Unintended Consequences.... on the way

This past Friday the House of Representatives passed the Energy/Climate Bill, otherwise known as the Cap and Trade or Cap and Tax Bill. This bill attempts to deal with "Global Warming" and energy consumption. The bill hopes to alter behaviour by taxing fossil fuel energy, and subsidising "clean" or "green" or "alternate" sources of energy such as wind turbines and solar panels, amongst an array of other "energy saving" initiatives. The bill assumes that domestic jobs will be created, energy independence will be achieved, and planet warming will be stopped or at the very least the USA will set an example for the rest of the world to follow.

Here's a scenario that could result from this kind of economic and weather tinkering. The winds that wrap around the world in the higher latitudes, between 35 and 65 degrees and called Westerlies, blow, in the northern latitudes, from the southwest to the northeast, and in the southern latitudes from the northwest to the southeast. Wind dynamics are discussed at length here: http://userpages.umbc.edu/~tokay/chapter9.html . It is our society's desire to have energy without either fossil fuel pollution or the nuclear solution, hence windmills... and to a lesser degree solar panels.... will proliferate both the land and seascape. Imagine building millions and millions of wind turbines and installing them coast to coast as well as offshore. As an aside, most of them will be built in China.

Here, the Laws of Thermodynamics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics) tell us that the energy "created" by the windmills will simply be energy taken from the wind. In other words, the energy of the wind is less in the lee of the windmill than it is on the windward side. There is only so much wind on Earth and any alteration of wind energy, having been converted to electricity, will eventually be felt in areas we have no or limited understanding of. As the wind to windward passes by our windmill it is converted to heat and electricity, the wind to leeward the turbine is lessened by that same degree. Those winds normally blow obliquely toward the polar regions and carry with them heat picked-up from the warmer latitudes. It can be safely assumed that since it has been agreed, at least by those in the Human Caused Planet Warming Camp, that humanity's quest for power and earthly dominance has and is altering weather patterns, we must assume that those converted warming breezes will to some degree be lessened, thus causing polar regions to cool. Those Westerly winds also push ocean currents in the same direction, toward the poles, bringing with them warm mid-latitude water which further moderates polar cooling. All of that oceanic and atmospheric action will slow down and as it slows we will begin to enjoy even less energy conversion to each windmill. Since the wind will lessen as it moves across the planet, we will need ever more turbines just to stay even!

As we sleep, with our Government Motors Chevy Volts securely parked in our garages and plugged into our trickle chargers, a monster will be slowing growing .... at the Poles. Ice. As the wind and ocean heat is sapped, even ever so slightly, the Polar Regions will react in a directly portionate manner. Our heat, our cooling, our locomotion, our electricity, stolen from the wind, will be replaced by the cold from whence the heat was extracted, at the Poles! The great irony here is that in man's effort to control Planet Warming he will have created the worst of all climates..... a man induced Ice Age.

Now we're not yet finished with our little scenario, it has a way of affecting other vital interests. It is well known that wind farms have an associated bird kill quotient: The National Wind Coordinating Committee (NWCC) in a study of wind farm avian mortality http://www.nationalwind.org/publications/wildlife/avian_collisions.pdf concluded that "data collected outside California" (this last is important because the data did not include one of our largest wind farms, Altamont, which has a very much higher bird kill rate) http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2005/10/69177 indicates an average bird kill of nearly 2 birds per turbine each year. Multiplication is easy: The USA uses some 5 Trillion kW, roughly half from coal alone. A state of the art turbine in a good turbine location will produce perhaps 1.5 Million kW. Millions of wind turbines will be needed to eliminate just coal powered homes and plants, not even mentioning powering-up all those Chevy Volts! You do the math. You tell me, what impact will the loss of millions of birds - the exponential loss due to the loss of breeding pairs - have on the planet? Similarly bats and insects are adversely impacted. Here is an article addressing Indiana bats and their problem with turbines: http://indianalawblog.com/archives/2009/06/environment_ind_37.html. With the birds, bats, insects, and cold, one can easily see the domino effect taking place.

Where are we so far? Let's see....Ice, Birds, Bats, and Insects. What else is waiting in the wings of the Wind Turbine World of the Future.... coming to a theater near you! Here is a recent article describing the health impact of wind turbines on humans... not to mention farm animals, http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/16774 . I personally have tried to sleep with a nearby turbine operating.... forget it. And we have yet to consider the overall impact on food production. With a cooling planet farm production will fall. With encroaching ice arable acreage will shrink. With dying winds, dying birds and dying insects, plant pollination will lessen. To me, that all adds up to the ultimate solution to our problem, that being, no, not a lack of energy, but one of too many human beings. As we shift from a warm and windy place to a cold and still one we will simply die off too...... did I mention the fossil fuel and other natural resources required to manufacture all those turbines?

