Tuesday, July 01, 2014
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Space Based Solar Power
Via Instapundit and Transterrestrial Musings, this Wired article by David S. F. Portree serves as a good introduction to space based solar power. However, the article only skims the surface. It doesn't mention Gerard K. O'Neill, who envisioned space based solar power as the impetus for space colonization in The High Frontier; the book is directly responsible for the creation of the L-5 society and the Space Studies Institute.
The article also stops around 1980 or so. However, many people have continued to work on the many facets of the issues surrounding solar power satellites (hereafter referred to as SPS), and far more recently. One notable example is the work of Colonel M.V. “Coyote” Smith, particularly in 2007 and 2008 for the National Security Space Office.
I have done some work on inexpensive solar power. I was heavily involved in the build in the video below (I'm the bald guy, with more hair and about 60 pounds heavier than today).
What we built was very inexpensive. With a couple of blind alleys and two failed designs before the one in the video, and including salaries, CNC machining of the prototype turbine (shown powering up some light bulbs using compressed air in the video), raw materials and other expenses, the whole project only cost $100 grand over a period of eight months. And it convinced me that for industrial scale solar power, a heat engine is the only way to go.
Right now, all of the electrical power supplied by coal or natural gas or nuclear power is converted into electricity through the use of a heat engine. The coal or gas or uranium is burned (or fissions) to heat a boiler which turns water into steam. The steam drives a turbine, converting the heat energy into kinetic energy. The turbine drives a generator, turning kinetic energy into electricity. (Hydroelectric power does the same process, substituting gravitational potential energy for heat energy, but the turbine/generator idea remains the same.)
In other words, we have lots of experience with using heat engines to produce electrical power on an industrial scale. The design problems and constraints and tradeoffs are well-characterized and understood through over a hundred years of operational experience worldwide.
Heat engines are dominated by a single equation: Carnot's Theorem. The maximum efficiency of a heat engine is
μ = 1 - T(cold)/T(hot)
where T is a temperature in Kelvin of the cold side and the hot side of the engine. All heat engines are constrained by this equation.
There are a few advantages to putting large scale solar power structures into space: nearly continuous sunlight, the ability to make arbitrarily-large flimsy structures, lack of atmosphere. However, the greatest advantage may lie in the Carnot theorem. The background temperature in deep space (in the shade) is around 3 Kelvin. That means that the hot side only needs to be greater than 300 Kelvin (27 degrees Celsius or 81 Fahrenheit) for the maximum efficiency to exceed 99 percent. To be sure, there are losses associated with conversion from heat to motion and from motion to electricity and from electricity to microwave and back, but such losses are mirrored in conventional systems.
On Earth, there is a broad range for the daylight background temperature depending on location and time of year. However, under the best of circumstances a power plant's background temperature will be as low as possible. A background temperature of 40 degrees below zero (C or F) is about as cold as it gets for heavily populated areas of the world. At that temperature, roughly 233 Kelvin, we can see that for a maximum efficiency of 0.99 the hot side of the boiler needs to be about 23 thousand degrees Celcius!
Clearly our current heat engines, for which most of the world relies for electrical power, have nowhere near 99% maximum efficiency. Conversely, a heat engine with a 600 degree Celsius hot side, which would have a maximum efficiency of 99.5% in space, would only have a maximum efficiency of about 73%with a 40 below cold sink. (If I've made a mistake on the math it's because I'm converting between Kelvin and Celsius and Fahrenheit; please correct me in the comments.)
If one is building an SPS out of photovoltaics, then every part of a vast satellite is an expensive electronic instrument. However, if one uses a heat engine, then the collection area needs to be little more than aluminum foil stretched across a frame. The aluminum sheets are positioned and angled so that they reflect the sunlight as a giant parabolic mirror focused on the boiler. Sort of like this, at a hundred times the size:
Then the vast majority of the mass and structure of the SPS is nothing more complex or expensive than aluminum foil. It can be made arbitrarily large, right up to the thermal limits of the boiler.
