water, and I sent this to my editor at Northern Express:

MS#1677watercar/672  words

August 7, 2012

Reply to:

Harley L. Sachs

Apt. 328

2545 SW Terwilliger Blvd.

Portland, OR 97201

503 299 4328

A Car Powered by Water?!

a column by

Harley L. Sachs

Imagine running your car on DiHydrogen Oxide, or HHO, commonly known as water. The theory of HHO gas is that water is broken down into its two gassy components, hydrogen and oxygen. When those ignite they produce a huge amount of heat energy. In my chemistry class Professor Schmidt brought out a balloon filled with two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. Using a long pole with a gas flame at the end, he touched the balloon. The loud explosion was so powerful it knocked the chalk off the blackboard.

So what if that energy could be harnessed in an automobile engine? . "HHO gas" got its name from physicist^[ Ruggero Santilli, who claimed that his HHO gas was "a new form of water". Historically, HHO gas has worked for torches used in working with platinum and other uses requiring small quantities. The lime light once used in theaters used HHO but was discarded as too dangerous.  For torches or limelight, yes, but the quantities produced by electrolysis of water into its component gasses is too small to run a car engine. 

Nonetheless, as reported in the New York Times and other newspapers, a Pakistani engineer Waqar Ahmad claims to have done it and demonstrated his water-powered car to parliament. “By the grace of Allah, I have managed to make a formula that converts less voltage into more energy,” the professed inventor, Agha Waqar Ahmad, is quoted as saying. The inventor got a degree in physics but is currently an unemployed policeman.

He attaches a kit to an ordinary car engine to make the conversion.

It’s true that you can run an internal combustion engine on hydrogen, but that is a different critter. That hydrogen wasn’t generated in a kit attached to an ordinary engine with a tank of water.

After seeing Ahmad’s demonstration, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the country’s nuclear weapons program  told a television reporter “I have investigated the matter, and there is no fraud involved.”

 It’s taken seriously by Pakistanis but debunked by scientists around the world. Agha Ahmad doesn’t care. He says he ran his Suzuki   for 250 miles on 10 liters of water.

If this is a hoax, it won’t be the first. A person called Ramar Pillai  once claimed to convert water to fuel and persuaded the Prime Minister, but  turned out to be a hoax.

The story emerges at a time when Pakistan is desperate for energy, a time that seems to correspond to what the British call the silly season. The news has precipitated a howl of laughter from doubters who say it’s a hoax and impossible. In that spirit, someone produced a fake video of a cleric who said he had a car that runs on “pious deeds.”

Such chaos is apparently typical in Pakistan where there’s been a flood of people with dubious college degrees ever since it was announced that all parliamentarians had to have degrees. It’s further complicated because of the conflicts between religious parties. Pakistan’s genuine Nobel laureate, for instance, was virtually ignored because he belonged to a minority sect. That kind of prejudice is not unknown in the United States, too.

Politics and religion aside, the scientific reason for the skepticism is that though the burning of hydrogen produces a lot of energy, electrolysis to extract the gasses in the first place takes even more energy than it puts out. It reminds me of the hypothetical hydrosphere which I reported on in this paper some time ago. That, if it worked, would have been a perpetual motion machine.

Any high school physics student can figure out that you can’t get more energy out than you put in. Even an electrical transformer is less than 100% efficient and it has no moving parts with energy sapping friction. It is amazing that the story of a car that runs on water would be so widely reported and turn up in the New York Times, presumably without tongue in cheek.

What next? Heavier than air vehicles that fly?  Duh.

Have some fun! print this label, cut it out, address it, and tape it to a plastic bottle.



……………………………………………
Mail to:

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Dr. Sachs’s Dehydrated Water
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matricides, fratricides, and suicides. Guaranteed
free of additives, minerals, caffeine, sugar, fluoride,
chlorine, high fructose corn syrup, gluten, whey,
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natural coloring or flavoring. Sodium free. Safe for
low or high potassium diets, Non allergenic.
Dr. Sachs’s Dehydrated Water is 100% pure!
Satisfaction guaranteed.
Copyright © 2011 Dr. Harley Sachs.
This product may be reconstituted by adding beer,
whisky, or any liquids to create the beverage of your
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Visit www.hu.mtu.edu/~hlsachs

It's August 5, 2012 and I am pumped! Yesterday at the Willamette Writers conference in Portland I "pitched" Patzi Gil's film script adaptation  of my novel, "Betrayal" to two film producers. Normally, I'm told, producers seldom take any scripts at the pitch sessions, but both of them took Patzi's complete film script. They are interested. Of course, if a film is made of "Betrayal" people will want to see the sequel, "Retribution" in which Irwin Glass finally gets his own back. You can read the reviews at Amazon.com and both books are combined in a special bargain bundle for the Kindle and the Nook.  If you feel flushed you can order the custom printed paperback from lulu.com. I don't call this kind of book "print on demand" which is so uncool. I call these "custom printed" which is what they are. If you get a custom printed copy of a Harley Sachs book it is going to be a rare book, like one of the twelve copies of Walden Pond that survived when he burned the rest of his privately printed, now classic  book.  One of those rare copies of Walden Pond is worth a fortune now, and if you hang on to one my my custom printed, rare books, for a hundred years, you, too, can make a tron of money. I promise. Of course, I won't be around a hundred years from now, but you can dream. I have currently over thirty books available for custom printing, some of which are so unnoticed that nobody ever buys one, so you can be the first. Think of it. My number one reader!
Let's hope one of the roughly five producers who are considering Patzi's film script for a movie actually makes it. If you want an advance idea of what the story is about, you can download the book and its sequel for your Kindle or Nook.
If you haven't a Kindle or a Nook, consider that the Kindle, unlike the Nook, has a text to speech feature. You can get the gadget to read the book aloud to you through its own speakers or through plug in ear buds. Amazing technology.