Category Archives: Technology

The Real Cost of Wind and Solar, by Norman Rogers

Posted on September 30, 2020 | Leave a comment

Take the numbers in this article with a grain of salt, but there’s no disputing the central argument—wind and solar can’t stand on their own two feet yet economically, they need government subsidies. From Norman Rogers at americanthinker.com:

The main problem with either wind or solar is that they generate electricity erratically, depending on the wind or sunshine. In contrast, a fossil-fuel plant can generate electricity predictably upon request. Blackouts are very expensive for society, so grid operators and designers go to a lot of trouble to make sure that blackouts are rare. The electrical grid should have spare capacity sufficient to meet the largest demand peaks even when some plants are out of commission.  Plants in spinning reserve status stand by ready to take over if a plant trips (breaks down). Injecting erratic electricity into the grid means that other plants have to seesaw output to balance the ups and downs of wind or solar.

Adding wind or solar to a grid does not mean that existing fossil fuel plants can be retired. Often, neither wind nor solar is working and at those times a full complement of fossil fuel plants, or sometimes nuclear or hydro plants, must be available. Both wind and solar have pronounced seasonality. During low output times, as for summer wind, the fossil-fuel plants are carrying more of the load. Of course, solar stops working as the sun sets.

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Chevrolet Releases California-Compliant Horse And Buggy

Posted on September 28, 2020 | Leave a comment

From the Babylon Bee:

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The Making of a Market, by Eric Peters

Posted on September 26, 2020 | Leave a comment

Where does a state governor get the power to wave a wand and decree that by 2035, there will be no gas powered cars on the roads? From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

Well, the other shoes has dropped. We now know how a “market” for electric cars will be created.

It will be done by outlawing the market for cars that aren’t electric.

Having trouble selling Tab?

Forbid the sale of Coke and Pepsi!

California Governor (and Gesundheitsfuhrer) Gavin Newsome has simply decreed – via “executive order” – that anything that isn’t “zero emissions” (at the tailpipe) must be “phased out” by 2035. This means only electric cars since they are the only vehicles considered to be “zero “emissions” by the regs – no matter their elsewhere emissions – including the substantial carbon dioxide “emissions” produced by the utility plants that generate the electricity they run on.

Which there will be more of when the only cars permitted on California roads are electric. But never mind. It feels good – to the Gesundheitsguv – like the wearing of any old rag to “stop the spread” of a virus you haven’t got.

The effects will also be felt a lot sooner than fifteen years from now.

And not just in California, either.

The car companies are going to stop putting R&D money toward cars they can’t sell in California – the biggest market for cars in the country – and toward the ones they’ll be forced to sell.  

In other states, too. Because it’s likely at least some will follow California’s lead – having their own Gesundheitsguvs in charge.

Development of new non-electric cars nationally will stagnate.

The ones that remain in production will sell for more, to offset the costs of developing electric cars. The more states that force-electrify, the more expensive the non-electric car will become – until the goal is achieved of making the non-electric car at least as expensive as electric cars.

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Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Economics, Economy, Energy, Government, Technology

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Coronavirus Gives a Dangerous Boost to DARPA’s Darkest Agenda, by Whitney Webb

Posted on September 19, 2020 | Leave a comment

The coronavirus outbreak is the latest in a long line of so-called emergencies by which the government expands its powers and curtails our freedom. From Whitney Webb at thelastamericanvagabond.com:

Technology developed by the Pentagon’s controversial research branch is getting a huge boost amid the current coronavirus crisis, with little attention going to the agency’s ulterior motives for developing said technologies, their potential for weaponization or their unintended consequences.

In January, well before the coronavirus (Covid-19) crisis would result in lockdowns, quarantines and economic devastation in the United States and beyond, the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon were working with the National Security Council to create still-classified plans to respond to an imminent pandemic. It has since been alleged that the intelligence and military intelligence communities knew about a likely pandemic in the United States as early as last November, and potentially even before then.

Given this foreknowledge and the numerous simulations conducted in the United States last year regarding global viral pandemic outbreaks, at least six of varying scope and size, it has often been asked – Why did the government not act or prepare if an imminent global pandemic and the shortcomings of any response to such an event were known? Though the answer to this question has frequently been written off as mere “incompetence” in mainstream media circles, it is worth entertaining the possibility that a crisis was allowed to unfold.

Why would the intelligence community or another faction of the U.S. government knowingly allow a crisis such as this to occur? The answer is clear if one looks at history, as times of crisis have often been used by the U.S. government to implement policies that would normally be rejected by the American public, ranging from censorship of the press to mass surveillance networks. Though the government response to the September 11 attacks, like the Patriot Act, may be the most accessible example to many Americans, U.S. government efforts to limit the flow of “dangerous” journalism and surveil the population go back to as early as the First World War. Many of these policies, whether the Patriot Act after 9/11 or WWI-era civilian “spy” networks, did little if anything to protect the homeland, but instead led to increased surveillance and control that persisted long after the crisis that spurred them had ended.

