Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[Dr. Strangelove]

I made Wiz STFU

[THE_WIZARD_]

No you didn't.

[foxhopper]

And the worst part is I still think Trump is more honest than Brandon, Hillary, Nancy, etc. He is just a world class dumbass. Tne legal team and people he surrounds himself with are crooks and idiots.

The apprentice was the stupidist show ever. Did people really watch that shit?

I never believed the guy had the kind of "real" money everyone thinks. Probably why he wouldn't release his taxes. He is just good at fooling the idiots of the world. One of those bull shitters I just want to kick in the balls.

It sucks shit that I have more faith in a fucking shit head like Trump doing whats best for our country than the rest of the greedy corrupt swamp.

Just my dumbass opinion but atleast I can admit to being a dumb fuck.

Just give me somebody trying to be honest.We all know the world is pretty much fucked. The big pryramid scheme is about to crash. Wax my balls now and give it a yank. Enough of the bullshit. I would rather go through the bad and try to figure out how to save ourselves than keep kicking crap down the road for the next generations to deal with.

[Obi-Jon]

If you think anyone is worse than Donald Trump, you are sadly mistaken. I'll give you that Hillary runs a very close second, but no one trumps the Donald. Even his secret service code name was "Beelzebub".

[Jeff Buchanan]

Trump’s office claimed that when he was president, he had a “standing order” that materials “removed from the Oval Office and taken to the residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them. There is a process for that. If it isn't followed, he can't do it, see DSL's post in response to Crash's false claims in his post..

"Apart from whether there is any evidence that such an order actually existed, the notion has been greeted with disdain by national security legal specialists. Glenn S. Gerstell, the top lawyer for the National Security Agency from 2015 to 2020, pronounced the idea that whatever Mr. Trump happened to take upstairs each evening automatically became declassified — without logging what it was and notifying the agencies that used that information — “preposterous.”

The claim is also irrelevant to Mr. Trump’s potential troubles over the document matter, because none of the three criminal laws cited in a search warrant as the basis of the investigation depend on whether documents contain classified information."

Look, Trump violated all kinds of National Security issued rules and processes for handling classified materials. Let's just ignore that for now as it is likely that if he is indicted, it won't be for his egregious carelessness and flaunting of rules to protect US National Security. The stuff seized in the entirely legal search of Trump's Mar a Lago residence will serve as evidence and the basis for his indictment if this thing proceeds to that and Garland will make that decision. These are the three laws, the potential violation of which, were contained in the search warrant:

"The first law, Section 793 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, is better known as the Espionage Act. It criminalizes the unauthorized retention or disclosure of information related to national defense that could be used to harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary. Each offense can carry a penalty of up to 10 years in prison."

The second, Section 1519, is an obstruction law that is part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a broad set of reforms enacted by Congress in 2002 after financial scandals at firms like Enron, Arthur Andersen and WorldCom. Section 1519 sets a penalty of up to 20 years in prison per offense for the act of destroying or concealing documents or records “with the intent to impede, obstruct or influence the investigation or proper administration of any matter” within the jurisdiction of federal departments or agencies."

"The third law that investigators cite in the warrant, Section 2071, criminalizes the theft or destruction of government documents. It makes it a crime, punishable in part by up to three years in prison per offense, for anyone with custody of any record or document from federal court or public office to willfully and unlawfully conceal, remove, mutilate, falsify or destroy it."

FFS, the allegations DJT is facing are very specific, well founded and contained. People commenting on this have to be cognizant of the legal facts in the matter. That's not happening. Instead we get flooded with misguided, uninformed commentary. That he is being investigated for breaking the law is entirely appropriate. Unusual, unprecedented? It is but Trump's presidency and the man himself are marked by some of the most egregious behaviors in the history of the conduct of a US president. IMO, the investigation of his conduct does not pose a risk of being used as a political tool going forward. Quite the contrary, they serve as a reminder to future presidential candidates and the world that the US is, in fact, a country of laws that no one is above.

