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Wonder if this McCarty is any relation to Joe McCarthy, R Wisconsin, who in the early 1950s started a witch hunt to weed out those Americans who had freely chosen to join the Communist and Socialist Parties during the Great Depression, their right via our Constitution ? Due to a total lack of response by a Conservative government to take any meaningful action to help jobless Americans find any work, the membership in these two parties ballooned and gained great political power that eventually forced the wealthy sector of this country to finance FDR's New Deal.
In the early fifties, McCarthy actually stood up in Congress and demanded that a Loyalty Oath be created and signed by all Americans, Fascism was taking root in this country.
We were saved by the Free Press of that period who went after McCarthy and crushed his political career and all his authoritarian goals. Unfortunately we no longer have a Free Press in place to save us this time !
It is MIND BOGGLING to me, how 47% of Human Beings in America, can be this GULLIBLE, and STUCK ON STUPID!
For we have issues in ALL RACE'S, yet our MEDIA is trying to convince us, its only the BLACKS whose creating these issues!
But if you go on GOV.NET, you will learn that out of 6.2 MILLION CRIMES committed in America, WHITES commits MOST of these crimes, whereby only blacks commit, LESS THAN HALF of whites do! Yet all you see in the MEDIA are BLACK FACES!
Wealthy WHITE FOLKS, OWN and CONTROL our MEDIA, and why we see the OBSTRUCTION and the LIES we do!
WALL STREET being our POSTER CHILD, WHERE GRAND LARCENY IS COMMITTED, yet NONE of them have gone to jail, yet living high on the Savings they have STOLEN from everyday working stiffs, whereby, they've PAID OFF our REPUBLICAN CONTROLLED HOUSE and SENATE, to make their GRAND THIEFS ... LEGAL!
and YES, there are some DEM'S involved, but not on the scale whereby reTHUGS, sell out the American worker like they are taking a leak!
The Negative Propaganda, Hillary supporter's are running against Bernie, sorry!
Even if Obama did NOT accept Wall Street Money, he STILL WOULD HAVE WON; WHY? BECAUSE THE MAJORITY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE HAD HIS BACK!
He disappointed us, by accepting Wall Street, when he did not need them.
We will PROVE in 2016, that IT IS PEOPLE, OVER MONEY!
BERNIE SANDER'S ... PRESIDENT for the NEXT 8 YEARS, to clean up America, to get us back where we should be .... ABOUT PEOPLE .... NOT THE 2%!
The TRUE REASON, America can NOT come to Syria's aide, is because the BUSH ADMINISTRATION DID TOO MUCH DAMAGE to that region! and that they, the Bush Admin. wants to make the Middle East the 51st State, as they did in America, by killing and taking this land away from the Native Indians, as they did in Hawaii, and Alaska!
Whenever we observe upsets as in the Middle East, its an AGENDA, the super wealthy whites, wants to OWN and CONTROL, for these bastards, do NOT BELEIVE, any PERSON OF COLOR, should be in control, nor own anything of major wealth!
This is, SATAN, ALIVE and Well, ruining our planet; yet too many good people stand down, to PREVENT what is happening in American and around the world!
That Willie Lynch Agenda, INCLUDES ALL RACES, and as we observe, they have not missed a step, and/or Culture! It destroyed the Black Race, now observe the Middle East! How Cultures can be this STUCK ON STUPID breaks my heart, after observing what they did to the Black Race in America!
Fact IS, problem IS, these Host's will NOT do the right thing, especially Chuck Todd! All these individuals care about is HOLDING ON TO THEIR JOBS! DAMN, the American People, and the LIES they promote everyday in the Media, and WHY many of us no longer watch these shows!
Correct of course, nice link.
Reply to post #29.
@ WindCity nice fantasy. As usual with these pipe dreams, no numbers, no analysis, lots of vigorous arm-waving, all the usual renewables talking points and all the typical anti-nuclear jargon, disinformation and fear mongering.
Latest NREL data for 2014 California is $4.66 per watt peak for solar installs. So 10 kw system costs $46,600 generates hopefully 15,800 kwh per year. Powerwall battery bank is $500 per kwh installed, so storing 16 hrs of power would be at least 10kw x 18%CF X 16hrs /0.8 eff/(1-0.2 DOD) = 45 kwh storage needed just to supply one days energy. That's $22,500 for the battery bank good for 15 yrs max, so two of those plus your solar panels gets you 25 yrs of electricity, 1800 watts for ~$90k in sunny California. That's a mere $50 thousand per avg delivered kw for 25yrs.
