The water engine

There’s a sucker born every minute – and there’s Fox News to take advantage of him. Rising Gasoline prices have resurrected many a scheme to fool the rubes into investing in perpetual motion type schemes the likes of which we last saw during the Great Depression – engines that run on water and things you put in your tank that miraculously slash operating costs. Rising energy costs, declining educational standards and information technology have recombined to make this truly the golden age of bullshit.

Always at the forefront when it comes to bullshit is Fox and a video clip has been making the rounds wherein their sock puppets rave on about wonderful new technology that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen “magnecules” called HHO gas that can then be recombined to give energy. Of course this is basically 19th century technology wrapped in technobabble and bullshit, but in a country where most of us think the world started last Wednesday it seems new. The problem with the notion that you can run a car on hydrogen by using the output of its engine to generate that hydrogen is that it requires an electrolytic process that is substantially more than 100% efficient. That’s the basis of all perpetual motion frauds. Fox also shows a hydrogen cutting torch supplied by this marvelous technology and gushes about how hot it gets – just as Navy divers did in the 1920’s when they were used for underwater salvage.

There’s nothing new under the sun but there’s always something new under the pile of bullshit. A popular myth during the 1930’s was that putting mothballs in your tank increased your mileage. It didn’t and it doesn’t, but myths are durable and memory is short and there’s one born every minute. A firm in Texas, the state that gave us the Sultan of Bullshit himself, has been selling bottles of little pills made of the same materials as moth balls and urinal deodorant cakes that will do wonders for your mileage – or so they say. The Texas Attorney General says otherwise.

Now that Gold is hovering around $700 per ounce, I expect there to be some new developing technology for producing it from lead. You’ll hear about it on Fox any day now and it will be something those plutocrat liberals have been suppressing because they don’t want you to cash in. . . . .