Three patents does not a Perpetual Motion Machine make

Posted on by Aj Davis

Just reading around on Huffington Post I saw yet another add for a perpetual motion machine. What I found most entertaining about this claim (outside of the LULZ inherent in this kind of flapdoodle) was this: The “HoJo Motor” is the only device that produces “Free Energy” that has 3 U.S. Patents!

  1.                 
  2. Produce Free Electricity For Your Home and Appliances in Just 48 Hours With The “Howard Johnson Motor” (HoJo Motor) – The only “Free Energy Device” to have 3 U.S. Patents! | HoJo Motor
  3. http://www.hojomotor.com/vid

It’s important to note here that the US Patent Office does not actually certify that the device produces ‘free energy’. The US government granted a patent not because the motor produces free energy. Rather, it granted a patent because the it is a working electric motor. The person is relying on the reader sucker not realizing this fact.

  1. >Produce Free electricity for your home and appliances in just 2 days!<
  3. No, you won’t be able to do this.
  5. >Fire the Greedy electric companies and supply more of your own electricity!<
  7. NO, you won’t be doing that either. Rather, you’ll be giving the greedy, self-deluding scam peddler lots of money as well as your greedy electric company.
  9. >Reduce your carbon footprint and help the environment!<
  10. Get a bicycle, it will actually work.

In case you are wondering how I can be so absolutely certain that this device doesn’t do what it claims to–and I’m certain it doesn’t–it requires invoking the thermodynamics.

Perpetual motion machines (and all ‘free energy’ devices are perpetual motion machines) violate either the first law of thermodynamics (conservation of energy) or the second law of thermodynamics (conservation of work).

The first law states that in a closed system you cannot create new energy. This device, the Johnson motor, appears to violate the first law. The claim is that you can generate work without having to input energy. The argument is essentially this: you give an initial impetus to the device and then, once it is going, it will continue to generate more energy than is needed to keep it going.

The second law states that in a closed system, whenever work is done *some* energy is loss to friction etc. In other words, you cannot have an engine that is *so* efficient that 100% of the energy input into the system is used.

The argument against all forms of free energy is this:

1) You cannot get free energy. In other words, you cannot get *more* energy out of a system than you put into it (1st law)
2) In any system where work is done (e.g. a change of states happens because of energy put into the system) some will be loss because of inefficiencies.
3) Therefore, you cannot make a machine that makes enough energy that it can either keep itself going without an external input or get out more energy than you put in.

All ‘free energy’ advertisements are scams don’t fall for ‘em!

Stay rational, my friends.

Recess appointments? That’s never happened before! Except it has.

Posted on by Aj Davis

“President Obama’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is perhaps the most powerful and unaccountable bureaucracy in the history of our nation, headed by a powerful and unaccountable bureaucrat with unprecedented authority over the economy. Instead of working with Congress to fix the flaws in this new bureaucracy, the President is declaring that he ‘refuses to take no for an answer’ and circumventing Congress to appoint a new administrator. This action represents Chicago-style politics at its worst and is precisely what then-Senator Obama claimed would be ‘the wrong thing to do.’ Sadly, instead of focusing on economic growth, he is once again focusing on creating more regulation, more government, and more Washington gridlock. As President, I will focus on turning around our economy so that America can once again lead the world in job creation.”

Livewire | TPM
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/updates/3593?ref=fpa

Here’s a partial list of Bush the Younger’s recess appointments. Just so that when your FOX News watching relatives pretend that Obama made up the whole concept of recess appointments you’ll have something to counter with, gentle reader.

William Pryor
Charles Pickering
John Bolton
Susan Dudley
Sam Fox
Andrew G Biggs

Whose liberty?