Nuclear power plants, even at rip-off US prices for FOAK (First of a Kind GenIII) are $7 thousand per avg delivered kw for 60-100 yrs. Chinese, Indian & Korean reactors are < 1/3rd of those costs.
And that storage is only good for one day. In California, very sunny place that would cover you most of the time, but not always, you would still need fossil to cover cloudy weather or storage cost would explode. Most places on this Earth are not like California, often weeks and even months of cloudy weather. And in Northern areas sun is minimal in winter when energy demand is max.
To supply the per capita US or Canada energy consumption of 10 kw. Family of four that's 40 kw. Add a couple retirees, disabled, non-productive and each US family needs to supply 60 kw to supply our avg energy consumption. At your one day, sunny California special that's $50 thousand/kw X 60 kw = $3 million per avg US family every 25 years. And add 2 cents per kwh O&M cost to that. Or 60 X 8760hrs X $0.02 = $10,500 per year. Or $260 thousand over 25 years. I don't know about you but I can't afford that. I can't afford that for everything never mind just energy and I'm just avg middle class. You want even the poor to pay that.
And you still need to pay for a full 100% backup fossil fuel storage, distribution & generation infrastructure for when the solar is missing in action for more than one day. Almost entirely fossil in the winter in more northern or rainy areas. And transmission of 1000 kms costs as much as 3 or more replacement, USA priced FOAK NPPs.
Those are the real numbers not your arm-waving fantasy.
As for your nonsense about Nuclear safety. The facts speak for themselves:
Deaths per TWh of electricity:
Coal: 161
Oil: 36
Biomass: 12
NG: 4
Hydro: 1.4
Wind: 0.15
Nuclear: 0.04
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
So nuclear is merely 4000X safer than our current coal enery supply. Not safe enough for nutball greenies though. Despicable fanatics is what they are.
"promoting policies that kill millions of Africans, destroys hundreds of thousands of jobs in the US, and leads to massive increases in electricy costs,"
That is one huge string of claims, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You gave none.
When scientists talk about climate, they have lots of evidence. As for your claims, first of all, reneewables in more and more parts of the country cost the same or LESS. So much for "increases in electricity costs" being a foregone conclusion that we're doomed to have if we actually work for a cleaner world.
But the problem goes deeper, and the hypocrisy. Aren't conservatives against "free-loaders"?
Why should a business "prosper" in part by dumping pollution into the Commons? The Commons aren't just some touchy feely thing that leftists use, it's what hard-nosed, for-profit competing businesses rely on every single day...including the major part of the Commons called the climate, that other businesses rely on. By externalizing costs onto both the public and other businesses by not paying for their dumping GHGs into the atmosphere, these oil-gas-coal based industries are free-loaders.
Worse, even Economics 101 is flunked by conservatives who claim to love market economics, by simply counting only *parts* of the balance sheet. No business would stay afloat - they would go bankrupt probably quickly too - if they had incompetent accountants who counted only some (but not other of the big) costs, or only some (but not others of the big revenues).
Well, for the "costs" of taking steps towards a cleaner environment including less pollution into the atmosphere, it simply flunks Economics 101 and Business 101 to count as "costs" only costs to polluters, and to skip most everything else.
This includes skipping not only the benefits (the other side of the balance sheet as it were) of protecting the environment, and polluting less....it also miserably fails to count other *costs* - the costs of Business As Usual fossil fuel based dirty energy.
Like the cost of not taking action, letting more and more pollution accumulate. Those costs are not accounted for in the rhetoric of "oh my, the huge liberal costs of cleaning up the environment are under your bed, they're gonna get you!"
Not only children's health, and lung disease, but those for starters. Then the costs of rising sees that, surprise surprise, affect the poor that you say you care about. Bangladesh for example is very vulnerable to sea level rise, it's population is 160 million, to put that in perspective, as recently as 1950 the population of the United States was just 150 million. So Bangladesh is not small. And highly vulnerable to sea level rise, and is a very poor country. The same poor, low-income people which the "let's not lower business profits by demanding they stop being free-loaders and polluting our common atmosphere" crowd claims to care so much about.
That's just one (huge) example. A large fraction of Bangladesh would be underwater from the kind of modest sea level rise we'll get this century (and the sea doesn't stop rising then, ya know?) if we're lucky and avoid any nasty surprises.
