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  • ‘More UN climate nonsense’ (updated 24jul25)

    George Rebane

    James Freeman in the 23jul25 WSJ writes a telling article on the intended confusion that surrounds ‘sustainable energy’ costs – i.e. the comparison of wind, solar, and hydro to fossil fuels.  The latest pile of steaming bullshit was regurgitated by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in an AP interview as reported here.  I am going to freely cut and paste purloined snatches from Freeman’s paywalled article.

    “Backers of inefficient and unreliable energy production used to say that wind and solar breakthroughs were just around the corner. But one can use this argument to secure government subsidies for only so many decades before taxpayers start asking why they have to support an infant industry that’s older than they are. These days it’s become more common for environmentalists to assert that the future has arrived and alternative energy is now dirt cheap. This ought to make it even harder to explain why government support should continue, but it also may create the misimpression that the massively expensive wind and solar experiment is finally working.”

    According to Guterres, “over 90% of new renewables worldwide produced electricity for less than the cheapest new fossil fuel alternative.”  His confused copy continued with “emphasizing his desire for central planning. He called for ‘new national climate plans to go all-out on the energy transition’ and said, ‘Governments must aim to meet all new electricity demand with renewables.’ ”

    “But if renewables are clearly better — and in fact unstoppable (since cheaper) — why does government need to plan or aim for anything—won’t producers and consumers choose such energy sources on their own?

    Continue reading ‘More UN climate nonsense’ (updated 24jul25) »

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  • ‘More UN climate nonsense’ (updated 3aug25)

    George Rebane

    James Freeman in the 23jul25 WSJ writes a telling article on the intended confusion that surrounds ‘sustainable energy’ costs – i.e. the comparison of wind, solar, and hydro to fossil fuels.  The latest pile of steaming bullshit was regurgitated by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in an AP interview as reported here.  I am going to freely cut and paste purloined snatches from Freeman’s paywalled article.

    “Backers of inefficient and unreliable energy production used to say that wind and solar breakthroughs were just around the corner. But one can use this argument to secure government subsidies for only so many decades before taxpayers start asking why they have to support an infant industry that’s older than they are. These days it’s become more common for environmentalists to assert that the future has arrived and alternative energy is now dirt cheap. This ought to make it even harder to explain why government support should continue, but it also may create the misimpression that the massively expensive wind and solar experiment is finally working.”

    According to Guterres, “over 90% of new renewables worldwide produced electricity for less than the cheapest new fossil fuel alternative.”  His confused copy continued with “emphasizing his desire for central planning. He called for ‘new national climate plans to go all-out on the energy transition’ and said, ‘Governments must aim to meet all new electricity demand with renewables.’ ”

    “But if renewables are clearly better — and in fact unstoppable (since cheaper) — why does government need to plan or aim for anything—won’t producers and consumers choose such energy sources on their own?

    (more…)

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  • Sandbox – 23jul25

    [The progressives’ inability to think logically, or even coherently, is on parade again across the nation.  ICE officers arresting illegal aliens may not wear face coverings to hide their personal identity (their official identity is visible from their uniforms, labeled jackets/vests, and badges) to prevent terrorists’ doxing their residences thereby threatening their families.  But it’s OK for leftwingers to support obvious criminals to wear identity-concealing face coverings as they riot, pillage, and burn while attacking law enforcement officers on the streets of America’s cities.  gjr]

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  • Scattershots – 16jul25 (updated 22jul25)

    George Rebane

    Trump almost gets it with Putin.  There is no need for Trump’s 50-day grace period for the thug’s decision to come to the table.  Five days would have been more than enough for Putin to tell the world how he wants to continue his war with Ukraine.  But at least our president is beginning to understand that he has been played by Putin, the mullahs, the ugly fat kid, and China’s Xi, the most clever of them all.  This ain’t New York real estate.

    Polymarket is a crowd-sourced prediction website (here) that lets people bet money on the outcome of future events on all kinds of topics.  It has shown its results to be prescient way beyond what polls report, and is today in a good position to put a lot of polls out of business.  This is abetted by the recent closing of two federal investigations into its operations (here).  We see an example of the value of polls from some of our liberal commenters who have gleefully announced Trump’s downfall from polling results over most of the last decade.  Such leftwing people have never been influenced by realworld results.  Now they are planning to give communism another try in NYC.

    The deportation record for illegal aliens under recent presidents is one of lamestream media’s current big lies.  They are telling their lightly read audiences that deportations of those innocent, hard-working “undocumented immigrants” was President Trump’s racist idea.  They are silent on the other presidents’ records – Obama deported 3.1M, Biden deported 3.4M, Trump has deported 1.4M.  The anti-American left (aka Democrats) do not recognize the laws that make illegal entry into the US a crime, and ALL such illegal aliens in our country criminals subject to summary deportation.  Illegal aliens do not have the complete slate of constitutional rights enjoyed by American citizens.  (more here)

    [19jul25 update]  Epstein files, who is preventing their release?  It turns out that it is our legal system instead of the flood of lamestream lies that the Trump DoJ is trying to hide something that would damage the president.  The reasons for a limited release of Epstein documents involve extant legal restrictions, victim protection, and ongoing appeals.  The controversy surrounding the Trump administration’s handling of the files, including “calls for transparency” have no merit whatsoever, but just political potboilers from Democrats who have nothing besides Trump hatred to offer voters.  For more google 'Who is preventing release of Epstein files evidence?' or go here.