Posted on by Aj Davis

According to Paul the Elder (Ron) and Paul the Younger (Rand) the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a terrible, terrible mistake. In their construction I, as an American, had more liberty when there were jobs I might as well not even bother applying for because of the color of my skin or because of my gender. This is the logic of libertarianism. In that construction, there are no tradeoffs. Rather, there’s just a big pile of liberty and everyone either has all of it or none of it.
Now, I will be the first to admit that my employer’s liberty was limited in that they couldn’t just refuse to hire me because I’m black, a woman or queer. However, in the America my parents spent the first 50 years of their life in their liberty was seriously constrained because they were black. In other blog posts, I have taken apart the idea that if only the market had been left to its own devices integration would have come to America in the fullness of time. There is less than no reason to believe this. In fact, the argument comprises a counterfactual worthy of Harry Turtledove. We ran the experiment and we know how it turned out. Many of the people who experienced that experiment through most of the last century are only now departing this veil of tears. Another fairly large cohort is only now just retiring. The generation who experienced ‘the Change’ are only now reaching middle-age. The market didn’t solve the problem on its own. I will not rehash that argument in this post but if you’re interested in it (and my mea culpa for assuming a goodwill on the part of Paul the Elder that his newsletters suggest he does not deserve) the blog post discussing the problem with the libertarian fantasy that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was unnecessary is here.
Over at the Washington Post, Michael Gerson, in full mainstream Republican freak-out mode makes this observation about Ron Paul and the overly anti-government rhetoric of libertarians.

Government can be an enemy of liberty. But the achievement of a free society can also be the result of government action — the protection of individual liberty against corrupt state governments or corrupt business practices or corrupt local laws. In 1957, President Eisenhower sent 1,000 Army paratroopers to Arkansas to forcibly integrate Central High School in Little Rock. This reduced Gov. Orval Faubus’s freedom. It increased the liberty of Carlotta Walls LaNier, who was spat upon while trying to attend school. A choice between freedoms was necessary — and it was not a hard one.

Tennessee Bill tries to carve out a ‘special right’ to bully gays

Posted on by Aj Davis

A proposed bill in Tennessee would create a loophole in the state’s anti-bullying laws to protect those expressing religious, philosophical or political beliefs, which one proponent says would ensure that people can still express their “views on homosexuality.”
The proposed bill would amend the state’s current anti-bullying laws to specify that the anti-bully policy should “not be construed or interpreted to infringe upon the First Amendment rights of students and shall not prohibit their expression of religious, philosophical, or political views” as long as there’s no physical threat or threat to another student’s property.

So the key here is not to threaten a gay kid but to just go ahead and beat the stuffing out of them. One wonders if the good people of Tennessee think that this law should cover Muslims although given recent history one suspects the answer is no.
(Tip o’ the hat to TPM for the original story.)

More signs the times they are a changin’

Posted on by Aj Davis
1

Twenty years ago, I tried to get a piece making a similar argument published in ‘The Crisis’ the ‘house organ’ of the NAACP.  It was roundly rejected.  It does my heart good to see more and more black people who are not gay coming forward and telling the community, particularly the black church which is the undeniable well-spring of anti-gay sentiment in the black community, that they are on the wrong side of history. 

Monique Ruffin: It’s Official: Gay Is the New Black

Gay is the new black. And some Christian blacks must be willing to look into their hearts and find the seeds of fear that would have them deny the humanity of another in the name of God (just the way it was done to them not that long ago). Let’s ask ourselves: do we fear gays or fear being gay? Why must gay leaders in our churches and communities serve clandestinely? Consider what the power of love and acceptance might offer if we are willing to stand courageously with gays as we stood for ourselves decades ago. Our freedom will not truly be granted until we can pass it forward. Gay is the new black, sadly, because many blacks haven’t been willing to embrace their own practices, secrets, fear, and shame about homosexuality. Many blacks have not been able to reconcile their real-life experience with their faith, and until they do this, they are oppressed people who are also practicing the oppression of others.

The Mark of the Barbarian

Posted on by Aj Davis

Barbarian:
noun
(in ancient times) a member of a community or tribe not belonging to one of the great civilizations (Greek, Roman, Christian).
• an uncultured or brutish person.
adjective
of or relating to ancient barbarians: barbarian invasions | barbarian peoples.
• uncultured; brutish.

We live in a time and place that puts high value on emotion, and that views emotions as self-validating. To feel something is thought by many to be sufficient evidence of its truthfulness, or at least its authenticity. This is a mark of the barbarian. I understand why post-Sixties liberals make the mistake of believing that nonsense. But conservatives?

