[Epoch Times] The administrative state is moving faster to cement its rule over the United States of America than we can to keep pace. They are doing this because they realize the majority of our people oppose their wishes, but if they are able to impose them by fiat before that opposition forms and reacts, most people will eventually go along. Unfortunately, it’s human nature for many. For example -
This Passover, I had a telling reminder when I learned for the first time that only an estimated 20 percent of the Jews left Egypt during the Exodus. The other 80 percent chose to remain in the comfort of what they knew—slavery. (These figures come from the medieval French rabbi Rashi, one of the most revered Talmudic scholars.)
Our slavery comes in an electric form. Only a few days ago, the following was announced in The New York Times:
"The Biden administration is planning some of the most stringent auto pollution limits in the world, designed to ensure that all-electric cars make up as much 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the country by 2032." Currently, the same article reports, they are around 5.8 percent. Leadership! Management by Objectives! This information basically coincides with the announcement by the Federal Reserve Bank of the new FedNow payments system to debut in July. As CNBC explains it, "The system will allow bill payments, money transfers, and other consumer activities to move more rapidly and at lower cost."
Oh, good. They add: "Some Fed officials say the program even could supplant the need for a central bank digital currency."
Note the use of the word "could." More likely, this really is a big step toward a central bank digital currency.
Simultaneously their overlords at NBC inform us "DeSantis and RFK Jr. misconstrue Fed’s digital plans in warning of government overreach."
Apparently, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, erroneously in the network’s view, alleged that digital currency would enable the government to block the purchase of a rifle or "too much gas."
Of course, it could. But NBC gives away the real story—most likely inadvertently—in one sentence:
"The Fed is exploring the idea to keep up with countries that have moved to implement their own digital currencies, such as China."
"Such as," indeed. I guess it’s okay for U. S. government agencies to emulate the Chinese Communist Party these days.
I take heart, however, that putative presidential candidates from both parties, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a Democrat and DeSantis as a Republican, are vociferously objecting.
Posted by: Bobby ||
04/13/2023 08:02 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[9 views]
Top|| File under: Commies
#1
Doomed, Doomed I tell ya. Everything they have attempted so far has been a total failure.
#2
Geraldo on The Five yesterday was all in for forceing people to go electric. He doesn't drive one and he has a big boat that he uses a lot. I wonder what his carbon footprint is.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
04/13/2023 16:06 Comments ||
Top||
[The Federalist] The report of a mass shooting in a bar in Thousand Oaks, California, in 2018 was more than a news account of a crime. It was also a story about two young men.
The killer was 28-year-old Ian David Long, a college dropout, divorced former Marine who was unemployed and living with his mother.
He knew the Borderline Bar and Grill held a weekly college night when it would be crowded with young people. He entered the bar dressed in black, a hood pulled over his head. Tossing smoke grenades into the crowd to create confusion, he drew out a pistol with a laser sight and started shooting. A sergeant from the sheriff’s office rushed over to help, but the shooter was waiting for him. After killing the sergeant and 12 other people, Long shot himself.
In the crowd that night was another young man, 20-year-old Matt Wennerstrom, who emerged as the hero of the hour. Sporting a backward baseball cap and a scruffy beard, Matt looked like a typical college student. But what he did was not at all typical.
As soon as shots began booming through the bar, he and about seven other young men grabbed as many people as they could and pushed them under a pool table for cover. Then they piled their own bodies over them to protect them from the hail of gunfire.
One woman, who was celebrating her 21st birthday at the bar that night, told reporters afterward, "There were multiple men who got on their knees and pretty much blocked all of us with their back toward the shooter, ready to take a bullet for any single one of us."
When the shooter paused to reload, Matt and his friends threw bar stools through a back window and began shepherding people outside. Repeatedly, the young men rushed back into the bar to steer more people to safety.
How did Matt have the presence of mind to respond so quickly to danger?
When a reporter at the scene of the crime asked that question, the young man replied, "My life is taken care of. I know where I’m going if I die, so I was not worried to sacrifice."
#1
As soon as shots began booming through the bar, he and about seven other young men grabbed as many people as they could and pushed them under a pool table for cover. Then they piled their own bodies over them to protect them from the hail of gunfire.
One woman, who was celebrating her 21st birthday at the bar that night, told reporters afterward, "There were multiple men who got on their knees and pretty much blocked all of us with their back toward the shooter, ready to take a bullet for any single one of us."