    [22jul25 update]  Stephen Colbert’s pink slip from CBS still gives the know-nothing, late night, unfunny man ten months to spew his TDS, copy that has left him with dregs of stupid viewers while costing the network $40M in annual losses.  But what is really perverse about this is the legion of talking heads today on lamestream media, as shown on FN, who are howling that canning Colbert represents a new and dangerous level of “censorship by Trump’s authoritarian administration.”  According to their propaganda CBS has no right to avoid losses and rid itself of content that has a dwindling audience and dismal ratings.  I remind RR readers that this is another in the flood of evidence of how the intrinsically evil Democrats are trying to influence their poorly informed and undereducated constituents. (more here)

    Iran’s nuclear facilities were not only “seriously damaged” but “destroyed” according to Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi as interviewed by Bret Baier on Fox News yesterday (here).  This again gives lie to the leftwing lamestream’s charges that America’s B-2s’ raid earlier this monthly was ineffective in eliminating Iran’s nuclear weaponization capability.  Their foreign minister clearly stated that “our facilities have been destroyed” (see video @ 8 minutes) and Iran’s “nuclear development has now stopped”.  Unfortunately Fox’s ongoing delinquent journalism omitted emphasizing the admission that the bombed facilities were indeed “destroyed” as reported by President Trump and subsequently mocked by the Left.

    BTW, Fox News is still America’s most comprehensive, reliable, and best source of news and commentary that you can access on your TV (in spite of my constant criticisms and nitpicking their reportage).  This fact is confirmed by every metric reporting viewership composition, ratings, profitability, and balanced reporting.  And it’s further confirmed by the number of international leaders who choose a single network on which to be interviewed and communicate to the American people.  No other network comes close, most certainly not CNN and MSNBC, the lamestream’s finest examples of junk journalism, unfortunately embraced by some of RR’s leftwing readers.

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  • Sandbox – 14jul25

    [Apologies for the late delivery of new sand.  Happy Bastille Day.  gjr]

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  • More Revelatory Bullshit from the Left

    George Rebane

    Propaganda Broadcasting System (you know, the unbiased one) in its 9jul25 News Hour had an interview with the new DNC chairman Ken Martin.  The entire interview is available here.

    Among the usual nauseating Democrat lies, this time about the BBB, that this interview again laid on their viewers (no real new revelations there), the segment concluded with Martin being very carefully asked about NYC mayoral candidate, Zohran Mamdani.  The entire interview was designed, of course, to promote the radical progressive narrative, and Martin followed the script with a glowing praise of Mamdani’s “brilliant campaign”.

    However, the only part of his brilliant campaign that PBS brought to light was why has that Muslim communist not disavowed the pro-terrorist phrase “globalize the intifada”.  Kent, of course, sidestepped the question with some prattle about the Democrats being “a big tent party”; never mind that the tent only stretches to the left to openly include their communist candidates.  More and more of them are now striking their false colors and declaring their radical anti-American positions on all issues – they believe that enough of their constituents have now been converted and/or sufficiently bamboozled that it’s safe to start opening up with their real agenda.

    But the real interesting part of PBS’s continuing biased reporting is that interviewer Amna Nawaz never went near Mamdani’s avowed plans to collectivize rents, transport, distribution, and production per the Marxist playbook.  That is still a no-no according to the mavens who assess the mangling of the public mind.  So the main issue that is making national news about Mamdani’s communism evokes nothing but the sound of silence when they talk to their Democrat handlers.

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  • Getting from here to there

    George Rebane

    OK boys and girls, it’s time to take a break from our socio-political harangues and debates, and delve into something more intellectual yet delightfully accessible.  The figure contains a 10-by-10 network of nodes each identified by their blue numbers from 1 to 100.  The related red numbers denote the cost of traversing that node.

    RandonArray

    The problem to be solved is to identify the minimum cost path between a given starting node and a destination node.  Here, let’s arbitrarily say we wanted to start on node 19 and end on node 92.  What is the path or sequence of nodes to be traversed that minimizes the total cost of the trip when all the costs of the visited nodes are added up?  And as you puzzle on the solution, see if you can come up with an algorithm that can solve all such problems.

    The rule for traversing is that allowable steps for any given node are the eight or fewer  of its neighboring nodes.  For example, from node 25 you can step to nodes 14, 24, 34, 15, 35, 16, 26, 36; and from node 31 you can step to 21, 41, 22, 32, 42.

    This is a simplified yet still powerful version of a problem that I had to solve long ago on a contract to develop an interactive combat system for combined arms field operations.  The specific problem was to compute and display a minimum time feasible path across a region of complex terrains for a given make-up and size of a combat unit to get from their current location(s) to a selected location.  Today a version of the resulting algorithm is used in you car’s and cell phone’s route calculating apps.  Have fun and let us know your solution and algo.

