Talk politics.

This post will increasingly delve into this concept as it goes on, so if you find yourself being baffled or bored, I would encourage you to skip to the conclusion. If you find it fascinating and encouraging as I did, you might want to read the brief article and watch the presentation video to understand it better. I got this from my daughter who posted this to my Google+ “wall”.

We are all familiar with the energy generated by the sun. Instead of the sun just burning hydrogen, which would have depleted the hydrogen of the sun in a few million years, the sun uses fusion. Simply put, subatomic particles are manipulated under extreme heat and pressure to convert hydrogen to helium. This process generates the energy of the sun and is the most resource efficient process known to modern science to generate energy of any kind.

In the 50’s, it was discovered that fusion could be achieved using a plasma field. Regrettably, at the time, the technology demanded enormous expense and resources in order to generate this field. Reagan and Gorbachev initiated the Tokamaks project during a summit that would create this plasma field efficiently. However, the fusion engine would have been 30 meters tall, weighed 23,000 tons, had 1 million parts and would cost $20 billion to produce. Its production on a global scale would have been prohibitive for the near future.

Lockheed Martin is developing a fusion engine that would fit on the back of a flatbed truck. It generates no hydrocarbons and is capable of an immediate shutdown in case of a stability breach of any kind. It is also incapable of being produced as a weapon. As opposed to the Tokamaks engine, it utilizes electromagnetic energy to contain the plasma field instead of a free flowing field like the Tokamaks engine. It is also viable for mass production and would be small enough for space exploration and colonization. Heat is created by radio frequency, so the resource to energy ratio would be more efficient.

Conclusion – Despite individual ranting that we live in a police state that uses its resources to horribly oppress its citizens in the United States, there is a fair amount of good that is coming out of the government. Yes, there are laws that dampen our ability to: be heavily armed, filch other people’s talents through intellectual property theft, allow predatory business entities to damage our citizens, allow the movements of those who pose a danger to others or themselves, mandate to a pregnant woman how she handles a parasitic organism within her own body, insist that our society provide our health care only because we refuse to provide it ourselves to the best of our ability

The government genuinely tries to work toward the best interest of all the people of this nation. Our government doesn't try to solve all our problems. It allows its citizens to overcome their own barriers because that's the essence of true liberty. This is one shining example of our chosen leaders moving our country and civilization forward in a manner that can’t be done on a smaller scale.

As could probably be expected, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal published an article explaining the implications of the Fiscal Cliff deal on the wealthy. The saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words. The graphic in this post actually came from the article that was put in the Journal.

It is fun to note the forlorn looks on the faces of the oppressed wealthy taxpayers in the graphic; as well as noting that the one group in the graphic that doesn’t have a tax increase is characterized as a retired black couple. Also, investment income is thrown into the mix to make the examples more Romneyfied dignified.

Along with the technical details of the tax package, I found it interesting that some of the provisions were listed as highly complicated, as if the wealthy wouldn’t be able to afford the $59.95 for Turbo Tax or some other tax preparation software. It would probably surprise me even more if the wealthy didn’t have a tax accountant do their taxes and tax dodge planning for them.

The article makes a point of noting that all working people will be paying an additional 2% in taxes for Social Security because the tax holiday package was allowed to expire as intended at inception. However, it failed to mention that most wage earners with six figure salaries will be exceeding the Social Security cap, and therefore will be less affected by this tax than most people.

This article may be tl;dr for many, but I think the graphic in the article merited a post all by itself.