RAY AND TOM MAGLIOZZI: CLICK AND CLACK TALKIN' SMACK

The Lasting Legacy of the “Clamp-It” Brothers:   Reverential Worship At the Vatican City of Anachronistic Endulgences (Energy-"E"-ndulgences)

 by John A. Flushing CPW News Services Commentary

     Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880) envisioned the Grand Inquisitor who made damn sure that the faithful followers went with the dominant program.   Most historians agree that the Roman Catholic Church’s Grand Inquisitor was actually Tomás de Torquemada for whom Mel Brooks wrote the song “The Inquisition” in his film History of the World.   

    Granted, Ray and Tom Magliozzi soft sell the place of the world’s most anachronistic  endulgence….fossil fuels, but from the basilica of the dominant U.S. Brahman whale oil, then petrol oil power elites, "Click" and "Clack" tow the line from the Vatican City of fossil fuel’s Bishop….Caleb Cushing.

     On Boston’s Copley Square, Cushing worshiped God at the Anglican Church near Tom and Ray’s Harvard Square and  sailed to China to negotiate the Wanghia Treaty spotting whale oil sources along the way and returned only to find whaling taking a back seat to drilling.    In time Cushing, Oklahoma became the Mecca and Medina of American subterranean oil flow with Cushing, Oklahoma's spigot setting the price of crude oil in America for over 100 years.   With the advent of Henry Ford’s gasoline autos…..Diesel fuel was around, but Mr. Diesel could not calibrate his promotion of the Diesel engine like Ford could the gasoline engine….especially after he slipped, was pushed, or dumped overboard in the Atlantic on his voyage to America to do just that.

    Tom and Ray Magliozzi are the Grand Inquisitors for the fossil fuel  confirmation process.   Each week the faithful listen or call in to glean some new way of appeasing the insatiable appetite of the carbon-fuel deity.  Gasoline, internal combustion engines, rods, pistons, gear shafts, crank cases, sprockets and bearings need the sanctified gifts now privatized by Exxon, Chevron, Shell, Texaco, AC/Delco, O’Reilly’s or Auto-Zone and sold like sacrificial pigeons, goats and bulls in the Temple’s outer courtyard. 

     Sure, there are new arrivals like St. Francis appearing at the Vatican steps to implore Pope Innocent to take a new direction and to jettison the old, monolithic model, but where would the dungeons filled with the pounding of pumping pistons from carefully controlled explosions be in their future?    While Bolivia contemplates its place in the world’s future Lithium supply, Bechtel tries to steal its water.  While serious scientists try to provide the hydrogen fuel cell as the next Franciscan-Copernican revolution, the American fossil fuel fairies try to convince the world that LPG makes the electrolysis process for fracturing oxygen from hydrogen more efficient….like Imperial Sugar Company mixing sugar with stevia because it’s better for you while snatching up all the South American stevia plantations with Coca-Cola, Pepsi and the other new “United Fruit Companies” of the 21^st Century.  

      NASA, meanwhile, continues to shoot rockets into space with hydrogen propellants while the NAS cars loop the tracks burning high octane fossil fuels, "new" Formula One tracks are being built to burn petrol as all the while the EPCOT (Experimental Planned Community of Tomorrow)  electric tram in Orlando speeds along at 40 mph while Europe, China and Japan move toward “90 minutes  from New York to Paris….undersea by rail".   Click and Clack, meanwhile, continue to rattle the rosary beads of high speed regression fueling global warming and the rising waters in New York's and Boston’s subways.

    Enter the Hindenburg.   No one remembers that the Hindenburg made 11 successful transatlantic flights before its explosive touchdown in New Jersey.  One investigator says that the explosion was likely set and the burning was not the hydrogen, but the painted zeppelin skin.  

     Enter David Seo, the undergraduate physics student at UCB, Berkley who takes the hydrogen discussion out of the realm of xenoglossia.   David Seo ran on-line the mathematical formula for the output of hydrogen from  a single gallon of H20….water…. and concluded:  “If every single one of those molecules was converted into hydrogen we would get twice as much hydrogen as we had of water or 2.53 x 10 to the 26^th power molecules of hydrogen.  However, since hydrogen is a diatomic molecule, meaning that the hydrogen that we talk about is H2, we would get 1.265 x 10 to the 26^th power molecules of hydrogen at 1 atmospheric pressure and 273K, 1 mole of hydrogen fills approximately 22.4 liters of volume, so 1.265 x 10 to the 26^th power molecules or about 210 moles, would fill 4707 Liters of volume.”

   Whoever moves the world away from this Vatican City of Anachronistic Endulgences and the Meccas and Medinas that also sit atop the sludge will be the Jonas Salk of the next generation, but without Salk's fanfare.  Whoever moves in this new direction should expect to be like Zwingli or Huss, Copernicus and Galileo, Einstein...cordoned off from the Manhattan Project….or Robert Oppenheimer….stripped of his national security clearance…..under house arrest or burned at the stake!   Where is Bill Gates or Warren Buffet with a prize for the perfecting the process of highly efficient fracturing of oxygen and hydrogen with the award going to the process that come closest to hitting the 4707 Liter mark?   Do that and the world can talk later about where, whether and how to monetize it. 

    Sadly, the greatest missed opportunity of the Twentieth Century....hell, of all times....was when John F. Kennedy said from Houston's Rice Stadium on September 12, 1962..."President Pitzer, Mr. Vice President, Congressman Thomas, Senator Wiley and Congressmen Miller, Mr. Webb, Mr. Bell, scientists, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen......This country was conquered by those who moved forward--and so will space."  Of course, Dr. Pitzer had his nose so far up the Texas oil barons asses that he could smell nothing else as evidenced by his discrediting of Robert Oppenheimer, but here's the kicker....."We choose to go to the moon, not because it's easy, but because it's hard."      And the greatest missed opportunity of ALL time:  "And we choose to do it using only hydrogen fuel which we will then use to fuel our personal transportation systems on a clean planet!"  Can you imagine the power of that vision unleashed in Houston where there is not yet the Al Gore Center for Global Warming next to the Burke Baker Planetarium and where Elon Musk and others have pinched the incense of earth's sold-out souls?  Cambridge and Harvard would have easily housed the NASA program had JFK....a Roman Catholic within a tradition of denying anything other than the myth that the earth....and its carbon-based sludge pockets....are the center of the universe!  There will be those who say....well, carbon fuels were ALL we had?  Bull shit!  We had the Hindenburg and it could have lifted Alan Shepherd over 20 miles before the hydrogen that lifted him there was used to propel the future astronauts to Tranquility Bay.  If you don't think this is accurate go to Houston, Texas during rush hour and sit in traffic while crossing the hundreds of bayous that are natural right-of-ways for the high speed electric, magnetized trams that have never been built!  Obviously JFK's head would have been blown off not in Dallas, but in Houston on that day, but what a proper and fitting sacrifice for a lost and disoriented humanity!

     Meanwhile, “Click” and “Clack” click and clack and Bechtel and the fossil formulators work overtime to control not only the world's lithium for the next generation of car batteries, but its H20 as well!