And:
Biden hs reached down in the racial bag and nominated a SCOTUS Justice who does not believe in what the Constitution has to say about matters. She is on the side of equity and outcomes.
Against Judge Jackson https://www.nationalreview.com
Finally:
For purely political advantage, Pelosi has chosen to get rid of American citizen terrorists:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/0
b) Ukraine misinterpreted the west's commitment.
c) The West's supplying military equipment was interpreted by Putin as rubbing salt in his wound and desire to rebuild the Russian Empire.
d) Putin concluded the west was too weak to defend Ukraine.
And:
A global retreat
Democracy has been on the decline worldwide for more than 15 years. One major reason is the growing ruthlessness of authoritarian leaders, particularly Russian President Vladimir Putin. Today, I will walk through how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine fits into the broader geopolitical trends of the past decade and a half.
Putin has spent more than two decades consolidating power, rebuilding Russia’s military and weakening his enemies. He has repeatedly undermined democratic movements and popular uprisings, including those in Syria and Belarus. He has meddled in Western elections. And he has deployed Russian troops to enforce his will, including in Georgia and Crimea.
The invasion of Ukraine — the largest war in Europe since World War II — is a significant escalation of this behavior. The country’s fall would mark a violent end to one of the world’s democracies.
Maneuvers like Putin’s, as well as insufficient pushback from other governments, have fostered this global democratic decline, experts say. Just one in five people now live in countries designated as “free,” down from nearly one in two in 2005, a new report from Freedom House found.
The invasion of Ukraine is “a taste of what a world without checks on antidemocratic behavior would look like,” Michael Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, told me. He remains hopeful that democracies will rally to impose serious penalties on Russia, signaling that they will not tolerate Putin’s behavior. But, he warned, “if they don’t, this is going to set the world back in a major way — not just for democracy, but for the rule of law.”
A war on democracies
The collapse of the Soviet Union more than three decades ago gave birth to democracies across Eastern Europe — and to Putin’s grievances. He once described the Soviet breakup as “the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” — a time period that included two world wars and the Holocaust. He has suggested he wants to reverse that collapse.
Putin’s complaints are less ideological — he is not a communist, and has not ruled like one — and more self-interested: He wants to protect his hold on power as well as further Russia’s global reach, which would increase support for him at home.
But the effect of his rule has been to undermine democracy globally. After Georgia moved to join NATO, with the support of voters, Russia invaded in 2008 and has meddled in the country’s politics ever since. Russia has worked with autocratic leaders to help crush democracies and protests where Putin believes that his country has security or economic interests, including in Kazakhstan and Venezuela.
He has also tried to destabilize democracies in the West — by interfering in elections in the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, among other nations.
In Ukraine, Russia’s meddling in the 2004 presidential contest helped spawn protests against corruption and for fair elections, a movement known as the Orange Revolution. In another round of protests a decade later, Ukrainians overthrew a pro-Russian government and replaced it with one closer to Europe and the West.
Russia responded by invading and annexing Crimea, in southern Ukraine, and by backing separatists in the east, who have fought a grinding war against the Ukrainian government ever since. Now, Putin is trying to seize control of all of Ukraine.
Unchecked autocrats
Democracy has also declined globally because democratic leaders have done too little to stand up for themselves, the Freedom House report argued.
As is now clear, the world’s response to Russia’s annexation of the Crimean Peninsula was not enough to deter Putin from going further. Even the sanctions imposed on Russia after its full assault on Ukraine this week stopped short of maximum punishment, sparing much of the Russian energy sector that Europe’s economy still relies on.
At the same time, autocratic governments have increasingly worked together, using their collective economic and political power to create a cushion against punishments from other governments. China approved Russian wheat imports this past week, effectively softening the impact of the West’s new sanctions.
Authoritarians have also abandoned pretenses of democratic norms. Putin, as well as rulers in Nicaragua, Venezuela and elsewhere, once tried to at least maintain the appearance of free and fair elections. But now they regularly jail political opponents, denying the opposition the ability to campaign.
All of these moves have shown other leaders with authoritarian aspirations what they can do as the liberal democratic order loses its sway.
In that context, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is part of a broader test: whether the global erosion of democracy will continue unchecked.
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Learn what a battery is and will nuclear fusion reduce the prospect of wars?
What is a battery?' Probably Tesla said it best when they called it an Energy Storage System. That's important. So what does it cost to “Go Green?”
Batteries DO NOT make electricity – they merely store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is 100% FALSE.
Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the Evs (Electric Vehicles) on the road are coal-powered, do you see?"
Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? ..To reiterate, it does NOT come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.
There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.
Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.
All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.
In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.
But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs."
Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.
In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.
The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.
Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it's back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.
A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.
It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just - one - battery."
Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?"
I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being 'green,' but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.
The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.
Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.
There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. "Going Green" may sound like Utopian ideals and are easily espoused, catchy buzz words, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is FAR more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure.
If I had entitled this essay "The Embedded Costs of Going Green," who would have read it? But thank you for your attention, and good luck.
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Someone has been reading my memos and concluded I was right when it comes to Sen Kennedy:
Subject: The Will Rogers of our Time
-SENATOR JOHN KENNEDY
You often see a TV Anchor ask Senator Kennedy a question, and one would think he is just a good ole boy from Louisiana.
Kennedy graduated Magna cum Laude from Vanderbilt, a Law degree from the University of Virginia and a B.C.L. degree from Oxford in England where he was a First-Class Honors graduate.
He is no country bumpkin; he is very insightful and often humorous.
COMMENT ABOUT CUOMO LECTURING US. "IT'S LIKE A FROG CALLING YOU UGLY".
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
THIS ELECTION IN GA WILL BE THE MOST IMPORTANT IN HISTORY. YOU HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT UNLESS YOU ARE A TAXPAYER, PARENT, GUN OWNER, COP, A PERSON OF FAITH, OR AN UNBORN BABY!
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
SENATOR JOHN KENNEDY FROM LOUISIANA DESCRIBES DEMOCRATS AS THE “WELL-INTENDED ARUGULA AND TOFU CROWD.”
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
YOU CAN ONLY BE YOUNG ONCE, BUT YOU CAN ALWAYS BE IMMATURE.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
AMERICANS ARE THINKING, THERE ARE SOME GOOD MEMBERS OF CONGRESS BUT WE CAN’T FIGURE OUT WHAT THEY ARE GOOD FOR. OTHERS ARE THINKING, HOW DID THESE MORONS MAKE IT THROUGH THE BIRTH CANAL.”
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
IT’S AS DEAD AS FOUR O’CLOCK.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
ALWAYS FOLLOW YOUR HEART.....BUT TAKE YOUR BRAINS WITH YOU.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
THE SHORT ANSWER IS ‘NO.’ THE LONG ANSWER IS ‘HELL NO.’
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
IT MUST SUCK TO BE THAT DUMB.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
WHEN THE PORTLAND MAYOR'S IQ GETS TO 75, HE OUGHTA SELL.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
I KEEP TRYING TO SEE NANCY PELOSI AND CHUCK SCHUMER'S POINT OF VIEW, BUT I CAN'T SEEM TO GET MY HEAD THAT FAR UP MY ASS.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
GO SELL YOUR CRAZY SOMEWHERE ELSE...WE ARE ALL STOCKED UP HERE.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
SHE HAS A BILLY GOAT BRAIN AND A MOCKINGBIRD MOUTH!
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
SEN. JOHN KENNEDY (R., LA.) SAID ON WEDNESDAY THAT HE TRUSTED MOST MIDDLE EASTERN COUNTRIES AS MUCH AS GAS STATION SUSHI.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
YOU CAN GET A GOAT TO CLIMB A TREE, BUT YOU’D BE BETTER OFF HIRING A SQUIRREL.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
1. THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON SINCE MOBY DICK WAS A MINNOW.
2. NEVER STAND BETWEEN A DOG AND A FIRE HYDRANT.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
OUR COUNTRY WAS FOUNDED BY GENIUSES, BUT IT'S BEING RUN BY IDIOTS.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
IT APPEARS THAT HE MIGHT DO THE RIGHT THING, BUT ONLY WHEN CLOSELY SUPERVISED AND CORNERED LIKE A RAT.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
DUMB ENOUGH TO BE A TWIN OF HIMSELF.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
THIS IS WHY SPACE ALIENS WON'T TALK TO US.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
DEMOCRATS ARE RUNNING AROUND LIKE THEY FOUND A HAIR IN THEIR BISCUIT.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
CHUCK SCHUMER JUST MOO’S AND FOLLOWS NANCY PELOSI INTO THE COW CHUTE.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
WHAT PLANET DID YOU PARACHUTE IN FROM?
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN SING DOESN’T MEAN YOU SHOULD.
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
SENATOR JOHN KENNEDY ON NANCY PELOSI, “SHE CAN STRUT SITTING DOWN!”
– Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy
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I find this very interesting:
| RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR | |||||||||||
| Turkey to Block Russian Warships in Black Sea | |||||||||||
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