 exciting episode of Stan Energy Man, Stan Osserman. Coming to you live from the windward side of Oahu, Kailua, Hawaii, and glad to be with you. So he's gonna be a little bit of a different show. It's gonna take off from last week's show where we talked about energy and power and the relationship and the differences between energy and power. But I'm gonna kind of focus on the power side and even get into a little bit of what we might be called non-traditional power or power other than directly related to energy. And even talk a little bit about some of the lessons learned that I hope we've learned from the current pandemic. So last week when we talked about energy and power, I said that energy was basically the source of motivation or mechanics to get things moving. So energy comes in many, many forms. You can have light energy, you can have sound waves, you can have nuclear energy, you can have heat, you can have motion, you can have gravity, pulling a heavy rock down a hill, potential energy. You have kinetic energy for two things banging into each other. You have a lot of energy, but the main thing that you have to understand about energy is the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy can either be created or destroyed. It just changes form. So when people think about energy and whether we could actually run out of energy, I can safely tell you that if we ever run out of energy, we don't have to worry about it because none of us will be here. The entire universe from the atomic level up to the solar system level requires energy to keep it functioning. And so when you think about energy, and I said this last week, if you think about it at the atomic level, the example I've been taught is that if you had an atom, the protons and neutrons would be like a basketball sitting on the 50-yard line of a football stadium and that the electrons would be little tiny mosquitoes whizzing around in the upper bleacher section. So in essence, most atoms are empty of actual material other than these particles that are either stationary in the center of the atom, protons and neutrons, or the electrons whizzing around the outside. And then when you get to explaining what energy does for you and how you can change forms from heat energy to electric energy or light energy to electric energy or heat energy to mechanical energy and things like that, that's where the term power comes in. When you actually have energy doing work, some kind of work, that's called power. So you have a gasoline engine running off of gasoline fuel and it's turning the pistons in a crankshaft and giving you torque and power at your wheels for your vehicle and that's power. If you have a nuclear power plant that's super heating water into steam and running it across turbines, excuse me, that's another kind of energy. So that's another kind of power. Then you can have solar panels that take light energy and turn it into electricity, DC electricity. And then you can take the DC electricity and run it through an inverter and get AC electricity. So that energy doesn't get lost, it just changes from one thing to another and gives us the ability to do work so that we as people aren't using our own calories and our own muscles to do the work but we're using other things to help us get work done without expending our own personal energy. And I mean, you can even look at the body, the human body takes in food and oxygen and nutrients and stuff and we can move our muscles, our heart pumps, our brain works and it's all based on the same kind of energy cycles that provide us fossil fuels and things like that. Fossil fuels are basically solar energy that's been captured in part of this cycle of plants and when the plant dies and starts to decay underground or pressure and things like that, it turns into either coal or oil or natural gas. Methane natural gas is CH4, so it's four hydrogen and then one carbon atom but it basically comes from plants. So the term fossil fuels a little bit of a misnomer because it's really not dead dinosaurs, it's mostly dead plants and decaying plants. So anyway, when it comes to power though, there's, I say two kinds of power, there's a kind of physical power that we talk about with energy and then there's a nontraditional power but it's just as real a power. It's power that you're all aware of and I start to start to mention the different examples, you'll be able to appreciate it. You have military power. I mean, the military might have a country is certainly a power. In fact, the actual ordinance that military people use in combat to provide kinetic impact and bombs and things like that, that's basically kinetic energy. It's power using energy and kinetic forces to deliver a course of force on somebody else's army or military. So you have military power but that's not the only kind of power I mean, think about the other end of the spectrum. You have the power of love, you know, the power of love and the power of faith and the power that you have in religions and in meditation and things. That has a whole nother power to it on the other end of the spectrum that it's a lot harder to get your head around but it's just as powerful. Those faith and things like that have moved mountains and done tremendous things. You have economic power. You have companies that make lots of money and do great work and great philanthropists that take money and do powerful things with it for society and turn it into medications or feeding people that otherwise couldn't afford it. You have political power. You have the power of politicians to make laws and send those military people to war and establish national foreign policy and things like that and trade agreements. So that's all in the realm of politics but when you think about it, there's one more power that kind of has come into play in my mind, especially recently but in reality, I'm 66 years old and I've been around to see a lot of things in this world and in my mind, this last power that I had on my list is one that really has played a huge role and I guess the best way I could describe it is you'll quote, I believe it's from Shakespeare but the pen is mightier than the sword and in today's world, it's basically communications