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13
#3
It was similar at the Dark Knight murders in Aurora, CO in 2012. About 7 guys died shielding women. Some were only on dates. I suspect that they share a beer together in heaven once a year.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
04/13/2023 12:52 Comments ||
Top||
[MediaMatters] Fox's Mark Levin: Car manufacturers won't include AM radio because “they finally figured out how to attack conservative talk radio”.
Can one get such things as a cell phone app nowadays? If yes, then a car aradio is not needed. Separately, I just read that car dealers are currently sitting on a glut of cars — in which case angering the car-purchasing masses, hitherto their primary market, is as unwise as Bud Light switching to a trans spokesperson.
#6
Or stream via iHeart or SiriusXM. You get a lot more channel choices.
Frank G that's what these two want.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
04/13/2023 9:26 Comments ||
Top||
#7
I renew my SiriusXM subscription every year just to listen to Real Jazz, though I do listen to some of the other channels from time to time.
I haven't listened to any talk radio in decades.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/13/2023 9:44 Comments ||
Top||
#8
Got that right Besoeker
Posted by: Chris ||
04/13/2023 9:53 Comments ||
Top||
#9
If the radio/stereo systems in the new vehicles have Bluetooth, which they most certainly will, it should be easy to do as Frank G suggests and then you can listen to stations from all over the world.
But I was listening to John and Ken one day on LA's KFI extolling the virtues of AM radio in case of natural or man made catastrophes such as the recent storms in southern California. If the electricity is out and your house is buried in snow, the battery powered AM radio might be the only source of outside information you have left.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/13/2023 11:42 Comments ||
Top||
#10
Conservative AM talk radio is a way for young people and blue collar types to get an introduction to conservative, traditional American ides and attitudes, away from the immersion of public education and broadcast television. Removing it is another progressive method to chip away one of the few sources of content we want them to hear. Many just discover it and the humor and variety draws them into thinking.
#13
The reason they're dropping AM radios is that the drive moters for the EV's they're pushing have always made horrendous electical noise, shielding is expensive and tricky, and they're going to pretend they've fixed the problem by making it so you won't notice.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
04/13/2023 13:44 Comments ||
Top||
#14
So in other words, removing AM radios is a twofer win for the Dems. It is brilliant.
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
04/13/2023 15:51 Comments ||
Top||
[Substack] In 2007, I interviewed Vaclav Smil by email. I asked the Canadian polymath and prolific author a simple question: why are so many people so easily duped when it comes to discussions about energy and power?
He replied: "There has never been such a depth of scientific illiteracy and basic innumeracy as we see today. Without any physical, chemical, and biological fundamentals, and with equally poor understanding of basic economic forces, it is no wonder that people will believe anything."
I am reusing that quote from Smil (who is one of my favorite writers on energy and power) because it’s germane to a report published on Wednesday by Tesla Inc. called "Master Plan Part 3: Sustainable Energy for All of Earth." The 41-page document is the latest in a shelf-full of studies I’ve endured over the past decade or so that have been produced by academics who work at expensive universities like Stanford, Princeton, and Cal-Berkeley. The studies are packed with elaborate graphics, complicated spreadsheets, and Dallas-size assumptions. And all of them make almost identical claims about how the U.S., or even the entire world, can be powered solely with wind, solar, and batteries, with maybe a lagniappe of nuclear and hydropower on the side. All of them downplay the obvious problems, including the ridiculous amount of land that will be needed, the raging backlash in rural America against the encroachment of big wind and solar projects, the difficulty of building high-voltage transmission, and the need for massive amounts of mining, metals, and magnets to make their schemes work.
In all of those facets, the Tesla paper is familiar. And like the others, it doesn’t contain the word "transformer" even though distribution transformers (and large transformers) are critical pieces of hardware and are in desperately short supply. (See my last piece, "Untransformed."
-- snip --
But the number that jumped off the screen when I read the Master Plan was this one: 240. That’s the number of terawatt-hours (TWh) of battery storage the authors of the report say will be needed to make the jump to weather-dependent renewables. I won’t quibble over the number even though it sounds awfully low. (Global electricity production in 2021 was more than 28,000 TWh.)