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Benz Gets Dieseled, by Eric Peters

Posted on September 18, 2020 | Leave a comment

The government wants to force diesel cars off the market and promote electric cars, as Mercedes Benz is finding out. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

It’s not just VW’s diesels that were targeted for termination. Mercedes has also found itself in the crosshairs – allegedly for the same reason, i.e., “cheating” on government emissions certification tests. In fact, for selling cars that posed an existential threat to the electric car.

There is no other reasonable explanation.

Car companies are routinely choke-chained for running afoul of various regulatory ukase; mostly, though, it’s not a garish public inquisition and ruinous fines are not applied. As an example, the treatment meted out to Ford over the Pinto’s tendency to burst into flames if hit just right in the tail (the actual number of fires was low relative to the huge number of Pintos built). In that case, there were actual victims – i.e., human beings actually killed.

Not many – but some, at least.

Which was enough to justify action by any reasonable standard.

Neither VW nor Mercedes diesels have actually harmed anyone – let alone killed anyone. The unreasonable basis for VW’s persecution, which far exceeded the fury felt by Ford over the Pinto’s tendency to cremate its occupants.

Harm has, of course, been asserted.

But one can also assert that the WuFlu Bogeyman will get you – and that wearing a dirty old bandana “face covering” will keep him at bay.

It says nothing about the truth of the assertion.

Nonetheless, VW was practically totaled – by fines amounting to tens of billions of dollars – and forced to fund its own public excoriation and signal the virtue of its government-mandated “competition” – the EV – via cringeworthy TeeVee spots.

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How the Underground Press Will Thwart the Media and Re-Elect Donald Trump, by Jack Cashill

Posted on September 18, 2020 | 2 comments

Few people yet realize the power of what Jack Cashill calls the underground press, also known as the alternative media. It elected Trump in 2016 and it may do so again. From Cashill at americanthinker.com:

As the saying goes, the difference between the New York Times and the old Soviet Pravda is that Pravda readers knew they were being lied to.

To circumvent the Soviet mainstream media, dissidents created what they called the “samizdat,” their word for the clandestine copying and distribution of literature banned by the state.

To circumvent our mainstream media, conservatives have created their own samizdat, an unorganized network of blogs, public forums, news-aggregators, online publications, talk radio shows, citizen-journalists, and legal monitors such as Judicial Watch, a truth force that one Second Amendment blogger aptly called “a coalition of willing Lilliputians.”

Despite repeated attempts by Big Tech to thwart the samizdat, the internet has given the Lilliputians unprecedented reportorial power, and social media —  Facebook and Twitter most prominently — have given them an ability to distribute their message in ways Soviet dissidents could only imagine.  It was the samizdat that carried Donald Trump to victory in 2016 and, barring massive vote fraud, will carry him again in 2020.

The samizdat has done most of the real reporting on the major news stories of the last dozen or so years, most recently on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) mania.  To understand the samizdat’s effect, consider a recent Gallup poll on the U.S. sports industry.  A year ago, by a 45-25 margin, most Americans had a favorable view of professional sports.  Today, by a 40-30 margin, most have an unfavorable view.

These numbers had to shock the more woke among NFL and NBA execs.  All summer, these execs have been reading about the largely peaceful protests against the systemic racism responsible for the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks among others and the crippling of Jacob Blake.  How, they wondered, could sports fans not embrace those athletes who stood (or knelt) in support of social justice?

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Injectable Biochip for SARS-CoV-2 Detection Near FDA Approval, by Joseph Mercola

Posted on September 17, 2020 | Leave a comment

Don’t you worry, they’ll only use injectable biochips to detect illnesses. And I’ve got some magic beans for you. From Joseph Mercola at lewrockwell.com:

The Silicon Valley company, Profusa,1 in partnership with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),2 has created an injectable biosensor capable of detecting the presence of an infection in your body.3

In early August 2019, months before COVID-19 became a household word, DARPA granted Profusa additional funding “to develop an early identification system to detect disease outbreaks, biological attacks and pandemics up to three weeks earlier than current methods.”4

As discussed in “Will New COVID Vaccine Make You Transhuman?” we appear to stand at the doorway of a brave new world in which man is increasingly merged with technology and artificial intelligence, and COVID-19 may well be the key that opens that door, in more ways than one.

For starters, many of the COVID-19 vaccines currently being fast-tracked are not conventional vaccines. Their design is aimed at manipulating your own biology, essentially creating genetically modified humans.

