Tidal Turbines

From Clean Technica comes news that Scotland is planning a tidal turbine farm sufficient to power 40,000 households:

ScottishPower Renewables will apply for planning permission next year to build the two farms in Northern Ireland’s seabed. The turbines will be manufactured in Scotland in an intentional boost to the country’s green-collar job market.

The 98-foot structures have been tested to operate in water as deep as 328 feet, and they spin slow enough to allow marine life to avoid the 66-foot blades. Most boats and ships would not be affected by the farms since the turbines won’t even reach 30-feet below the surface, but net-towing trawlers will be forbidden from the area.

“Tidal power is completely renewable, being driven by the gravity of the sun and moon, with no carbon dioxide emissions, plus the added benefit of being entirely predictable,” said Keith Anderson, the director of ScottishPower Renewables. The farms would help Scotland attain its goal to reduce its carbon footprint by 80% by 2050.

Maybe this is the answer to those wealthy folks like Walter Cronkite and the various Kennedys who are opposed to wind farms being placed in the waters off Cape Cod? Let's hope!

Franklin Raines, Fannie/Freddie, and the Democrats

From Hot Air: Franklin Raines, former Clinton Budget Director, became CEO of Fannie Mae and was under some heavy grilling in 2004 by Republicans concerned that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not observing basic accounting rules, including those established by Sarbanes/Oxley in the aftermath of Enron's collapse.

Just watch and form your own conclusions, but my take is that this video could not be more devastating, even if we didn't have the heavy-handed text super-imposed on the video.



This is Through-the-Looking-Glass territory, with Republicans insisting on the need for reform and greater regulation, and the Democrats arguing everything is fine, and leave the markets alone. The problem is, the markets were not operating normally, they had been distorted by political pressure to offer lending to high-risk home loan recipients, something that Fannie and Freddie were then buying up, spreading the toxic debt of these future foreclosures throughout the entire financial system.

So Fannie and Freddie have now collapsed, precipitating the chain of events leading to the $700 billion bailout that the Congress is voting on today.

But don't worry about Mr. Raines! He came out just fine with a multi-million dollar pay package, according to his Wikipedia entry:

On December 21, 2004 Raines accepted what he called "early retirement" [4] from his position as CEO while U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigators continued to investigate alleged accounting irregularities. He is accused by The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), the regulating body of Fannie Mae, of abetting widespread accounting errors, which included the shifting of losses so senior executives, such as himself, could earn large bonuses [5].

In 2006, the OFHEO announced a suit against Raines in order to recover some or all of the $50 million in payments made to Raines based on the overstated earnings [6] initially estimated to be $9 billion but have been announced as 6.3 billion.[7].

Civil charges were filed against Raines and two other former executives by the OFHEO in which the OFHEO sought $110 million in penalties and $115 million in returned bonuses from the three accused.[8] On April 18, 2008, the government announced a settlement with Raines together with J. Timothy Howard, Fannie's former chief financial officer, and Leanne G. Spencer, Fannie's former controller. The three executives agreed to pay fines totaling about $3 million, which will be paid by Fannie's insurance policies. [ed. emphasis added] Raines also agreed to donate the proceeds from the sale of $1.8 million of his Fannie stock and to give up stock options. The stock options however have no value. Raines also gave up an estimated $5.3 million of "other benefits" said to be related to his pension and forgone bonuses.[9]

An editorial in The Wall Street Journal called it a "paltry settlement" which allowed Raines and the other two executives to "keep the bulk of their riches." [10] In 2003 alone, Raines's compensation was over $20 million.[11]

On July 16 of this year Ben Smith at Politico pointed out that Barack Obama has been calling Franklin Raines for advice on mortgage policy.

See also my earlier post on Senator Obama being the #2 recipient of all Fannie/Freddie political contributions over the last 20 years, just behind #1 recipient Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn), now chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

Update: For a highly opinionated take on things, Stanley Kurtz of the National Review writes in the NY Post that Obama's early community organizing affiliations with ACORN helped in the critical loosening of lending standards that has led to this mess:

... community organizers help to undermine the US economy by pushing the banking system into a sinkhole of bad loans. And Obama has spent years training and funding the organizers who do it.

