Reliance on coal-fired electricity to produce solar panels raises concerns in the West

Solar panel installations are surging in the U.S. and Europe as Western countries seek to cut their reliance on fossil fuels.

But the West faces a conundrum as it installs panels on small rooftops and in sprawling desert arrays: Most of them are produced with energy from carbon-dioxide-belching, coal-burning plants in China.

Following the ratifying of the US Constitution, John Adams rightly foretold, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” //

As one popular blogger has pointed out, the problem is that what the candidates are accusing each other of is all true. One candidate has bragged about assaulting women and has encouraged violence at campaign rallies. The other candidate has broken federal laws regarding national security and attacked women that claim to have been sexually assaulted by her husband. Many citizens feel that “they’re both gross, so the only sales pitch they really have is the one Prince Humperdink proposed in the “Princess Bride”: ‘Please consider me an alternative to suicide.’”

Many have asked themselves why? How have we gotten to this point, or what has caused us to descend so far? Alexander Pope penned a poem that easily answers these question.

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

While we watch the presidential election unfold and decide what we personally will do, we ought to ask ourselves both as families and individuals if or how we have contributed to the degradation of our nation. Have we brought crudeness, violence, anger, dishonesty, foul language, and sexual deviancy into our homes through our music, books, and movies? What have our tv shows taught us and our children? What have we been taught in schools and what have we allowed our children to be taught? Have we allowed ourselves to indulge in crude or foul language? Have we been rude and unkind? Have we endorsed or accepted sexual deviancy as normal? Do we first endure and then pity and then embrace? //

Is there anything that can be done now? A wise man once said:

“No nation ever rises above its homes… We are no better as a people than are our firesides, our homes. The school, the church, and even the nation, I feel confident, stand helpless before weakened and degraded homes. The good home is the rock foundation, the cornerstone of civilization. It must be preserved. It must be strengthened.”

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

John Adams

For me, it’s all and only about freedom. For me without freedom, there is no point in anything. So take away all the numbers, all the statistics, all the models and predictions, all the promises and threats; all the steel hand in velvet glove coercion. Take all of that away. To me it all boils down into something simple.

I declare that I am a free man.

I was born 54 years ago into part of the world, just a relatively small part of the world, but I was taught that my freedom had been won for me by men and women who had fought and died to make it so. I was born just 22 years after World War II into a world, still full of those men and women who had fought for my freedom and lived to tell the tale and what a tale it was. It started with the sudden appearance of a force bent on tyranny. Of course the sudden appearance was an optical illusion. In truth that force had been on the rise and making plans for years before it was ready to pull the trigger. It’s worth remembering that that force believed it was poised to make the world a better place. A glorious place. When that force started moving it seemed nothing could or would stop it. In the beginning of the fight to prevent the victory of that tyranny it was a minority -a minority outgunned and shouted down by fellow citizens- who feared that deals might be struck with tyranny, that stood up and shouted no. English writer Mervyn Peake said “To live at all is miracle enough.” It’s a good line and I’ve quoted it for years, but but now I see merely to live at all is not enough, not nearly. A caged bird is alive but without the freedom to fly the Limitless sky, it is denied everything that makes a bird in the first place. To be alive is not enough. What matters is to live in freedom. A bird is such a fragile creature. It’s really all and only about movement. Take away a bird’s movement and it’s a handful of feathers and air.

Freedom is not negotiable. You’re either free or you’re not. Freedom is not even safe. Those who’ve been imprisoned are often terrified of freedom. All those choices, for all of our personal responsibility. This is why ex-cons often reoffend, to go back behind bars where it feels safer, out of harm’s way. I have three children. Teenagers all. Often I think I would like to keep them close by me forever, where I can stop them doing stupid things. Dangerous things. If I kept them in the house no stranger would hurt them, but that would be no life. Not for them and not even for me. I would be their jailer and they would be my caged birds. As it happens, this past year-and-a-half has let me see what happens to children kept safe in the house. It’s not good, not good at all. And so if I didn’t know it before, I know now that I have to let them go into a world that is full of all manner of things, danger included.