But it's not the multi-billion dollar immensely powerful fossil fuel industry, or heavily polluting free-loader industries who make a profit on the back of cleaner industries by polluting shared common resources, it's not the powerful flat-earth "Free market" ideoogy that all regulation is bad (well, if it hurts profits of the powerful..regulating us little folks is "ok")...it's not that, it's that they care oh so much about the poor...that's the ticket..
Pfwells, is this some kind of joke? Like, suppose someone is accused of having started a fire, charged with arson, and imagine the suspect responds by saying to the police:
"who me? I didn't do it. I can show you that over the last 100,000 years - most of it before I was even born! - there were lots of fires. How silly are you police officers of claiming I committed arson. There have been fires going on since centuries before I was born, heck, since centuries before humans walked the Earth. Silly, incompetent cops, or maybe even in the payroll of some liberal think tank, you are....to accuse me of arson when I can show you it's been happening, fires happening, for thousands even millions of years. Why the nerve of you, accusing me of arson"
Would you take that seriously? Of course not. But that's what you just did. No, really. It's exactly the logic you just used. Who are you trying to fool, yourself, or the rest of us? You just said you don't believe in human-caused climate change (which is sometimes called simply "climate change") and your evidence, your huge and supposedly impressive "evidence" is that the climate has "changed" in the past? Really?
Come on, you know perfectly well that the fact that fires have existed long before humans, in no way, shape, or form, does that rule out that, now that we do have people on this Earth, that someone can commit arson. You know that. The fact that the climate "changed" in the past (which the scientists, I want to assure you in case you're worried ,they are very well aware of that....) does not rule out in any way, shape, or form, that since the Industrial Revolution, human activity has placed a large role in changing the climate.
The fact that to save time people (on all sides) call it "climate change" --a term championed by a conservative operative, Frank Luntz saying it would sound less severe than Global Warming, so he pushed for the term Climate Change, by the way -- the fact folks on all sides don't usually use the longer phrase Anthropogenic Climate Change or Anthropogenic Global Warming, doesn't change a thing. A rose is a rose, whatever you call it. We can call it "Climate Beautification" or any other term, doesn't affect what it is, what is actually is, and that humans have played a big role..the science shows, is that climate has changed sharply since the Industrial Revolution.
CO2 levels have gone up from about 280ppm, to today's 400pm, in the blink of an eye geologically speaking - since the industrial revolution (and most of the increase since mid-1900s) which is the blink of an eye geologically. We know that the CO2 levels have fluctuated between about 180ppm and maybe 295ppm for the last 800,000 years....then in the blink of an eye (a mere 1/10 of 1 percents of that 800,000 year period would be 800 years, and the industrial revolution, how long ago did that start? It was only about 1/4 of that, of that 1/10 of 1 percent; only some 200 years ago) in that blink of an eye, shot up from 280ppm to today's 400ppm.
More evidence?
Analysis of how much human activities release, minus how much oceans and biosphere have absorbed, guess what? The numbers add up: they match that very increase from 280ppm to 400ppm.
As if that's not enough of a smoking gun, how about another one? Analysis of carbon isotopes show where the new carbon came from - "CO2 produced from burning fossil fuels or burning forests has quite a different isotopic composition from CO2 in the atmosphere" (RealClimate website by actual climate scientists) and the isotope ratios are a completely independent way to find a second smoking gun which shows, guess what? The extra CO2 came from burning fossil fuels/forests.
Another good website is SkepticalScience which has a list of top myths (like, isn't it the sun that is causing recent global warming? Well no, if the sun was the main factor, the warming would be during the day ,not at night. If it was greenhouse gasses, you'd expect the increase in temperature at night, to be larger than the increase in temperature during the day. The numbers were measured and, sure enough, temperatures have gone up by more, at night. So much for "it's all because of the sun") but it has many more myths, detailed explanations, links, actual citations of science papers, and more.
@ mjonir That's liquid FLOURIDE Thorium Reactor. Flouride salts are extremely stable just as table salt is an extremely stable salt of Chlorine which is similar to Flourine.
It takes 250 Tonnes of natural uranium enriched down to 35 tonnes of fuel to run a typical Light Water Reactor used in America. One Tonne of Thorium will run a 1 GW LFTR reactor for a year. One person can dig that up for free, with a shovel, in 3 hrs from the waste or tailings of a Rare Earth mine, where they produce metals for Wind Turbines. That's a lifetime energy supply for over 10 thousand Americans.
