The WUWT Hot Sheet for August 16th, 2013

EW3, your right. This is the most lawless administration ever. My advice – anyone negatively affected by illegal EPA mandates should consider an act of civil disobedience by not obeying any proclamation by Gina McCarthy.

How many lawsuits against the Obama administration’s breaking of the rule of law are already ongoing or pending? Anyone knows?

@DirkH
Ah, but remember the recent Supreme Court ruling: citizens have no standing to sue the government over policy.
Since the court has obviously been compromised (I’m looking at you Justice Roberts), and no citizen has standing to sue, can we honestly expect the 22nd amendment to protect us?
Personally, I’d stock up on element 82, or a shovel to dig your grave.

Outrageous Ampersand says:
August 16, 2013 at 9:38 am
“@DirkH
Ah, but remember the recent Supreme Court ruling: citizens have no standing to sue the government over policy. ”
Then who has?

@Colin;
If we go, the world goes with us. When the Pax Americana ends, every regional and ethnic conflict that’s been frozen for decades will flare up. Plus the entire global financial system will collapse. And a massive chunk of food supplies will be compromised. One hungry desperate person is a tragedy; 5 billion of them is Judgement Day.
These fools are playing with forces they can’t hope to control. Once you uncork the genie bottle, you can’t make him go back in.

McCarthy insisted the administration could reduce so-called greenhouse gas emissions without harming economic growth, (…)
0 * [1 >= x > 0] = 0
They’re right, no harm at all, the (pre-adjustment) growth rate will stay exactly the same!

Green energy is the only way forward, it conserves the earths resources, cuts don on pollution and if its in the past why has Spain implemented the very firs Solar energy plant? Congress are frighteningly naive when they see capital disappearing. You would think it was their own money the way the lie, cheat and distract people to keep it 🙁

She is trying to act before the truth is obvious to all, even the ignorant idiots that unquestionably believe in this nonsense.

The new “WAVE” of McCarthyism…..

Surely Obama [and his Administration] are worse than Carter or Nixon, maybe the worst ever…….
Viewed from the UK and very fond of the USA and my many friends who are having to suffer unnecessarily at present.
Thank goodness Al Gore never made it to the White House!

@milodonharlani
Certainly, a return to the republic as it was orginally envisioned, or even with some modifications in the trappings but not spirit, is the best possible outcome.
Let me know when you figure out how to do it, because I’m plumb out of ideas. Regrettably I’m young enough that I’ll live to see the end of everything.

My suggestion is to read up on Article V of the U. S. Constitution. The Founding Fathers, knowing full well that there could come a day when a bloated federal government would not change their ways, provided the States with a method of amending the Constitution WITHOUT any action by Congress or the President. Two thirds of the State Legislatures can force Congress to call a Convention for proposing Amendments (not a constitutional convention) and those amendments shall become valid when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the States.
We don’t need no stinkin’ congressional or presidental approval.

richardscourtney says:
August 16, 2013 at 10:42 am
=====
A cursory look at the “tornado” machine shows this to be a typical highly capital-intensive green gizmo that isn’t likely to be economical just because of the capital involved. There are less capital intensive ways to recover waste heat.
I’m always happy to be wrong about these things, but I’m usually not. This looks like another too-clever idea that will never pencil out because of sky-high capital costs.

Congress should allocate $1 to the 2014 budget for the EPA. It would send the right message to the bureaucrats and rule-by-decree presidency about who wears the pants when it come to spending tax dolalrs.

@ Janice Moore;
Votes? How terribly quaint. We use a more ‘nuanced’ method now. 21st century and all that.