Nevertheless, it only takes a minute to understand why that 240 TWh of storage is so gobsmackingly silly. First some basics. Recall that 1 TWh is equal to 1,000 gigawatt-hours (GWh) and that one Gigafactory can manufacture about 50 GWh of batteries per year.
Tesla currently has 5 Gigafactories. Thus, Tesla’s current battery storage output is, in rough terms, 250 GWh per year. Now recall that the Master Plan requires 240 TWh, which is 240,000 GWh. Therefore, as can be seen in the graphic directly above, producing 240,000 GWh of battery capacity would require the output of all of Tesla’s existing Gigafactories for the next 960 years.
But let’s give Elon Musk and his people the benefit of the doubt and assume Tesla can expand its output ten-fold, to 50 Gigafactories. Even with that mega-expansion, manufacturing 240,000 GWh of storage would still take 96 years. Of course, the difference will be made up in unicorn farts.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/13/2023 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[15 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Cried a City Hall clerk from Nahant,
"Buy a house and a car? Why, you can't!
Por favor, don't be pissed --
For mordida, I list
You to share an electric Trabant."
#3
Also left out of the calculations is a thing called "transform efficiency", which is basically, every time you store, transform, transmit, or use energy there is a loss. Always more than 20%, sometimes north of 80%. You can't get as much power out of a battery as you put into it; you can't get as much out of a transformer as you put in.
You notice how these things get warm in use? That heat is the power that's being lost in the transform.
It's called thermodynamics. And there's no getting away from it. (It's why they keep trying to develop superconductors.)
Posted by: ed in texas ||
04/13/2023 13:57 Comments ||
Top||
#4
Someone did a fantastic layman's summary of the laws of thermodynamics:
You can't win.
You can't break even.
You can't get out of the game.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
04/13/2023 13:59 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Projecting the future based on current tech is a fools shell game.
Musk may find a way to produce far more out of his gigafactories, or they may find the original numbers they were hoping to reach were in reality far lower than they thought.
#6
My personal theory, based on no evidence whatsoever, is that Elon cares fookall about batteries here on earth. He is going to Mars and to do that he needs rockets, autonomous vehicles and batteries. Hence, his investment in these technologies.
#7
That is a really good theory but it has one flaw. The autonomous vehicles part. Musk has insisted on using visual systems for his autonomous Teslas instead of Lider which would seem much better for outer space usage. Maybe there is something about visual that makes it better on Mars with the dust and all, if so I can't see it.
#8
An interesting point, ruprecht. I did not know this, but apparently Tesla has dropped both ultrasonic and radar sensors, and gone all in on optical methods. Welcome to Tesla Vision!
Lidar gives you a nice clean 3D point cloud but starts to fall down in dusty or rainy environments. Optical methods and computer vision tricks can use information like color for object discrimination and tracking.
If I were me, I'd be trying some sensor fusion from both lidar and visual. But maybe Elon tried that already.
[Gateway] Former presidential candidate, congressman and medical doctor Ron Paul appeared on the Tim Pool podcast this week and made some bold statements about the state of country.
Paul called out the numerous current members of Congress who have no knowledge of or loyalty to the U.S. Constitution. He slammed corrupt and out of control government spending.
Finally, he claimed that JFK was murdered by the CIA and that that moment was the beginning of a coup.
#3
Whenever somebody is murdered, police detectives will ask, among other questions: Who had the most to gain from the victim's demise?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/13/2023 12:23 Comments ||
Top||
#4
Once you believe that the JFK shooting was a coup, it is inconsistent to vote for anyone but Trump or Kennedy. If the government is conspiring against the people’s will to the point of assassination, that issue has to be the first priority. Every other candidate is just going to be rearranging the deck chairs or increasing totalitarianism along the path mapped by the Obama/Biden team.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
04/13/2023 12:45 Comments ||
Top||
#5
It is strange that parts of the JFK assassination files are STILL classified after 60 years.
Posted by: Tom ||
04/13/2023 13:01 Comments ||
Top||
#6
There once was an ant of Hyannis
Who jumped on the back of a mantis
And flew very high
Until one day she...
"Whyyyy?"
"It's my nature. Sic semper tyrannis."
[crunch]
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
This information basically coincides with the announcement by the Federal Reserve Bank of the new FedNow payments system to debut in July. As CNBC explains it, "The system will allow bill payments, money transfers, and other consumer activities to move more rapidly and at lower cost."