Dr. Kiki (she's very hot) does an interview with Kirk Sorenson on LFTR:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEpnpyd-jbw&feature=player_embedded#at=51
Oh man, the emails! Where do these come from? And, yes, they just keep getting passed around by those whom Bill Maher likes to call the GOP's "useful idiots". I rather like that moniker...
Good bit of analysis putting the pieces together, Thom. It always boggled me how politicians & pundits could come out with such insane rhetoric, with no support given, but people just eat-it-up. And here you have it: those who aren't primed by RW media get it from these emails.
KM wants boots on the ground in Syria, a lot of them. Morn Joe mentioned the one And I think KM is whom. So war with Assad, Isil, Russia, and Iran are a given, Israel will want some action too. Saranjevo replay? Turkey and Nato vs Greece (also Nato) vs drones. Saudi's Sunnis (behind 9/11, Isil, and alQaeda w/Turkey's complicity) vs Iran's and Assad's Shiites w/Russia's assist. Lebanon is 25% refugees and been abused by Israel (who hasn't been?)
Contrails are temporary and I doubt they represent a significant amount of cloud cover.
As for the idea of chemtrails, you'd have to explain how airlines keep going bankrupt and choosing to squeeze money out of their customers while being paid by the government (or whoever) to carry extra weight in their planes.
The Benghazi and Hillary Email distractions continually make the news, while the Caucus Room Conspiracy is known by relatively few. No revelation here, the Fascists control the message. In addition you'll never hear Democrats like Wasserman Schultz bring up the subject of the Caucus Room Conspiracy on a Sunday show, they're all too busy playing timid defense.
The Caucus Room Conspiracy is one of the biggest political scandals since Watergate, and the we hate the President plot is to this day being carried out to completion. The end result is all collateral damage, "We the People," are taking the hit..... Obama is doing just fine.
Without a doubt, McCarthy and the other scoundrels involved would have been tarred and feathered 240 years ago!
For a party that claims to oppose Public Campaign Financing; no party in the history of the United States has become more adept at it than the Republican party over the last 25 years. Wasting 100s of millions dollars, wether it be the Clinton Impeachment, Whitewater, Acorn and Planned Parenthood investigations, Obamacare votes,Benghazi, Shirley Sherrod and so on; these are noting more than public financed political campaigns for the Republican party. And they have accomplished nothing more than feeding red meat to their fanatical base and trying to stain the brand of the Democratic party. And all at the cost of 100s of millions of taxpayer dollars as just admitted by Kevin McCarthy.
Paul has hit the nail squarly on the head. It's a matter of will. Does the public possess enough will power to force change through the election process or have the wealthy special interests who have clearly bought our government won already?
I believe the combination of Elon Musk's Powerwall and LFTR technology alone are scaleable such that they can replace the use of fossil fuels for electricity generation. Google thorium and read some of the articles about LFTR technology. They have convinced me.
A side note: LFTR technology was developed and tested by the DOE in the 60's but was discarded because it was not a viable source of weapons grade Uranium and Plutonium. There was no technological reason for not using LFTR technology, only a political one. When will we start basing technological problem solving on science instead of politics? If we continue to make political decisions over scientific decisions to tecnological problems particularly as it realates to the climate destruction taking place today we may be facing our own extinction.
Let us not forget that McCarthy was hand-picked by Bill Thomas - the (real) major power in the House for years (same district, Bakersfield, and was my Congresscritter for a few years until they redistricted!) The inner sanctum of the rethugs' elite level (redundant?) and their billionaires have obviously, and accordingly, hand-picked KM for Speaker AND an eventual run for POTUS. Just watch. He represents/shills for - not only monster agri-business but the myriad of associated exploitive corporate extortions that defraud and poison the population. Include Koch Industries, pesticides (oil++), . . . But, let us take heart: the t-partiers and other knuckle-draggers might just blow the whole plan up.
Thanks again, Thom. Keep it coming.
I don't think it's a a matter of "can" but one of "will". Yes, we "can" make the switch to clean(er) energy. The technology is there. Several industrial nations are ready have. They've proven that it could be done. We've even tried it on smaller scales such as various communities, and it's worked.
However, it's a matter of "will". Do we have the national willpower to implement it. Do we have the national willpower to fight and defeat the special interests groups---especially the oil and gas industries---which have a near stranglehold on Washington. And finally, do we still have the fortitude as a nation to stick to the gameplan and not allow ourselves to be distracted by one make believe crisis after another, designed to delay and then postpone any changes to who knows when?