“””””””……..
Outrageous Ampersand says:
August 16, 2013 at 10:52 am
@milodonharlani
I’ve long been in favor of a North American union, including Mexico, but drawn up more as a tarriff free, border free econonomic zone and not like the zombie that’s the EU. I’m not really sure the details of how to draw it up though.
I’m a registered Republican and vote as one, but am more libertarian in my outlook. I’d vote for a Democrat if any in my state were worth voting for.
I’m a registered Republican and vote as one, but am more libertarian in my outlook. I’d vote for a Democrat if any in my state were worth voting for. ……””””””
Well on the Rand McNalley Maps, there currently are two borders; well the US / Canada border is multifaceted.
So in your borderless Utopia, I guess Canadians can come down and live in the Florida Keys if they want, and I could retire to Baja and go fishing.
Who would be charged with prying those Mexican land barons off their vast holdings, so that all could share them ?
Now who all else from the rest of the world, would we allow to come and join us ?
Ooops ! just forget it. I guess I didn’t read this part:- “””””….. I’m not really sure the details of how to draw it up though. ………”””””

“””””””…….Tom in Florida says:
August 16, 2013 at 10:34 am
My suggestion is to read up on Article V of the U. S. Constitution. The Founding Fathers, knowing full well that there could come a day when a bloated federal government would not change their ways, provided the States with a method of amending the Constitution WITHOUT any action by Congress or the President. Two thirds of the State Legislatures can force Congress to call a Convention for proposing Amendments (not a constitutional convention) and those amendments shall become valid when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the States.
We don’t need no stinkin’ congressional or presidental approval……..”””””””
Well that is simply wunnerful Tom. But it ain’t ever going to happen.
Two thirds of the State Legislatures don’t come anywhere close to agreeing with the will of the people of the USA. That’s why we have the current Senate, that we do have.
Two thirds of the State Legislatures would vote to keep digging this hole those States have gotten us into. Too much gravy in it for them. Right now we have the very best government that money can buy.
I would start with a rule, that any and every law or regulation must be absolutely binding on each and every government employee, from top to bottom; no exceptions. (yes that does mean all elected government officials, and their hired staffs.) All public employee pension programs, would simply be the “Social Security” “”trust fund”” plan. Better yet, I would require that only elected members of the Congress, could offer ANYTHING to be voted on for passage into law. NO law written by unelected beaurocrats.
Yes I know, Utopias come in many forms. I would like to be able to vote for (or against) each and every person, who had the authority to lay and collect ANY tax from me. Preferrably that would be the several members of the local County Council. They can haggle with the State Government, who in turn can deal with the Federal Government. No need whatsoever for me and the Federal Government to have any dealings with each other.

richardscourtney says:
August 16, 2013 at 10:42 am
“Friends:
I am surprised that so far in this thread nobody has commented on the item
Controlled Tornadoes Create Renewable Energy
Waste heat from power plants could be twisted into a nonpolluting source of energy.”
“Nonpolluting” only if one doesn’t count the pollution created when building whatever contraption is required to get energy out of that controlled tornado. Like with windmills, that probably means more expensive than plain old power generation, and hence also more polluting ( taking money expended as measure for polluting potential).
In general, every uneconomic green contraption leads to MORE industrial activity necessary to gain 1 kWh of energy; compared to an economic way of gaining the energy. Efficiency == economics == protection of the environment, as a first approach. Highly subsidized == very inefficient == very polluting.
BTW it sounds pretty similar to a solar updraft tower , which has been shown to produce only 1/10 of the energy you get when you cover the same area with solar panels.
So, probably a great new way to siphon off a few billion in taxpayer money.

george e. smith says:
August 16, 2013 at 11:52 am
“Well that is simply wunnerful Tom. But it ain’t ever going to happen.”
I am fully aware that it isn’t ever going to happen. See my comments above. As you say, we have the best government that money can buy. Truly sad.

@ Tom in Florida;
I’m also from FL, by the by.
Anyway, don’t be so sure about the inevitability of tyranny. Strange things can and do happen, and hummanity has a way of surprising everyone.
After all, G Washington could have been a king, and the rest of those guys nobles, and precisely no one would have batted an eye. That’s the way the world had worked for centuries, and it wouldn’t have struck anyone as out of the ordinary.
Instead they decided to try something different and resist the temptation of a crown.