is a powerful tool. Information and communications is hand and glove between the two of them, probably one of the most influential powers that we see floating around today. So lessons learned during this COVID-19 pandemic that I think are important for us to take away, especially in that non-traditional power category are the fact that we've kind of experienced, intentionally or unintentionally, some things that have opened our eyes that have given us the personal energy and the personal power to recognize things that maybe we've just kind of been lulled into accepting or lulled into following or maybe just never really thought about it because we're so busy with our cell phones and our computers and our games and our movies and our TV shows and things like that. And so the two things that I really think shine for me in terms of this pandemic and power are number one, the fact that our American experiment in the Democratic Republic has insidiously been degraded over time. And if you try and explain the popularity of a Bernie Sanders and the socialist movement and stuff, you can probably say it's because a lot of people feel disenfranchised from the government. They feel like they're wasting their vote. Doesn't matter who you vote for because nothing ever changes. Voter apathy is higher than it's ever been up until probably the 2016 election. And people are just tired of wasting their time voting for people. And those people go to Congress and or to the White House or to their governor's office. The state legislature and things just never change except maybe get worse and very few things get fixed and a lot of things stay broken and there's crisis seemingly going on all the time and always nothing but problems. So in my mind, what I've seen over my lifetime of six decades is that in our federal government and in our state government, I've seen a lot of the power of the legislative branch migrate to the executive branch in a couple of ways. The legislature's supposed to draft the laws and it has the representatives of the people from the district level, the kind of like the community level in the house side and then from the state level or the broader population on the Senate side that are supposed to take and make legislation that helps guide our country and keeps us in a balanced budget situation and things like that and takes care of those big administrative things. But over the years, I've seen a lot of that power and a lot of that responsibility handed to the executive branch, to the governors and to the president and a lot of it's, I think because a lot of the legislative branches have just said, well, well, we have too much at risk. If we don't do this or that, we might not get elected. So we'd rather just push that responsibility to the president and the governor tell them to do it and then we don't have to risk putting our reputations on the line and risk not getting elected, especially on the house side where every two years you're up for reelection. So what we see is, we see a lot of the government shifting from the legislative power side back to the executive side. On the executive side is where all the people work. Not a whole lot of people work directly for legislators. I mean, they have their staff and things, but the majority of civil service lines up under the executive branch, under the governor, under the president. And when that happens and you develop a civil service and oh, by the way, I have 24 years of federal civil service, six years of state civil service and just shy of two years of county civil service. So I'm pretty experienced on civil service period and civil public workers unions and things. And have been a supervisor too. So I've had to deal with the union issues and also deal with the legislative folks and the congressional delegations for our state and the governor work with the governor quite a bit. So when it comes to watching that power shift, I'm a little bit nervous because in the civil service, we've got over the years is we have a larger and larger group of people who are not elected, who are appointed by elected officials, who get into positions, many of whom, if they're rank and file, they're not in SES level federal positions or senior state positions like department heads. They basically have a job for 25, 30 years. And it's almost impossible to fire a rank and file civil service person, especially if they're in a union, it's really difficult. So what we've got is we've got a big chunk of our government that is not elected. And if you don't like the policies and stuff that they're pushing and you don't reelect the president or whatever, nothing changes, the next president comes in unless he spends all of his energy trying to change the stuff to the way it should be and get rid of some of the people that aren't carrying out his policies, which you get is a lot of wasted time. Does this sound familiar to what we see going on right now? I think it's pretty obvious that we have a president that's frustrated by a bunch of people that he never changed out because he didn't have the bench to pick from and he's been fighting for three years. The other piece that comes with that shift of power to the executive branch is the fact that those executive branch departments, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Department of Land and Natural Resources or Education or whatever, they start to develop the EPA, they start to develop their own regulations and they start actually putting those regulations into play with penalties. So in essence, they're actually writing laws that aren't laws, they're just regulations, but they have the force of law. And then the courts, because of the way they were all structured, the courts will tend to back up the government and those rules as if they were laws. So our whole government system has shifted quite a bit and that's really one of the key things that has really gotten my attention over my generation, my lifetime. I've just kind of seen this insidious change in government to where back when I was a teenager or younger, the government had significant role to play, but it didn't control your life. I mean, you could still have a voice, you could still petition