Click PLAY or watch Groucho being redundant on YouTube. 🙂
Category: government
Canal Solar Power Project
The Canal Solar Power Project is a project launched in Gujarat, to use 19,000 Kilometre long network of Narmada canals across the state for setting up solar panels to generate electricity. …
The pilot project will generate 1.6 million units of clean energy per annum and also prevent evaporation of 9 million litres of water annually from the canal. The project virtually eliminates the requirement to acquire vast tracts of land and limits evaporation of water from the 750 meter long canal, tackling two challenges simultaneously by providing energy and water security. …
I hope this works.
related –
U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment sponsored by Rep. David McKinley (R-WV) that seeks to prevent the Department of Defense from using funding to address the national security impacts of climate change.
See who voted YES (not to study climate security risk) and who voted NO (to study the risk).
The GOP must change or die, long term. The voters are moving towards accepting Global Warming as a fact while Republicans cling to denial.
Republicans on Dope – just say “NO COMMENT”
Ask Sen. Marco Rubio whether he’s ever smoked marijuana, and the answer you’ll receive might seem a bit hazy.
In an interview with ABC and Yahoo News’ Politics Confidential published Monday, the Florida Republican and potential 2016 presidential candidate said that he will not answer the much-asked pot question.
“Here’s the problem with that question in American politics, if you say you did, suddenly there are all these people saying ‘Well, it’s not a big deal, look at all these successful people who did it,’” Rubio said, later adding, “On the other side of it, if you tell people that you didn’t, they won’t believe you.”
related – Rubio’s Wrong on Recreational Pot
Once again, the GOP is (mostly) on the wrong side of the trend towards ending the idiotic War on Drugs. And decriminalizing marijuana.
Rubio hasn’t the guts to admit he tried pot. That’s what I’m assuming since he hasn’t the guts to answer the question.
America dumbs down
Robert Sawyer linked to this article by Jonathon Gatehouse:
… That inarticulate legacy didn’t end with George W. Bush and Sarah Palin.
Barack Obama, the most cerebral and eloquent American leader in a generation, regularly plays the same card, droppin’ his Gs and dialling down his vocabulary to Hee Haw standards. His ability to convincingly play a hayseed was instrumental in his 2012 campaign against the patrician Mitt Romney; in one of their televised debates the President referenced “folks” 17 times. …
The U.S. is being overrun by a wave of anti-science, anti-intellectual thinking. Has the most powerful nation on Earth lost its mind?
It’s over-stated, but the headline is correct. The USA is getting dumber, not smarter.
Hard to say where it’s all going to end.
Influx by Daniel Suarez – a review
… a world in which decades of technological advances have been suppressed in an effort to prevent disruptive change. …
Particle physicist Jon Grady is ecstatic when his team achieves what they’ve been working toward for years: a device that can reflect gravity.
Their research will revolutionize the field of physics—the crowning achievement of a career. Grady expects widespread acclaim for his entire team. The Nobel Prize. Instead, his lab is locked down by a shadowy organization whose mission is to prevent at all costs the social upheaval sudden technological advances bring. This Bureau of Technology Control uses the advanced technologies they have harvested over the decades to fulfill their mission. …
“Influx” isn’t different, deep down, from the “suppressed new invention” plot used by Robert Heinlein, Ursula K. Le Guin, Poul Anderson and many others going back to H.G. Wells himself. …
The highlight for me were scenes where people can alter their own gravity fields, with very interesting effect. It would make a great film.
An Artificial Intelligence is directed to kill the heroes of the book. But the AI is conflicted. The computer does both. Tries to kill. And tries to save, both at the same time. 🙂
Daniel Suarez is a darling of the Tech / Geek crowd.
Daniel Suarez (born December 21, 1964) is an American information technology consultant turned author. He initially published under the pseudonym Leinad Zeraus (his name spelled backwards).
His career as an author began with a pair of techno-thriller novels. The first one, Daemon, originally was self-published under his own company Verdugo Press in late 2006. It was later picked up by the major publishing house Dutton and re-released on January 8, 2009. His follow-up book Freedom TM was released on January 7, 2010.
… Kill Decision, was released on July 19, 2012. His latest book, Influx, was released on February 20, 2014 …
The Daemon (2 book series) is brilliant. Kill Decision and Influx are not nearly as brillian. But they are still good.
I recommend Influx. And will continue to buy his books into the future.
rated 3.92 / 5.00 on Goodreads
less skeptical about Global Warming
Though the majority of scientists think the Earth is warming, most believing it being somehow caused by you and me, I’ve remained skeptical.
Until now.
I was a skeptic because the time frames cited were in the 10s or 100s of years. That’s NOTHING in geological terms.
But long term data like this via the Washington Post are more convincing.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
If that data is solid, “warming” looks real enough to me.
Key glaciers in West Antarctica are in an irreversible retreat, a study team led by the US space agency (Nasa) says.
