Flint: Bottled Water Verses Rainwater

   It is very expensive to deliver bottled water to people’s homes. Rainwater is delivered quite regularly already. We, here at McDonald Philosophy, have been working on methods of rainwater collection. If a sufficient filter can be attached to any of seven models, rainwater can be collected even for drinking. But that we are not collecting rainwater for washing defies belief. In Bermuda, where the ground does not hold water any better than Americans hold new ideas, they have been collecting and drinking even roof rainwater for a century.

   Does everyone simply assume that rainwater is dirty? When we used lead in the gas, one might expect lead in the rainwater east and north of a city, but now the air is fairly clear in most places. And the water coming out of the pipes, where do we think that came from? And we think it best to first run it through the poisoned ground in Flint, then down the poisoned river and through the poisoned pipes, then try to filter it? We seem to have this image that water must be “treated” and made artificial by some government controlled process. And is bottled water tested, say, for plastic after it has sat in the sun? The challenge in inventing water collection systems is keeping the collection system clean, as roofs are exposed to bird droppings. If I leave mine out, I have to wash it good before a rain, usually washing it with well water. We have one model that folds up, so that it is covered, and unfolded before a rain. This, and my plastic and dowel on a frame model, I would have produced and delivered for sale in Flint, but there are no investors. One cannot do these things by oneself, especially if blacklisted and ostracized for having new ideas.

   With the method pictured on the Inventions page in the menu of this website, I have for nearly a year collected almost all my own drinking water. If I could afford to test it, I would, and if I could afford a sand and charcoal or graphite filter, I would have one. I use coffee filters, which work fine for the big stuff, But for the most part, my water is pristine, and leaves no film on the containers, as the well water does. That, too, we want to test, as no one has looked into the spread of poisons from Mount Salem under the ground toward Northville Township. And we watch collecting water when the wind blows from the south.

Flint Water Funds Run Dry: No Rainwater In Sight

Funds for bottled water will soon cease to flow, and Flint has still not figured out to stop relying on government and turn to rainwater, at least to supplement the leaden city water system. Rain barrels could have been providing much water for washing, but they are watching this go down the drain. Inventions for rainwater collection systems are ignored, or cycled here among a few fellow authors on WordPress, while entrepreneurs and fellow inventors play on Facebook, and Google just cannot seem to locate my website on any of the search engines. Seriously, can no one who wants to make things and make money, can no one see that it is possible to filter and collect rainwater for drinking, at half the trouble and expense of bottled water? Can no one see the possibilities for patents and inventions regarding water? Can no one see that it is possible to collect rainwater in a larger a way, for whole communities, and even to sell bottled rainwater, if it can be filtered and tested? The future use of these systems will only increase, while Flint and everyone else watches the rain water go through the poisoned ground, the poisoned rivers and poisoned pipes before they try to filter it. I can see these possibilities, and it is quite painful to watch Flint fumbling around with bottled water and new pipes while the rain flows down the drain. That is why my vice is libertarian cynicism. A bit of integrity in about five different offices and areas, and these problems would long ago have been moveing toward these obvious solutions.

Meanwhile the Trump fever does seem to have broken with his recent drop in the polls, after a continuous and meteoric rise. America may be seeing through the sham behind the curtain, and be on her way home to Kansas after all regardless. That is why The Wizard of Oz is the American Myth.

Rainwater Collector #1: A Picture

Here is a picture of my simplest rainwater collector. Again, it is a 6 x 10 piece of plastic spread over a frame with a rock in it and a hole off-center, with a coffee filter and funnel underneath catching the water into a five gallon Absopure bottle set in a trough for overflow or any we miss. The edges of the plastic are rolled in dowels and a staple gun secures the system up to about a fifty mph wind. Pouring the trough water through the funnel manually takes more time. A graphite or charcoal filter would help. The hole off center collects anything solid and heavy, and pouring off the top when it is full, or overfilling the bottle, clears off anything that floats, but we get very few impurities. I collected 11 gallons in the storm before last, before the headwind of the one after that blew a frame board aside. I would like to start a company of water inventions, but cannot even afford a patent, so I am trying to find an investor or someone who will give me the twenty percent of profits usual for a good invention. But mostly, I want people to do it and have clean water!

   I have seven different models based on this idea, all patentable inventions. The second is to sew a filter pocket onto the plastic collector. The third is to make the same shape out of sheet metal like a coffee table with a top that opens and closes to keep it clean between rains. A fourth is to make interlocking plastic sections about 4 x 4 that flow into one another and are set in the ground with stakes. A fifth is made of granite like a counter top, but shaped to collect water. A sixth is out of formed mortar, and a seventh is a sculpture out of stone such as marble. Different materials like cotton are being considered for the first and simplest model. The shapes must be cleanable, and this is the great advantage compared to roof rainwater collection. 60 square feet yields enough drinking water for one person, (including 3/4 gallon per day for coffee!). I would like to test my water, but again, it appears quite clean or, pristine. If the plastic is left out, it must be washed before a rain.