Combined with hydrogel biosensors — which do not suffer from rejection as foreign bodies like earlier implants, instead becoming one with your own tissue5 — we may also find ourselves permanently connected to the internet-based cloud, for better or worse.

Hydrogel Chip Will Connect You to the Internet

Hydrogel is a DARPA invention that involves nanotechnology and nanobots. This “bioelectronic interface” is part of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines’ delivery system.

The biochip being developed by Profusa is similar to the proposed COVID-19 mRNA vaccines in that it utilizes hydrogel. The implant is the size of a grain of rice, and connects to an online database that will keep track of changes in your biochemistry and a wide range of biometrics, such as heart and respiratory rate and much more.

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Higher Gas Mileage – No Matter What it Costs You, by Eric Peters

Posted on September 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

The government proposes and you pay. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:

A court just ordered that you will pay more to use less gas.

The court did not put it quite that way, of course – courts specializing in not putting things directly, much less honestly.

Like the government – which the courts serve.

The issue at hand was whether car companies should be triple fined by the government for not “complying” with regulatory decrees pertaining to how many miles the cars they make can travel on a gallon of gas. And how much higher those minimums are to be – as well as how soon.

The mandatory minimum number of miles new cars must travel per gallon – or else –  has been increasing each decade since the ’70s, when the government first got into the business of telling car companies how far their cars must go – and how much you’ll pay to get there.

These MPG mandates – and attendant fines for not meeting them – cost you in other ways, too. They killed off large family sedans and station wagons, which were replaced by large SUVs and pick-ups which cost much more than the extincted-by-the-regs large family sedans and wagons. For a time, trucks and SUVs were subject to lower mandatory MPG minimums by an accident of regulatory categorization – they were “light trucks” rather than “passenger cars” – and so the car industry built more of the former to satisfy the market demand for the latter, thwarted by the regs.

But the government caught up – and that’s why trucks and SUVs got so expensive. They are going to become largely unaffordable – and so, very scarce.

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5G Opponents Are Not Luddites, by Karen Selick

Posted on September 11, 2020 | Leave a comment

A debate rages about the safety of 5G. From Karen Selick at lewrockwell.com:

As a science and technology aficionado who believes in using science to promote human health and prosperity, I was startled to find myself classified as a Luddite by Frontier Centre research associate Paz Gomez in her article “Luddites Stand in the Way of 5G Prosperity: Fears Overblown, Ignore Benefits of Communications Connectivity” published on July 29, 2020.

The one thing I can agree with Ms. Gomez on is that faster communications would provide many benefits to humankind. However, choices have to be made about how to deliver faster communications to households, offices, farms and manufacturing buildings. Not all choices are good ones. And you can’t do a proper cost/benefit analysis without thoroughly exploring all of the costs.

The expression “5G” refers to the fifth generation of wireless technology, which will carry more data, at higher speeds, than previous cellular networks. But wireless 5G is not the only game in town when it comes to delivering high-speed internet. It faces stiff competition from fibre optic systems. 

Fibre optic cables consist of extremely thin interior strands of glass or plastic which carry signals in the form of light, surrounded by multiple layers of cladding, coating and jacketing which prevent the light signals from escaping.

Fibre optic cables are already in use for most of the world’s internet transmissions. This 2010 article estimated that “ninety-nine percent of the Internet’s physical distance has been strung with fiber already.”

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‘The Day Has Arrived’ Snowden Hails Appeals Court Ruling Slamming NSA Metadata Harvesting as Illegal, by Svetlana Ekimenko

Posted on September 4, 2020 | Leave a comment

What Edward Snowden did was heroic and should be lauded, not punished. From Svetlana Ekimenko at sputniknews.com:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on 2 September lauded the ruling by the US Court of Appeals that the mass surveillance programme conducted by the National Security Agency, including bulk collection of phone records, was illegal. The ACLU called described it as a “victory for our privacy rights”.

Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee turned whistleblower Edward Snowden responded on Wednesday to a ruling by the US Court of Appeals that the US National Security Agency’s mass surveillance programme, including the bulk collection of citizens’ phone records, was illegal.

​The programme, believed to have been discontinued in 2015 when Congress passed the USA Freedom Act, had extended beyond the scope of what Congress allowed under a foundational surveillance law, ruled a panel of judges, acknowledging that it was possibly a violation of the US Constitution.

The former NSA contractor tweeted that he had been “charged as a criminal for speaking the truth”.

Snowden was referring to the trove of classified intelligence data detailing the sweeping American domestic surveillance programme that he had leaked in 2013 and for which he is wanted in the US on charges of espionage and treason.

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