your congressman or whatever and they would actually listen to you, but that doesn't seem to happen as much nowadays. So I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that and then about the second part of non-traditional power that's really gotten my attention lately after we take a quick break. Aloha, I'm Krista Stadler, the host of Nonprofits Mean Business 2 on Think Tech, Hawaii. Nonprofits Mean Business 2 investigates the operational challenges and costs related to managing nonprofit organizations while encouraging our viewers to find a nonprofit organization that you're passionate about in our community. We are streamed live on Think Tech, Hawaii bi-weekly at 12 p.m. on Thursdays. Thank you so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. Mahalo. Hey, welcome back to Stan Energyman and Stan Osterman here. And we're talking about a kind of a transition from traditional energy and power into the non-traditional pieces of power that I've experienced over my life that are basically impacting our government and our foundational pieces of our constitution. You know, the constitution was designed so that unlike any other government that's ever existed on the face of the earth, that the power to run the country rested in the hands of the citizens. The term of, by and government, of, by and for the people is enshrined in what we call our basic tenants of our government, of our constitution. And our constitution gives us a framework of how the Congress is set up and relates to the president and how the military is set up and fits in the whole picture and how the states relate to the federal government. And then the first 10 amendments to the constitution called the Bill of Rights gives us things like, you know, our ability to speak freely, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to assemble, lawfully assemble and petition the government with grievances, the right to keep and bear arms, which I'd like to point out as a personal note, the right to keep and bear arms is the only Bill of Rights amendment that allows us to have any other amendments or any part of the constitution. Because if you give the government all the power, including the power of the civilians to arm themselves, then the government can have unlimited power over you because you can't fight back. So a lot of people think that the second amendment was just there so that the pilgrims could hunt turkeys at Thanksgiving and, you know, people could go hunting for their food and defend themselves in their home, all good things. But the second amendment is really there as a check and balance, which is what our whole system is set up with, a check and balance against an overpowerful government that won't listen to the people anymore. And that's just scared the bejeebies out of anybody that's thinking about, you know, taking down our government. It certainly has dissuaded a lot of the enemies of our country to ever invade this country when they realize that for every man, woman and child in our population, there's at least one weapon in the circulation. And that should scare a whole lot of people into making sure that we have the ability to demand by force, if necessary, a change in our government if it ever gets too tyrannical. But basically our government is starting to fall apart for a couple of big reasons. And if it was me deciding what were the key issues for the country today and what should be the key things that politicians should be campaigning on, they would be these three things. First of all, campaign spending reform. I don't think it's right that lobbyists and special interest groups should be able to go into a congressional members office or the president's office or the governor's office and say, hey, you know, we'd really appreciate this kind of work and or this kind of benefit or this kind of law. And oh, by the way, last year we contributed $100,000 or $10,000 to your campaign fund or we're contributing to this political action committee and they're gonna give you a big chunk of their money if you help us fight for this special interest or that special interest. And these special interests aren't just companies. A lot of people get, you know, bent that it's all big business and it's not like the NRA only who fight for Second Amendment rights and people say they're just a big lobbying group for the gun manufacturers, trust me there. We don't sell a whole lot of guns in the United States compared to military weapons that are sold all over the world that are made by other companies besides the ones that support the NRA. But there's also the folks from non-for-profits from churches, from church groups, all kinds of folks, lobby politicians. And it's gotten out of control. And we need to have campaign spending reform where say if you're gonna run for president, the government's gonna give you a million dollars to run your campaign. And if you're gonna run for Senate, if you have Senate, they're gonna give you, you know, $300,000 to run your campaign. And everybody's on a level playing field and it comes out of taxes. And we just cover it that way, but nobody can buy influence in our legislative or executive branch. The second thing I would do is term limits. Now, interestingly enough, a lot of young politicians promise when they come to Washington to introduce a bill on term limits and almost every year in the state legislature and in Congress, a bill on term limits does come up and guess what, it never passes. It never gets anywhere because if you're counting on the legislative branch to limit their power, and there's that word again, power, they won't do it. They just, they can't do it. They, it's like, they would be considered cutting their own throat if they limited their terms. I would think what would be reasonable is 20 years in Congress. That would give you 10 terms as a House of Representative member and maybe two or three terms as a Senator plus one or two or three terms as a Congressman. I mean, that's a 20 year career. And oh, by the way, some of those rules that the executive branch has set up in their departments, those are the same things that happened in Congress. The House and the Senate set up these rules so that they basically