Here’s the thing is, if your freedom means that I might catch COVID from you, then so be it. If my freedom means you might catch COVID from me then so be it. That’s honestly how I see it. For the sake of freedom…I will cheerfully risk catching COVID. That is a chance. One among many that I am prepared to take and happily. Life is not safe, freedom is not safe. For the sake of freedom, yours and mine together, both freedoms being of equal value, I will cheerfully risk much else besides.

Apple’s new solution will load all remote content using multiple proxy servers. This will do two things. First, images can be presented on all your emails without any risk of tracking—they’re being served from Apple’s own servers. And second, marketeers will receive a near 100% open-rate for their emails, rendering it useless data.

So, unless you click a link from within an email, there should be no way to harvest any data from your email browsing activity. The only thing Apple will provide is a broad idea of the region you’re in, to ensure any context and language is right. //

The flight to privacy, fueled by Apple and others, is shining an awkward light on Google, Facebook and the data-driven digital marketing industry. “The everyday user is waking up to the importance of privacy,” security researcher Sean Wright says. “Anything that helps them keep control over their data is a step in the right direction, but privacy is not ‘one size fits all’. The power to choose how and where data is used should always be in the hands of the individual. As such, education and transparency so users can make informed decisions about which mail clients they should use is key.”

In Troxel v Granville, 530 US 57 (2000), the Supreme Court declared, “The liberty interest at issue in this case—the interest of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children—is perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court.”
Parental Rights Demand Strict Scrutiny Protection

Because parental rights are fundamental, they cannot just be pushed aside at the whim of government actors. Rather, they must be accorded “strict judicial scrutiny.”

“Strict scrutiny” refers to the level of judicial review, the legal burden, placed on any law that would restrict a fundamental right. It is often defined as requiring that a law be “narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest by the least restrictive means.”

We expect this standard to apply, not only because of the Supreme Court’s (repeated) declaration that parental rights are fundamental, but also because it is called for in the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and in the DC code.

In this case, the government failed to establish any compelling governmental interest, the law is not narrowly tailored, and it does not employ the least restrictive means to accomplish the government’s goals.

The law allows children as young as 11 to grant legally binding consent for any vaccination the government has approved, as long as the medical provider giving the shot decides the child is mature enough to make an “informed decision.” The law also requires that everyone involved in the act—the medical provider, the child’s school, and even the parent’s insurance carrier—keep this information away from the parent.

Far from being the least restrictive means, this limits the parent’s exercise of their fundamental rights in every possible way. This law will keep parents (and, not insignificantly, a lot of primary care physicians) completely in the dark regarding their child’s medical history. This will greatly increase the risk of physical, medical harm to the child now and into the future, as parents will not know their child’s full medical history.

Fortunately, this call for strict scrutiny is also firmly established. As recently as July 23, the Ninth Circuit declared, “Because California’s ban on in-person schooling abridges a fundamental liberty interest of these five Plaintiffs that is protected by the Due Process Clause, that prohibition can be upheld only if it withstands strict scrutiny.”

This DC law, though it covers a completely different area of decision-making, abridges the same liberty interest cited in that Ninth Circuit case.
Parental Rights Protect Children

Ultimately, parental rights protect children.

DC’s law places children at risk of manipulation or coercion, while those naturally placed in their lives to protect them from bad decisions—their parents—are taken out of the way.

Keeping parents in the dark will also make it impossible to properly monitor a child for a possible negative reaction. And it will put the child at risk of receiving other treatments that may be contra-indicated with the vaccine, because they do not know the child had the vaccine.

In more normal times, one might be asking themselves how the CDC and the media keep making all these mistakes? It should be fairly obvious that simply being honest about who is most at risk (age and comorbidities) and then targeting those populations for vaccination is the smart move instead of carpet bombing people with fear and hysterics that only breed distrust.

But we don’t live in normal times. Rather, the panic is the point, and when you start things with that point of view, it all begins to make a lot more sense.