Italicized sections of this post are from multiple sources including Politico, The Hill, the NYT and Wapo.

[Da Geezer]

From the WSJ today. Of particular note is how much energy it takes to make a cell phone as opposed to a car or a refrigerator.


The government of California can issue as many proclamations and prohibitions as it wants against gasoline-powered vehicles. No doubt the Biden administration will enjoy spending the ocean of tax dollars now earmarked for low-intensity energy sources. But reality will stubbornly remain.

In a new report due out next week from the Manhattan Institute, Mark Mills takes on the “dangerous delusion” of a global energy transition that eliminates the use of fossil fuels. Surveying energy markets and public policy around the world, Mr. Mills asks readers to “consider that years of hypertrophied rhetoric and trillions of dollars of spending and subsidies on a transition have not significantly changed the energy landscape.” He notes:

Civilization still depends on hydrocarbons for 84% of all energy, a mere two percentage points lower than two decades ago. Solar and wind technologies today supply barely 5% of global energy. Electric vehicles still offset less than 0.5% of world oil demand.

Mr. Mills then explains why the global appetite for energy is not heading south:

One can begin with a reality that cannot be blinked away: energy is needed for everything that is fabricated, grown, operated, or moved... digital devices and hardware—the most complex products ever produced at scale—require, on average, about 1,000 times more energy to fabricate, pound for pound, than the products that dominated the 20th century... it takes nearly as much energy to make one smartphone as it does one refrigerator, even though the latter weighs 1,000 times more. The world produces nearly 10 times more smartphones a year than refrigerators. Thus, the global fabrication of smartphones now uses 15% as much energy as does the entire automotive industry, even though a car weighs 10,000 times more than a smartphone. The global Cloud, society’s newest and biggest infrastructure, uses twice as much electricity as the entire nation of Japan. And then, of course, there are all the other common, vital needs for energy, from heating and cooling homes to producing food and delivering freight.

Advocates of a carbon-free world underestimate not only how much energy the world already uses, but how much more energy the world will yet demand... In America, there are nearly as many vehicles as people, while in most of the world, fewer than 1 in 20 people have a car. More than 80% of the world population has yet to take a single flight.

He then proceeds to take on the argument that wind and solar power are now becoming competitive with fossil fuels:

Claims that wind, solar, and [electrical vehicles] have reached cost parity with traditional energy sources or modes of transportation are not based on evidence. Even before the latest period of rising energy prices, Germany and Britain—both further down the grid transition path than the U.S.— have seen average electricity rates rise 60%–110% over the past two decades. The same pattern is visible in Australia and Canada. It’s also apparent in U.S. states and regions where mandates have resulted in grids with a higher share of wind/solar energy. In general, overall U.S. residential electricity costs rose over the past 20 years. But those rates should have declined because of the collapse in the cost of natural gas and coal—the two energy sources that, together, supplied nearly 70% of electricity in that period. Instead, rates have been pushed higher thanks to elevated spending on the otherwise unneeded infrastructure required to transmit wind/solar-generated electricity, as well as the increased costs to keep lights on during “droughts” of wind and sun that come from also keeping conventional power plants available (like having an extra, fully fueled car parked and ready to go) in effect by spending on two grids.

None of the above accounts for the costs hidden as taxpayer-funded subsidies that were intended to make alternative energy cheaper. Added up over the past two decades, the cumulative subsidies across the world for biofuels, wind, and solar approach about $5 trillion, all of that to supply roughly 5% of global energy.

Whether it’s to cool a home, heat steel, or power a data center, the eternal engineering challenge has always been to find the lowest-cost way to make energy available when it’s needed to meet inherently variable demands, especially in the face of inevitable challenges from nature’s attacks as well as supply chain and machine failures. Oil, natural gas, coal, and even wood and water are easy to store in very large volumes at very low cost, but not so electricity. Hence, grid-scale electric availability has been made possible by using electricity-producing machines (turbines) that can be turned on when needed, fueled by large quantities of primary energy sources (such as natural gas, coal, and flowing water) that are easily and inexpensively stored. Such metrics characterize, for now, more than 80% of U.S. electricity production and more than 90% of transportation. The U.S., on average, has about one to two months’ worth of national demand in storage for each kind of hydrocarbon. Such enormous quantities are possible because it costs less than $1 a barrel per month to store oil or the energy equivalent of natural gas. Storing coal is even cheaper. Thus, over the past century, engineers achieved the feat of building a nation-spanning group of electricity grids that powers nearly everything, anytime, while still consuming less than 3% of the GDP
.