have seniority issues or the senior ranking person of the party that's got control of the House or the Senate can literally at this point in time, stop legislation and blame the other party for not doing anything because they can't. Because we've let Congress centralize power in one or two people. If you don't think that's true, just look at what's going on today with Nancy Pelosi. All by herself, one woman can sit down and say, hey, we want this law to go through. And then course all the members from her party to vote for it or show black ball them. And the ones that don't wanna vote for it, probably will anyway, because they're at risk of losing a bunch of their funding for their campaigns from the DNC or people will break from the party at risk and great peril because they really don't like the bill but they're doing it at great risk. And that's an unfair thing to put our legislators up against in their job where they have to play politics every day with bills and legislation as it comes through. That's just wrong. So campaign spending reform, number one, term limits, number two. And with the term limits, I'd also say refining the rules of the House and Senate. So we can't centralize power in just one or two people out of a body of 500 people where we can just stop legislation or basically force the president to use like President Obama said, I got a cell phone and a pen, I'll just write an executive order and make it happen. If the Congress doesn't wanna take action, I'll just make it happen and let the courts figure out if it's legal or not. That has a lot of weight and you've seen President Obama do it a lot and you're starting to see President Trump do it a lot because if Congress ain't gonna move, then boom, he'll just do it. And you know what happens then? We've got 500-something people sitting in the state in the US Capitol getting paid a lot of money with big staffs getting paid a lot of money and they're not doing squat. So if you're frustrated with government, start demanding that some of those things like term limits, campaign spending reform and getting rid of lobbyists as the last one and reforming the lobbying rules so that we can't have so much soft corruption filtering into our political process. So the second thing I think we've learned besides the impact to our country and our government from the power, the non-traditional power shift and we picked up from coronaviruses that we've kind of let too much stuff get outside our personal control. Right now, government and technology basically control us. And this virus kind of gave us a picture of that as people started getting frustrated because they couldn't go back to work or they couldn't leave their houses and they were being told by the government they couldn't even when a lot of times the quote-unquote scientific data really didn't justify some of the draconian limitations they put on everybody. They felt frustrated and they began to realize that insidiously over decades and decades we've given our government and technology the power to control us. And I mentioned last week in the show, imagine if the grid went down across the US for a week. The folks out in the country that live on the farm they'd be okay, they can slaughter a cow, they got chicken eggs, they got fruits, vegetables, they can trade with their neighbors, they'll get by. But if there is no grid power in a high rise in New York City or LA or a big factory all those people would be idle. No pay, no production, no nothing. People living in high rises, no electricity meaning walking up 30, 40, 60 flights of stairs or in New York City maybe a hundred flights of stairs. No water, because after a couple of days the water supply on the roof is gone they can't pump water up there so there's no water in the building to flush a toilet to drink to do anything with. A city without a grid would be total chaos in a matter of hours if not just a couple of days. It would be total chaos. And same with technology, my wife's a teacher was a teacher, she retired now but some of her kids would go to like a summer Hawaiian studies program. And when the kids would get out into these remote areas where there wasn't cell phone coverage some of the kids literally started having psychological issues where they couldn't be separated from their Facebook or their Twitter or social contact or being able to contact their friends or their parents like instantly and they would have to be sent home from these programs because they couldn't handle it. And it's like really have we gone that far and the answer unfortunately is yes. We've again insidiously after time we've just watched these things kind of go slowly away from us and we've accepted it. And so now if you take them away from us you're literally your life isn't at risk. And in reality that's where we get back to Stan the energy man's primary mission which is talking about clean renewable sustainable energy. We need to use the energy of the falls from the sky blows with the wind runs downhill with the stream of water through a hydroelectric turbine to get the electric energy we need. And we need to store extra energy in hydrogen or things that are non-carbon based storage mediums not just batteries but flywheels and hydrogen and things like that so that we can be self-sufficient and self-sustaining. We don't have to depend on other countries for fuel or for critical things like lithium or cobalt for our batteries. We don't have to depend on other countries for drugs and we certainly certainly should have become a socialist globally networked one big government thing and watch our broken government turn into a international broken system which is what all the socialist stuff will drive us to. So a little bit of a different twist on energy and power but I hope it gives you something to think about and I hope you'll really think about elections this year and what's important this year and take some lessons learned from this COVID pandemic and really understand and think hard about what you've got what you may have given up without knowing it and demanding a lot more out of our leaders and our government than we've been getting. So until next week is a Stan Energy Man signing off Aloha.