You see, Democrats and their media allies recognize that the 2022 electoral landscape is looking apocalyptic for them. //

The panic they are stoking isn’t meant to earn them new voters. Instead, it’s meant to justify a continuation of emergency orders in a variety of states, many of which include key swing districts that will be decided in 2022.

If the COVID crisis simply doesn’t end, then neither do all the changes to the voting system that allowed mass mail-in voting, drive-thru precincts, and ballot harvesting in 2020 under the guise of an existential emergency. Judges will once again override state laws and the DOJ will use COVID to argue that election integrity laws that return things to normal amount to disenfranchisement. Further, Democrats are acutely aware that Republicans typically vote in person. What better way to suppress that vote than to create enough panic that in-person voting is limited in many key areas?

I’m reminded of a different life, ages ago, when a statistics professor of mine made the statement “Statistics don’t lie, but statisticians do.” The CDC might not be lying, but its exaggeration of the data and its relevance to the US health situation certainly borders uncomfortably close on deceit. The picture the CDC seeks to paint is that its whiplash-inducing U-turn over the last week was the result of sound scientific evidence – but the evidence is neither extensive nor does it unanimously point towards what the CDC cherry-picked from it (without, of course, mentioning as caveats the reasons why those pieces of evidence might not apply to the current situation. The data, quite simply, does not support the bold assertions of the CDC. There are perhaps two findings that support an increased risk for young adults with fewer or no comorbidities from Delta, and some evidence suggesting that, and that Delta might be slightly more infectious.

What the data shows is that – contrary to the CDC’s clumsy messaging – vaccines work, and while this new increased risk to young adults should encourage vaccinations among that age group, there is no need to advocate for extreme mitigation based on overstated evidence and exaggerated risks.

24,000 BTU (2.0 Ton) 21 SEER Three Zone Ductless Mini-Split Heat Pump System

Landlords are not evil. They are often middle-class Americans who chose to invest their money wisely. The government has chosen to target them financially with no constitutional right to do so. Further, the repercussions of this are widespread. Fewer people are now going to invest in housing that people could then rent because it’s not worth the risk. And because there are so many people squatting in current rentals, there are people with the money to pay rent who can’t find a place to live. //

No “emergency” gives the federal government the right to steal from citizens, at least outside of full due process regarding criminal activity. The Supreme Court needs to take this seriously, including Justice Kavanaugh pulling his head out of his backside, so as to offer immediate relief if Democrats push through another eviction moratorium.

I want to age like sea glass

By Bernadette Noll

I want to age like sea glass.
Smoothed by tides, not broken.
I want the currents of life to toss me around, shake me up and leave me feeling washed clean. I want my hard edges to soften as the years pass—made not weak but supple. I want to ride the waves, go with the flow, feel the impact of the surging tides rolling in and out.

When I am thrown against the shore and caught between the rocks and a hard place, I want to rest there until I can find the strength to do what is next. Not stuck—just waiting, pondering, feeling what it feels like to pause. And when I am ready, I will catch a wave and let it carry me along to the next place that I am supposed to be.

I want to be picked up on occasion by an unsuspected soul and carried along—just for the connection, just for the sake of appreciation and wonder. And with each encounter, new possibilities of collaboration are presented, and new ideas are born.

I want to age like sea glass so that when people see the old woman I’ll become, they’ll embrace all that I am. They’ll marvel at my exquisite nature, hold me gently in their hands and be awed by my well-earned patina. Neither flashy nor dull, just a perfect luster. And they’ll wonder, if just for a second, what it is exactly I am made of and how I got to this very here and now. And we’ll both feel lucky to be in that perfectly right place at that profoundly right time.

I want to age like sea glass. I want to enjoy the journey and let my preciousness be, not in spite of the impacts of life, but because of them.

JULY 29, 2021 By Robert Busek
Rather than trying to reform an educational system that has betrayed us, we should starve it of access to its favorite fodder: our children.