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  • Getting from here to there

    George Rebane

    OK boys and girls, it’s time to take a break from our socio-political harangues and debates, and delve into something more intellectual yet delightfully accessible.  The figure contains a 10-by-10 network of nodes each identified by their blue numbers from 1 to 100.  The related red numbers denote the cost of traversing that node.

    RandonArray

    The problem to be solved is to identify the minimum cost path between a given starting node and a destination node.  Here, let’s arbitrarily say we wanted to start on node 19 and end on node 92.  What is the path or sequence of nodes to be traversed that minimizes the total cost of the trip when all the costs of the visited nodes are added up?  And as you puzzle on the solution, see if you can come up with an algorithm that can solve all such problems.

    The rule for traversing is that allowable steps for any given node are the eight or fewer  of its neighboring nodes.  For example, from node 25 you can step to nodes 14, 24, 34, 15, 35, 16, 26, 36; and from node 31 you can step to 21, 41, 22, 32, 42.

    This is a simplified yet still powerful version of a problem that I had to solve long ago on a contract to develop an interactive combat system for combined arms field operations.  The specific problem was to compute and display a minimum time feasible path across a region of complex terrains for a given make-up and size of a combat unit to get from their current location(s) to a selected location.  Today a version of the resulting algorithm is used in you car’s and cell phone’s route calculating apps.  Have fun and let us know your solution and algo.

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  • Scattershots – 6jul25

    George Rebane

    Yellow journalism is the practice and bailiwick of conservative media.  I am literally nauseated listening to so-called “fearless” journalists on outlets like Fox News.  According to my lights a professional and ethical journalist will not let an interviewee’s obviously erroneous statements, diversions/evasions, and lies stand, and simply proceed to the next question or topic.  The uninformed and mostly lightly read audience deserves to hear the journalist respond to such interviewee answers with, “From your response I see that you neglected to answer my question (repeated)”,  or “your answer contradicts the information widely supplied by (citation)”, or “perhaps you can cite some evidence for our audience to support your allegation”.  You get the idea – as a journalist with balls, don’t just skedaddle on to the next question when your last one went unanswered.

    Leftwing journalists and outlets cannot be so accused.  It is not and never has been their intention to accurately inform their audiences.  In their reports and interviews they will purposefully incorporate erroneous statements, diversions/evasions, and lies – they have a collectivist ideology to promote.

    Apropos to Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy for NYC mayor.  It is nothing but the next ratchet in the Left’s program to control the populations of the country’s big urban centers.  The means to do this is to restructure the financial and cognitive make-up of its inhabitants.  Their method is simple, transparent, and direct – “Forget the chatter about ‘abundance.’ The left hopes to solidify control of cities by driving the middle class out.”  WSJ columnist Allysia Finley outlines this process in her 5jul25 ‘The Progressive Paucity Agenda—From Mamdani in New York to California’.

    A miss to Vladimir Lenin, leader of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, who promised, “Give me four years to teach the children and the communist seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”  Well now, in America we have given him three generations of children to teach socialism in our public schools and academia, but today barely half of our population has been converted into reliable supporters of what he has sown.  A sorry record indeed.  [This was submitted to The Union for their Hits & Misses column.]

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  • Growth and ONLY growth

    George Rebane

    The Republican debate about the Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) goes on after it squeaked out of the Senate with the VP’s vote.  A quick look at the alternatives shows that the debate involves no reasonable alternative to the BBB.  Everyone except the economically ignorant leftwingers in the country knows that the only solution to our national debt problem (crisis?) is through the strong growth of our economy.  And that level of growth – annually 3-5% – is necessary to make ongoing deficits and debt growth manageable.  Higher levels of growth, albeit not likely, will make the debt problem irrelevant.

    All, save of the Left, who have been paying attention know that we cannot tax or redistribute ourselves out of debt, and that reducing spending requires the politically impossible and massive reduction of legally entrenched entitlements.  Given these constraints, the Republican opponents of BBB’s passage must quietly be hoping for a Plan B from heaven because no one on this planet has a clue on how to gin up and get anything else through this congress.  If they blow it now and the BBB dies in the House, the Republicans have had it – they have dashed all hope and given birth to the biggest political disappointment in the country’s history.

    Without passage of the BBB we will be heading for a financial and governance crisis under the resurgent Democrats who are eager to reduce America into a second rate socialist country and reexperience all the economic catastrophes of the Europeans.  A harbinger of this is Zohran Mamdavi, Democratic candidate for NYC mayor.  What continues to disappoint me is that the talking heads on Fox keep telling us that they simply don’t understand how so many NYC Gen Zers have voted for the communist in the primary.  The answer is beyond obvious, they are the third generation educated in Great Society union-controlled, socialist public schools ranging from kindergarten through academia.  To them socialism, not free market capitalism, is the preferred form of governance and organizing society.  It would be good if the conservative media had the wits and balls to regularly report this sad attribute of our voting public.

    Bottom line message to all Republican congress critters – unless you know of a Plan B that has better than a snowball’s chance in hell of passage, vote for the goddam BBB!

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