Government Control Is Not Needed Where Obama Wants It!!

Your government wants to stick it's bureaucratic nose into everything that affects average, working-class people. Everything except those areas it should be investigating and regulating more strictly! For example...

"NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Exxon Mobil Corp. reported quarterly earnings Thursday that easily beat analysts' expectations on higher crude prices.

The world's largest public energy company reported net income of $7.56 billion, or $1.60 a share, in the second quarter, up 91% from $3.95 billion, or 81 cents a share, in the same period in 2009.

Earnings for the first half of 2010, excluding special items, were $13.9 billion, up 60% over the first half of 2009." (Emphases added)

Yes, my friends, that is Billion with a capital "B". The concept of a million of anything is difficult for most of us to envision, and the term billion just boggles the mind. Maybe this will help get it into perspective - a billion minutes ago, Christ was alive. Here's a picture showing the relationship between one thousand, one million and one billion -

There is a 6" difference between the million point and the billion point on this line. (A trillion [a figure our government loves to throw at us] would be marked 500 feet to the right of the billion mark.) Now, think of that number in terms of dollars - the dollars you spend at the gas pump, the dollars you spend for groceries, the dollars you spend for clothing... and your tax dollars!

Diesel fuel, the least refined and least expensive to produce, currently hovers at around $4 per gallon. More than premium gasoline! Do you still wonder why the cost of "goods and services" is skyrocketing upward? Understand that goods do not magically appear in Wal-Mart at the beginning of each business day, nor do groceries breed on the shelves of your local Kroger or Safeway grocery stores when the lights go out. These items are transported to every retail store in our country by diesel-fueled delivery vehicles, whether they be 18-wheelers, railroad trains, or a combination. The oil companies have taken our nation hostage! And your government has not done - or even said - a thing about it. It's areas like this that we need government mandated price caps! The workers of this nation need gasoline to get to and from their place of employment in order to earn a living so they can afford to buy those goods and services. Gasoline now costs between $3.25 and $3.65 per gallon and the price is increasing almost daily! The excuses used by big oil are "There's unrest in Saudi Arabia", "The middle east crisis is driving our costs up", and "It's the Yemeni problem". What's wrong with this picture? The problem is Big Oil's corporate GREED! Individually, or even collectively, We The People can do next to nothing about it directly. Government intervention mandating price caps is the only solution.

How do we get that done? Write, email, or telephone your elected Congressional Representatives - including Senators - and tell them that We The People need relief from the price gouging oil corporations economy-crushing GREED!

(Because our national economy is "in the dumper", China is campaigning at the U.N. to have the U.S. dollar replaced by the Chinese yuan as the "reserve currency". For those of you who may not know exactly what the "reserve currency" is, it is the global currency of international trade. If China is successful in their bid, it will further diminish the U.S. in the eyes of "the global community".)

I'm Gil, and I approved this blog!

ALTERNATIVE FUELS FOR TRANSPORTATION ~
I was chatting with some acquaintances the other day, about ways to improve our costs of transportation (people movers, commercial transportation, etc.), when I was reminded of something I saw published in the late-1950s in one of the premier technical magazines of the times. I can't recall exactly which one it was now, but it was probably either Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, or Road and Track - or something of that ilk. As I remember it, the article was about something called "electronic injection", which was significantly different from fuel injection, in that it used a standard carburetor that had been modified with an electronically controlled fuel metering device. Fuel vaporization and the fuel:air ratio was supposedly as close to perfect as one could get using the technology of the times. The stated advantage of such a fuel delivery system? Fuel consumption in the range of 90MPG in a V-8 engine! And, yes, that was the last I ever heard of it.
Today's technology is moving more toward the replacement of fossil fuels as our primary source of energy, especially for our ever-increasing transportation needs. Engineers are now looking at the possibility of extracting hydrogen from water, fuel cells, closed system refrigerants (i.e.: air conditioning), electricity, steam, and most recently, compressed air as alternative sources of fuel for our vehicles.
Now, everybody that believes that Mobil-Exxon (et al) will allow anything that they can't control the availability - or price - of to become a viable alternative to fossil fuels, raise your hand. I see a few hands raised ... but, the short bus is here to pick them up now. We're talking about tens of billions of dollars in profits!
How many of those billions of dollars (that's one of these -> $ followed by a positive integer and 9 zeros) of profits do you think the American Oil Cartel will spend to defeat such efforts? How much would YOU spend, if your $36,000,000,000 in profits were being threatened? One hundred million dollars ($100,000,000) is a pittance when you're looking at the potential loss of billions of dollars. (Granted, the concept of a million of anything is extremely difficult for "Joe Average" to get his head around. It's a number for which most of us have no frame of reference. And a billion? Fuggeddaboudit! Simply counting to one million would take about 11 days, 24/7, and counting to one billion - roughly 30 years! A billion seconds ago it was 1959, and a billion minutes ago it was 193AD ... so, yes, these are unrealistically large numbers for the vast majority of us to try to realize.) And we revel in our complacency - trusting that our government, our elected officials, our neighbors will insure that we are treated fairly by our multi-national corporations. We don't mind that our government is leasing our roadways to foreign entities, who are charging us money to use the roads that our taxes built! Swiss cheese borders are of little to no concern to many of us. It is time for the "silent majority" to break its silence, and let the world know that we are fed up with what they've been feeding us. We aren't mushrooms! Remember the words of Edmund Burke, who said:
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

I'm Gil, and I approve this blog!