Let's remember why the special counsel was appointed by Rosenstein: Rosenstein signed off on a memo justifying to Trump why Comey should have been fired for his threatrics re: Hillary in the run-up to the 2016 election. This was the stated reason to fire him.
What came out after Comey was fired was that:
1. Comey had called up Preibus out of the blue, told him that the Russia-gate stuff being reported in the press about the FBI was nonsense. Preibus then asks if Comey can make a clarifying statement to the press to that effect. Comey says no, AND leaks to the press that he was being pressured by Preibus. Despite having been the one to initiate the conversation and bait Preibus into the ask. Classy.
2. Comey starts leaking his "memos" to the press via his law professor friend with the explicit and expressed purpose of getting a special counsel appointed to probe his firing. Despite some of those memos technically being classified by virtue of the fact that they described a conversation between Trump and Comey acting in their capacities as POTUS and FBI head, respectively and talking over classified matters (because counter-intelligence?). Classy.
3. Turns out that a number of people plead guilty and went to jail for far less than what Hillary was being accused of, but Comey pretty much says he quashed it because of political considerations. Classy.
So now we have the report of the special counsel, who was appointed to probe whether Trump obstructed justice by firing Comey...coming up completely empty on the question of whether a crime even occurred for Trump to have been covering up and absolutely declining to make a decision on whether obstruction occurred. Read that again: the thing he was mandated to investigate...he makes no determination of. Despite failing to find evidence that a crime even occurred.
But it gets better. Since Mueller declined to make a determination to either incriminate or exonerate Trump...it fell to Attorney General Barr to evaluate the evidence and make the call. Except Barr says he consulted with Rosenstein. The same exact Rosenstein who signed off on the memo to justify firing Comey to begin with. So Rosenstein's coming out of this smelling like a rose too: he appoints the special counsel to investigate whether the justification he wrote for firing Comey was actually part of an act of obstruction of justice...and now at the end he gets to make the decision on whether or not the thing he had his name all over constituted a crime.
Yeesh.
Never mind the Pee Dossier, never mind the trickle of less than flattering information about Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe and Evelyn Farkas and Brennan and Clapper the rest of them trying to tip the scales and leak shit to the press and out-and-out try to bait Trump officials into perjuring themselves. The basic fact is that the assistant AG wrote a memo justifying the firing an FBI head who clearly had it coming to him...then appointing a special counsel to investigate himself...and then declaring himself to have not taken part of a crime. Lovely.
Kids...if you're reading...this is not what accountable government looks like. In fact, this is what an out-of-control Deep State looks like: all court intrigue and a colossal circle-jerk for the purpose of...what for all the world looks like...generating a smoke screen in the press to divert attention away from wrong-doing by the very people claiming the mantle of Protectors of the Republic(TM).
Too bad you'd be riding on rocket fuel. Fuel and oxidizer packed in close proximity is something we didn't push too hard on in aviation on account of it being too dangerous for everyday use and tremdendously mass SWaP inefficient compared to liquid fuel powering an air-breathing engine. But suddenly you want it in your car.
It's not the government's business (see 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution), it's not my employer's business, and it's not of your business.
Now just watch the other businesses that supply the Other People's Money that prop up de Blasio's bourgeois socialism start to decamp to less crazy jurisdictions and New York will be right back where it was in the 1970s: broke, crime-ridden, and ready to elect Republicans again.
Minus last week. Minus pee dossier. It's irrelevant pop clickbait. Time was, I used to think of that sort of thing as Not Serious Journalism written by Not Serious People.
to both talk shit about right-leaning news outlets and by their presence to make us believe we need some white knight (like NewsGuard!) to ride to the rescue.
Monoculture. Spend enough of the formative years of your life (ie most of your twenties) around loud people who think "there are two genders" is both fake news and a neo-Nazi dogwhistle and of course you'll start believing that 2+2=whatever the powers that be say it is. I'm not surprised. I'm saddened that the country I love has allowed itself to get so complacent that it has descended to this level of madness, but I'm not surprised. All this shoddy thinking is hardwired into the human mind. America just had the good luck to have not excited to that particular eigenstate for the first several hundred years of its history. One hopes we can damp it out before we turn into Venezuela.
I've been in the military industrial complex my whole adult life. I've wasted money. I've bought gizmos it turned out that I didn't really need, done things the expensive way because it was the fastest way, or because I just didn't know any better. I've charged my time for my work on X while skimming a couple of hours here and there for pet project Y, or just screwing around reading the internet when I had a mental block. A few thousand a year here and there, maybe peaking around 10k for the worst of it.
I wasn't terribly proud of doing that. Still am not. But at least I didn't sell some schmuck who didn't know any better a promise to break the laws of physics with nothing but a pencil and paper (no wastebasket required). Whew. I can sleep soundly again.
To anyone who wonders how I can have the job I claim to have and be a small-government RightwingNutjob instead of a big-government LeftwingNutjob...stargates and UFOs and EmDrives is your answer.
No, they aren't. If I wanted to be self-sufficient for a full 24 hour cycle, with perfectly clear skies in the day and no need to run heat or AC, I'd need two Powerwalls for a cost of about $12k. If I needed to run a heat pump at night, make that $24k. If it was an average winter day, $36k. If I wanted to last more than 24 hours, $40k or more. If the batteries were all centralized, it would be back down to 36k. Per household. Amortization doesn't work like you think it does. If I have to run the heat, so does my neighbor. If it's cloudy where I am, it's cloudy next door too.
That's the rub isn't it. It would cost me next to nothing to just have solar panels only and no battery to cover my peak electrical consumption on a sunny day. Or even on an average day. But the whole thing doesn't work if everyone tries to use the grid as a battery. Someone is going to have to pay for that storage capacity, and it's going to cost roughly the same whether it's sitting in your basement or sitting a few miles away on the electrical substation. And batteries cost a shit ton of money when they get that big.
