11 billion dollars a month

[Aurel]

$11Bn a month is what the war in Iraq is costing to the US taxpayers. I was thinking on other ways that money could be spent. For instance, you could give $110 M a month to 100 Universities for research on alternative energies. But really, $110M a year would be plenty enough, so there would be plenty of money left for other purposes.

Now, let us think a little bit at the return on investment for the war in Iraq. I see Iran and North Korea emboldedened in developing Nukes. I see a civil war with no solution in sight in Iraq that is going to destabiliize the entire region. I see gas prices going up again, the dollar at a record low, and the stock market losing confidence. Plus all the deads on both sides of the war.

Really, I can think of a thousand better ways that money could have been spent. It somehow angers me, and definitely makes me think that we are governed by complete idiots for wohm I have no respect whatsoever.

Aurel

[Nostril Cheese]

11 billion that could have gone to alternative energy sources.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by Aurel
$11Bn a month is what the war in Iraq is costing to the US taxpayers. I was thinking on other ways that money could be spent.

That's socialist thinking. What you should be thinking is what each American, and English citizen for that matter, could do if he or she had been allowed to keep that money in their own hands.

Never think of monetary shifts, think about never collecting it in the first place, that's the only way we'll ever get control of the government again.

[tabs]

OK so we pull out, the Region goes to war and Gasoline costs $9+ a gallon...

[Aurel]

Originally posted by fastpat
That's socialist thinking. What you should be thinking is what each American, and English citizen for that matter, could do if he or she had been allowed to keep that money in their own hands.

Never think of monetary shifts, think about never collecting it in the first place, that's the only way we'll ever get control of the government again.

Fastpat, socialist thinking is sometimes necessary when it deals with investments that concern national security. Research is one of those investments, that typically does not make any money right away. Private companies are concerned with making return for their stockholders, and have considreably reduced or supressed any form of research than can create real advances, such as the transistor or Si solar cells that came out of Bell Labs.

Good luck trying to advance science with private investment. Some discoveries take more than three years to mature, which is typically the patience an investor will have.

Or maybe your model of ideal society is one that still uses horse and buggy?

Aurel

[Dueller]

OK so we pull out, the Region goes to war and Gasoline costs $9+ a gallon..."

...and Exxon, et al make even BIGGER profits

[gaijindabe]

All this alternative energy is so much smoke screen. There may be some breakthrough in fission or something out there - but throwing tax money at the education establishment willy-nilly is not going to do a thing. The real "alternatives" are there staring us in the face. An alternitive lifestyle of no air-conditioned cities in the desert. No over heated - over cooled McMansions, no SUVs, reduceded travel and etc.. Watch the price of oil go up - and you will see alternitives come into play. One driver, homeowner and consumer at a time...

[IROC]

Originally posted by Nostril Cheese
11 billion that could have gone to alternative energy sources.

Or maybe 11 billion that we wouldn't currently owe to the Chinese... :>)

[Sonic dB]

The US is going to pull out....but supply covert arms and support to one side, probably the Shietes, and they will kill each other off a bit... but "our" side will win with our support, and they will install a puppet government, lead by a strong-arm thug murderer, who at first will be a puppet of the US, but ultimately down the line will become an enemy and axis of evil. This is how these things are usually done, and will limit US casualties and monetary involvement in the short term, appearing like a political victory for that party. This is how the political leaders think, typically.

[fastpat]

I, Pencil
as told to Leonard E. Read

I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.*

* My official name is “Mongol 482.” My many ingredients are assembled, fabricated, and finished by Eberhard Faber Pencil Company.



Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that's all I do.

You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery— more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G. K. Chesterton observed, “We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me—no, that's too much to ask of anyone—if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.

Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Not much meets the eye—there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.

Innumerable Antecedents

Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents. But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background.

My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods. Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!

The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents.

Consider the millwork in San Leandro. The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again. How many skills went into the making of the tint and the kilns, into supplying the heat, the light and power, the belts, motors, and all the other things a mill requires? Sweepers in the mill among my ancestors? Yes, and included are the men who poured the concrete for the dam of a Pacific Gas & Electric Company hydroplant which supplies the mill's power!

Don't overlook the ancestors present and distant who have a hand in transporting sixty carloads of slats across the nation.

Once in the pencil factory—$4,000,000 in machinery and building, all capital accumulated by thrifty and saving parents of mine—each slat is given eight grooves by a complex machine, after which another machine lays leads in every other slat, applies glue, and places another slat atop—a lead sandwich, so to speak. Seven brothers and I are mechanically carved from this “wood-clinched” sandwich.

