Don’t miss these headlines! Just think how much fun you can be at the weekend barbie, armed with this information!
Number Seven. Redstate dot com. EV battery facility requires dirty power.
The brand new 4 million-square-foot plant at DeSoto, Kansas, built by Panasonic with the $7 billion they got from you through the Inflation Resumption Act last year, will produce 1,000-lb batteries for electric vehicles.
That promises to save the world from the extinction that is surely upon us, caused by putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it is used to feed the trees and other green plants.
The only thing it takes to run the new battery manufacturing facility is a little bit of electric power. This makes perfect woke sense: Using electricity to make electricity is the embodiment of synergism. I can see doctoral degrees awarded leveraging this theme.
However, there is a fly in the ointment. Some very narrow-minded and glass-half-empty journalists have refused to be impressed, and are asking really ignorant, uninformed and unkind questions, such as: Where does the electricity to make the batteries come from?
Mounting such an irrelevant and hostile verbal assault, by asking a question, holding a microphone and waiting for an answer, is truly violent.
In testimony before the Kansas Corporation Commission, a representative from the local electric utility explained that the new Panasonic plant has created a challenge with regard to resource adequacy.
Which means, they will need to build another conventional fossil-fuel power plant to provide the electricity needed to make the electric batteries to run the cars so that the use of fossil fuels can be avoided.
Avoided, except for the daily charging required for said car batteries. Which, if you are interested in the numbers, requires about 12 kilowatt hours each day, which might be like filling your gas tank half full. That’s about a 40% increase in electrical usage for an average home, which might mean about a 40% increase in the fossil fuels used to make that quantity of electricity for your home.
In other words, it’s a wash.
But wait, you’ll say, we are avoiding all the gasoline we would have used in the car. And that is true.
In fact, if your battery runs 100,000 miles before it needs to be replaced (perhaps a little optimistic, but let’s go with it), it will have saved enough gasoline to pay for all the coal and gas that was required to manufacture the 1,000-lb battery in the first place.
Which means, by the time we are done building new coal plants and handing out $7 billion grants and building about a billion new charging stations and reinforcing all the overhead electric lines in every neighborhood to handle the load required for the home charging stations, we will have netted out to about a zero percent reduction in the use of fossil fuels.
Which some might conclude is an idiot thing to do, but those people are probably not the ones receiving the grants or the government contracts to build the infrastructure.
Actually, I think electric vehicles are really a good idea, seriously. They run quick and burn clean and have fewer moving parts. Once the battery gets figured out, and once we convert to nuclear power, or have something like orbital solar collector arrays, and learn how to beam the electricity to earth-mounted receptors, they will probably be the wave of the future.
Once those things are ready, which may be in this century, the free market will let us know because people will start buying the cars.
It would be really nice if we still had a functioning America in place when it happens.
Being able to afford to put down the cash to buy your freedom while awaiting your arraignment, in other words to pay your bail, has long been the province of the well-to-do felon.
It’s only the chumps with no money and a serious rap sheet that have to remain in the hoosegow till their court date. The people with serious rap sheets and lots of money can usually get released while waiting.
To put a stop to this, one solution might be to make it harder to bail yourself out. Raise the price, or limit the number who can be released, or more tightly regulate the bail bondsmen. But in some circles — the circles inhabited by the well-heeled criminals who would like to remain free while their attorney buys off the jury pool — that is considered unfair.
So instead, LA County has gone the other way. Instead of making the rich guilty people stay in jail, they are going to let the impoverished guilty people go free.
Those words sound vaguely American, and this system promises to offer a much more level playing field for the perpetrators.
What it offers for the victims of the crime is not quite as clear, but with all those criminals set free, who were arrested when the victims pressed charges against them, the vics might want to check their six from time to time.
“It’s justice!” claimed a spokesperson speaking in favor of the Pre-Incarceration Release Protocol, or PIRP, when asked for a statement. “It’s simply not fair to let a rich guy with a hundred grand of drug money buy his way out of jail for shooting somebody, when you’re going to keep a guy without a hundred grand of drug money stay in jail for shooting somebody. I mean, where is your sense of fairness? The guy’s already been shot, so, to channel a well-respected cabinet secretary speaking of a shooting incident, what difference, at this point, does it make?”
Put like that, the logic appears to be unassailable. And the more violent perpetrators are released, the more unassailable the situation will become.
You’ll like this one!
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this.
Mr. and Mrs. Marty Ansen of the land down under ran the numbers on the retirement home they were considering. In their market, it came to $500,000 down plus monthly payments.
Looking for alternatives where they could obtain round-the-clock meals, maid service, light entertainment, climate control and interesting neighbors, they settled on the Princess Cruise Lines’ 2,000-passenger Coral Princess.
They booked in advance a year’s worth of back-to-back two-week cruises on the luxury liner for a total of $60,000. Deluxe meals and daily maid service are included, not to mention free wi-fi, ballroom dancing, ping pong, shuffle board, shore excursions and gaming tables.
When their year is up, they plan to move to the Crown Princess, a larger ship, and continue the adventure.
What’s not to like?
Number Four. Trudeau Government orders podcast platforms to register with state regulator.