Storing electricity itself—the output from solar/wind machines—remains extremely expensive despite the vaunted battery revolution. Lithium batteries, a Nobel-winning invention, are some 400% better than lead-acid batteries in terms of energy stored per unit of weight (which is critical for vehicles). And the costs for lithium batteries have declined more than 10-fold in the past two decades. Even so, it costs at least $30 to store the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil using lithium batteries. That alone explains why, regardless of mandates and subsidies, batteries aren’t a solution at grid scales for days, never mind weeks, of storage.

[Hannibal]

"We had probable cause to go after OrangeMan. Trust us"

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[Mike]

They’re gonna get him this time.

[Hannibal]

Mother nature invented a battery a thousand times better than what any man-made battery will be -- the bonds in organic molecules. A one gallon container of carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds costing four dollars holds enough energy to move a typical car 30 miles or so.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Ukraine: Because not much of significance is going on within the battle space, the most reported stories involve the Zaphoriza NPP in southern Ukraine. Russian forces have occupied it since late March. However, operators within the NPP are Ukrainian and continue to provide for the operation of the NPP, at gun point, .

I can't tell if the arm waving about radiation danger should shelling, likely coming from both sides, damage portions of the NPP that would cause a radiation leak is a big deal or not. First, reporting is unreliable because it is being politicized and through that possible dangers exaggerated. Second, how NPP radiation dangers are created is complicated stuff. A radiation leak can be caused by damage to a reactor from artillery shells, damage to a power source that powers reactor controls, damage to lines that connect reactors to power generators and power generators to existing electrical grids.

Various agencies, including the UN and the bodies within it that are involved with nuclear power generation safety as well as nuclear weapons non-proliferation, have all called for demilitarization of the NPP and the establishment of a no fire zone surrounding the plant. Russia has prevented adoption of any resolutions by disagreeing with language within those resolutions. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) stated that after disconnecting it, unspecified actors (but almost certainly Russian forces) reconnected part of the Zaphoriza NPP to the Ukrainian power grid on August 26.Russian forces that remain in full control of the plant threatened to and finally did disconnect the ZNPP from the Ukrainian grid on 8/25. Details of that event are not clear. Russians reconnected it on 8/26. It is unclear why they would have reconnected the power unit after disconnecting it as a war time punitive measure designed to weaken their enemy.

Meanwhile, in NYC, Russia blocked the adoption of a joint statement to close out a United Nations conference on an ongoing nuclear arms treaty. Moscow’s representatives at the monthlong conference objected to language in the agreement that raised concerns about Ukraine. The conference — on upholding and strengthening the 50-year-old global Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons — is held every five years. In the last 2 meetings over a 10 year period, a consensus on the language in a post meeting, joint statement was not obtained.

This is a sickening reminder of how futile global cooperation wrt to nuclear power and armaments is when authoritarian regimes with increased territorial aspirations, nuclear weapons and powerful armed forces, Russia and China, in particular, NK and Iran armed to a lesser degree but with territorial aspirations, have a vote in settings where unanimity of member states is required.

[AlabamAlum]

Liverpool beat Bournemouth 9-nil.

At least one wager paid off today.

[iam416]

Please take this to the piss bag/WAR! thread.

[AlabamAlum]

You bastard…

[Hannibal]

Meanwhile, in "things that voting Democrat leads to"...

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[Hannibal]

The economy is shrinking while inflation hovers at 8% inflation. But don't worry, the people in charge of the money supply are practicing lots of affirmative action.


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