Again, I am watching the people of Flint cart bottled water and drink leaden tap water. They did not even figure out to use rain barrels for washing and bathing water. They first must run the rainwater through the ground, down the river, through the pipes, then the filter. These inventions could supplement our bottled water delivery system, already over-taxed. Finally, if the system could be kept clean, this could be done in a big way, even on the roof of the factory where they bottle drinking water. Bottled rainwater would surely sell because of the beauty of the idea. Our water problems are only beginning, with road salt melting the pipes and many areas poisoned for groundwater. But there is no reason first to run the water through the ground, if only we filter it as the ground once did. Thirty percent of the world lacks clean drinking water, and how many there watch the rain go into the gutters and dirty ponds, then try to drink it?

 

 

Mount Salem: The Sheeny Man

Mount Salem is of course the giant trash dump everyone in Salem loves because they get free dumping and local taxes. Long ago, though, we noticed that no one cares about the dumping of toxic waste. Everyone just throws batteries into the trash, not to mention other chemicals. This of course goes into the ground water and flows probably into Northville Township, where no one cares because they think drinking bottled water keeps them safe. I myself have not made the one hazardous waste day in the past three years, and do not even know what day this is on. But when I worked at the factory by the dump, there was a sign not the drink the water, though they would not admit it was because it was poisoned by the dump.

So I was thinking (Who, me?) what if we had a sheeny man, a trash-picker, who was allowed to set up by the dump, reclaim and sell good stuff, even sell stuff he had fixed up, and at the same time reminded people not to dump poison? What if they had a hazardous waste day right there at the dump every day? The Sheeny man is an old word, from my mother’s childhood, when he used to go around the neighborhood picking up good trash. There are lots of sheeny men who would like such a job, and at the dump they could make a fortune if they could stand the air, and of course, bring their own water.

It is a shame too that all the compost from yardwaste is poisoned from Chemlawn and Roundup and a thousand other things.

Marijuana, Microsoft and the FBI

Microsoft, as the BBC informs us, has decided to get into the business of tracking Marijuana businesses, inventing programs that help regulate and for example control seeds, to make sure the seeds are from the legal rather than the “illegal” market. This is a very strange report, since such a program would be a very small part of the Microsoft business. But we have suspected a Monsanto style attempt to control seeds was in the works. Farmers, say, in India, are already having difficulty with the ten thousand year old practice of selecting and saving seeds for the following year, of every kind of plant, due to dominance of hybrids and the money to be made by controlling seeds. By “Illegal” market, I believe the report, taking their language from Microsoft, means nature.

Perhaps Microsoft will also help track the use of chemicals for profit in Marijuana growing, track which are carcinogenic, and who might be growing inorganic weed. Perhaps they will help the legislators figure out how not to encourage growing poisonous weed, as they did tobacco to increase yields once limits were set in acreage or number. Most of all, perhaps they will track where the illegal market leads kids to the heroin dealer, or track where corrupt police use the medicinal law to seize property contrary to the Constitution and divide the profits with organized crime and the municipalities, and even where these two are becoming less distinct.

It is time for a supreme Court decision recognizing that if one grows ones own weed and smokes it, no Constitutional law could possibly be violated. One simply avoids supporting organized crime, and that is the major effect on commerce, though this does prevent the corporate control of nature for profit as well.

In a separate report, the FBI was hiring, but, in addition to other stringent requirements, one may not have smoked weed in the past three years. The FBI, and society in general, have long selected for a certain kind of ignorance, the sort behind such sayings as “could not even pass a drug test.” The FBI has a culture, an in-group that treats pot smoking as a crime, now even above sodomy and gamory, which are allowed, while pot smoking, even as a part of religious exercise, is forbidden. We want the FBI, our FBI, and all law enforcement, to spend one tenth the effort they spend “enforcing the law wherever they see the law violated” to enforcing the law when they see corrupt police and judges giving and taking payoffs and kickbacks to pervert their badges and our courtrooms. Perhaps they might also watch for when corporations like Microsoft track human beings, exposing them to criminals, such as hit men or the Orlando shooter.