You push a man too far, and he’ll push back. Even a harmless old lady will fight if you’re hurting her grandchildren.
A man fighting for his life is much more dangerous than a man fighting for his pay.

Why do comics do that to his chin? An exageration of his face would do the opposite. Looking at an Obama headshot right now and thinking, if I were going to draw a recognizable comic distortion of this guy I see:
-Little or no chin
-Very round head
-Thin neck
-Long, thin, curly lips
-Giant teeth
-Little ears that stick out sideways
They get the teeth right, but miss the rest.
I’d like to build a collection of MBA two-axis diagrams, x = cartoonist political lean, y= subject personality’s political lean. Lewandowsky?

@ Philosophy Science (@PhilosoScience)
Obama is like a teenager experimenting with whiskey and firearms. He’s trying to channel forces he has no hope of controlling.

During his (almost obsessive) lying about Benghazi, I realized that Obama was beginning to go off the rails. This isn’t going to be pretty, but I don’t think these wine-and-cheese types are really cut out to be dictators. Instead, they expect that we’ll all submit and everything will be OK.
Plus, they’ve bet the farm on AGW of all things! So what happens when their fantasies fail to materialize? That will be a lot of egg to wipe off. Egg enough to drown in.
No, they act like a bunch of arrogant bastards, but at the same time they’re little people spinning out of control because they’re way, way out of their depth.
(Shows you what a university education can lead to these days.)

[snip . . site rules . . mod]

@SAMURAI, Outrageous Ampersand, milodonharlani, et as. –
With der Fuehrer’s increasingly aggressive usurpations of congressional and judicial authority, have we not a situation parallel to both (1) Hitler, in the first months after he was named chancellor of Germany, appointed through an entirely democratic process; and (2) Egypt’s Mursi, also democratically elected, but a brazen tyrant withal? Democratic processes can still produce a tyrannical regime, a lesson we’ve been way too slow to learn – and that is clearly what is happening here.
Unfortunately, in situations like this, constitutional processes are almost certain to fail, because the political class controls them and prevents them from being exercised. Therefore, a coup cannot be ruled out here, any more than in Egypt, unless one is willing to surrender freedoms once and for all
I too believe that a possible solution may reside with the states: as I noted before, they could block Schutzstaffelgruppenfuehrer McCarthy’s actions by declaring them invalid and of no force or effect because unconstitutional, pursuant to the Tenth Amendment. That might force the federal government either to declare martial law or otherwise intervene militarily – or back off, if they want to avoid a bloodbath. I would hope that if der Fuehrer put the military in that position, it would side with the people instead of the regime.
AGW fanaticism is only the tip of the iceberg in all this. It is really only the public face of a movement whose agenda and objectives are far deeper and more sinister

Tom J on August 16, 2013 at 1:44 pm
[snip . . site rules . . mod]
Oops.

Congratulations Willis and Anthony for mention in the Vancouver Sun:
http://www.vancouversun.com/opinion/op-ed/Carbon+taxes+poor/8789954/story.html\
I was going to post a reply to Greg’s comment, but I don’t do Facebook.

Outrageous Ampersand says: @ August 16, 2013 at 9:44 am
…..the entire global financial system will collapse. And a massive chunk of food supplies will be compromised. One hungry desperate person is a tragedy; 5 billion of them is Judgement Day.
These fools are playing with forces they can’t hope to control.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are correct. Energy and Food, two of the forces these idiots are playing with both at the same time. Everyone here is aware of the constant push for a carbon tax and ‘Green Energy’ The other problem is the attack on our food supply from rising energy costs and the sudden implementation of nasty red tape. Suddenly the US food supply is not looking quite so good.
The USA produces ~ 25% of the World Food supply and we export a lot of it.