Although only large-scale grid-connected rectennas are illustrated in the Wired article, supplying a city with grid power isn't the only possible application. There is a geometric relationship between transmitter and receiver size. The larger the broadcast antenna, the smaller the receiver needs to be. With a large enough broadcast antenna, a receiver could be small enough to fit inside a car, powering an electric vehicle from space. This would be particularly useful on the battlefield, drastically changing the logistics of keeping tanks in the field.
The power generated at an SPS doesn't need to be directed down to earth as microwaves. It could be beamed as a laser to a receiver on a space vehicle. With an SPS as an external power source, a space vehicle can use almost anything as a propellant in a plasma thruster. Just heat up the propellant with microwaves using power beamed by laser from the SPS, and suddenly the specific impulse of the propellant is an order of magnitude higher than if one was to simply burn Hydrogen and Oxygen. Beamed power would revolutionize inter-orbital transport.
Yet another advantage accrues to using a large Aluminum reflector to gather light. Since Aluminum is a commodity, it doesn't matter where the material comes from. Aluminum from Canada is the same as Aluminum from anywhere else in the world. And it's the same as the Aluminum found in the rocks on the surface of the moon. Although the first few SPSats in orbit would need to be entirely shipped up from Earth, those satellites could power mining operations on the moon and the plasma thrusters needed to bring the Aluminum to orbit, to be fashioned into subsequent solar power satellites. The existence of SPS would thus be both a driver and an enabler for in-situ resource utilization of the Moon - and subsequently, everywhere else in the solar system.
The article also stops around 1980 or so. However, many people have continued to work on the many facets of the issues surrounding solar power satellites (hereafter referred to as SPS), and far more recently. One notable example is the work of Colonel M.V. “Coyote” Smith, particularly in 2007 and 2008 for the National Security Space Office.
I have done some work on inexpensive solar power. I was heavily involved in the build in the video below (I'm the bald guy, with more hair and about 60 pounds heavier than today).
What we built was very inexpensive. With a couple of blind alleys and two failed designs before the one in the video, and including salaries, CNC machining of the prototype turbine (shown powering up some light bulbs using compressed air in the video), raw materials and other expenses, the whole project only cost $100 grand over a period of eight months. And it convinced me that for industrial scale solar power, a heat engine is the only way to go.
Right now, all of the electrical power supplied by coal or natural gas or nuclear power is converted into electricity through the use of a heat engine. The coal or gas or uranium is burned (or fissions) to heat a boiler which turns water into steam. The steam drives a turbine, converting the heat energy into kinetic energy. The turbine drives a generator, turning kinetic energy into electricity. (Hydroelectric power does the same process, substituting gravitational potential energy for heat energy, but the turbine/generator idea remains the same.)
In other words, we have lots of experience with using heat engines to produce electrical power on an industrial scale. The design problems and constraints and tradeoffs are well-characterized and understood through over a hundred years of operational experience worldwide.
Heat engines are dominated by a single equation: Carnot's Theorem. The maximum efficiency of a heat engine is
where T is a temperature in Kelvin of the cold side and the hot side of the engine. All heat engines are constrained by this equation.
There are a few advantages to putting large scale solar power structures into space: nearly continuous sunlight, the ability to make arbitrarily-large flimsy structures, lack of atmosphere. However, the greatest advantage may lie in the Carnot theorem. The background temperature in deep space (in the shade) is around 3 Kelvin. That means that the hot side only needs to be greater than 300 Kelvin (27 degrees Celsius or 81 Fahrenheit) for the maximum efficiency to exceed 99 percent. To be sure, there are losses associated with conversion from heat to motion and from motion to electricity and from electricity to microwave and back, but such losses are mirrored in conventional systems.