My “lead” itself—it contains no lead at all—is complex. The graphite is mined in Ceylon. Consider these miners and those who make their many tools and the makers of the paper sacks in which the graphite is shipped and those who make the string that ties the sacks and those who put them aboard ships and those who make the ships. Even the lighthouse keepers along the way assisted in my birth—and the harbor pilots.

The graphite is mixed with clay from Mississippi in which ammonium hydroxide is used in the refining process. Then wetting agents are added such as sulfonated tallow—animal fats chemically reacted with sulfuric acid. After passing through numerous machines, the mixture finally appears as endless extrusions—as from a sausage grinder—cut to size, dried, and baked for several hours at 1,850 degrees Fahrenheit. To increase their strength and smoothness the leads are then treated with a hot mixture which includes candelilla wax from Mexico, paraffin wax, and hydrogenated natural fats.

My cedar receives six coats of lacquer. Do you know all the ingredients of lacquer? Who would think that the growers of castor beans and the refiners of castor oil are a part of it? They are. Why, even the processes by which the lacquer is made a beautiful yellow involves the skills of more persons than one can enumerate!

Observe the labeling. That's a film formed by applying heat to carbon black mixed with resins. How do you make resins and what, pray, is carbon black?

My bit of metal—the ferrule—is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.

Then there's my crowning glory, inelegantly referred to in the trade as “the plug,” the part man uses to erase the errors he makes with me. An ingredient called “factice” is what does the erasing. It is a rubber-like product made by reacting rape- seed oil from the Dutch East Indies with sulfur chloride. Rubber, contrary to the common notion, is only for binding purposes. Then, too, there are numerous vulcanizing and accelerating agents. The pumice comes from Italy; and the pigment which gives “the plug” its color is cadmium sulfide.

No One Knows

Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?

Actually, millions of human beings have had a hand in my creation, no one of whom even knows more than a very few of the others. Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn't a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field—paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.

Here is an astounding fact: Neither the worker in the oil field nor the chemist nor the digger of graphite or clay nor any who mans or makes the ships or trains or trucks nor the one who runs the machine that does the knurling on my bit of metal nor the president of the company performs his singular task because he wants me. Each one wants me less, perhaps, than does a child in the first grade. Indeed, there are some among this vast multitude who never saw a pencil nor would they know how to use one. Their motivation is other than me. Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants. I may or may not be among these items.

No Master Mind

There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work. This is the mystery to which I earlier referred.

It has been said that “only God can make a tree.” Why do we agree with this? Isn't it because we realize that we ourselves could not make one? Indeed, can we even describe a tree? We cannot, except in superficial terms. We can say, for instance, that a certain molecular configuration manifests itself as a tree. But what mind is there among men that could even record, let alone direct, the constant changes in molecules that transpire in the life span of a tree? Such a feat is utterly unthinkable!

Leonard E. Read (1898-1983) founded FEE in 1946 and served as its president until his death. “I, Pencil,” his most famous essay, was first published in the December 1958 issue of The Freeman.

[gaijindabe]

Originally posted by Sonic dB
The US is going to pull out....but supply covert arms and support to one side, probably the Shietes, and they will kill each other off a bit... but "our" side will win with our support, and they will install a puppet government, lead by a strong-arm thug murderer, who at first will be a puppet of the US, but ultimately down the line will become an enemy and axis of evil. This is how these things are usually done, and will limit US casualties and monetary involvement. This is how the political leaders think, typically.

Kind of how we did it in Afganistan and the British did it for four hundred years around the world. Play one side off the other. A nasty business.

[fastpat]

I, Pencil, am a complex combination of miracles: a tree, zinc, copper, graphite, and so on. But to these miracles which manifest themselves in Nature an even more extraordinary miracle has been added: the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and spontaneously in response to human necessity and desire and in the absence of any human master-minding! Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.

The above is what I meant when writing, “If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.” For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand—that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive master-minding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.

Once government has had a monopoly of a creative activity such, for instance, as the delivery of the mails, most individuals will believe that the mails could not be efficiently delivered by men acting freely. And here is the reason: Each one acknowledges that he himself doesn't know how to do all the things incident to mail delivery. He also recognizes that no other individual could do it. These assumptions are correct. No individual possesses enough know-how to perform a nation's mail delivery any more than any individual possesses enough know-how to make a pencil. Now, in the absence of faith in free people—in the unawareness that millions of tiny know-hows would naturally and miraculously form and cooperate to satisfy this necessity—the individual cannot help but reach the erroneous conclusion that mail can be delivered only by governmental “master-minding.”