March 16, 2012
….Last year, the U.S. exported a record $137 billion worth of food. Indeed, food has always been one of America’s leading exports, with grains accounting for the vast majority of products shipped.
But lately, the U.S. has been exporting a lot more non-bulk value-added foods like meats, fruits, vegetables, poultry, and nuts. Processed foods like food ingredients, beverages, frozen foods, and dairy accounted for $50 billion alone in 2011….
http://www.foodlogistics.com/article/10657446/how-to-feast-on-the-us-food-export-boom-without-fear-of-credit-risk

In 2011, 96 percent of U.S. crop farms were family farms, and they accounted for 87 percent of the value of crop production. There is a major problem looming called the Food Safety Modernization Act which will be hitting farmers about now.
A bit about the Author of the following two articles:
“Hans Bader is Counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington. After studying economics and history at the University of Virginia and law at Harvard, he practiced civil-rights, international-trade, and constitutional law.” link

Food Safety Modernization Act harms small farmers and safety innovation
… As the FDA puts “in place a massive overhaul of the nation’s food safety system,” due to the Food Safety Modernization Act, “Few groups have expressed more frustration than tree fruit farmers, who grow apples, pears and a variety of other produce. They complain that the FDA’s approach, in some ways, defies common sense.” The 2010 law is proving far more costly than its supporters promised it would be, in order to get Congress to pass it.
The “Food Safety Modernization Act would impose only modest costs on farmers, or so we kept being assured when it passed in 2010.” But many orchard growers now face tens of thousands of dollars in costs, notes the Cato Institute’s Walter Olson. As he points out, the law’s unexpected costs have caused a furor in some farming communities, and the Town of Brooksville recently became the “ninth in Maine to pass symbolic ‘food sovereignty’ resolution [See Jordan Bloom, The American Conservative; Food Renegade (Dan Brown of Blue Hill)].”
“The FDA has issued two proposed rules to implement the Food Safety Modernization Act enacted in 2011,” notes Brian Wolfman of Public Citizen, who provides details and links. “The costs to fruit and vegetable growers for complying with the newly proposed produce safety regulation have been estimated at more than $30,000 annually for large farms and about $13,000 per year for smaller farms,” reports The Grower. As Olson, a veteran legal commentator, observes, this could be an enormous burden for some farmers: “How much do typical US farm households make in a year, you may wonder? According to U.S. government figures (here and here, for example) a large proportion of smaller family farms make little or no profit, and are instead supported by the off-farm earnings of family members.”….
At one point, liberal journalists who supported the law made blatantly false claims about its reach, claiming it wouldn’t reach any small farms that didn’t sell across the state lines. That false claim, parroted by a left-leaning “fact-checker,” was explicitly contradicted by Section 406 of the bill, which stated that “In any action to enforce the requirements of the food safety law, the connection with interstate commerce required for jurisdiction shall be presumed to exist” even for farms that do not sell any produce across state lines…..

OH DARN! so they did manage to slip in the *&^$@ Commerce Clause. That is really really bad news.

…Ignorance about the law’s broad reach (and how it will be construed by the courts) has thwarted opposition to the bill… For example, a newspaper claims the bill “doesn’t regulate home gardens.” The newspaper probably assumed that was true because the bill, like most federal laws, only purports to reach activities that affect “interstate commerce.” To an uninformed layperson or journalist, that “sounds as if it might not reach local and mom-and-pop operators at all.” (The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, has sought to forestall opposition to her bill by falsely claiming that that “the Constitution’s commerce clause prevents the federal government from regulating commerce that doesn’t cross state lines.”)
But lawyers familiar with our capricious legal system know better. The Supreme Court ruled in Wickard v. Filburn (1942) that even home gardens (in that case, a farmer’s growing wheat for his own consumption) are subject to federal laws that regulate interstate commerce. Economists and scholars have criticized this decision, but it continues to be cited and followed in Supreme Court rulings, such as those applying federal anti-drug laws to consumption of even home-grown medical marijuana. Indeed, many court decisions allow Congress to define as “interstate commerce” even non-commercial conduct that doesn’t cross state lines….. http://www.examiner.com/scotus-in-washington-dc/trojan-horse-law-the-food-safety-modernization-act-of-2009

And just to make you feel all warm and fuzzy, especially if you were aware of the Premises ID/National Animal ID battle and the sneaky way the government signed up your property WITHOUT permission and placed you in a data base they refused to remove you from.