On Earth, there is a broad range for the daylight background temperature depending on location and time of year. However, under the best of circumstances a power plant's background temperature will be as low as possible. A background temperature of 40 degrees below zero (C or F) is about as cold as it gets for heavily populated areas of the world. At that temperature, roughly 233 Kelvin, we can see that for a maximum efficiency of 0.99 the hot side of the boiler needs to be about 23 thousand degrees Celcius!
Clearly our current heat engines, for which most of the world relies for electrical power, have nowhere near 99% maximum efficiency. Conversely, a heat engine with a 600 degree Celsius hot side, which would have a maximum efficiency of 99.5% in space, would only have a maximum efficiency of about 73%with a 40 below cold sink. (If I've made a mistake on the math it's because I'm converting between Kelvin and Celsius and Fahrenheit; please correct me in the comments.)
If one is building an SPS out of photovoltaics, then every part of a vast satellite is an expensive electronic instrument. However, if one uses a heat engine, then the collection area needs to be little more than aluminum foil stretched across a frame. The aluminum sheets are positioned and angled so that they reflect the sunlight as a giant parabolic mirror focused on the boiler. Sort of like this, at a hundred times the size:
Then the vast majority of the mass and structure of the SPS is nothing more complex or expensive than aluminum foil. It can be made arbitrarily large, right up to the thermal limits of the boiler.
Although only large-scale grid-connected rectennas are illustrated in the Wired article, supplying a city with grid power isn't the only possible application. There is a geometric relationship between transmitter and receiver size. The larger the broadcast antenna, the smaller the receiver needs to be. With a large enough broadcast antenna, a receiver could be small enough to fit inside a car, powering an electric vehicle from space. This would be particularly useful on the battlefield, drastically changing the logistics of keeping tanks in the field.
The power generated at an SPS doesn't need to be directed down to earth as microwaves. It could be beamed as a laser to a receiver on a space vehicle. With an SPS as an external power source, a space vehicle can use almost anything as a propellant in a plasma thruster. Just heat up the propellant with microwaves using power beamed by laser from the SPS, and suddenly the specific impulse of the propellant is an order of magnitude higher than if one was to simply burn Hydrogen and Oxygen. Beamed power would revolutionize inter-orbital transport.
Yet another advantage accrues to using a large Aluminum reflector to gather light. Since Aluminum is a commodity, it doesn't matter where the material comes from. Aluminum from Canada is the same as Aluminum from anywhere else in the world. And it's the same as the Aluminum found in the rocks on the surface of the moon. Although the first few SPSats in orbit would need to be entirely shipped up from Earth, those satellites could power mining operations on the moon and the plasma thrusters needed to bring the Aluminum to orbit, to be fashioned into subsequent solar power satellites. The existence of SPS would thus be both a driver and an enabler for in-situ resource utilization of the Moon - and subsequently, everywhere else in the solar system.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
I do not write like Rudyard Kipling. That is evident on several levels. The lines from the Gods of the Copybook Headings (reprinted below the videos) have been going through my head more and more lately.
History repeats itself over and over and over again.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
History repeats itself over and over and over again.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling
AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Monday, December 23, 2013
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Obama is Oz
The following quote from this post made the connection for me. Obama is the Wizard of Oz.
In the 1900 book by L. Frank Baum, the Wizard appears to each of the main characters individually: as a giant head, a beautiful fairy, a ball of fire, and a horrible monster. When he finally meets them all together, he's a disembodied voice. Obama, too, has this quality. In the prologue to The Audacity of Hope, Obama himself wrote "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."
To this day, nobody knows anything about the man's past. What were his college grades? Who were his childhood friends? Why isn't the PDF of his birth certificate a single layer? Who signs the paycheck for a "community organizer"? Hell, we don't even know what he stands for now - every single thing he says has an expiration date.
Even now, Obama's trying to pick and choose which parts of his signature legislation (the Affordable Care Act is more commonly known as Obamacare) will be enforced and which will not, a power not authorized to the office of the President and a power outlawed in the 1600s for the monarchy in England.