It analysed 40 years of observations of six big ice streams draining into the Amundsen Bay and concluded that nothing now can stop them melting away. …
BBC
If those glaciers really do disappear, over the projected next couple of hundred years, they would add roughly 1.2m to global sea level rise.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the Earth is warming. … What do we do about it that would actually have any positive effect long term? And what would it cost? 😦
related – the NASA press release
Solar FREAKIN’ Roadways!
I’ve got to live FREAKIN’ long enough to see this technology in the wild.
Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.
email openinternet@fcc.gov
… the FCC voted to move forward with their new proposed net neutrality rules. While somewhat tempered from the original rumored proposal, the proposed rule is still far-sweeping and controversial. …
If you have strong feelings about the proposed rule, now’s your time to be heard. …
The e-mail inbox the FCC set up for accepting comments …
openinternet@fcc.gov
Consumerist – How To Tell The FCC Exactly What You Think About The Proposed Net Neutrality Rule
Here’s the message I sent them:
faster internet, wider delivery and more competition
Tell me honestly that Wheeler’s current proposal will result in faster internet, wider delivery and more competition.
You can’t.
It won’t.
We want what they have in Korea, Japan and Europe. Or better.
DISAPPOINTED in the FCC and the Obama government. This is the kind of anti-competitive legislation I’d expect from Republicans.
Mike Elgan has 3,291,744 followers on Google+.
https://plus.google.com/+MikeElgan/posts/DQQmXzwrpAi
I trust his opinion as do hundreds of thousands of others. His opinion is my opinion:
Wheeler has managed to forward his proposal to kill net neutrality in a country where almost everybody wants net neutrality. He’s doing it by exploiting the ignorance, gullibility and passivity of the public, the anti-regulation platform of the political right and truckloads of money from the industry he serves at the expense of the public. …
read on … How Tom Wheeler’s FCC plan will wreck your Internet.
email openinternet@fcc.gov
Or don’t complain if your Internet service is slow, expensive and crappy in future.
17-year-old Tea Party candidate
In some Republican districts, ANYONE who comes out MORE right wing gets elected. It’s a protest vote.
Does a 17yr-old have enough life experience to govern?
I don’t think so. The Tea Party is a valuable protest movement, like Occupy Wall Street, but it’s foolish to consider many of their candidates qualified to govern.
Less than a month before graduating from high school, a West Virginia teen has won her first election. 17-year-old Saira Blair ran in the Republican primary for state delegate and beat the incumbent state lawmaker Larry Krump …
The impressive west Virginia teen may have won the GOP primary, but what does that mean for her and what does it mean for the Republican party? …
In her own words, she is pro-life, pro-gun, pro-marriage, pro-family, pro-business, pro-jobs and pro-West Virginia. As a Republican platform, those stances are easy to unpack. She opposes abortion, She is against gun control. She is against gay marriage. She wants small government and few government regulations on business. She wants to cut taxes. …
Without taking away from the obviously impressing and interesting story that she has created in West Virginia by winning the GOP primary, her qualifications for being a political leader should definitely be in question. …
Saira is getting some positive press, even from an organization her Tea Party boosters would like to ban, the NPR.
Wish her luck.
___
related – A couple of people reminded me of 19-year-old, Pierre-Luc Dusseault, the youngest person ever elected to Canadian Parliament. He gave up his summer job at the Golf Course to sit as an MP.
He was one of a “motley crew of political newcomers” to be elected in that bizarre protest vote against the Bloc Quebecois.
right wing “echo chamber”
People ask me why I’m so agitated by the Tea Party and other right wing gasbags. And not nearly as much irked by soft-headed, left wing muddled thinkers.
What makes me mad is disinformation.
Disinformation is intentionally false or inaccurate information that is spread deliberately. It is an act of deception and false statements to convince someone of untruth. Disinformation should not be confused with misinformation, information that is unintentionally false.
The left wing often spreads misinformation. Poorly.
In the USA (but not in Canada) people make money in the right wing media echo chamber.
In media, an echo chamber is a situation in which information, ideas, or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission and repetition inside an “enclosed” system, often drowning out different or competing views. …
One purveyor of information will make a claim, which many like-minded people then repeat, overhear, and repeat again (often in an exaggerated or otherwise distorted form) until most people assume that some extreme variation of the story is true. …
I love seeing Jon Stewart and Colbert call out the disinformers.
One of the worst is Glenn Beck, “with his violent rhetoric, his frequent and absurd fear-mongering, his nasty vitriol, his “jokes” about assassinating government officials, his baseless conspiracy theories, his race-baiting, his flat-out, bald-faced lies, his many hypocrisies … ”
Well said.
Beck left FOX in 2011. But is worth about $90 million today. The more he lies, the more money he makes.
Rush Limbaugh makes around $66 million / year.
The main motivation for those two, Bill O’Reilly and others, is money. I don’t trust a word they say.
FOX and the echo chamber endless repeat daily “talking points“. It’s incredibly boring to count the repetitions of the talking points of the day.
related – NY Times opinion piece 2013 – Suffocating Echo Chamber
Rick McCharles 