In our FBI, we have cultivated a certain kind of ignorance. I believe they have done a fairly good job of weeding out corruption in the FBI hiring process, but they also select for a certain kind of dumb jock. Thought and imagination are selectively excluded. Steve Jobs could not apply to work for the FBI. That is part of why crime is simply out-thinking us lately, not to mention the Russians in internet land. How many artists, say, will be running to apply for the FBI now, or musicians? These types of souls, if not necessarily these particular persons, are a portion of human ability, and they are too free to be able to live according to convention, where everything cultivated is artificial. Their categories sometimes do not match up with the suburban contemporary American categories, but they think of things the dumb jocks cannot even understand when they are directly told. Try calling the FBI to tell them of an obvious scam, say, that the bank is asking for the first five digits of our social security numbers, or that hit men are welcome for a bit of effort to track us using the internet and all modern technology that spies on us for marketing. Do not even try to ask how they expect to find the resources to keep us safe once we have bought such a world. The FBI phone operator will most likely ignore you, but if they pay any attention at all, they are more likely to spy on you because calling the FBI and saying things they do not understand is annoying to them, too much for them, that they are to understand, say, that we are often asked for the last four digits, 5 + 4 = 9 and all our phones are hacked, meaning that the bank is very likely taking kickbacks from someone selling social security numbers.

Jeffrey Rosen on NPR: The Chilling Passage

   Terry Gross has just interviewed Jeffrey Rosen on Fresh Air regarding his new book Louie D. Brandeis, American Prophet. On the air, they read a passage from the opinion of Brandeis in the Olmsted case, the most important privacy case, regarding wiretapping. Brandeis foresaw a time when government or private businesses would be able to watch us through the technology in our homes such as the television and computer. Do they realize that this is being done as I write? That if you query on google, Microsoft, Toshiba, Roku and Magnavox have given themselves the liberty to spy on us in our homes through cameras and microphones even after some are supposedly disabled? From fear of terrorism etc, the FBI is using the private companies, while Congress will not question anyone in hearings, but will take campaign contributions from these companies to pervert the law to allow infinite marketing-spying to occur on the American citizens? I wish Mr. Rosen were here the night Microsoft took a picture of me. It was surreal: a camera came on the screen without my consent and snapped a picture, just like when one snaps a picture from the phone cam. Both the FBI and hit men find such pictures and such surveillance useful.

   Lets get one thing clear first. The purpose of government is “to secure these rights,” in the second sentence of the Declaration. While the Bill of rights directly limits the national government, our government certainly does have the power to pass laws that require the private companies to secure these rights. Congress is just made up of a bunch of thoughtless, ignorant, slavish sissies. Again this started with drug testing, and perhaps directly the marijuana issue. “I will piss in a cup for no man living,” I like to say, because I am a Scotsman. But the thought behind it is this: the law forbidding marijuana is unconstitutional to begin with, and a private company cannot test applicants to see if they violate a law, because a law might just be unconstitutional. The unconstitutionality of the whole circumstance is obvious if one smokes on Sunday while reading scripture, and is, like a Rastifarian, exercising religion, truly and honestly. Only a slave, and not an American, would piss for some employer to see if they violate such a law.

   But the citizens through their elected representatives- are you listening, President Obama?- must require government to compel the companies to secure these rights, through laws that are enforced. The American people just cannot and will not stand up, yet.

   The Chilling passage that Rosen selects from the Olmsted opinion of Brandeis is this:

   “Brandeis noted that at the time of the framing of the Constitution, a far less intrusive search — namely breaking into someone’s home and riffling through their desk drawers to identify a critic of King George III — was the quintessential example of an unreasonable search,” Rosen says, “[Brandeis added] that it was now possible to invade the privacy of people on both ends of a telephone wire. And then … Brandeis looked forward to the age of cyberspace. He said, “Ways may someday be developed — without breaking into desk drawers — to extract papers from home and introduce them in court before a jury… The court should translate the Constitution and recognize that you don’t need a physical trespass to create an unreasonable search.”

Terry Gross adds:

   Rosen says it took decades for the Supreme Court to embrace Brandeis’ insights. In 1967, the high court overruled Olmstead v. United States in the case Katz v. United States, which extended the Fourth Amendment to include all areas where a person “has a reasonable expectation of privacy.” Law enforcement agents were then required to obtain a warrant before wiretapping suspects.

   The whole issue, too, we might remember, does not even begin to address the circumstance where courts would grant all warrants, or grant warrants without cause and call it cause.