Cheers, Mel

Who Died Today?

I think I need another TV channel...... The Death Channel. It would specialize in covering the lives of recently dead celebrities and those long boring rehashings of The Year that show-up around New Years. The Death Channel would allow me to continue to watch the shows I look forward to each day and week without fear of preemption just because a famous person has left us.

Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and today the famous huckster Billy Mays. With the number and age of celebrities around these days pretty soon ALL the regular channels will be nothing but death stories. We need a whole channel just for those folks, and their fans so the rest of us can enjoy our regular choice of entertainment and information.

It's just another push forward for the net.... where one can choose the info one needs/wants. Remember when Princess Di died? .... was it continuous coverage on every channel for what? a week? or was it a month? God help us when Obama goes, or even gets sick.... it'll be bedside 24/7 coverage and if he dies, oh my God! it'll be at least a month or a year? of 24/7 mausoleum coverage!


Cheers, Mel


P.S. Also today, "My Little Margie," Gale Storm Passed.

A State of Fear and Loathing

This a Chart of Fear. It describes in stark graphics what happens to an economy when it's government is first gripped by fear, changes direction and concurrently has a desire to create social revolution reordering the laws of physics: Thermodyamics and Gravity. The government puts its citizens into a state of fear and its business leaders into a state of loathing.

The Chart speaks volumes. How did this happen and where are we going? It happened because the government has capriciously changed Contract Law, seized major businesses: private, publicly held, and quasi-public; and seized control of nearly every area of finance.

The result is that it is impossible to operate within this changing system with any certainty. It's like being at sea in a storm with both wind and waves rough and confused. The best tactic? Reef-down, lower sail, go slow and keep damage to a minimum. To survive that means: take no risk, make no unnecessary expense, hire no unnecessary employees, make no plans other than to await a sea state one can sail upon. Unemployment will continue to rise, businesses will continue to fail, homes will continue to fall into foreclosure. Nothing has been "fixed" by government leaders. Much of what got us into this mess is being rekindled by those very soles charged with fixing "it": government giveaways, easy credit to those least deserving and least likely to repay, The Fourth Estate in bed with the regulators, business people caught like deer in the headlights, the rest watching it all ravel and unravel like a comic horror show in which we are all playing a real-life role.

Dietrius From Around the Web

George Soros

Burt Prelutsky reports that George Soros' sorry behavior as a Jew in Hungary during WWII, as detailed on Wikipedia has been erased...

"....About a month ago, I looked up George Soros at Wikipedia and read about his helping the Nazis confiscate the property of his fellow Hungarian Jews when he was a teenager. At the same time and place, I read that in response to a Steve Croft question on “60 Minutes,” Soros claimed that he had never regretted doing it or felt any shame or remorse afterwards because, as he explained, if he hadn’t done it, someone else would have. The other day, I re-visited the site and the entire episode had vanished. There still remained the mention of his having been convicted by a French court of insider trading. I am now wondering if billionaire Soros will make certain that it, too, disappears..." Read the entire posting here: http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/bprelutsky/2009/05/06/a-matter-of-opinion/

Islam Day in Hawaii

This is a little strange in a State where the indigenous people are treated as 3rd Class Citizens, kept barefoot, pregnant and ignorant in order to provide the necessary lawn-mowers and bed-makers for the tourist industry. Just a cynical cloying ploy to attract wealthy sheiks? The desperation of recession?
http://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/session2009/Bills/HCR100_HD1_.HTM

Happy Talk

The Headline reads: "New jobless claims plunge, retail sales improve!" But the small type buried in the story reads: "But the total number of people receiving jobless benefits climbed to 6.35 million, a 14th straight record." When we get to the point that the last working person is finally laid-off will the headline read?: Hurray, we've turned the corner at last.... Only ONE person Laid-Off last Week!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090507/ap_on_bi_ge/us_economy;_ylt=Aqsh7XkrdJDYqlWBAjaW.tyyBhIF

Finally, a question.....

What has changed in the past 3 or 4 or 6 or 12 months? What has happened to: imploding mortgage market, chronic energy shortage, job creation, shovel ready projects, broken banks, non-competitive automakers, rapid transit, the war in Iraq, nukes in Iran and South Korea, the Taliban? To all the above... nothing. In the meantime... Texas and Oklahoma are heating-up over secession:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=67229

Are we having fun yet?

Obama's First 100 Days

100 Days, and counting….

“Mel, in regard to President Obama’s first 100 days, isn’t there anything you agree with?”