Finally! It’s high time sometime began to clip the wings of those podcasters who say anything they darn well please and try to convince otherwise docile and polite subjects of the British crown that their government is run by an evil, nasty, oppressive regime.
Justin Trudeau is just the man to restore respectable, non-controversial, government-approved messaging to the internet by requiring every broadcaster who dares say anything in public get a permission slip before doing so.
This is not targeted at individuals; the new rule will only apply to large podcasting corporations with more than $10 million in annual revenues.
One should absolutely never consider that a law put in place to regulate big companies would ever be expanded to apply to smaller operations. That would be a slippery slope argument, which we know has no place in polite society.
According to a spokesperson for the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), this is “a modern broadcasting framework that can adapt to changing circumstances. We need broad engagement and robust public records.”
In a nation like Canada, it is critically important that their modern broadcasting framework be adaptable to changing circumstances, such as the circumstance where wayward podcasters begin to spread the word that the Parliament in Ottawa gave a standing ovation to a 98-year-old German Nazi veteran as a hero of Canada (September 24, 2023).
Some circumstances, like admitting to the public that the Parliament praised the Nazi, simply cannot be tolerated.
As far as broad engagement and robust public records, the more robust the better, and the more broadly podcasters are logged into the government oversight system the more effective the administration can be in ensuring that the only words spoken are those which promote whatever it is that the government has deemed ought to be spoken.
Because we have your best interests at heart. Trust us!
Number Three. The Washington Free Beacon. Hunter Biden relies on 2nd amendment ruling.
If anyone loves freedom in this country, it’s Hunter Biden. Just look at the resources he is expending to ensure his continued freedom.
Studying the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruling last year in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, Hunter’s legal team has suddenly discerned a path forward for the President’s son.
Hunter is only 53 years of age and really cannot be expected to take responsibility for his actions, given the drug-addled situation in which he finds himself through no fault of his own. In the matter where he lied about his drug use on the BATF Form 4473 asking permission to please purchase a gun, it seems Hunter’s team is going to make the case that the 4473 violates his God-given right to keep and bear arms.
The gun in question, by the way, was a Colt Cobra revolver, a sweet precision machine if ever there was one. Call me jealous.
When Associate Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority Bruen opinion in 2022, he relied on the notion that federal government rules regarding firearms ownership must be consistent with historical traditions of firearm regulation.
Because crack cocaine use was not common in colonial America among farmers and merchants trying desperately to carve out a living each day to ward off certain starvation, such an addiction cannot be said to be an historically traditional impediment to owning a gun.
Because it wasn’t.
You won’t find it in any court records of the time.
So… Hunter v. United States, if ruled in favor of the President’s son, may contribute to greatly expanding gun ownership across the country.
There remains the small matter of intentionally lying on a federal form, which carries serious penalties, the cocaine use notwithstanding.
However, with this crack legal team (no pun intended) who are not only capable of offering such tortured logic with a straight face, but willing to do so in public, my guess is they can find a way around those obstacles also.
Number Two. Reuters. Maryland restrictions on guns in bars lifted.
Well! Another 2A case for you gun nuts!
Adding more fuel to the four-alarm fire that is Hunter Biden, a federal judge has temporarily stopped enforcement of a Maryland statute that prohibits carrying guns where alcohol is sold and at public demonstrations.
As in the Hunter Biden case, there is no historical tradition of banning firearms in these venues, so the judge was obligated to grant a motion for a preliminary injunction against the law.
He let stand the portion of the ban on guns at museums, state parks, schools and on mass transit because those are so-called “sensitive” areas.
In this context, another word that could be used instead of “sensitive” is “open season.”
But what do I know?
Number One. New York Post. Facial Software used to boot lawyer from Radio City Music Hall.
When the Girl Scout troop took a road trip to see the Rockettes’ kick-line in action, Kelly Conlon helped chaperone her 9-year-old daughter and other troop members.
Once her ticket was scanned and she made it through the metal detector, she was shadowed by a pair of security guards who spoke on radios of a “woman with long dark hair and gray scarf.”
They stopped her, checked her ID, and escorted her off the premises.
It seems that biometric cameras are in use, ostensibly to heighten security in order to ensure guests’ safety.
It has now become apparent that the reason Conlon was asked to leave was because of her employment. She is an attorney with Davis, Saperstein and Salomon, which has brought an unrelated personal injury case against James Dolan, the man who owns Radio City Music Hall.
Dolan has added dozens of photographs of attorneys for the plaintiffs to his terrorist watchlist database and has engaged facial recognition technology to see if any have sought entrance to his Music Hall. When they find a match, the lawyer is removed from the premises.
Ain’t technology wonderful?
The argument is made that it’s Dolan’s venue and he can refuse service if he wants. How this will help him in the civil case is a little unclear, but he will play it the way he will play it.
And honestly, from this distance and with only a single news article, it’s sort of tough to tell who’s on first.
But the facial recognition thing… it may be coming for you, if you keep reading blogs like this.
In the meantime, invest in a good pair of sunglasses and start wearing ball caps pulled down low.
Enjoy your weekend!
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Curt
The Alligator News Roundup