…The Utah Department of Agriculture and Food is promoting the Utah Garden Challenge in order to collect information about independent food production for the USDA.
The Utah Garden Challenge is a voluntary contest to register 10,000 gardens. The data mining project has a broad interest in any “resource” who is growing food…
http://www.morphcity.com/home/117-utah-garden-challenge-for-suckers

USDA: Join the People’s Garden Movement Register Your Garden

Is your garden benefiting the community, incorporating sustainable practices and a collaborative effort? If yes to all three criteria, congratulations on growing a People’s Garden!
Regardless of type – vegetable, beautification, wildlife, or other – new and existing gardens can receive the designation of a People’s Garden….

Collaboration is a joint effort of multiple individuals so your family could be considered a collaboration. If you give away food to your neighbors, family or friends it is collaboration, and who hasn’t received Zucchini: the vegetable from hell from a neighbor.
I wonder how many will ‘register’ their gardens….

DirkH says:
August 16, 2013 at 9:41 am
Outrageous Ampersand says:
August 16, 2013 at 9:38 am
“@DirkH
Ah, but remember the recent Supreme Court ruling: citizens have no standing to sue the government over policy. ”
Then who has?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The States. But they are also getting told by the US Courts to SHUT …. UP! So we are now in a neat little box. Citizens can not sue and states can not sue on their behalf so where does that leave us? Our second Amendment rights….
Oh I forgot those have been done away with too or at least some of them, “Anti-Occupy” law ends American’s right to protest. Obama is busy working on the last one. Kerry says US [Obama] will sign UN treaty on [small] arms regulation despite lawmaker opposition From the point of view of international Law that binds the US to the treaty.
“U.S. law distinguishes what it calls treaties, which are derived from the Treaty Clause of the United States Constitution, from congressional-executive agreements and executive agreements. All three classes are considered treaties under international law; they are distinct only from the perspective of internal United States law…..”
“This [Supreme] Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty.” ~ Reid v. Covert, October 1956, 354 U.S. 1, at pg 17 <a

Can the states sue the federal government for exceeding its constitutional authority?
According to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the answer is no. Last year, that court dismissed Virginia’s lawsuit challenging Obamacare, on the grounds that the state had no interest in the lawsuit above and beyond the interests of its citizens, and states aren’t allowed to sue just on behalf of their citizens. States can only sue if they have some unique interest as states.
In the latest issue of the University of Florida Journal of Law & Public Policy, I argue otherwise. I contend that states should have the right to sue the federal government for exceeding its constitutional boundaries if in doing so, it conflicts with a state law, such as the Health Care Freedom Act. After all, states already have the right to challenge federal laws that contradict state laws on a variety of other subjects. If the federal government says that states can’t regulate hunting or fishing within their boundaries, for example, the states can sue because the federal government is interfering with the state’s constitutionally reserved sovereignty. The Fourth Circuit acknowledged that, but said that that rule didn’t apply because the Health Care Freedom Act didn’t regulate individual action or run a state program. But as I contend in my article, states aren’t just limited to regulating individual action or running state programs. They also have the authority (reserved by the Tenth Amendment) to articulate and enforce individual rights, which is what the Health Care Freedom Act did. And that means that they should have the power to intervene to defend their own interest as states to protect their citizens.
After all, that’s basically what happened in McCulloch v. Maryland, one of the central decisions in American constitutional law…which the Fourth Circuit completely ignored….