The only winning move is not to play. //

We have experienced the shift in thinking in a personal way. After years of unabashedly voicing their concerns about our kids’ homeschool education, our extended family has been curiously (and blessedly) silent ever since COVID-19 started wreaking havoc on our educational infrastructure. For once, we are ahead of the curve, and it is thrilling. //

A funny thing happened when students began remote learning during lockdown: parents started paying attention to what their kids were being taught. Many were not pleased with what they discovered. They felt betrayed by the system to which they had entrusted their kids and their money. Quite a few are fighting back, much to the chagrin of teachers’ unions, administrators and their political allies.

Each time we eliminate a data vendor like Amazon Web Services, we eliminate a potential 'cancel' moment that could paralyze our site. //

CaucusRoom.com is a social network designed to help conservatives gather, encourage and engage locally. We are a small but growing player among conservative platforms that see a need, and a business opportunity. Operating on the “Cancel Cloud” posed a liability to our company legally, financially, and technically. Now unshackled from Big Tech’s chains, CaucusRoom is better off in every respect.

Surprisingly a real-life scenario and not a plotline from The Simpsons

A reactor at Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in Taiwan malfunctioned on Tuesday morning, triggering an auto shutdown that resulted in the loss of 985 megawatts of power – all due to the misplacement of a chair.

The plant owner, state-run Taipower, said the incident did not cause any grid power outages, although the power supply light turned yellow from green, indicating the system was running at 6-10 per cent of operating reserve ratio.

Both the power company and the Atomic Energy Commission, a government agency for atomic safety, confirmed there was no concern about radiation release.

An investigation by the Association for Natural Energy pinpointed the cause: misplaced furniture. Staff working in the control room moved the chair to clean and, in the process, knocked the acrylic protective cover of a main steam isolation valve switch causing it to tilt, shift, and close, setting off a chain reaction that tripped the main steam turbine and stopped the reactor.

Taipower filed a report on the 6:30am oopsie and by 11:40pm the reactor was approved to restart.

If Microsoft has the most to win, it also has the most to lose – Salesforce's Slack love is as a CRM channel, where it will end up getting the metrics and aggregated channels anyway. Google and Amazon have the reach and the infrastructure to sell conferencing services on the open market, with open access points. And they are creatures built from open standards, unlike Microsoft. Google won mobile by being open. If it showed any sign of understanding conferencing, that'd be nice.

Pinning your hopes on an uneasy alliance getting on a war footing before a focused opponent has already won is not how any sane person would make a better world. But the evidence for hope is there. Just ask the veterans of the last war, and listen when they say – there is a better way. ®

Designed by Howard Hughes himself, and ridiculed as the “Spruce Goose” for its size and the material it was built out of, the Hughes H-4 Hercules should have had a long and storied service life. Yet it never took off as it was expected…

As the largest fixed-wing aircraft ever built (only the LZ 129 Hindenburg airship from the famed Hindenburg disaster is bigger), the H-4 was a behemoth for its time, and indeed in our own, being far larger than anything built before or after it. //

Despite being built in the 1940’s, the H-4 held the record for the longest wingspan of any aircraft for over 70 years, holding it from 1947 (when the prototype first flew) to 2019, when the Burt Rutan-designed Scaled Composites Stratolaunch first flew.

That’s 72 years!

On Monday (July 26), astronauts said goodbye to a cornerstone of the International Space Station and captured stunning images of the compartment burning up in Earth's atmosphere.

A Russian Progress cargo vehicle towed the module, called Pirs, away from the space station and down through Earth's atmosphere to ensure the module burned up completely and reduce the odds of any large chunks making it to Earth's surface.

"Quite a strange feeling to see a part of your ship fly away in mid-air (so to speak — no atmosphere here duh)," European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet wrote in a statement shared with the photographs on Monday. //

Russia had launched its Pirs module in 2001; since then, the module, which served as a port to the space station, hosted more than 70 different capsules and supported Russian cosmonauts conducting extravehicular activities, or spacewalks. //

To make room for Russia's new science module, dubbed Nauka, which launched on July 21 and will arrive at the station on Thursday (July 29), Pirs had to go. Yesterday's fiery retirement ceremony marks the first time a major component of the International Space Station has been discarded.

