Our Muncie M22 Government & the Greenspan Transform

November 9, 2021: This is just a relatively-quick overview (it was supposed to be, but I turned it into a rambling "screed," kind-of). The full details of this should be in my app, which is still in beta while I try to "perfect" (as much as I can) the app's voting/polling function. I'm very busy trying to directly address court corruption. I want to publish this "quick" note because Alan Greenspan is really getting up there, and when something goes wrong with his health, I'll be limited for a while in how much blame I can heap on him. I hope that Greenspan lives a long time and has all his faculties, so he can witness the full extent of the damage he has caused.

The Muncie M22 "rock crusher" could be shifted without a clutch. Apparently there was an M23, which was even tougher and which I just read about. I knew about the M22 back in the mid-late 70's when I unknowingly bruised a gear on a Hardinge lathe because I thought I could shift it like an M22 and not disengage the gears.

So here's my pretty-decent analogy about government and Muncie transmissions. Before I tell you, I want to say that the analogy spectrum is very subjective -- from p-poor through weak, through so-so, through pretty decent, through "okay," etc. until you reach mathematically-exact. You learn a mathematically-exact analogy in physics 101 (or by reading the ARRL Ham Radio handbook in the library when you were in jr. high, because you had been banned from checking it out anymore, due to your having kept it out too long), between electrical circuits and mechanical systems. You write down the equations for each, and you can draw a line from one term in one equation to the corresponding term in the other equation. You simply cannot deny that mathematical correspondence, so you predict that an electrical circuit will behave exactly like a mechanical system but in its own electrical world. You then measure the voltage and current in the electrical circuit, and you see the theory in reality. This is one version of the scientific method, which you learn about in 7th grade General Science with Mr. Wright -- or probably earlier than 7th grade, now. The math is the key. Math is always the key for a solution that make transportation or communication work. Those two things are the most important things for humans, after the basics that we all know. I've discussed this previously in my highly-disorganized blogs. In particular on the whiteboard at the Constitutional Convention.

So, in our Muncie 21 government, there is a working clutch because you need a clutch to shift an M21. There was an M21 close ratio on my '69 Chevelle SS that I got in the early 80s for $1200, which I saw in the pre-Besozian newspaper classifieds, near a place called Montgomery Mall, which I hadn't been to in a long time then, but cannot presently go to because there's a "body attachment" arrest warrant on me in that dreadful place called Maryland. A run-on sentence is the kind of thing someone like the underground-man in Notes from Underground might lapse into as he gets angrier and angrier at something -- at corrupt judges, for instance.

The clutch is Congress or a state's legislature. The clutch allows the power from the engine, which is Mr. Peebles (formerly known as We the People), to transfer power smoothly to the transmission. The transmission has many gears and is the executive branch. Let's pretend that, rather than a four-speed transmission, the transmission has one gear for however-many government departments there are. Or you can give the transmission a gear for however many government employees and contractors there are. There are a huge number. I've been a gov. contractor. I was a gov employee when I was a summer student. Practically all engineering grad students (and professors) are indirectly government contractors because so many grants come from the government or places that have government funding. I'm just noting a reality. This isn't necessarily a bad thing because we need technology for our military, and our economy depends very strongly on our military, through the strength of the dollar. Don't laugh when I mention "strength" of the dollar. I'll get to the Greenspan Transform, shortly. The point here, in my quasi-rambling, is that the Clutch-Congress is supposed to transmit power smoothly from the Engine-Mr. Peebles to the complicated, many-geared Executive-Transmission. So where are the courts, you ask?

Good question! The courts are the very-small pilot bearing at the back of the transmission's input shaft. The pilot bearing often isn't even a bearing, like a ball bearing or a roller bearing, because it doesn't take any thrust or side load. Even on the M21, which is a really beefy transmission, the pilot bearing is an Oilite bushing, which is a brass donut impregnated with oil. It just pilots the input shaft by keeping it from moving laterally and misaligning -- the way a pilot drill bit starts a hole in-alignment, before the big bit digs in. The courts are simply to keep things in alignment with the laws Congress passes -- and the Constitution -- as Clutch-Congress transmits power from Engine-Mr. Peebles to the Transmission-Executive. The courts-pilot (deliberately lower case) bearing isn't supposed to move things around with any strong force. It is supposed to simply keep the Executive-Transmission aligned with the real power -- from Engine-Mr Peebles through Clutch-Congress. I'm getting repetitive and heavy-handed because I'm really pissed off about the courts.

The input-shaft bearing takes the side load (along with the gears and dog clutches and more). My input shaft bearing lost-it on the Pennsylvania Turnpike near Somerset, PA , where I was towed to Roger Saylor's Dodge and treated fantastically. This was about 1980. I took a bus to Cleveland to see my buddy, but, like the worrywart I was, I fretted over what I thought would be a huge bill for a used tranny and installation. The whole thing was something like $350, which was a bargain even back then. Roger was my hero, and I told him so after I took the bus back to Somerset to get my car. I think he may be gone now. I know. Somerset was where the plane went down. Plane crash survivors need to prepare before they talk about plane crashes because it can get...tough. I have thoughts about it, but not now.