The short answer is no. The full answer is here:

- No, I do not agree with "transparency" of Top Secret documents during an ongoing war.
- No, I do not think it is smart to attack the previous administration‘s conduct safeguarding the U.S. in the middle of a war. Following 9/11, we all wanted to do what was required to restore safety to our country. Attacking the preceding administration sets a dangerous precedent. Show Trials were reserved for the Soviets in the 1950s! We watched them with amazement and amusement; now we'll watch them tear apart America.
- No, I do not agree with the greatest spending spree civilization has ever seen: http://www.safehaven.com/article-12175.htm .
- No, I do not believe the Feds should run the car companies -- even arrogantly appointing a "Car Czar" that knows nothing more about cars than that they should have a comfortable rear seat -- nor the Banks, nor the Brokerages, nor the Newspapers. If these outfits can't make it under the rules of capitalism let them fail. If they are "saved" their saving will be the destruction of their honest competition.
- No, the president should not aid the Unions -- Unions broke the railroads, then the steel mills, next the airlines, and now the auto industry, and along the way most of the rest of the industrial base of America, our bed-rock bottom line strength. The real story behind out-sourcing is an attempt of American industry to remain competitive and that means finding cheap labor. And now the unions have a stranglehold on State and Federal Government! France!
- No, the President should not bail-out the thieving bankers and stock brokerages, and struggling auto makers, newspapers or any other individual business. These companies should be allowed go bankrupt and not be refinanced by higher taxes, high inflation, and devaluation of our hard earned money!
- No, I do not believe that it is Obama's job to go around the world proclaiming what a terrible place America is and to apologise .... to our detractors! Who then, behind his back, laugh! The President represents Americans… his job is to Protect and Defend Americans.
- No, I am not in favor of ratcheting-up yet another war. Afghanistan this time. Afghanistan is not Iraq. Iraq at least had a central government and an organized society, more easily conquerable. Afghanistan is a piece of the earth more accurately defined by the borders of the countries that abut it than by it's own sense of self. The President of Afghanistan is no more than the mayor of Kabul, the only "city" there and whose limits define the ends of civilization. History in replete with the bones of those who have attempted to conquer Afghanistan, from Alexander the Great in AD 320's to the Russians who pulled-out, defeated, in AD 1989. That is precisely why Afghanistan is called "The Land of Bones." And now it will be our young men's and women's bones. This foray sounds just like Kennedy's into Vietnam. ....just 5000 advisers.... we all know what happened there. I'll predict right now... this is going to be the Democrats undoing. Afghanistan.

Demobamas...

The no-nothings are in charge and will remain so ... even if we go bankrupt or succumb to totalitarian government. Here is why: take a look at Obama's supporters and you will see that his popularity is due solely to three things, none of which I consider qualifications for Presidency: his speaking style, his color and his appeal to base populist sentiment. This last is dangerous. Those pitchforks Obama threatened the financial/banking/brokerage industry with several weeks ago spring from populist rule. His popularity will remain in the 55% range for a very long time. Take a look at these numbers, they all add-up to a solid block of Demobamas: Hardcore Democrats = 35%, Jews = 1.5%, Muslims = 2%, Blacks = 12%, Hispanics 15%. This voting block represents more than 65% of the total vote. All Obama needs is 80% of these to maintain a plus popularity. By the way I'm not even counting the no-nothing youngsters that have the right to vote, nor the ACORN enrolled illiterate and dead, nor the 40+ million Hispanic family members that are waiting to flood into America once the existing 12 - 20 million illegals are granted citizenship.

Worry. Be very very worried.

My biggest three are inflation and devaluation, taxes, and loss of freedom, which will turn us into a much poorer nation. Print and pass-out $3,600,000,000,000.00 dollars and guess what... each one isn't going to be worth much. As the economy rebounds inflation is going to go nuts. The cost of everything will explode. The USA will owe most of those still wet new 3.6 trillion bucks to foreign governments like the Chinese and Japanese. Here’s our debt now, unbelievable: http://brillig.com/debt_clock/ . The Obama administration hopes to use this devalued inflated money to retire this crazy debt. Will the Chinese go along? I think they will take those dollars and use them to buy and stockpile natural resources. I'm betting on commodities!

The Mexican Solution

I see that there is an outrage over the fact that the firefighters of California and Oregon are essentially non-english speaking Hispanics and that the job bosses are non-spanish speaking Americanos. Really, no American, at least not enough to fill the available job-slots, wants those jobs. No American: educated, fat and happy, and somewhat committed to home, wife, kids and that $250K mortgage, wants to handle a shovel in high temperatures with the risk of serious injury and loss of life for a double digit hourly salary without benefits. That leaves the slave population, read - Mexicans, to do the job. They are willing to leave their native digs, head-off to the fire fields of a foreign country and risk their necks for, what? 10 -12 bucks an hour? It's a shame really, but hey, it's the end result (same as obesity) of a rich society. Like the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Portuguese, Spanish, English (and others) of yore.

