A bit of an anthology blog tonight but try to follow my train of though.

Tonight, I feel guilt but also the comfort that old man Brooks from Shawshank Redemption felt when he went back into

prison. You see, after three years of driving a clean hydrogen fuel

cell car, I once again feel the roar of internal combustion under my feet. Where once my car only produced water and electricity, now I am back to polluting.

For reasons ostensibly of an economic nature, systems have not supported clean hydrogen cars and my three-year lease on my wonderful fuel cell car has ended. Despite being touted in 2001 by then President Bush as the way of the future, the lack of hydrogen fueling stations has made it hard to readopt this better tech. The Hyundai and Honda versions are not available and I don’t care for the Toyota.

People who drive electric cars don’t discern a difference in zero emissions but there is a huge one. Most of the electricity for that electric car is created by non-sustainable, carbon burning methods, at least on our California grid.

When we talk about incentivizing people, we have to realized you have to make it easy for people to be good. Because I often waited that  to fuel my car from the newer Toyota Mirai cars, I would have a negative feeling when I saw them; this reminds me of the song by War, “The World is a Ghetto”. I should feel pride and solidarity with my early adopting colleagues but I occasionally felt resentment even though the system that created the ghetto of hydrogen users fighting over resources was to blame.

In a Ghetto, people are fighting over scarce resources and fighting amongst themselves. We could have had hydrogen fuel cells since their invention in 1839.

• NASA has used fuel cells because of their efficiency and production of water as a “waste” product.
• Unlike internal combustion to turn a magnet in an electric field that fuels electric cars, the chemical reaction of Hydrogen + Oxygen produces no heat…just electricity and water.
• A Brazilian man invented a water combustion engine that can power a motorcycle for 300 miles on a liter of water.
• On the other end of the spectrum, a company in Lichtenstein has a supercar with top speed of 236mph and a range of over 1000km.

So you can use hydrolysis, use ionized water, or use hydrogen, which is the most abundant thing in the universe (along with stupidity, according to Harlan Ellison). Hydrogen can be a byproduct of waste decomposition or derived from cow flatulence.

Speaking of cows and doing the right thing, have you ever thought of becoming vegetarian after seeing a video of cow slaughtering? I have. When I blogged about lab grown meat in this funny posting about eating dinner with some Jains, the cost had already started coming down and soon, you may have no choice to have meat derived for intact animals.

The larger question of whether lab grown meat is vegan is not a simple one. Extracting muscle stem cells is not cruel and then producing meat from them is very compassionate since it doesn’t involve slaughter of a sentient being. But if you fast forward to mass adoption, the very existence of cows in a human-dominated world is in serious jeopardy if the farmers no longer require them. Is non-incarnation a form of animal cruelty?

What is the point of this rambling blog? It is that the entire way that we consume, aspire, conceptualize, and despair is largely a prison or ghetto system that we are actively complicit with. Instead of demanding abundant, clean, renewably, and non-violent means of eating, commuting, and living, we allow the masters of the ghetto to dictate all the conditions.

The foods, fuels, living spaces, manufactured enemies, and even limitation on our own beliefs are all easy “choices”. And it is likely that if a choice is easy, it is because someone wants you to choose it.

I plugged back into the fossil fuel “Matrix” not because it was the right thing to do but rather because it was the easy thing to do. My friend, Syd, explained that all of human behavior is driven by “Minimax” game theory; minimizing the maximal bad outcome.

The reason why South Korea’s president was deposed was that laziness and the easy choice swung so quickly to doing the right thing and it aligned with the Minimax principle. People finally told the truth because the press and the politicized Koreans demanded it.

In most systems coercion, cronyism, influence peddling, and crass monetization are powerful levers to control systems. As my fellow futurist and friend, Michael Rose explains in this brilliant critique of academia, the faults of many if not most institutions lie in human ego and lack of devotion to principles.

Yesterday, we celebrated Independence form the British crown and the evil of taxation without representation. Now realize that we have 21 trillion in private debt that is paid for my taxpayers who have no interested in auditing the private Federal Reserve bank, and you realize the power of myth and narrative over the principles of truth and transparency.

As a closer to this anthology of past blogs, I close with my own futurist/humanism utopian vision blog. In it, I tried to invent new systems to render the current ones obsolete. I believe that war, fossil fuels, election fraud, corporatism, and crony capitalism are all in their end stages and fall as a result of their own unbridled successes. The narrative has been so controlled, the populace has be so lulled to sleep, and the wealth has been so concentrated, that only a “Hail Mary” like Guaranteed Basic Income could possible save this system.

The good news is that more and more people are waking up from the illusion of scarcity and the total fable that the world is a ghetto. Like the proverbial elephant that still believes it can’t move because it was chained to a tree as a baby, there are many possible futures where a peaceful transition to a sustainably abundant world occurs. The fear of overpopulation is pernicious and doesn’t reflect the world of underpopulation emerging in the so-called developed world.

Free energy, democracy, taxation only with representation, humanism, and abundance are all within reach.