Tag Archives: politics

Hydrogen again rears its petrochemical head

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Another breathless article about the wonderful earth-saving hydrogen revolution that’s been just around the corner since the 1980s.

Here’s the breakdown on the hydrogen swindle. It’s all just basic science.

1) Usable hydrogen does not occur naturally on Earth, you have to make it. There isn’t any hydrogen well, there aren’t any hydrogen mines. The easiest way to make large quantities is something called steam reformation but you can also electrolyze water.

2) Since you have to expend energy to make usable hydrogen, hydrogen is not really a fuel like oil or coal, hydrogen is a way to store energy produced in some other way. You don’t get all the energy you spent back out, either; there’s some loss involved. So you can burn polluting fossil fuels to make hydrogen from natural gas, and actually create more pollution and waste than you’d make running directly from the fossil fuels without any hydrogen being involved.

3) Sure, you can make hydrogen using a sustainable energy source like solar or wind. But comparing stored hydrogen to other energy storage technologies, such as batteries, you find that hydrogen has extremely poor energy density – that is, a battery that can store just as much energy as a hydrogen tank of a given size is significantly smaller than the hydrogen tank – and if you are using the latest technologies, the battery will be lighter and safer as well.

So while hydrogen has many wonderful properties, IT IS NOT A FUEL and it isn’t even a very good energy storage medium (at least compared to batteries) for most purposes. And we haven’t even talked yet about the expense and difficulties associated with storing and using it!

The truth is Big Oil likes hydrogen because any so-called “hydrogen economy” would necessarily be built and run on petroleum and natural gas. And another truth seems to be that you can sell any pseudo-scientific energy quackery in California, since they’ve already been around this barn twice now and are apparently still falling for the same nonsense.

3 states now blocking Tesla sales

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New Jersey has joined Arizona and Texas in banning direct sales of Tesla electric vehicles to the public.

Chris Christie, that fearless champion of free enterprise and democracy, used his personal control of the state’s Motor Vehicle Commission to end-run the representative branch of New Jersey’s government, who might have raised some sort of ethical objections to what Christie called “the cold, hard hand of government determining winners and losers.”

Tesla will presumably have to shut down its two dealerships in New Jersey, which were giving well-heeled NJ residents a way they could personally and individually choose to reduce the tailpipe-emission pollution problem that sends 53,000 Americans to an early grave every year.

Is the inevitable apotheosis of the Reagan “Revolution”? Parasitic middle-men and Ayn Rand worshipping dirty energy producers using their control over the machines of government to prevent individuals from taking effective action on the behalf of their neighbors and descendants? These people believe that any action that is not motivated by greed should be forbidden, and it seems that they have the power to make it so.

Maps of Vanished Empires

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Every imperial project, no matter how great, eventually meets its downfall. In fact, you may be reading this in a country that was once part of a now-vanished international superpower. Here are maps that reveal the rise and fall of the world’s most ambitious empires. Thanks, IO9!

Joseph Priestley

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Joseph Priestly died 210 years ago today on February 6th, 1804. Mostly remembered today as the discoverer of oxygen, Priestley in his own day was a noted scientist, educator, political theorist, natural philosopher, dissenting clergyman and Christian apologist. Thomas Jefferson, who was active in the same fields, credited his own conversion to Unitarianism to Priestley’s 1782 book “History of the Corruptions of Christianity”.

Priestley’s scientific and philosophical career is replete with triumph and tragedy; brilliant discoveries and a stubborn refusal to give up mistaken ideas. He was derided as “the last defender of phlogiston” and burned out of his Birmingham house for denying “the divine right of kings” in the so-called Priestley Riots. Priestley made his inventions available to the public and received no money for any of them; the local Unitarian Universalist Church district is named in his honor.

Fighting “Doubt Science”

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In 2010 Dr. Laura Welch wrote an exhaustively researched and documented amicus brief to the Michigan Supreme Court titled “Asbestos Exposure Causes Mesothelioma, But Not This Asbestos Exposure” exposing the practice of “doubt science”. The brief was signed by 51 other notable physicians and medical researchers.

…the vast amount of additional scientific information regarding asbestos and mesothelioma, provides more than sufficient evidence to allow someone to conclude within a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that a mesothelioma in a mechanic who worked with asbestos-containing brakes was caused by that asbestos exposure. Since 2000, Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler have paid over $30,000,000 to hire consultants for the purpose of generating the very papers they rely upon, and for testifying regarding those papers in Courts.

One of the main industry experts has acknowledged that the papers were conceived and authored for the purpose of buttressing testimony in court cases involving mechanics suffering from mesothelioma.