Are they stupid enough to think that they can harm Obama and not at the same time harm the country? Or do they not care about that because they're not too fond of our country's government if they're not running it anyway? So what then do you call intentionally harming the people's government, by calculated Congressional gridlock, for example?
What do you call it when the Supreme Court and a major political party conspire to deprive citizens of the right to vote, while allowing a flood of anonymous megabucks to influence our political system? Is it just misfeasance to use a House committee for partisan political purposes? These evil genius' are corrupting the government at every turn and they're not going to stop, and their base keeps them in offfice. In the pay of their donors, apparently job number one is to ruin the people's government however they can.
One thing you could say about House Majority Leader (and the presumptive next Speaker) Kevin McCarthy, is that he just comes right out and says what the GOP real goals are. Regarding the endless rounds of Benghazi hearings, he said yesterday that Hillary’s dropping poll numbers are evidence of the “effectiveness” of the hearings. In other words, getting at the truth of the matter was never the goal. Swift-Boating Hillary was. We knew all this already, of course, but to have the top GOP guy boast about it on national TV is breathtaking.
Michael Brown
Portland Oregon
"Liquid fluorine (-188 oC) burning engines have also been developed and fired successfully. Fluorine is not only extremely toxic; it is a super-oxidizer that reacts, usually violently, with almost everything except nitrogen, the lighter noble gases, and substances that have already been fluorinated. Despite these drawbacks, fluorine produces very impressive engine performance. It can also be mixed with liquid oxygen to improve the performance of LOX-burning engines; the resulting mixture is called FLOX. Because of fluorine's high toxicity, it has been largely abandoned by most space-faring nations."
Yeah, nothing could go wrong here. Liquid flourine is, perhaps, the most difficult chemical agent known to man, to control.
Windy City, have you researched Liquid Flourine Thorium Reactor technology? Lumping all nuclear technologies into the same basket is a serious error. LFTR technology is has significant advantages and far fewer disadvantages over current boiling water reactors. The most significant is that it does not use Uranium as a fuel, hence none of the disadvantages of mining another non-renewable and finite resource. LFTR uses 95% of its fuel vs less than 1% of BWR's. Thorium is primarily derived from monazite a waste product of rare earth mining and is abundant worldwide. LFTR technology is safe.
Holy crap, these right-wing jackasses are annoying. Not conducive to a discussion of issues, nor, as a viewer, of learning from such.
I think "witch hunt" is an apt term. We all know that it's used because the people being hunted are not witches. The term indicates the unfair branding of its victims. Besides, the term has been used in plenty of situations where only men were involved.
If it's a matter of money, distributed solar energy supported by a revamped grid architecture and advanced storage systems will be far less costly to implement than nuclear energy, and will carry none of the risks nor present any of the vexing issues such as the sequestration of spent nuclear fuel for thousands of years. Yes, a transition to solar will be costly, too, but not nearly as much. Nuclear power has many hidden and societal costs, not just the expense of R&D, construction, operation, and maintenance; for instance, decommissioning a nuclear power generator costs billions, more than the original cost of building the plant. In the event of an accident, it can make large territories uninhabitable. I grant that progress has been made in safety, but the argument that nuclear power is cheaper, safer, more practical than solar, wind, geothermal or renewables is simply wrong. All the energy for electrical power that we need shines down on us every day of the year. We just need to harness it. The cost of PVCs is falling steadily, and the growth of the solar energy industry has become exponential. Solar is the future. Nuclear energy will have certain niche applications; it will be useful, for instance, in space exploration for powering ion propulsion systems and will no doubt still be applied as an energy source for powering large ocean-going vessels. But for feeding the national power grid? It makes no sense whatsoever. I realize that the industry has powerful advocates, just as, for instance, the fuel cell industry does. But just as fuel cells make absolutely no sense in terms of physics—why mine and refine dirty fossil fuels to produce hydrogen, an inherently dangerous gas, difficult and costly to control, to use as feedstock for an expensive fuel cell to make electricity when the electrons can be harvested directly from sunlight, stored in a battery, and drawn as needed?—nuclear power suffers from the same deficit of common sense. Why dig up uranium, spend billions to refine it, stick it in a reactor, produce tons of hazardous waste, to send electricity over costly and inefficient power lines to end users? It's like using a cannon to kill a fly when a fly swatter is all you need and does a better job at it. Solar is the future for large-scale electrical energy generation. Nuclear will fill a number of niches, but it's the wrong choice to meet our larger needs.