“Many companies will need to purchase new computers to run Windows 8.”
No, as a couple of other people have already pointed out, they merely need to download and install one of the many free versions of Linux optimised for older PCs. Personally I recommend Mint XFCE.

1 Faith Morgan says:
August 16, 2013 at 9:47 am
Green energy is the only way forward,
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are of course correct Faith. It is the only way forward to economic and political chaos, third world status and occupation by either the UN or China. I would suggest you hurry up and start your training in Mandarin now.
I am not going to repeat myself. So here is my comment about why Green energy doesn’t work and how the EU is finally waking up. Click HERE
And the results of “….Lower the CO2 emissions to 83% of the 2008 level over the next seven years….” Click HERE

I did not realize ‘Faith’ is in the UK (You would think she might have notice all the people freezing to death by now.)
So Faith, for you I suggest learning Russian.

Have a look at Charles Krauthammer, “Obama’s global-warming folly” – The Washington Post, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/charles-krauthammer-obamas-global-warming-folly/2013/07/04/a51c4ed0-e3fc-11e2-a11e-c2ea876a8f30_story.html

Txomin says:
August 16, 2013 at 3:37 pm
“@Outrageous Ampersand
Nonsense. “America” is not that important. Sure, upheavals of power murk the waters and create opportunity for disaster. But also for renewal and growth. In short, the world will go on.”
…but maybe as a shithole.

@ Chad Wozniak,
Most troops are southern boys. They grew up listening to the lessons of 1865. They won’t fire on civilians, regardless of how loud the brass screeches.
To everyone else: if America goes, everything else goes with us. Have you forgotten what happened in 476? Sure, hummanity will survive, it will just be set back 1,000 years.
America is the last remnant of the glory of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. A poor shadow, to be sure. But the only ghost left of the mighty heritage of western civilization.

_Jim says:
August 16, 2013 at 11:20 am
One wonders if you are familiar with the facts surrounding the passage of a particular piece of legislation titled the Affordable Care Act …
_Jim,
Thank You!
Those facts very much needed to be clearly stated yet again. I’m glad I read all of the comments, before I responded. You corrected the false statements with greater clarity than I would have.
MtK

I hate to preach, I really do. But right now I feel I must.
There is a very old story. It’s 10,000 years in the telling. It has many branches and many twists. It tells the tale of an animal that chose to stand on two legs and face the universe. This animal had no claws, no fangs, nothing but reason and naked courage.
When famine came, he grew special plants to sustain him. When the sky roared and the earth shook, he made the stones themselves shelter him. When mighty creatures chose to dine on him, he fought them off with fire.
As he progressed, he built roads to encircle the new of the earth, arts to bring the gods down to earth, and laws to ensure that all could walk unafraid.
And he failed. He failed.
The glorious story of Man faltered for many years, with only a single divine spark left alight, a single seed.
This seed found root on a new continent, and blossomed into the greatest force for good the world has ever known. A story 10,000 years long reached its climax under the dawn of a new world.
Now the world grows dim. The light is fading. The darkness closes in, last as it was first.
America is a feeble old man, but we are all that is left. If we go, the light leaves the world, maybe this time forever.
That is what we fight for. Not an economy or a country, but the course of seven billion souls.

@Andres Valencia –
Regrettably, Krauthammer still endorses limiting CO2 emissions, which, if he had stopped to think about it, is exactly what will drive the economic suicide he otherwise recognizes. You can’t oppose economic suicide without opposing its cause.. Too many Republicans, including others like Christine Todd Whitman and William Ruckelshaus, still buy into AGW. These people need to get the message THAT CO2 HAS NO DISCERNIBLE EFFECT ON CLIMATE, be right up front with it to the American people, and fight tooth and nail for real science.
On a related point – now we have new Interior Secretary saying there had better not be any “climate deniers” in the Department of the Interior. Hypocrite! She and her fellow gusanos are the deniers, of actual science.