I had driven too much in 5th gear up the relatively-gentle hills on the PA turnpike, with a noisy input-shaft bearing. I knew it was weak because it was noisy, but I didn't think carefully: that 5th gear put more of a side load on it than did 4th gear. In 4th gear, the engine revs higher, but there's less side load on the input shaft, because there's less force on the gear teeth. So in order to baby a defective input-shaft bearing, the engine takes more wear. This is similar to a defective part of the Executive branch requiring more work from Mr. Peebles, transmitted through Clutch-Congress with higher revs. If some part of the Executive is not doing its job, Mr, Peebles and its (Big Magilla) Clutch-Congress have to work harder. I'm not afraid, in the least, of working hard and even harder. I've had a great many obstacles to overcome, especially in the last 10 years.

So, one defective part in the system causes other parts to wear faster and risk system failure, requiring a tow truck. I was broken with my systems failing after my plane crash. And rescue 4x4's driven by police and firefighters and EMTs were the tow trucks that took me to the first hospital. I have a lot on my mind and a lot of motivation.

BTW, I broke the worn final drive on a motorcycle in a similar way -- at least I think so. I was going up I5 towards Mt. Shasta. I should have used 4th gear instead of 5th, similarly, to take the load off the final drive. To be frank, though, I'm not positive it was the same situation, because I'm not sure there's more side load on the final drive in 5th. I'd need to look at a diagram.

What if the courts-pilot bearing isn't doing its job. I'm pretty sure that in a real transmission, the pilot bearing hardly ever fails. You usually replace the pilot bearing when you drop the tranny because it's so cheap. Input shaft bearings fail (as I know) and clutch throw-out bearings wear, and you replace them with the clutch. But if the pilot Oilite bushing fails -- and I'm guessing now and going to make some assumptions -- I'm guessing it would fail because it was never replaced when it should have been. I'm guessing it would run out of lubrication, and then the heat and wear would cause the hole to grow and let the input shaft get out of alignment, and probably wander. That would cause misalignment in the gears and synchronizers and perhaps the dog clutches would be affected, too (but this is starting to get way beyond my good knowledge). So, my analogy is that the court system is so archaic -- like a pilot bushing that hasn't been changed and is still dependent on decades (or a century) old lubrication. Its ability to keep the input shaft in alignment is very poor. Its alignment-hole's diameter increases with wear, and the input-shaft alignment gets sloppy and causes misalignments and malfunctions in the transmission, generally. I think misalignment of the input shaft could cause extra wear on the input-shaft bearing, which could cause the clutch plate to get canted and then wobbly. So, Clutch-Congress and, in turn, Engine-Mr. Peebles start feeling the pain, over time, of the bad courts-pilot bearing. In other words, over a long time, defective courts cause problems for everything and everyone. Mr. Floyd and Mr. Daniel Shaver were two people whose problems were very big problems caused by defective courts.

This is also the reason that courts have been able to fly under the radar as they do their damage. People don't notice the courts' slow deterioration away from the actual law -- the way the pilot busing loses its lube over time. Corruption grows slowly over time, in the shadows and under the radar.

I've mentioned a few times in my blogs the Auden poem (Google-search doggy life innocent behind). The bad stuff grows in the shadows and under the radar. The courts have been the problem, not Trump. The courts are the root cause. A president is in the spotlight. The courts are in the shadows. Trump spotlighted the courts. Not all was fair about it, but courts know very little about fairness -- or the actual law, like Rooker-Feldman. The courts are still the problem.

I acknowledge that I don't really know how courts have performed -- or deteriorated -- over the decades, because I really don't have any long-term hard statistics on how the courts have performed. There are recent statistics on federal caseload, but that is only part of the story. Courts complain all the time about "scarce judicial resources," and their complaints have skyrocketed with the pro-se "problem" (so-called), meaning people who don't hire a lawyer and, instead, use Google-scholar. I've seen plenty of courts that simply don't care a whit about "justice;" they just want to clear their dockets as fast as possible. I've seen a few impressive judges who have actually said they were going to take more time with a case because they needed to get it right -- not my case, but still, that was very impressive. And my case didn't require much time, anyway -- not at that particular point. I have a fair amount of data.

So, what's the Greenspan Transform have to do with any of this and my rambling? The Greenspan Transform changes equity into debt. Equity is stock in a company. You're not guaranteed any return from equity. You may get a return by the stock going up in price or by getting a dividend paid per share of stock. Debt gives you some level of "guarantee" that you will be paid interest. You have some expectation of an interest payment at a promised rate. The promise may be worth a lot -- as is the US Government's promise, in theory and in some fact -- or the promise may be worth very little.

When a company is in trouble, the stock price drops and can drop to zero. For eons, that was called "tuff luck, pal." The promise the company made to debt holders was stronger than that, and the strength was reflected in the debt rating -- A, B, C and with multiple letters sometimes and with "junk" in there, sometimes.

Sometimes, the debt holders were able to "swap" debt for stock that is a new class of stock after the original stockholders got the "tough luck, pal." That was a transformation of debt into equity. That is a doable thing and has been done plenty of times when a company is in trouble.