Every portrayal of the Wizard of Oz, from Frank Morgan to Richard Pryor to James Franco, shows the wizard to be a small time con man who suddenly finds himself thrust into a position of power.Each knows he is a fraud, but he's got some tricks up his sleeve to make people believe him. As Mark Steyn writes:
Sooner or later, however, reality bites. Sooner or later, something happens that touches the material interests of individuals in a way they cannot willfully ignore. Sooner or later, something happens that causes all but the most blind partisans to step back, pay attention, and rethink. It is like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy sees behind the curtain. You and I have long been aware that the country is being conned. We knew that the President was lying when he told Americans on 24 occasions, in no uncertain terms, that they could keep the health insurance that they had. We knew as well that he was perfectly aware that he was peddling a whopper, and everyone in our larger political class knew so as well. The mainstream media knew, and they helped him sell his lies.Oz the Great and Powerful, who can do anything - but pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
In the 1900 book by L. Frank Baum, the Wizard appears to each of the main characters individually: as a giant head, a beautiful fairy, a ball of fire, and a horrible monster. When he finally meets them all together, he's a disembodied voice. Obama, too, has this quality. In the prologue to The Audacity of Hope, Obama himself wrote "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."
To this day, nobody knows anything about the man's past. What were his college grades? Who were his childhood friends? Why isn't the PDF of his birth certificate a single layer? Who signs the paycheck for a "community organizer"? Hell, we don't even know what he stands for now - every single thing he says has an expiration date.
Even now, Obama's trying to pick and choose which parts of his signature legislation (the Affordable Care Act is more commonly known as Obamacare) will be enforced and which will not, a power not authorized to the office of the President and a power outlawed in the 1600s for the monarchy in England.
Every portrayal of the Wizard of Oz, from Frank Morgan to Richard Pryor to James Franco, shows the wizard to be a small time con man who suddenly finds himself thrust into a position of power.Each knows he is a fraud, but he's got some tricks up his sleeve to make people believe him. As Mark Steyn writes:
Until October 1, Obama had never done anything — not run a gas station, or a doughnut stand — other than let himself be wafted onward and upward to the next do-nothing gig. Even in his first term, he didn’t really do: Starting with the 2009 trillion-dollar stimulus, he ran a money-no-object government that was all money and no objects; he spent and spent, and left no trace. Some things he massively expanded (food stamps, Social Security disability) and other things he massively diminished (effective foreign policy), but all were, so to speak, preexisting conditions. Obamacare is the first thing Obama has actually done, and, if you’re the person it’s being done to, it’s not pretty.And now, what was so obvious to so many in 2008 simply can't be hidden by the legacy media any longer,
Wednesday, July 17, 2013
A very old game, with very high stakes
Ezra Levant posted an essay on Facebook today about comments made by a high-profile Canadian:
However, the issue runs much deeper than David Suzuki or the media. David Suzuki just knows how the game is played, so he knows he can get away with anything.
It's the same game that has made Al Gore a billionaire since he left the VP job behind. It's the same game that is played by the too-big-to-fail banks and GM, the same game played by the Federal Reserve and the professional protestors who astroturf every G8 summit. It is the game that kept the Liberal party in power in Canada for most of the 20th century.
The game is called "bread and circuses". From Wikipedia:
The game is simple: keep the population distracted and buy their votes. David Suzuki plays a small part in the game but he plays it well; he is a key player in the circus that is man-made catastrophic Climate Change. He knows that as long as he stays relevant in the environmentalist movement, and as long as the movement is the big tent in the Circus, he will do very well for himself indeed.
The same game is played out over and over again. Every new government program beyond the basic minimum requirements for a functioning government is only a way to buy votes, period. Social Security? Buying the votes of the retired and soon-to-be retired. Affirmative Action? Buying the votes of minorities. Welfare? Buying the votes of the thriftless and lazy. All government "charity" is a vote-buy. That's the bread.