With high profile audits of votes from the 2020 election are underway in Arizona and Georgia, what seems to be a spooked as well as woke US Department of Justice has sent a second sternly-worded memo to the states warning them that any attempt actually to verify the votes cast in 2020 carries the potential risk of violating the Civil Right Act. This is from BuzzFeed News so take its accuracy for what it’s worth… //

The hook the DOJ is using to stick its nose into what is an inherently and exclusive state function; the idea that auditing the results of a completed and certified election could trammel the civil rights of anyone, even someone who may have stolen an election, is just nonsense. At the same time, there is absolutely no doubt that the Gestapo waiting in the wings at Justice would leap at the chance, like flying monkeys from a castle wall, to harass and intimidate state officials trying to uphold state election law which the current regime finds inconvenient.

Why is the DOJ attempting to stretch the law in this manner? Why do they even care about the results of an audit which, worst casing it for the Democrats, can’t change anything?

This is my assessment.

2022 is a must-win year for the Democrats. //

There is a strong feeling across the nation that Joe Biden did not win but rather cheated his way into the White House by a massive influx of ballots of dubious authenticity injected into the system by partisan judges rewriting existing laws in favor of new “COVID voting rules.” This has inspired at least 17 states to pass new laws designed to curb abuses of mail-in ballots, ballot harvesting, counting votes after election day, and all manner of other Third World bullsh** created by the courts out of whole cloth.

All that is needed is a showing of fraud in any of the audits underway to sink the Democrat falsehood that voting fraud is rare. (My personal view is that it is systemic and endemic in some jurisdictions.) If that happens, you will see more states enact laws to foil vote fraud. //

“If there isn’t a way for us to repeat what happened in November 2020, we’re f—ed,” said Nsé Ufot, CEO of the Stacey Abrams-founded New Georgia Project.

“What happened in November 2020,” of course, is widespread and flagrant vote fraud at every step of the process.

the Democrats are following the Cloward-Piven strategy to bankrupt the country and usher in a “socialist Utopia.” And why wouldn’t they since the modern Democrat Party is nothing but a collection of “democratic socialists” and Communists-by-other names (e.g., the 100-plus members of the “Congressional Progressive Caucus”)? They couldn’t care less about fiscal responsibility and living within one’s means.

The Democrats’ goal is to pass this giveaway to Democrat constituencies and then force a follow-on gigantic tax increase to pay for it (or at least some of it). Everyone – even the RINOs in Congress – know that is the standard Democrat tax-and-spend play, except this time the order is reversed: spend first then tax to pay for it. The Hologram’s tax plan announced in April totaled $1.8 trillion in new taxes. The remaining $1.7 trillion would be deficit spending, with a big spike added to the federal debt.

https://tricentennial.us/2020/04/03/is-the-cloward-piven-strategy-being-used-to-destroy-america/

In August 2019, former President Trump signed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019 that suspended the debt ceiling through July 31, 2021. //

Republicans need to use the debt ceiling to halt the Democrats’ spend-and-tax plans in order to prevent an economic tailspin in the country. That and the filibuster are just about the only tools left to congressional Republicans (besides enhancing election integrity laws in various states and electing fiscally conservative Republicans in 2022). //

The bill is going to come due at some point; there will have to be tax increases to pay for the deficits planned by the Democrats to finance their schemes. Those taxes will be the biggest negative impact on businesses and the economy in general moving into the future. The scale and scope of the federal government is so gargantuan that there will never be a return to fiscal discipline and a balanced budget unless action is taken now. A general economic slowdown is inevitable unless the out-of-control spending stops.

And it will require grassroots pressure to provide the Republicans with the spine and staying power needed to fight off the inevitable Democrat-media onslaught. //

Skeptical Techie
12 hours ago
One respectful correction. While Democrats were once the "tax and spend" party, that is no longer the case.

Now, the Party is the "spend and tax" party.

What came before was almost, ALMOST, at least a tip of the hat to fiscal responsibility or maybe a sort of fiscal acknowledgement. Now, blowing up anything resembling fiscal acknowledgement is THE POINT. Blow up the budget so as to FORCE draconian taxation and the attendant draconian control to collect such weighty taxes.