I certainly hope so, but he better move fast

rw says:
August 16, 2013 at 1:37 pm
During his (almost obsessive) lying about Benghazi, I realized that Obama was beginning to go off the rails. This isn’t going to be pretty, but I don’t think these wine-and-cheese types are really cut out to be dictators. Instead, they expect that we’ll all submit and everything will be OK.
Plus, they’ve bet the farm on AGW of all things! So what happens when their fantasies fail to materialize?…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Urban Wars that will make the Rodney King riots look like a walk in the park.
Why do you think the local police and the Department of Homeland security are gearing up for war?
Obama has been repeatedly playing the race card, Zimmerman, the rodeo clown and every other chance he gets. Now picture what will happen when the electric grid goes completely unstable – permanently because we have shut down too many Coal plants. Now picture what happens when farmers like me take one look at the cost of implementing the Food Safety laws and say LET THEM EAT GRASS!
THEY thought the laws would mean farmers would sell out but I won’t I will be G… D… if I will let the Sons of Syphilitic Camels have my land. And I am not the only one. The average age for an American farmer is ~56. Many are Vietnam Vets. Most farm because they love it not because thats how they make money. So they grow corn for ethanol or plant trees to sell to the UK as fuel but they flip the finger at the ADMIN and the rest of America and they don’t grow food.

“Essentially, he said that it is time to act,” she said. “And he said he wasn’t going to wait for Congress, but that he had administrative authorities and that it was time to start utilizing those more effectively and in a more concerted way.”
==============
Just how might one implement such a strategy, while leading from behind ?

Outrageous Ampersand says: @ August 16, 2013 at 5:04 pm
I hate to preach, I really do. But right now I feel I must….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Ampersand, thank you for putting my feelings into words. I am old, I have no children. I fight with words because like you I look into the future and I see the coming of a Dark Age that makes the last one look benevolent.

Ric Werme,
Thanks I was aware of Concord asking for the military equipment but not of the hearing. I used to live in NH while working in MA. I just could not force myself to live in the People’s Republic until I married a native.

u.k.(us),
A quick Google search shows that “syphilitic camels” gets thrown around a lot in politics. I would call it a playground level insult in most cases, however it can be more serious.
http://joelsgulch.com/insert-blessing-that-involves-the-fleas-of-a-thousand-camels/

richardscourtney says:
August 16, 2013 at 12:35 pm
The device proposed in the above article is not some green dream like windfarms. It is a proposal for increasing the output of thermal power stations by utilising their low grade heat instead of dumping that heat from cooling towers.
At this stage it cannot be known if the proposal is technically, financially and economically feasible. But, at present, power stations dump more energy as low grade heat than the energy they provide as electricity. The proposal certainly seems worthy of investigation.
Richard
=========================================================================
Actually it can be known. I don’t care if we use artificial tornadoes, Stirling engines, or unicorn merry-go-rounds, Carnot thermal efficiency still applies. It is uneconomical to extract more mechanical work from the waste heat from power plants now because the inlet and rejection temperatures are simply too close to one another. I find it hard to believe that this scheme will achieve a 40% increase in total electrical power for the same thermal input. Even assuming they’re talking coal or nuclear baseload which are in the neighborhood of 30-35% efficient, we’re supposed to believe that we’re going to improve this to somewhere near 50%. I’m not buying it til someone shows me some real data or sound calculations.

@Tsk Tsk – Combined heat and power (cogeneration) facilities feed the steam from generation into industrial processes to capture its energy to do useful work. Also, combined cycle gas generation uses the steam heat as well as the combustion heat, to generate added power.