The US debt is in the trillions. Money is being printed and pumped into the digital system as fast as possible. Miraculously, the US debt has stood at exactly $16,699,396,000,000.00, $25 million below the debt limit, for eight solid weeks, while still taking on debt through some very shady accounting.
And yet, the American public is more interested in Trayvon Martin; he's part of the Circus. So is anything to do with Kim Kardashian. These people serve as distractions, filling other circus tents like the Racism circus tent or the Celebrity circus tent. These circus tents and the other ones - the Environmentalism tent and the Gender Wars tent and the War on (some) Drugs tent and the Abortion tent and the UFO tent and all the others - these make up the Circus.
The Circus keeps people distracted from the real problems. The Bread keeps people's immediate needs satisfied. It keeps the game-players in power and everyone's happy and we're making Important Efforts in Solving All Our Problems, Together, as long as we can keep the game going. It's perfect!
Except, it's not. All that Bread and all those Circuses cost a lot of money, sixteen trillion dollars more than the US government has ever brought in with all the taxes it has ever collected in over 200 years. Add in the debt it has already promised but isn't on the books yet - those pensions that have been promised to retirees, for which they've paid all their lives in a giant Ponzi scam - and the total coming due by 2019* is many times that 16 trillion. That is rather a lot of money by any standards.
And people expect to get paid. The Fed has a tricky balancing act - keep pumping dollars into the economy without triggering hyperinflation and bank runs. Every new dollar printed isn't a new dollar of wealth. There's the same amount of wealth as before, just divided among a larger amount of dollars. So, every existing dollar becomes worth slightly less. By the time the bill comes due, sure the number of dollars is correct but the value of those dollars is much less. People grumble and complain but the discrepancy adds up gradually, over time, in barely noticeable increments.
It's a lovely plan but it has the flaw that people are not stupid. They recognize that everything costs more, that $100 of groceries is a lot less than ten years ago. Then as more and more dollars are pumped in faster and faster, people notice that a hundred dollars in groceries is a lot less than last year. Then they notice that $100 doesn't go nearly as far as last month, or last week. Then, a few stock up on supplies ahead of time and the rest wait until it's too late and panic.
Make no mistake, that is the endgame of Bread and Circuses. Keep people happy and distracted - until you can't anymore. It's such a long, slow game, it can span many generations - it's been going on for over a hundred years in the USA, a pretty good run for a complex game. The repercussions are always so far down the road that they hit long after the policy makers are dead, so why should they worry, as long as they can keep the game going? Until they can't, and it all crumbles down around them, everything - the economy, military security, and the nation itself.
But there is another way out. Stop playing the Bread and Circuses game. That was what energized the Tea Party protests - the recognition that the nation spent too much and soon wouldn't be able to pay for it, even though people were already taxed to the maximum, condensed into a plaintive cry of "Stop spending, stop spending, stop spending, stop spending!".
How? It's kind of rough, but much less rough than going off the cliff. It's a financial restructuring.
First, stop printing money immediately. Then, repeal the 16th Amendment and repeal every single line of the tax code. Instead, institute a flat federal sales tax on every purchase. The Federal government's only revenue then becomes that flat sales tax and government-run lotteries (which are a voluntary tax).
Next, eliminate every single government department with the exception of State, Defense, Justice, Treasury, and about half of HHS (including eliminating Obamacare). Everything else, gone. No welfare, no medicaid, no social security, all gone. Instead issue every citizen a monthly stipend (identical *small* amounts for every man, woman, and child, but they must be citizens). The stipend would just be a nice bonus for those that don't need it and a crucial difference for those who do, but everyone would be treated equally before the law.
The federal government's bureaucracy would be much smaller so expenditures then become a fraction of prior expenditures.
The sales tax rate would have to be set so that the government's revenues exceed the (much smaller than previous) expenditures, with the surplus applied to the debt and no new programs introduced until the debt is paid off.