This is another one of those “scary-to-write” posts because what I am going to say so breaks with standard Left orthodoxy that it feels as if I am writing religious heresy. The above quote is taken from a post at Frum Forum written by a conservative about older conservatives (Fox Geezers) who get all their news from FOX News. My concern in this post is not with the Right-leaning people who think that it is sufficient that they feel that the HCR law leads to ‘death panels’ or that Obama is a Marxist Islamist. My concern here is with the Left-leaning people, my own political tribe, that think it is sufficient to ‘feel’ something in order for it to be ‘true’ or ‘authentic’. The barbarian I speak of is in the second sense of the uncultured or brutish person.

The examples I have are too numerous to count. It is such a commonplace on the Left that whenever two or three of us are gathered together, it is a near certainty that someone will make a statement of the ‘George W. Bush was worse than Hitler’ species. If challenged, that person will then claim that “well, that’s true for me” as if that makes a difference. “That’s true for me” is just another way of saying “I felt it, that settles it.” The Left, generally, and the Queer-Left specifically has a disturbing tolerance for these kinds of statements. What’s more there is a colossal blind spot that people willfully ignore even though it causes all manner of problems. If your feelings are accurate barometers to what is going on in the real world then by what logic are my feelings not an accurate barometer?

In other words, if one leans left and believes that, for instance, the Republican party has active plans for the elimination of queer people in America and you believe that the mere fact that you feel it means it must be true how can you turn around and argue that the FOX News watcher who believes that Barack Obama wants to enslave white people is wrong? They aren’t working off of a basis having any more foundation than your belief.

I have had this conversation so many times in online lesbian circles that I have now had to leave two online lesbian communities because of it. The first time was when someone insisted that there were clauses in the 2009 stimulus package that were demonstrably not there. This woman kept posting ‘as if’ those statements were there and when I pointed out to her that they weren’t and that she was clearly lying about it, I was told by a moderator that we had to be ‘tolerant of diverse opinions’. Except she wasn’t expressing an opinion, she was making a statement of fact. Either the stimulus package had language about reparations for slavery or it didn’t (for the record it didn’t) but this woman kept insisting that it did, along with language about a train from Disney to Vegas. On another board, there was a discussion about whether quantum mechanics explained telepathy and telekinesis (it doesn’t) and when I pointed out to my interlocutor that the brain is too large and too hot for quantum effects to be observed, they kept insisting that in their quantum mechanics it did. On that same board, I did a post on how humanity has become less violent over time. As an example, I offered up the fact that slavery is no longer legal in most of the world and is certainly illegal everywhere in the West. Someone then responded to say that slavery still happened in the United States and the rest of the world. Now, it is important to note that I was talking about the legality of slavery and its being socially acceptable. This person was using the (cough) logic (cough) that if slavery happens anywhere then it might as well be legal everywhere. Their response was about emotionalism. They want, perhaps even need, to be able to see America as a nation that is singular in its malevolence and so the idea that things might have improved in America was anathema to them.

There was a time in the West that we thought that self-control and particularly control of our emotions was a virtue. Now, we believe pretty much the opposite. To practice self-control and control of the emotions is seen as inauthentic and is, perhaps, even a vice. At least it is a vice when it is oneself who is expected to show some self-discipline. On the other hand we still like it when others show self-control since it makes them easier to deal with. I have a sign “keep calm and carry on” on the wall outside my office at home. Can you imagine people giving that advice in contemporary Left-leaning circles in America? I can’t.

Ben Nelson Retiring Ahead Of 2012 Election

Posted on by Aj Davis

Someone will miss Nelson, I’m sure but I don’t know who that Democrat is but I’m sure he’ll be missed by someone. I wonder if he’s measured the drapes for his lobbying office on K street yet.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) is expected to announce that he will not run for reelection in the 2012 election cycle, Politico reported Tuesday. Nelson is currently in the middle of his second term. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000.

Ben Nelson Retiring Ahead Of 2012 Election
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/27/ben-nelson-retiring-reelection_n_1171256.html