   I will say again, Mr. Rosen, that I believe my former fiance was a person who was set on me due to proximity in my education, involuntary or compulsory proximity, to agents of the executive agencies, and that no one will even inquire as to whether what I say might be true. This woman came from a mile and a half from my University, the University of Dallas, and by coincidence I met her up here. By coincidence, I was invited to apply at the CIA after about a year at the university of Dallas, and by coincidence she was the secretary of my best friend at his company where they helped me to print my dissertation and book- all by coincidence. Astonishing, and it is also astonishing that our publications at UD were routinely pre-screened, and no one minded, astonishing that I figured out where the application offer came from and astonishing that that professor’s son now works for the CIA. Astonishing too that I have not had a moment’s peace since that discovery, have seen my hopes for family and career destroyed, etc, etc. Astonishing too that now these people have an interest in my being thought mad, and astonishing too that I have screamed bloody murder to my representatives and my university and nothing is done and no one will even inquire. Astonishing that WordPress blocks my search engine traffic so that all my traffic is word of mouth. Astonishing too that I am now much like Snowden, but I won’t leave. I have never seen a classified document in my life, and what I figure out for myself is my own. Much of this can be proven and demonstrated. Astonishing, though, that my fellow citizens, former teachers and fellow students, no one cares. Want to keep things secret? Don’t set women on people, get them to fall in love with them, then set them between friends so they will accuse one another and you all can glean the info.

   These methods are a bit more advanced than wiretapping. But modern spy theory, and advances in our political theory due to our reading especially of Machiavelli, have made these new powerful means possible, means no doubt to secure the representative democracy that Jefferson and Madison envisioned.

Rainwater Testing

It is of course important to test rainwater, though we are too poor to do this ourselves. The fellow from Sydney, Australia found the rainwater there to be just fine even close to Sydney, but again, one wants to consider what is upwind. My sister plowed her garden south of my collector, and suddenly clay dust is collecting in the plastic, though most is separated due to the hole off center. We have the Mount Salem dump just two miles south. A couple weeks ago, I had a bad case of something, I am looking up Montazuma’s Revenge, and cryptosporillia. The Garage kitty is the most likely cause of cryptosporillia, though this can come from contaminated water. The second most likely, though, is that I have repeatedly got stuck with Maxwell House French Roast on sale that causes diahrea and painful gas, which is not good if one already has blocked intestines and prostate trouble!

I am using only a coffee filter on my rainwater, again due to extreme poverty. But the graphite filter that comes from California, just invented, does this thing get out the parasite that causes cryptosporillia? And are these things cleanable, by rinsing them out backwards, and affordable because they are re-usable? Devising a filter that lasts very long will be extremely difficult if it is not cleanable by rinsing.

Yet, even with these problems, rainwater is obviously incomparably superior to leaden Flint ground and tap water, or Ann Arbor dioxin water. I am still just beating my head against the wall that people do not understand the simplest ideas, and trying to find and persuade investors. Again, I have six or seven patentable rain and water inventions, but no money, because I am a thinker who works for free and not a shyster on the take at every turn, as one third of America seems to prefer.

The Rainwater is Overflowing Again

Tonight I collected another five or so gallons, and had three left over from before. I’ll rotate it, as I do not know how long it stays fresh in re-used plastic jugs. I’v had plenty, though, for coffee and drinking, with some to store, again from just a 6 x 10 tarp system. I’m looking for my extra coffee filter basket, since to contour my filter inside the smooth funnel, I’m using a rock. Tonight, I forgot to set the Absopure bottle inside the trough, and so had to manually filter three gallons. Each day I listen on the radio to all the things they are having the residents of Flint do, such as “flush the pipes.” I hear them gradually catch on to how there is a problem with water everywhere “in Michigan,” from road salt. Soon enough, they will catch on to how this is not going to get better but worse, and water inventions are the next thing. They will soon accept rainwater from necessity, but they are sooo slow, and screaming bloody murder, no one will listen. I do not want to hear the Governor again deflect criticism by saying we should look for solutions, then when I write or call, have some chick give me references to submit inventions to industry. If I was already rich, I’d prob’ly never have thought of these things. Maybe I can go on that Donney Trump style T.V. show, and get booed off, since everyone knows one cannot drink rainwater. Wolfpeaches.

The Rainwater Collector Invention

Now I’v got it, Pastor Jackson and Representative Neeley of Flint: Interlocking 4×4 plastic collectors fused into the ground with adjustable stakes, each a little higher than the last, with a filter on that lowest one in the center suspended over you funnel and 5 gallon Absopure bottle or your nice clean Home Depot or Ace Hardware five gallon bucket. 6×10,* or sixty square feet is giving me plenty of pristine rainwater to drink here in may, but I want like 6 5 gallon Absopure bottles to store some away for July.