There is no room for pork in this option. The same basic template applies to Canada and Australia and the EU as much as it does to America. There is no room for the players of the Bread and Circus game. But it is also the only way to avoid the crash of America or the other democracies of the world.
(*) Why 2019? The Baby Boom was roughly 1945 to 1963, with a median of 1954. Babies born in 1954 turn 65 in 2019, so in that year about half the Baby Boomers will be retired, and those born at the start of the boom will only be 74, short of the average lifespan. That's a lot of pension checks, and not as many people paying into the system as before. That which cannot go on forever won't, and when the pension system goes bust it won't be pretty.
Recently, Cherry gave an interview to a newspaper in France. The interviewer asked Cherry about immigration. Did he support a policy, espoused by some extremists in Australia, of zero immigration? Cherry's reply was shocking:Levant's article initially attributes the quote to Don Cherry, a plain-speaking common-sense man loathed by the Left in Canada, before revealing that the man being quoted is actually David Suzuki, noted environmentalist and darling of the Left. He used Don Cherry's name to illustrate the hypocrisy of the leftist mainstream media in Canada, who would roundly condemn Cherry if he were to make such a statement.
"Oh, I think Canada is full too! Although it's the second largest country in the world, our surface area has been reduced. Our immigration policy is disgusting: We plunder southern countries by depriving them of future leaders, and we want to increase our population to support economic growth. It's crazy!"
We've all heard Cherry's rants against European hockey players. But this is different - this was a condemnation of his fellow Canadians. Who just happen to pay his hefty salary through their CBC taxes each year.
What Cherry said wasn't illegal. But it was tantamount to looking every new Canadian in the eye - translation: Looking minorities in the eye - and saying, "you're disgusting" and "it's crazy that we let you in here" and "there's no room for you."
However, the issue runs much deeper than David Suzuki or the media. David Suzuki just knows how the game is played, so he knows he can get away with anything.
It's the same game that has made Al Gore a billionaire since he left the VP job behind. It's the same game that is played by the too-big-to-fail banks and GM, the same game played by the Federal Reserve and the professional protestors who astroturf every G8 summit. It is the game that kept the Liberal party in power in Canada for most of the 20th century.
The game is called "bread and circuses". From Wikipedia:
"Bread and Circuses" (or bread and games) (from Latin: panem et circenses) is a metaphor for a superficial means of appeasement. In the case of politics, the phrase is used to describe the creation of public approval, not through exemplary or excellent public service or public policy, but through diversion; distraction; or the mere satisfaction of the immediate, shallow requirements of a populace, as an offered "palliative." Juvenal decried it as a simplistic motivation of common people. The phrase also implies the erosion or ignorance of civic duty amongst the concerns of the common man.
In modern usage, the phrase is taken to describe a populace that no longer values civic virtues and the public life.
The game is simple: keep the population distracted and buy their votes. David Suzuki plays a small part in the game but he plays it well; he is a key player in the circus that is man-made catastrophic Climate Change. He knows that as long as he stays relevant in the environmentalist movement, and as long as the movement is the big tent in the Circus, he will do very well for himself indeed.
The same game is played out over and over again. Every new government program beyond the basic minimum requirements for a functioning government is only a way to buy votes, period. Social Security? Buying the votes of the retired and soon-to-be retired. Affirmative Action? Buying the votes of minorities. Welfare? Buying the votes of the thriftless and lazy. All government "charity" is a vote-buy. That's the bread.
The US debt is in the trillions. Money is being printed and pumped into the digital system as fast as possible. Miraculously, the US debt has stood at exactly $16,699,396,000,000.00, $25 million below the debt limit, for eight solid weeks, while still taking on debt through some very shady accounting.
And yet, the American public is more interested in Trayvon Martin; he's part of the Circus. So is anything to do with Kim Kardashian. These people serve as distractions, filling other circus tents like the Racism circus tent or the Celebrity circus tent. These circus tents and the other ones - the Environmentalism tent and the Gender Wars tent and the War on (some) Drugs tent and the Abortion tent and the UFO tent and all the others - these make up the Circus.