And when Gina was head of air quality at EPA she was asked if she knew the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. She had to admit that she did not. How can someone with such ignorance rise to a position such as this? Shocking.

nzrobin says:
August 16, 2013 at 11:13 pm
And when Gina was head of air quality at EPA she was asked if she knew the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. She had to admit that she did not. How can someone with such ignorance rise to a position such as this? Shocking.
=====================================================================
Hmm. It looks as though the US is very similar to the UK in this regard. Here it almost seems like an act of faith to appoint to top jobs, not least as government ministers, people with absolutely no knowledge of the subject on which they’re supposed to lead. Either that, or we pick people with such a vested interest that they will only pursue their own agenda without any regard for facts or evidence.
It’s working SO well …

Dear Richard S. Courtney,
In the “Tornado Turbine” designs, there is an external heat exchanger somewhere producing the warm air from the plant’s warm water.
Thus you’ll already be building something about as grand as a cooling tower as just one component, to dump the heat to air.
So why not just use a cooling tower? Take a bog-standard hyperboloid natural draft cooling tower, except at the bottom you rework the air intake so the incoming air passes through a turbine first. You don’t want evaporative cooling, you want to use air, so size it for dry cooling.
All the energy in the warm water is available there as would be for a Tornado Turbine. Anything more fancy invites additional efficiency losses. You can get the swirling by offsetting the turbine outflow into the central “tube”, which is more efficient than aimed at center anyway, take it in tangential, even have it in the right direction for a Coriolis force assist.
Will it work? You know much more than I about such, you tell me. Any removal of energy will slow the air stream. There are more air flow restrictions than a standard tower, sapping more available energy. How much can be removed before natural draft stops working?
Which is interesting as a theoretical max, as there is a more important consideration, the rate the heat from the plant is shed. As you remove more energy and slow the air stream, you slow the cooling rate. But the plant MUST dump heat at a certain rate. How much energy is recoverable before the cooling systems aren’t cooling fast enough?
I don’t see the Tornado Turbine being of any benefit over my redone cooling tower. Except where one involves known proven technology whose pros and cons presumably can be rather readily evaluated, the other is screaming for a giant federal research grant to build a giant structure to test the concept. Without being anywhere near as sexy as hot fusion or subatomic particle collisions.

oh, like back when we kinda used to resemble Zimbabwe, less government and more national insecurity, more crime, more illiteracy, more infant and maternal mortality and way lower life expectancy among other things.

Chad Wozniak says:
August 16, 2013 at 7:48 pm
@rw –
I would caution anyone not to think these people have the will to act out their intentions and destroy science, freedom and the economy. We should be prepared for them to cling to AGW and to their claims of authority outside of the Constitution to the bitter end, and they can do tremendous damage before they are finally stopped. . They will do that until physically compelled to stop.
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I’m not saying there aren’t some ominous trends (such as the militarization of the police, and the PC’ing of the military). But Lois Lerner and Doug Schulman aren’t Hermann Goering and Ernst Roehm. What happened in Germany involved tens of thousands of lower echelon officers who had battle experience in WWI and then learned to kill their political opponents in the 1918-23 period (see K. Heiden’s The Fuehrer). They weren’t like our contemporary wine-and-cheese types, and they had a very different ‘reinforcement history’ – and that makes a big difference.
Another way of putting this is that we really do live in a world of cause and effect.

Pamela Gray says:
August 16, 2013 at 10:22 am
I also have Windows 8. HORRIBLE product!!! My new hp extended keyboard notebook has a large mouse pad. Great idea for a mouse pad on a computer used for data analysis and report writing, but bad if you have windows 8. Windows 8 is actually made for a touch screen. Which I do not have. But when I rest my wrists below the keyboard as I am typing they connect with the mouse pad and the Windows 8 “finger sweep” functions start playing with my imagination, making me think my software has a poltergeist.

Pamela, on an HP laptop with W8 there is a small indent on the mouse, top left, when pressed this shuts of the mouse for ease of typing – double tap to close and double tap to activate again, maybe it is the same for the notebook.