Here is the solution; it's called Manifest Destiny. We already believe in it, it has been tried successfully, we are ready to roll with it now, and the idea is protected by the Monroe Doctrine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_Destiny . This solution, at least, kicks-the-can of a myriad number of problems a hundred years down the road. We should: invade, conquer and colonize Mexico: 1) The Mexicans all become instant American citizens; something a large number seem to want. 2) Mexican territories are rich in natural resources and fertile soil. 3) The population is mostly subservient and will not, for the most part, resist; especially when the option is better than the current government. 4) They have no great ideological differences with America: they are Catholic and hard workers and have a built-in affinity with the American population which is already 15% Hispanic.

Additional benefits?: 1) The border "problem" is resolved instantly. 2) The Mexican drug problem would be taken-in-hand and the violence largely quelled. 3) The country is beautiful, with white-sand beaches and and towering mountains, and ripe for American style development. 4) Most of the current illegal population of the States would return to the State of Mexico to work and develop the country along the lines of America to the north. 5) 105,000,000 million new Americans that all want cars, trucks, homes, businesses, tractors, farms, credit, flat-screen TVs and Direct TV, AND are willing to work hard to get them. 6) Last but not least..... 105,000,000 new members to sign-up for the Ponzi scheme called Social Security; kicking that can down the road at least another 75 years! We have the men, women, and machines, the territory is very close-by and the current long list of problems beg for a solution.

Mel

Warren's Dilemma

Warren Buffett supported Obama, but now with considerable financial blood in the street he seems to be backing-off, or is he just in a corner? He said that he does not support "cap and trade" nor the raising of taxes, nor the prohibition of private jets, nor "card-check." There are other "ideas" he does not support either, like the vilification of the "captains of business" and "caps on salaries." What parts of the administration's policy does he support?

Obama is clever and recognizes people's weaknesses - that is how his speeches are directed, how he has climbed the ladder of political success; one hears what one wants to hear. Truly charismatic and dangerous. He appeals to an ego like Buffett's and says, "I respect your success, would you be one of my advisers?" The “Messiah” gets the “Oracle” on board (a winning combination?!) and then ignores advise. Having publicly committed to Obama, Buffett now does not want to look foolish and remains - sort-of - committed.

Eventually (1), anyone with any money left will disclaim Obama. But his majority support will not diminish – it will actually grow. Obama has co-opted, through a cult of "believers" and "tax relief" promises, 50% of the voters, who will now receive either outright IRS welfare checks or minor income tax relief. He is rapidly creating more followers needing entitlements as a result of the destruction of the capitalistic system. Obama will continue to appeal to many voters: most Blacks, many Hispanics, traditionally liberal Jews, and rising Islamists, the very poor, and all those who can't bring themselves to vote for anyone without the (D) after their name. This absolute block, of perhaps 50% of voters, will be his... no matter what. A solid block. Classic Bolshevism. Read A Peoples Tragedy by Orland Figes. The conservative Democrat has vanished, as has the traditional Republican.

http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=a+peoples+tragedy&tag=googhydr-20&index=stripbooks&hvadid=1500914441&ref=pd_sl_4yh92q1kjm_e

Eventually 2 (soon) taxes will have to be raised or the dollar will collapse. A country just can't print money forever! The so-called rich are really the nation's Income Class. These folks have cash flow, these citizens are the only ones left to pay, and are ripe taxable targets. This large middle class will have to pay nearly all required taxes. The truly rich, the Equity Class are already off-shore and pay few taxes. Corporations pass ALL taxes on to their customers and pay NO taxes themselves. Sticking with his pledge, Obama won't raise income tax brackets on any but the truly rich. Instead a broad range of tax collecting measures will be put into place: taxes on cell phone use and texting (just pennies); taxes on web access (just pennies); a national sales tax (sales tax or Value Added Tax, or Gross Excise Tax) which will tax every single transaction in America including transactions on the likes of eBay; fossil fuel tax; carbon foot-print tax; water use tax; interstate highway use tax; mileage driven tax; luxury taxes; etc. In LA a new tax - a super tax - is under discussion (perhaps passed by now) on those with houses larger than 3500 sq.ft. Could this sort of tax be re-modeled and applied nationally by the Feds?

Eventually (3) a huge underground black market will spring-up. This has happened in every economy where the population feels put upon. The taxpayer is not a stationary target, he/she can step aside....

One more note: Additional proof that the "catastrophe" is being allowed to continue and “not going to waste” (as stated by Obama illuminaries: Akelrod, Raahm and Clinton), is that there is no apparent rush in D.C. to fix the collapsing economy... if there was, a fully functioning Treasury would be in effect NOW!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/business/economy/09treasury.html?hp

Considering that the banking system began its sudden descent just before the election, and Obama started speaking to it then, before the election, and that he stated, immediately after the election that he and his team "were prepared to hit the ground running," to fix it, nothing has been done to staunch the decline in either stock market or real estate values, not even an uplifting speech.

There's trouble ahead...