The same expert also acknowledged that this business model is a pattern he has also followed with dioxin, benzene, hexavalent chromium, beryllium, formaldehyde, and glycol ethers. Recent revelations regarding undisclosed involvement of the employer of these experts in connection with publication of a paper favorable to the chromium industry have been well publicized and led to the retraction of that paper.

It is in no way surprising that the experts and papers financed by these manufacturers conclude that asbestos in brakes can never cause mesothelioma. To the contrary, the exoneration of the sponsoring industry is the expected conclusion of doubt science.

Robert Kehoe, Charles Kettering and Thomas Midgley created doubt science so that General Motors and DuPont could knowingly poison the world with tetra ethyl lead. Over the years the Merchants of Doubt have become an accepted part of the American dialogue, and doubt science is used in courtrooms, newspapers and bar-rooms to justify and applaud all sorts of vicious, completely avoidable crimes against humanity knowingly committed by the wealthy corporations that own our political leadership in order to marginally increase their profits.

Go go go NAACP of Delaware!

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Yesterday the Delaware NAACP’s Jea Street wrote an excellent, fire-breathing letter to Governor Jack Markell and Secretary of Education Mark Murphy, defending the Reach Academy and blasting the ongoing re-segregation of Delaware’s schools.

Delaware’s system is currently set up to provide blatantly unequal public education, segregated purely by wealth. And it’s not the good kind of unequal, which would consist of putting more resources where they can accomplish more, but instead Delaware’s Choice, Charter and Neighborhood Schools laws intentionally exaggerate pre-existing inequalities. The state is not using our tax dollars to break the cycle of poverty, but rather to provide marginally better facilities and instruction to the children of people who are relatively well off (and who in many cases quite frankly could afford private schools). Delaware’s infamous “zero tolerance in schools” policies also preferentially victimize the children of the poor.

Street and the NAACP have become involved because the majority of the poor in Delaware are people of color, and thus statistically speaking the system is rigged primarily against them, and because the Reach Academy primarily serves African-American children. Go get ’em Councilman Street!

Are they exploiting the oil, or the Brazilians?

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Brazil had an auction of the right to use up some of their non-renewable resources. The Chinese state-sponsored companies CNPC and CNOOC made a deal with French oil giant Total and Anglo-Dutch Shell to submit a combined bid – instead of bidding against each other, they submitted the lowest possible bid as a consortium.

Reading between the lines, it looks like maybe the Chinese told the other nine companies expressing interest “we can outbid you, or you can work with us” but only Shell and Total were willing to collaborate; everybody else just left, rather than annoy the Chinese by driving the price up.

Magda Chambriard, president of the Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency, said “It is hard to imagine a more successful outcome.”

Indefinite suspension for drawing a cartoon bomb.

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In a bid to upstage Delaware as the most anti-child state in the USA, Greenville, South Carolina’s Hill Crest Middle School has suspended an autistic 13-year-old for drawing a picture of a bomb. News coverage here and here.

“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?” —George W. Bush, speaking in Florence, South Carolina, Jan. 11, 2000.

Higher education’s obesity spiral

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Tim Carmody gives his take at Snarkmarket.

Heather (my only reader) says that it’s unsurprising that University costs are so high; she claims that the accommodations and meals are better than at a hotel, what with the sushi bars and high-speed Internet and whatnot. She’s definitely got a point.

But it seems to me, even so, that we could easily afford give every child in America a complete tax-funded education – all the way to PhD level if they can hack it – for less than we spend on foreign military adventuring. And since we no longer bother to raise taxes to pay for our wars, obviously printing money has not been any barrier to spending in the Obama or Bush administrations. Money’s not really the problem for these people we’ve elected; it’s just a matter of what they want to spend our wealth on – in short, they’ve willingly chosen slaughter over education.

Tom Paine was a dirty commie!

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Thomas Paine, one of America’s Founding Fathers and much quoted by “patriots”, was in favor of -gasp- socialism!

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man’s own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

In Agrarian Justice Paine systematically lays out financial means of caring for “three classes of wretchedness. The blind, the lame, and the aged poor;” in terms that would make any modern Democratic or Republican politician’s head explode. The numbers aren’t relevant today, but the sentiment – that the Earth is the shared treasury of all who live upon it, and those who enjoy private ownership of any part of it should be taxed to support those who do not – comes through loud and clear. Reminds me of Dick Gaughan’s “World Turned Upside Down” and the readable parts of Marx.