The seeds of today's financial meltdown lie in the Community Reinvestment Act - a law passed in 1977 and made riskier by unwise amendments and regulatory rulings in later decades.

CRA was meant to encourage banks to make loans to high-risk borrowers, often minorities living in unstable neighborhoods. That has provided an opening to radical groups like ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) to abuse the law by forcing banks to make hundreds of millions of dollars in "subprime" loans to often uncreditworthy poor and minority customers.

Any bank that wants to expand or merge with another has to show it has complied with CRA - and approval can be held up by complaints filed by groups like ACORN.

In fact, intimidation tactics, public charges of racism and threats to use CRA to block business expansion have enabled ACORN to extract hundreds of millions of dollars in loans and contributions from America's financial institutions.

Banks already overexposed by these shaky loans were pushed still further in the wrong direction when government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began buying up their bad loans and offering them for sale on world markets.

This, unfortunately, is precisely what is meant by the proverb "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

I Just Heard the News Today...

... yes, I know, it's a Beatles reference, but I literally did just hear the news that keyboardist Richard Wright of Pink Floyd has died.

R.I.P., Richard.



Pink Floyd "Echoes"

Overhead the albatross
hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves
In labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant time
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine.

And no one called us to the land
And no one knows the wheres or whys
But something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb towards the light

Strangers passing in the street
By chance two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
And do I take you by the hand
And lead you through the land
And help me understand the best I can

And no one calls us to move on
And no one forces down our eyes
And no one speaks and no one tries
And no one flies around the sun

Cloudless everyday you fall upon my waking eyes
inciting and inviting me to rise
And through the window in the wall
Come streaming in on sunlight wings
A million bright ambassadors of morning

And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
And so I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky

Decentralized Nuclear Power

This is very interesting. Instead of large, expensive, nuclear power plants that take years to build, Hyperion Power proposes to build thousands of small-scale nuclear power plants sufficient to power 10,000 American households:

It's about 70 megawatts thermal, and, depending on your steam cycle and how you're generating electricity, it's about 30 megawatts electrical, at the turbine. Thirty megawatts is tiny compared to traditional nuclear reactors and even coal plants, but we're going for distributed or grid-appropriate electric generators or for industrial uses—for mining, for heavy oil production.

And, they claim it's safe, self-sustaining, and utterly useless to any would-be nuclear bomb makers:

Our fuel is very unique. It's uranium hydride. UH3 is the chemical formula. Low-enriched, about 10 percent [uranium isotope]-235, the rest is U-238. By comparison, bomb-grade fuel is about 98 percent enriched.

You can't turn our fuel into a bomb. You'd have to re-enrich, re-process the fuel, so you might as well start with yellowcake. That's one of the neat safety features of our reactor. For nefarious purposes, our reactor has absolutely no value whatsoever.

[...]

The neat thing about UH3, about uranium hydride, is it's a moderator and an emergency cooling system in one. Its chemical composition—and we say it's been designed by God to be the prefect nuclear fuel—when uranium hydride gets too hot, when the reaction gets a little out of hand, it will start shedding those hydrogen atoms naturally, which turns off the nuclear fires and, if necessary, cools down the reactor. This happens very, very fast.

If Hyperion's claims prove true, this is a small, relatively cheap, easily managed form of nuclear fission. Not only could this be easily applied throughout the United States, but also throughout the world. Since defeating global warming is not only about the United States getting off carbon-based energy production, but also about India and China doing so, the adoption of such clean, distributed low-cost nuclear power by those nations could be a big part of the eventual solution.

Hat Tip: Clean Technica

Ron Paul Shows His Stripes

Shockingly, it turns out the love in Ron Paul's Revolution is only for those who are white, Christian, and racist! I am sure the various 9/11 Truthers, white supremacists and Holocaust deniers who flocked to his campaign will be disappointed.