Testimony Galore

If I, Pencil, were the only item that could offer testimony on what men and women can accomplish when free to try, then those with little faith would have a fair case. However, there is testimony galore; it's all about us and on every hand. Mail delivery is exceedingly simple when compared, for instance, to the making of an automobile or a calculating machine or a grain combine or a milling machine or to tens of thousands of other things. Delivery? Why, in this area where men have been left free to try, they deliver the human voice around the world in less than one second; they deliver an event visually and in motion to any person's home when it is happening; they deliver 150 passengers from Seattle to Baltimore in less than four hours; they deliver gas from Texas to one's range or furnace in New York at unbelievably low rates and without subsidy; they deliver each four pounds of oil from the Persian Gulf to our Eastern Seaboard—halfway around the world—for less money than the government charges for delivering a one-ounce letter across the street!

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.

[Cdnone1]

"I see Iran and North Korea emboldedened in developing Nukes. I see a civil war with no solution in sight in Iraq that is going to destabiliize the entire region. I see gas prices going up again, the dollar at a record low, and the stock market losing confidence."
You must be a lot of fun to be around.
Gas prices are always going to fluctuate, the Dow doesn't go up for two days in a row and you see losing confidence, the dollar has been to strong for too long and was due a corection, Korea has been dong what it wants for ever and the Middle East has always been a he// hole.
Go outside and take a breath of fresh air.
Steve

[fastpat]

Originally posted by Aurel
Fastpat, socialist thinking is sometimes necessary when it deals with investments that concern national security. Research is one of those investments, that typically does not make any money right away. Private companies are concerned with making return for their stockholders, and have considreably reduced or supressed any form of research than can create real advances, such as the transistor or Si solar cells that came out of Bell Labs.

Good luck trying to advance science with private investment. Some discoveries take more than three years to mature, which is typically the patience an investor will have.

Or maybe your model of ideal society is one that still uses horse and buggy?

Aurel

Industry is the only entity that should be doing research. Government research is politically controlled and motivated, and produces very little of value.

Did you ever think that the reason corporations aren't doing as much research is that they're getting free results from government, instead of having to fund it themselves? There should be absolutely NO government funding for research, zilch, not one thin dime.

Research targeted at producing something someone wants and needs is much better than so-called "basic research", which is academic double speak for "please fund me".

[Aurel]

Originally posted by fastpat
There should be absolutely NO government funding for research, zilch, not one thin dime.

But then again, in your ideal society, there should be no government funding for anything at all, since there would be no government at all. If I was talking about health, transportation, education, or anything else I would be getting the same type of reply. So I really can`t take it personally .

Aurel

[sammyg2]

Of that $11 bil, how much would we spend if we were not in Iraq?
In other words, if the soliders were in the United States would they still get paid? Would we still spend money to house them, feed them, and train them?
Of course we would. Granted the number of soldiers would be much lower, but cost is cost.

Don't be naive enough to fall for twisted sensationalistic media tricks.

Did you know that sending US troops to Iraq in the original gulf war actually saved thier lives?
They figured out that we had less casualties in Iraq during the Gulf war than we would have had from drunk driving fatalities if the same servicemen were stationed in the United States.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by sammyg2
Did you know that sending US troops to Iraq in the original gulf war actually saved thier lives?
They figured out that we had less casualties in Iraq during the Gulf war than we would have had from drunk driving fatalities if the same servicemen were stationed in the United States.

That's statistical nonsense. The same sort of smoke and mirrors statements are routinely made by Limbaugh et al. The real facts must be based on the numbers of soldiers in Iraq versus the number of them dying.

I believe the latest stats are one in five soldiers in killed or seriously injured in Iraq.

[Aurel]

Originally posted by sammyg2

They figured out that we had less casualties in Iraq during the Gulf war than we would have had from drunk driving fatalities if the same servicemen were stationed in the United States.

That is an interesting perspective. Go tell that to the parents who send their kids in Iraq. Me thinks they will drink a lot more when they come back from Iraq, so maybe they smarties should have factored that in their study too.

Aurel

[Aurel]

Actually, Fastpat, I was thinking: your ideal society exists, right before your eyes: Iraq. No governemnt, pure anarchy, everyone having a weapon and doing their own police. Probably no more tax collection, reduced electricity and transportation infrastructure. The citizens left to themselves. Do you like it?

Aurel

[island911]

Originally posted by Aurel
. .. you could give $110 M a month to 100 Universities for research on alternative energies. But really, $110M a year would be plenty enough, so there would be plenty of money left for other purposes. .. .

Aurel

really? is there an army of really smart guys like yourself, who are waiting for big checks before they unleash their planet saving solutions?

I think that we should just send all those troops to Arurel's lab to help him . .. maybe a few thousand to go get his coffee . .a few thousand more to go shopping for him-spend that money . . .so he can focus on planet saving solutions. That would be a much better ROI.