The Greenspan Transform is kind of the reverse. It transforms stock into a debt-like creature that doesn't really exist. The GT created the near-universal expectation in the US, that the "stock market" would provide some statistically-guaranteed rate of return over some "long" number of years.

There are reversible and irreversible physical processes. There was a guy named Dr. Elvis N. Tropy, who was all shook up about these physical processes. Dr. Elvis showed that physical processes can be kind-of (theoretically) reversed but only under very specific circumstances. Debt can be transformed into equity, but the reverse is not true. The process is not reversible. Debt is more constrained than is equity; debt has more rules controlling it. Debt is like a horse in a corral. You can let the horse out of the corral where it has fewer constraints, but it can be really hard -- and sometimes impossible -- to get the horse back into the corral. Equity can't actually be transformed into debt. The GT has attained a pseudo-violation (fake violation) of this irreversible process, and it has managed to do so for 30 years -- transforming equity into a statistically pseudo-reliable rate of return. You cannot put a wild equity horse into the debt corral -- not really and not for any long period. Soros understood this and still does. The Greenspan Transform pseudo-violation of physical law is likely coming to an end soon.

The particular way the Engine-Mr. Peebles takes in air and fuel to generate economic power is through the efficiencies of its intake system. In the Mopar Hemi configuration, there was (and I think still is, in its latest configuration) a hemispherical combustion chamber that allowed a particularly-even distribution of fuel-air mixture and heat transfer...so inefficient and damaging detonations were sort of minimized. The fundamental problem with how the economy's "fuel" (money) is introduced into the combustion chamber and mixed with "air" (human ingenuity that, over time comes up with some really-great achievements -- there's an airhead joke in there somewhere) is a really big design deal. The reality is nowhere close to any ideal "uniform" distribution -- the goal of an efficient combustion chamber. There are neat tricks, like the Honda CVCC, which created a "controlled vortex" with the fuel-air mixture. But there are always going to be some bad distributions of fuel-air when introduced into the economy's combustion chamber. What do I really mean here with all my babbling? I mean that the Federal Reserve puts money into the economy and does a p-poor job of distributing it equally. Don't be fooled by "equally;" putting money into the economy equally is not the dreaded "socialism" or whatever ism. It is the closest a controlled money system can get to a free market. But it's never equally. The people near the money center banks have an advantage. You know where the money center banks are, right? Not in Toledo or Oshkosh.

Greenspan and his transform assume that the efficiencies of introducing money-fuel into the economic combustion chamber through the money-center banks -- to unite with human ingenuity -- are high. He is wrong. Greenspan's latest carbon copy, Powell, is following the same wrong formula, but he really doesn't have much choice, given where we are. (And Yellen is actually a much bigger problem than Powell, as her fingerprints are all over the place, including places they never should have been, like Citadel.)

There is now much less actual reserve power in Engine-Mr Peebles, than when Greenspan started his transform, about 1990, a few years after he got into the driver seat. There are no easy solutions. Easy, naive promises -- by JD Vance in particular, but all of the spotlighted Ohio candidates -- don't take into account where we are along the curve of the failure-modes of the Greenspan Transform. In other words, how far up s**t creek are we and how broken is our economic paddle? Rather far and pretty bad. Sorry.

But I think it may not be hopeless. I am sure that the same old babble -- like Vance's "bring jobs back to Ohio" -- won't do it. There needs to be more, and you need to deal with China in the right way. Vance doesn't actually understand this, though he gabs about China. He doesn't even know how to keep his domain name active. (ourohiorenewal.com Buy now for: $2,795 Questions? Talk to a domain expert: 1-303-893-0552.) "Details aren't my thing," Vance said.

Venture Capitalists must have at least some engineering background and/or curiosity because you need to analyze the details of a prospective investment. And all actual startups have some technology that they claim gives them a competitive advantage. Ohioans may just be ignored details on Vance's trail to prezville. The "renewal" of his Ohio website's internet domain was just a detail he overlooked. Sorry to his supporters, but I don't believe Vance is authentic.

So much for my, as usual, "quick" overview. There will be more in my app, believe it or not. And it will be a lot clearer. One "teaser" I will leave you with is: why has our government become an M22 government? Because Clutch-Congress is not doing its job. When the clutch is defective (not necessarily worn so it's slipping), then Engine-Mr. Peebles has no way of smoothly transferring power to the transmission. Power goes directly to the transmission in jolting shifts. That is a direct democracy. That, in a sense, is what has been happening over time. It is not a healthy, efficient form of government for a big country. It may possibly be good on the quarter-mile strip, but it doesn't cut it for the long haul. The M22 "rockcrusher" was designed to take a beating, but engineers and other real-world, hands-on types know that every piece of hardware has its limit -- its point of failure.

About John: Engineer - electronic hardware design and test; MSEE Stanford/Ginzton Lab-applied physics; B.A. Oberlin College, physics, math. email: john4midwest@gmail.com . John will not immediately reply to requests for comment, where "immediately" may be >1 year, especially in the case of the Chant Now Network,