A friend of mine was an intern at Bellvue Hospital in New York. A 28-year old man from Aruba said he was going to die, because he had been cursed. He was admitted for psychiatric evaluation and found to be normal, but his health steadily declined. My friend was able to rehydrate him, balance his electrolytes, and give him nutrients, but nevertheless the man worsened, insisting that he was cursed and there was nothing that could prevent his death. My friend realized that the patient would, in fact, soon die. The situation was desperate. Finally he told the patient that he, the doctor, was going to invoke his own powerful medicine to undo the curse, and his medicine was more powerful than any other. He got together with the house staff, bought some headdresses and rattles, and danced around the patient in the middle of the night, chanting what they hoped would be effective-sounding phrases. The patient showed no reaction, but next day he began to improve. The man went home a few days later. My friend literally saved his life.

as David Brinkley once said, “The one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.”

Would Citibank have spent the money to fix its Y2K problem without government urging? Of course, because not to do so would have put them out of business. The same is true of other banks and businesses around the world. Yet government takes the credit.

According to Jesse Ausubel of the Rockefeller Institute, industrialized nations have been decarbonizing their energy sources for 150 years, meaning we are moving away from carbon toward hydrogen. In other words, the ratio of carbon to hydrogen decreases as you go from wood and hay (1:1) to coal to oil to gas (1:4). Here is an illustration from one of his articles: