Reflections From a Murky Pond

The Roberts Electric Car was built in 1896, 13 years before even Henry Ford’s famous Model T, and it got, using only the lead-acid batteries of the late 19th century, 40 miles per charge. This is the same range as that which is advertised for Chevy’s $32,000 Volt which cost nearly $750 million for them to develop.

Roberts Electric Car Circa 1896 – 40 Mile Range

Slightly later, in 1914, the Anderson Electric Car Company in Detroit, MI was producing electric cars using Edison’s nickel-iron batteries with a confirmed range of 80 miles per charge, twice that of the car which GM Dan Akerson called “not a step forward, but a leap forward.”

Anderson Electric Car Circa 1914 – 80 Mile Range

So the Volt was progress? No. The abject and pathetic travesty that is the Obama-approved “Great Leap Forward” in green engineering, the now defunct Chevy Volt was not progress in anything other than gross stupidity compounded by government intervention.

Chevy Volt Circa 2012 – 40 Mile Range

If one wants to look at progress in electric vehicles one might consider looking at Dave Cloud, an electric vehicle hobbyist who designed and built his Dolphin for just $3000 using reclaimed car parts and COTS equipment. His Dolphin has a range of 200 miles on a single charge with a speed of 60-65 mph for 85% of those miles.

Dave Cloud’s Dolphin Circa 2004 – 200 Mile Range

Admittedly, Cloud’s Dolphin is not truly practical for normal driving. Yet, what could someone like Dave Cloud design and build if given a fraction of the $750 million that GM wasted on the Volt?

Of course, between the actions and demand of the UAW and the restrictive regulations of the federal government, even if Mr. Cloud got access to funding it’d be unlikely that he could bring anything to market that was anywhere near as good as what he’s already designed.

Obama and/or his “uncoordinated”  Super PACs do love them some green energy and black lies. Their latest afront to Americans and reason is their the recent ad which glibly fosters the impression – they are too nuanced to lie outright – that Obama created 2.7 million jobs in the “green energy” sector of America’s economy.

Damn! They Said The Cord Would Reach To November, 2012

Once Americans are unplugged from the fantasy, however, they’re forced to realize that it is nothing but a fantasy – a pack of lies and misinformation meant to save one singular job, Obama’s.

That 2.7 Million jobs figure that Obama and his die-hard cultists are shopping is, from all appearances, loosely based upon a report by The Brookings Institution. That report bears only vague surface level resemblance to their claims.

The clean economy, which employs some 2.7 million workers, encompasses a significant number of jobs in establishments spread across a diverse group of industries. Though modest in size, the clean economy employs more workers than the fossil fuel industry and bulks larger than bioscience but remains smaller than the IT-producing sectors. Most clean economy jobs reside in mature segments that cover a wide swath of activities including manufacturing and the provision of public services such as wastewater and mass transit. A smaller portion of the clean economy encompasses newer segments that respond to energy-related challenges.

The clean economy grew more slowly in aggregate than the national economy between 2003 and 2010, but newer “cleantech” segments produced explosive job gains and the clean economy outperformed the nation during the recession. Overall, today’s clean economy establishments added half a million jobs between 2003 and 2010, expanding at an annual rate of 3.4 percent. This performance lagged the growth in the national economy, which grew by 4.2 percent annually over the period (if job losses from establishment closings are omitted to make the data comparable). However, this measured growth heavily reflected the fact that many longer-standing companies in the clean economy—especially those involved in housing- and building-related segments—laid off large numbers of workers during the real estate crash of 2007 and 2008, while sectors unrelated to the clean economy (mainly health care) created many more new jobs nationally. At the same time, newer clean economy establishments— especially those in young energy-related segments such as wind energy, solar PV, and smart grid—added jobs at a torrid pace, albeit from small bases.

Working backward from the numbers leading up to the 2003 – 2010 time-frame of the report, only 500,000 “green economy” jobs et al were created during 2003-2010, a small fraction of which were in “green energy.” Since Obama didn’t become POTUS until 2009, that means that only 125,000 “green” jobs were created during his regime, once again only a small fraction of which were in “green energy.”

So, even if Americans give Obama and his cultists the handout of accepting any “green” job for the purposes of the veracity of this campaign ad, that still shows the reality is only about 4.6% of the fantasy that they’re promulgating.

~*~

Keep your eyes open. Travel light but load heavy, and always put another round in the enemy after they’re down.

Google, the internet search giant and greatest controlling force on the internet, keeps track of what you search for and, while they claim that they don’t sell this information to 3rd-parties, they do bundle it together so as to better sell you to those 3rd-parties.

Google Knows What You’ve Been Searching For

You might want to remember that Google is watching and remembering while you’re cruising the web and searching for stuff, especially you freaks in Lahore, Pakistan. 😆

Yo, Chutiya! You’re taking a lot more into your own hands than you think if the Islamists surrounding you find out what you’re doing on the web.

But before any of us complain too stridently about this, let’s all take a moment to remember something else:

If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.

— Andrew Lewis aka blue_beetle

That’s pretty much how it goes in the real word which, despite the best efforts of fools, the internet is part and parcel of. So enjoy yourselves, but remember that it’s Google giving you that feeling of being watched while you….whatever. 😉

Obama has chosen to “repurpose” NASA as both a means of promulgating the AGW hype and as a Muslim outreach program, all the while cancelling its programs and cutting its budget. Insofar as Obama is concerned, NASA needs to look downward and inward not upward and outward. Space exploration is right out. It’s just too costly.

But if it’s that costly, how can we have this:

Boldly Going Where NASA Can’t Afford To Tread

If a space program is so expensive that the Obama Regime has to curtail NASA’s efforts, how could a small Washington DC metro area restaurant chain, Sticky Rice, with only for restaurants be able to afford to collaborate with RVA TV and Bark Marketing to launch one of their Godzirra rolls into space – and how could they manage to do it in the first place?

OK, for the sake of precision, Sticky Rice didn’t actually put a Godzirra Maki into space. They didn’t breach the Karman Line and only managed to send their sushi into the middle stratosphere.

Sticky Rice should rename their Godzirra roll. They should call it the Fukyu-Obama Maki.

If a small business can, using commercially available equipment and materials send, film, and successfully recover sushi to the edge of space then it’s disgusting to claim and laughable to believe that America needs to curtail space exploration.

There’s a lot of whinging, whining, ranting, and raving over SOPA and PIPA. My guess is that very, very few – perhaps as low as 1% – of the people engaging in these histrionics have bothered to read either bill.

That fundamental, self-imposed ignorance, of course,  never seems to stop these cretins from yammering about things about which they know nothing or next to nothing.

Most hilarious reaction is the SOPA Strike or Blackout protest going on today (January 18, 2012).  Well over 99% of the sites choosing to “go dark” are so inconsequential that their permanent loss would go utterly unnoticed by the internet public at large.

NOTE: This blog would also most definitely fall into that 99%, as would virtually all personal websites. I have some comforting illusions but this blog’s importance isn’t one of them.

On the slim chance that you, my dear reader, wish to be one of the 1% who isn’t bleating in ignorance born rage, links to the full text of both SOPA and PIPA can be found below:

Texts of SOPA & PIPA

• Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) [H. R. 3261]
• Protect IP Act (PIPA) [S. 968]

At least after reading the bills in question one can, if one still has an issue with one or both of them, have complaints and arguments based upon actual verifiable facts as opposed to the drivel certain agendists spoon feed their drones. And it’s not inconceivable that you would still take issue with SOPA and PIPA; like all laws, there’s room for argument over the details – especially over the various amendments and riders that are always added to bills in Congress.

Read the rest of this entry »