If you have no clue what I'm talking about, it's that Ron Paul endorsed one Chuck Baldwin of the Constitution Party for President. These are a few of Mr. Baldwin's beliefs:

If America wishes to remain a free and independent republic, if this nation truly desires future peace and prosperity, and if we genuinely aspire to remain a blessed and protected land, we must quickly throw off this foolish infatuation with multiculturalism, which is nothing more than an attempt to de-Christianize our country, and humbly return to the God of our fathers!

[...]

Call it what you want - “New World Order,” “International Order,” “International Community,” “World Law.” It all means the end of U.S. sovereignty and independence. Americans need to be aware that power hungry politicians from both parties along with money hungry executives from multinational corporations pose a much greater threat to our liberties than any foreign terrorist does.

[...]

For nearly a half-century, we have forsaken the moral principles of Heaven. We have legally murdered too many unborn babies. We have too readily accepted aberrant, sexual behavior. We kicked Heaven out of our schools, out of our homes, and out of our hearts. As a result, God is giving us a little taste of Hell.

This glorious news was resoundingly seconded by Alex Jones (last seen here protecting the world from Michelle Malkin) and the Council of Conservative Citizens.

Apparently, true-blooded American patriots are so thin on the ground that the Ron Paul Revolution has no choice but to turn to white supremacists like the aforementioned Council. Check out their Wikipedia entry for more.

Or, if you don't want to take Wikipedia's word for it, just read the Council's own Statement of Principles:

(1) We believe the United States is a Christian country.

[...]

(2) We believe the United States is a European country and that Americans are part of the European people.

[...]

(8) Cultural, national, and racial integrity. We support the cultural and national heritage of the United States and the race (ed. emphasis) and civilization of which it is a part, as well as the expression and celebration of the legitimate subcultures and ethnic and regional identities of our people.

Ron Paul shows his true stripes. I look forward to those well-meaning anti-racist libertarians duped by him thus far leaving and denouncing his cause post-haste.

Hat Tip: Little Green Footballs

Obama and Ayers

Stanley Kurtz of National Review offers a report on the recently unveiled archives related to Barack Obama's relationship with '60s radical and unrepetenant bomber William Ayers:

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago's public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.

The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.

In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

This last paragraph brings home the bottom line for me as a Democrat. Does anyone truly doubt that if a rising Republican politician had spent five years working with an unrepentant abortion-clinic bomber who described himself as a "a small f fascist" or as a "small n nazi," that he would still be seriously considered as a national politician? So why the double standard on behalf of Barack Obama?

I am a small d democrat as well as a big D Democrat. And Ayers is not an adherent of democracy! He decided that, since the democratic will of the American people had disappointed him in the 1960s by not ending the Vietnam War quickly enough, he and his fellow radicals would force the American people to change their mind through a bombing campaign aimed at the Pentagon, the Capitol building in DC, and that well-known center of war planning, the NY city Police Dept. headquarters.

In a similar vein, I have long felt there was something smelly about Pat Buchanan's long support for Nazi death camp guards like John Demanjuk (spelling?). Sure enough, Buchanan has come along in recent years with the ridiculous thesis that the U.S. never should have warred against the Nazis, that poor Adolf Hiter was forced into a war against Britain and the West that he did not want by Winston Churchill, among others.

Just as Buchanan has revealed what many long suspected about his pro-Nazi tendencies, I think Obama's association with anti-American radicals like Ayers and out-and-out racists like Rev. Wright tells us that Obama's true politics lie with the radical left. One decade-plus association with Wright or Ayers alone would be troubling enough! Two such associations tells us either:
a) Obama is a dupe who cannot figure out on his own what these men are like; or
b) Obama is a cynic who thinks he can build his political career in Chicago with the likes of these guys, and still go on to claim he's a post-partisan, post-racial moderate.