It’s weird to see today’s politicians, nearly mummified in the flags they’ve wrapped about themselves, spouting nonsense that the likes of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Thomas Paine might have lynched them for. Their claims that Social Security and taxation of assets (as opposed to taxation of income) are unamerican are such barefaced lies that you have to wonder about the sanity of these people. And if you look up what the first Americans thought about corporations, you’ll have to assume that one hundred percent of today’s congress would have fought for the British (well, for the East India Company, really) in the American Revolution.

Thanks to Kent for his gift of Common Sense, which I enjoyed, and got me started on reading Paine.

Banksy is in NYC!

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http://www.streetartnews.net/2013/10/banksy-new-street-art-in-chinatown-new.html

He did a piece in LA a little while ago, too.

If you’re above the law, why bother hiding it?

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Eric the Just says “when you play a rigged game, you get sloppy“.

In a well regulated free market, organizations tend to spring up, grow, and eventually fail, just like living organisms. They aren’t maintained in power by corrupt legislators so that they can become a leeching plague upon a nation’s citizenry. Barack Obama lost my vote on July 9, 2008, at 2:47 PM, when he (along with most of the Democratic Party) reneged on the promise that “telecom immunity is off the table”; for me, the infamous TARP bailout and Obama’s continual unfunded war-mongering has been just icing on the cake.

gun safes unsafe

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I’m a strong supporter of people’s right to defend themselves, which is why I’m extra horrified by this video of children two and three years old trivially opening commercial gun safes.

The video is from Marc Weber Tobias, and was posted to Forbes today.

The most interesting part? Tobias investigated these safes due to a real-life incident in which a 3-year-old died; when his law firm contacted the makers of that safe, and Walmart, who sold the safe, the makers and vendors refused to view the evidence. Instead, they stated that the safes meet the standards of various regulatory offices, and therefore would continue to be sold.

i like ike

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“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
–President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1952

Sadly, the power of a few stupid Texas oil millionaires has grown enormously since Ike’s time.

time to play whack-a-mole

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Bev Harris of Black Box Voting has obtained and published source code to the Accenture voting software used in US elections!

Excerpt from Bev’s post:

Note that one of the service items reveals that it was tripling votes for “random” voters in the 2004 primary. Files I have obtained show that it doubled or tripled votes in the 2008 primary, and also in the May 2010 and Aug 2010 primaries in Tennessee. However: It is not random. It only appears to be random when voters are sorted by fields other than precinct/voter ID. In fact, it is doubling and tripling recorded votes in white Republican suburbs.

Everyone with any computer chops who has actually been studying this issue knows that vote-rigging has been on the rise in the US for quite some time. It’s always seemed pretty clear to me that vote fraud is not nationally co-ordinated – it’s happening all over the place, in individual districts, and both parties are involved. Basically, an eminently hackable voting machine with no audit trail is an attractive nuisance.

BBV is (so far) holding up under the load, and (so far) hasn’t been shut down by the authorities. I’m hoping for a repeat of the DeCSS whack-a-mole comedy. Download it and pass it on!

obama spending binge never happened

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If you’re wondering why the much-vaunted “Stimulus” didn’t get your kid off the dole, you might want to look at this article over at marketwatch.

Reagan and Bush remain the greatest spendthrifts in US history, of course, putting the lie to Republican claims of conservatism. To be conservative, you really ought to believe in conservation and fiscal responsibility. Stephen Bloch has done an interesting analysis that shows some of the complexities of measuring this stuff.

Kucinich slams NATO

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Dennis Kucinich is one of the few US politicians I can stand to listen to. I’ve often thought that we’d be a better country today if the 2004 election had been between Kucinich and Ron Paul, instead of the two schmucks that actually ran. What if the American people were offered a choice between meaningfully different views of domestic policy, instead of two different flavors of corporate toadying wrapped in smugly self-serving patriotism? I like the fiery populism of Kucinich, even though he’s more conventionally left-wing than I’ll ever be.

Anyway, Kucinich released a statement about NATO in which he pointed out that they were created to unify Western Europe and the USA against the Soviet bloc, which no longer exists. Kucinich says NATO primarily functions today as an expensive mechanism for war-mongering, and that the war in Afghanistan is not ending, despite claims to the contrary from the Obama administration.

The Strategic Partnership Agreement between the U.S. and Afghanistan commits us to the country for at least another decade, despite public support for the war being at an all time low. The United States will pay for half of the estimated $4.1 billion per year cost of supporting 352,000 Afghan army and police officers. Afghanistan’s contribution will be $500,000. The rest will be financed by our ‘NATO partners.’