"I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire

Wednesday 24th April 2024

Latest

March 13, 2024

Hold the Fone, Fani

Key Point. Once you establish a credibility issue, it’s hard to believe anything afterwards. Well, here’s another court case that... Read more

Global Economics

March 13, 2024

Getting IT DONE

Key. When you’ve been a US Senator since Nixon was around through the Great Recession ((2008) that is until we... Read more

Policies

April 2, 2024

Walls

Key Point. Walls work. That’s because gravity works. Really, that’s that. Hey people who do not advocate walls: China has... Read more

Featured

April 2, 2024

No Election Day in 2024

Key Point. Your election day should be (1) the day you receive your ballot in the mail if you’ve already... Read more

Fiscal Corner

April 2, 2024

Transactional Politicians

BUZZ: Interesting Transactions That Have Been Recently Reported in the Press The following unverified transactions have been mentioned in various... Read more

Politics

April 2, 2024

Move Over, Manchen; Sen. Lankford Will Share That Dunce Seat

Key: A new Border Bill came and went. Schumer and his good bud Minority Leader Mitchell McConnell were unable to... Read more

Noteworthy

April 2, 2024

“Mr. Pres, Have You SEEN the Border Numbers??”

“Yes! I am down: 28% who approve to 72% that disapprove!” Read more

California Corner

March 27, 2024

We Have Some Old Issues and Then New Some Issues Too

Key Point. When you’re kin to the most powerful Speaker of the House ever, and favored, and beholden to her,... Read more

Featured news

Clean Wind Power

August 6, 2022

Windmills have significant embedded costs. Surprisingly, they are significantly environmentally destructive. Each weighs 1,688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1,300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass. Carrying on a recurrent theme here, we have the rare and expensive to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used windmill blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects. Ironically,  There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. Windmills will be likely be mostly abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent. On a recent trip to Europe I saw a couple smaller windmills in an industrial park being dismantled; they were too noisy to have close to the workers and buildings. Many countries in Western Europe are holding off on significant windmill investments because nobody wants to see them, NIMBY, yes, but even “I don’t want to see them way over there,” with a wave of one’s...Read more

Clean Solar Power

August 6, 2022

Purifying silicon requires processing with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone and incorporating gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride; much of this is highly toxic. Silicone dust is a hazard to the workers. It’s not like you can have a conveyor belt that takes sand into a containment vessel and spray it with these chemicals. A HUGE amount of sand is required to yield pure silicon. Far more than you can use a conveyor belt and way more than you can haul into a large hangar-sized building, treat, clean up, and haul away. And once more there is a minor chemical disposal issue. Have you ever been to the Tower of London? Outside it I mean? There’s a spot where the King’s and Queen’s poop comes out. They would poop inside on their gilded poop thrones and the stuff would fall through a hidden hole in the floor and run down the outside wall. As far as the royals were concerned they were done with it since they never went outside that way.  This is sort of like electrical cars. If you don’t go by the spot where they use the acid, or bury the batteries,...Read more

A Battery Is Not a Panacea

August 6, 2022

You might think your electric vehicle (EV) runs because it makes electricity. You’d be wrong.   Your EV stores electricity produced elsewhere. “Where does the electricity for charging come from?” “That’s simple! It comes down a wire!” Which is connected to a big plant somewhere,  primarily coal, uranium, natural gas-powered, or diesel-fueled generators, some hydro, to be sure. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not usually true. Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see? This can be up to 90% coal powered in some areas of the United States. When your EV is charging, the electricity involved is being created right that second, somewhere maybe thousands of miles away. Something gets hot, turns a generator, and the electricity that pops out goes right into your battery by being pushed by other electricity behind in in all the connecting wires. The way things get hot is we burn something to make them hot; all the electricity we use except wind generation is something getting hot. And in solar panels the thing burning is almost...Read more

Concrete Analysis of International Policy and Macroeconomics

Listen, some people like economics or even love it. Some people understand economics, and most do not. Some people hate econ. One could make a Venn diagram… Economics, believe it or not is considered by many intelligentsia-type people to be a science. But we consider it to be a discipline with quite a bit of structure to it, with principles but few actual “laws” as in the law of gravity or the Pythagorean Theorem. Take for example what is called “the law of supply and demand.” While it’s true that the more available st...
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