The Circus keeps people distracted from the real problems. The Bread keeps people's immediate needs satisfied. It keeps the game-players in power and everyone's happy and we're making Important Efforts in Solving All Our Problems, Together, as long as we can keep the game going. It's perfect!
Except, it's not. All that Bread and all those Circuses cost a lot of money, sixteen trillion dollars more than the US government has ever brought in with all the taxes it has ever collected in over 200 years. Add in the debt it has already promised but isn't on the books yet - those pensions that have been promised to retirees, for which they've paid all their lives in a giant Ponzi scam - and the total coming due by 2019* is many times that 16 trillion. That is rather a lot of money by any standards.
And people expect to get paid. The Fed has a tricky balancing act - keep pumping dollars into the economy without triggering hyperinflation and bank runs. Every new dollar printed isn't a new dollar of wealth. There's the same amount of wealth as before, just divided among a larger amount of dollars. So, every existing dollar becomes worth slightly less. By the time the bill comes due, sure the number of dollars is correct but the value of those dollars is much less. People grumble and complain but the discrepancy adds up gradually, over time, in barely noticeable increments.
It's a lovely plan but it has the flaw that people are not stupid. They recognize that everything costs more, that $100 of groceries is a lot less than ten years ago. Then as more and more dollars are pumped in faster and faster, people notice that a hundred dollars in groceries is a lot less than last year. Then they notice that $100 doesn't go nearly as far as last month, or last week. Then, a few stock up on supplies ahead of time and the rest wait until it's too late and panic.
Make no mistake, that is the endgame of Bread and Circuses. Keep people happy and distracted - until you can't anymore. It's such a long, slow game, it can span many generations - it's been going on for over a hundred years in the USA, a pretty good run for a complex game. The repercussions are always so far down the road that they hit long after the policy makers are dead, so why should they worry, as long as they can keep the game going? Until they can't, and it all crumbles down around them, everything - the economy, military security, and the nation itself.
But there is another way out. Stop playing the Bread and Circuses game. That was what energized the Tea Party protests - the recognition that the nation spent too much and soon wouldn't be able to pay for it, even though people were already taxed to the maximum, condensed into a plaintive cry of "Stop spending, stop spending, stop spending, stop spending!".
How? It's kind of rough, but much less rough than going off the cliff. It's a financial restructuring.
First, stop printing money immediately. Then, repeal the 16th Amendment and repeal every single line of the tax code. Instead, institute a flat federal sales tax on every purchase. The Federal government's only revenue then becomes that flat sales tax and government-run lotteries (which are a voluntary tax).
Next, eliminate every single government department with the exception of State, Defense, Justice, Treasury, and about half of HHS (including eliminating Obamacare). Everything else, gone. No welfare, no medicaid, no social security, all gone. Instead issue every citizen a monthly stipend (identical *small* amounts for every man, woman, and child, but they must be citizens). The stipend would just be a nice bonus for those that don't need it and a crucial difference for those who do, but everyone would be treated equally before the law.
The federal government's bureaucracy would be much smaller so expenditures then become a fraction of prior expenditures.
The sales tax rate would have to be set so that the government's revenues exceed the (much smaller than previous) expenditures, with the surplus applied to the debt and no new programs introduced until the debt is paid off.
There is no room for pork in this option. The same basic template applies to Canada and Australia and the EU as much as it does to America. There is no room for the players of the Bread and Circus game. But it is also the only way to avoid the crash of America or the other democracies of the world.
(*) Why 2019? The Baby Boom was roughly 1945 to 1963, with a median of 1954. Babies born in 1954 turn 65 in 2019, so in that year about half the Baby Boomers will be retired, and those born at the start of the boom will only be 74, short of the average lifespan. That's a lot of pension checks, and not as many people paying into the system as before. That which cannot go on forever won't, and when the pension system goes bust it won't be pretty.
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