So far, Obama has actually been able to get away with option b, to my amazement. We'll see if he's be able to make it last until November 4.

Hat Tip: TigerHawk

Naomi Wolf Brings Us the Truth!

Naomi Wolf, lone voice in the wilderness, tells us about the coming Palin-Rove administration, umm, I mean dictatorship:

Under the coming Palin-Rove police state, you will witness the plans now underway to bring Iraqi troops to patrol the streets of our nation. This is not McCain's fantasy: it is Rove's and Cheney's.

Under the Palin-Rove police state, there will be no further true elections. Mark Crispin Miller has done sensational and under-reported investigating to establish that -- as I warned -- indeed the GOP staffers on the US Senate Judiciary Committee have been.

Yes, that last didn't make sense to me either. No doubt it was a secret message to the freedom fighters massing in their hidden bases to strike a blow against the evil Empire!

What's a good evil Empire, though, without the S&M? Of course, Palin/Rove have that angle covered, writes Wolf:

I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints. I heard her echo Bush 2000 soundbites ("the heart of America is on display") and realized Bush's speechwriters were writing her -- not McCain's -- speeches. I heard her tell George Bush's lies -- not McCain's -- to the American people, linking 9/11 to Iraq. I heard her make fun of Barack Obama for wanting to prevent the torture of prisoners -- this is Rove-Cheney's enthusiastic S and M, not McCain's, who, though he shamefully colluded in the 2006 Military Tribunals Act, is also a former prisoner of war and wrote an eloquent Newsweek piece in 2005 opposing torture. I saw that she was even styled by the same skillful stylist (neutral lipstick, matte makeup, dark colors) who turned Katharine Harris from a mall rat into a stateswoman and who styles all the women in the Bush orbit --but who does not bother to style Cindy McCain.

Who knew Sarah Palin was an "S and M" stateswoman? But wait! Where is John McCain in all this? Well, Wolf has braved unspeakable dangers to bring us the truth:

McCain doesn't matter. Reputable dermatologists are discussing the fact that in simply actuarial terms, John McCain has a virulent and life-threatening form of skin cancer. It is the elephant in the room, but we must discuss the health of the candidates: doctors put survival rates for someone his age at two to four years. I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them. If McCain-Palin get in, this will be the last true American election. She will be working for Halliburton, KBR, Rove and Cheney into the foreseeable future -- for a decade perhaps -- a puppet "president" for the same people who have plundered our treasure, are now holding the US economy hostage and who murdered four thousand brave young men and women in a way of choice and lies.

I think Wolf meant to write "a war of choice and lies" in that last sentence, but I would not presume to amend her sacred words of warning.

Read her whole devastating expose at the Huffington Post. Where else?

Hat Tip: Jammie Wearing Fool

Hitchens on Obama

The man, Christopher Hitchens, has this to say about Obama:

Why is Obama so vapid and hesitant and gutless? Why, to put it another way, does he risk going into political history as a dusky Dukakis? Well, after the self-imposed Jeremiah Wright nightmare, he can't afford any more militancy, or militant-sounding stuff, even if it might be justified. His other problems are self-inflicted or party-inflicted as well. He couldn't have picked a gifted Democratic woman as his running mate, because he couldn't have chosen a female who wasn't the ever-present Sen. Clinton, and so he handed the free gift of doing so to his Republican opponent (whose own choice has set up a screech from the liberals like nothing I have heard since the nomination of Clarence Thomas). So the unquantifiable yet important "atmospherics" of politics, with all their little X factors, belong at present to the other team.

Hitchens is equally hard on the Republicans, too. But he points out something I have long thought about Obama -- that he really didn't expect to be the nominee this time around, and now he's stuck:

To put it a touch more precisely, what I suspect in his case is that he had no idea of winning this time around. He was running in Iowa and New Hampshire to seed the ground for 2012, not 2008, and then the enthusiasm of his supporters (and the weird coincidence of a strong John Edwards showing in Iowa) put him at the front of the pack. Yet, having suddenly got the leadership position, he hadn't the faintest idea what to do with it or what to do about it.