Type 1 plastic, the sort they use for Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice, is my favorite plastic so far. 3-D printers could produce these 4×4 plastic sheets that interlock so as to flow into the one below, making the collector expandable, for one person, a family, a neighborhood or a village. The corner ones flow at the diagonal, the central four at the sides, and the thing could be shaped to fit the yard, with the stakes making the height of each panel adjustable.These could be printed and on the ground in Africa tomorrow. And Hey, when it is not raining, take out the bucket, stake the tapered system close to the ground, and collect evaporating water as the survivalists do. I cannot believe the amount of evaporated water captured under a tarp in the sun, but the plastic too must be safe in the sun. Glass is best, but just too dangerous to work with. I still want to make garden sculpture rain collectors out of stone, all cleanable, with a place to set your bottle underneath!

These are all elaborations of my plastic tarp with a rock in it, ends rolled up in dowels and suspended over a frame, hole just off center over a filter funnel and bottle. Then came sew the filter to the bottom of the tarp, and my nephew says put a hose to connect the filter to the inside of the bottle: then one could ditch the funnel, having just the contoured filter packet on the bottom of the tarp. Yeah!

My Rainwater is pristine, especially compared to our well water. Today I made rainwater ice cubes, and brought in a quart of rain in a juice bottle for the old mum, who drinks the store-bought stuff.

And it the dry season, the 3-D printers could be set to make those triangular insulated people pod bed that are interlocking and expandable, the bed that keeps in the body heat for the homeless, refugees, and people who want to turn down the heat!

*so, 4×4 is only 16 square feet, but 6×10 is 60. Take 3×5=15 sq. ft., add on to one side, subtract one from the other side, one gets not 15 any more but 16? Go figger! But Five 4×4 panels would be 80, and with the diagonals, 8 4×4 sheets go around the one in the center, making 120 (or, 128) square feet of collection surface, with lots of stakes (16)! Oh, I forgot the one in the middle, 144. That is good for 10 gallons in a good rainstorm!

**The problem in Plato’s Meno is the diagonal of a square, an irrational number. So Aristotle teaches that the human things do not admit of the precision of mathematics, but Socrates knows he does not know, and knows where to look, in the question both of geometry and what is virtue.

So, Pastor Jackson and Representative Neeley, we should find entrepreneurs and investors, and make lemonade out of the Flint Water Crisis !

Overflowing Rainwater for Drinking

I have more drinkable rainwater than I can store, and am thoroughly sick of the nay- sayers who just assume that one cannot drink rainwater, though I learn more from them than they learn from me. One must indeed be careful, but even bottled water has plastic leaching into it, and of course our city water and well water is now not safe. People assume this stuff is “purified,” but how do we even know that the bottles were not left in the sun in transport? And where does water come from? Oh first we’ll run it through the poisoned ground, then down the drain and into the river, then through the leaded pipes, oh but well coat these with shit, then we’ll filter it, then we’ll drink it! And call anyone crazy who does not drink this instead of filtering the rainwater!

Indeed, the ground once did filter the water, and there was not air pollution for the rain to catch on the way down. But I’m betting on the water this side of those pipes.

Indeed we want to test the rain, and indeed I cannot afford to do it. But precipitation is a purifying process, like distilling though not as good. Again, when one boils water, where do the bubbles come from? If you do not know this, shut up and listen! (And I have never asked yet and been answered correctly.) People assume that no one they know can think of anything new, or that if one were worth listening to they would already be rich. They even become quite mean, and I will forgive, but not forget that this has occurred.

How do you think people who do it on their own become rich? I know a guy, his grandmother turned down an early offer to buy stock (or was it an offer of marriage?)from Henry Ford. If it were obvious, as it is to me, they would indeed be doping it already, and again I am very impatient watching the people of Flint eat lead.

So, again, take a piece of plastic 6 x 10, roll the edges in dowels, attack these as with a staple gun, go to the corner of your fenced back yard, add three 2 x 4’s to make a frame (one for a leg, the other two to complete the rectangle made with the corner of the cyclone fence. Place a rock in the suspended plastic, and a hole a few inches off center. Suspend a filter in a funnel in an Absopure bottle with a trough under it, as I do, secured by bricks, or even just stretch a cloth over a five gallon bucket for a collector and filter. You will have gallons of drinking water every time it rains, except downwind from an operation polluting factory. Get a rain barrel for bathing and washing, hook it to your gutter, and if you like, wash you roof with the hose before a rain, or even spread clean plastic. We are working on products made of the most food-safe plastic, printable with a 3-D printer if it can handle 6 x 10, and a model that folds like a card table made of sheet metal. We will have them at the hardware store as soon as we find investors.

I have gallons right now stored in fruit, water and even washed out milk jugs, more water than I can use, delivered to my home for just the effort of collecting.