Barry Ashby

Things are coming together, as they say. This column was published around Election Day 2020 and completes 48 consecutive years of my writing it. Over this time, seven out of 10 reader responses have been kind and positive.

More and more citizens’ life happenings are outside of their control, arranged by bureaucracies. That is an important thought to consider as we look at a continuously declining public education system that has degraded over the last 50 years. And what is the result to the national industrial base and citizens’ collective future?

This article was written on Aug. 3, 2020. As you read this, a world calamity in China may have occurred or soon will.

In March, this column discussed the types of fuels used worldwide for electricity generation and where new gas and oil pipelines will be built. In August 2019, we talked about the need for better waste-to-energy (WTE) furnaces, especially those burning municipal trash.

I often say my lifelong job has been to “watch government(s) and report how they screw things up.” Abraham Lincoln said, “We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the Courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who would pervert the Constitution.”

It was early summer of 1979 when I was in Abu Dhabi to give a presentation to the king, Sheikh Zayed. As was common practice, such meetings were held at “reception.”

We have learned in modern physics that only 4% of energy in the universe is what we know – electricity, magnetism, gravity and light, for example – and the other 96% in all creation is “dark energy” (68%) and “dark matter” (27%).

It was mid-1963 that I met John, who was working at the CIA, and we became friends. He was doing security inspections at embassies worldwide when we discussed the rising threats of audio surveillance and a need to curtail it, especially when telephones were used for eavesdropping.

As a reader of this journal, you know that you work in the largest energy-consuming sector of the U.S. manufacturing economy. You should also know some of the details and nuances of what this can mean.

My family settled in “the valley” (Shenandoah) in the 1640s. Later, the “war” devastated the entire area, to the extent that it took 90 years (1960) for the local population in northern Virginia to return to pre-war levels.