Look at the record, and at Obama's replies to essential and pressing questions. The surge in Iraq? I'll answer that only if you insist. The credit crunch? Please may I be photographed with Bill Clinton's economic team? Georgia? After you, please, Sen. McCain. A vice-presidential nominee? What about a guy who, despite his various qualities, is picked because he has almost no enemies among Democratic interest groups?

Read the whole thing.

Gabriel!

Peter Gabriel, who I have been fortunate enough to have seen in concert in 1987, 1993, and 2003, sings an extraordinary song of Native American loss and resilience:

Peter Gabriel "San Jacinto"

Thick cloud - steam rising - hissing stone on sweat lodge fire
Around me - buffalo robe - sage in bundle - run on skin
Outside - cold air - stand, wait for rising sun
Red paint - eagle feathers - coyote calling - it has begun
Something moving in - I taste it in my mouth and in my heart
It feels like dying - slow - letting go of life

Medicine man lead me up though town - Indian ground -
so far down
Cut up land - each house - a pool - kids wearing water
wings - drink in cool
Follow dry river bed - watch Scout and Guides make
pow-wow signs
Past Geronimo's disco - Sit 'n' Bull steakhouse - white
men dream
A rattle in the old man's sack - look at mountain top -
keep climbing up
Way above us the desert snow - white wind blow

I hold the line - the line of strength that pulls me through
the fear
San Jacinto - I hold the line
San Jacinto - the poison bite and darkness take my sight -
I hold the line
And the tears roll down my swollen cheek - think I'm losing
it - getting weaker
I hold the line - I hold the line
San Jacinto - yellow eagle flies down from the sun -
from the sun

We will walk - on the land
We will breathe - of the air
We will drink - from the stream
We will live - hold the line

Ralph Peters on Palin

Ralph Peters is always the sort to shoot from the hip in his essays and let God sort it all out, and he doesn't disappoint in his essay on the appeal of Sarah Palin:

Sarah Palin's one of us. She actually represents the American people.

When The New York Times, CNN, the NBC basket of basket cases and all the barking blog dogs insult Palin, they're insulting us. When they smear her, they're smearing every American who actually works for a living, who doesn't expect a handout, who doesn't have a full-time accountant to parse the family taxes, who believes in the Pledge of Allegiance and who thinks a church is more than just a tedious stop on daughter Emily's 100K wedding day.

Later on, he writes,

For the first time since Ronald Reagan, our last great president, we, the people, see a chance that one of us might have a voice in governing our country.

Speaking of Reagan (Eureka College, Illinois), every chief executive we've had since the Gipper snapped his final salute as president has had the imprimatur of an Ivy League university. And we've gone from bad to worse:

* George Herbert Walker Bush: Yale.

* William Jefferson Clinton: Georgetown, Oxford, Yale Law.

* George W. Bush: Yale and Harvard Business School.

The first lacked the sense to finish the job in Desert Storm; the second lacked the guts to go after al Qaeda when it was just a startup - and the third, well, let's just say he disappointed our low expectations.

Now we have the Ivy League elite's "he's not only like us but he's a minority and we're so wonderful to support him" candidate, Sen. Barack Obama (Columbia and Harvard Law).

Our country can't afford another one of these clowns. Harvard isn't the answer - Harvard's the problem.

So here's the message Palin is sending on behalf of the rest of us (the down-market masses Dems love at election time and ignore once the voting's done): The rule of the snobs is over. It's time to give one of us a chance to lead.

Sen. John McCain's one of us, too. He raised hell at Annapolis (quadruple ugh: military!), and he'll raise the right kind of hell in Washington.

McCain's so dumb he really loves his country.

Sarah Palin's dumb that way, too. How terribly unfashionable.

Agree or disagree with the man, Peters always is bracing, unconventional, and calling 'em like he sees 'em. I happen to think he's on to something here.

Hat Tip: Hot Air