It takes thirty years because most of it is spent fighting off nuisance law suits and quasi-astroturfed protests from the likes of the Sierra Club. If you change the law to limit these kinds of lawsuits (and it'd need to be a serious change in both state and federal law to do that, not some bandaid legislation that's rushed through), then suddenly you can build them as fast they get built in other parts of the world that don't have a green parasite problem.
Speaking of the Sierra Club: fun fact is that they're behind the Thirty Meter Telescope protests on Hawaii. It hasn't broken ground yet, and if it gets built, it will see first light in the mid 2020s. If the natives had been riled up to block construction, it would be building right now and would have seen first light in the next couple of years. But on paper, the time to build it from start to finish would have been 15 years, of which 5 was spent fighting off idiot treehuggers.
Oh, and I forgot to add: to cover my electric bill in full, I'd need to cover both front and back yard in solar panels and batteries. Since I live at 42 degrees north in New England, if I also want to keep my house at a paltry 60F during the winter without burning fossil fuels of one form or another, I'd need to about triple the amount of everything. Which would buy me enough inefficient heating oil to last several more lifetimes.
Conclusion: greenies are full of shit/can't do math/don't care if we all freeze.
Unfortunately the environmentalist fake news machine has been in high gear for nearly forty years convincing millions of otherwise intelligent people that nuclear power equals three-eyed fish and glow-in-the-dark babies. Same people who want to shut down coal-fired power plants but also don't like natural gas pipelines or LNG terminals to replace the electricity. Same people who demand solar on every roof but would flip a shit if they knew how "dirty" solar panel and power electronics manufacturing is.
As usual, I blame society. For real this time. Too many people seem to have grown up with the idea that it's possible to have all the good stuff without paying for it in some way, either with cash, lack of reliability, pollution of one form or another, and usually some combination of all of the above.
For the record, I'd prefer to live down the street from a nuclear plant than a gas or coal or oil-burning power plant. And I did the math: if I covered my roof in solar panels, I'd lower my electric bill by at most 50-60% on sunny days, and only 30% averaged year round. If I covered my whole property in solar panels and battery energy storage, I might reduce my electric bill to zero, but with the money it would cost to do that (batteries being the biggest drain), I could buy enough electricity, even at inflated Taxachusetts rates of close to 25cents/kWhr, to last me more than a lifetime, and certainly way more than the lifetime of the batteries. Aggregating this stuff in centralized facilities won't make it cheaper by any significant amount.
I'm proud that I don't buy the latest shiny every year just because the cool kids on $LATEST_AND_GREATEST_SOCIAL_NETWORK told me to.
12 year old car, mid-range previous year's model phone, and still the same microwave I had in college almost twenty years ago. None by financial necessity, but because they ain't broken and because I have better use for that money sitting under my mattress than lining the pockets of billionaires some more.
It's not always in the classwork. In the serious disciplines, it's not in undergraduate classwork at all. Where you will find it is in the administration and in the policies that affect the behavior of faculty, staff, and graduate students who are paid by the institution, rather than paying money to it. It's in hiring practices. Right now, many of the higher tier places are falling over themselves trying to pad their numbers with minority or female hires. You'll have to work a little extra hard to land a tenure track position if you don't check one of those boxes and are up against someone who does. Places like Harvard let that bleed into undergraduate admissions, but in most places it's confined to the side of the university that paying customers don't see, but paid employees do.
I wouldn't be surprised at all, since you're making my point for me. If people are being told, 'go into debt to get this piece of paper and you're guaranteed a good paycheck,' and people are believing it en masse, then it's a problem that needs to be fixed by less money into the system, not more.
Slashdot Mirror
airport restaurants now? Cool.
Let's remember why the special counsel was appointed by Rosenstein: Rosenstein signed off on a memo justifying to Trump why Comey should have been fired for his threatrics re: Hillary in the run-up to the 2016 election. This was the stated reason to fire him.
What came out after Comey was fired was that:
1. Comey had called up Preibus out of the blue, told him that the Russia-gate stuff being reported in the press about the FBI was nonsense. Preibus then asks if Comey can make a clarifying statement to the press to that effect. Comey says no, AND leaks to the press that he was being pressured by Preibus. Despite having been the one to initiate the conversation and bait Preibus into the ask. Classy.
2. Comey starts leaking his "memos" to the press via his law professor friend with the explicit and expressed purpose of getting a special counsel appointed to probe his firing. Despite some of those memos technically being classified by virtue of the fact that they described a conversation between Trump and Comey acting in their capacities as POTUS and FBI head, respectively and talking over classified matters (because counter-intelligence?). Classy.
3. Turns out that a number of people plead guilty and went to jail for far less than what Hillary was being accused of, but Comey pretty much says he quashed it because of political considerations. Classy.
So now we have the report of the special counsel, who was appointed to probe whether Trump obstructed justice by firing Comey...coming up completely empty on the question of whether a crime even occurred for Trump to have been covering up and absolutely declining to make a decision on whether obstruction occurred. Read that again: the thing he was mandated to investigate...he makes no determination of. Despite failing to find evidence that a crime even occurred.
But it gets better. Since Mueller declined to make a determination to either incriminate or exonerate Trump...it fell to Attorney General Barr to evaluate the evidence and make the call. Except Barr says he consulted with Rosenstein. The same exact Rosenstein who signed off on the memo to justify firing Comey to begin with. So Rosenstein's coming out of this smelling like a rose too: he appoints the special counsel to investigate whether the justification he wrote for firing Comey was actually part of an act of obstruction of justice...and now at the end he gets to make the decision on whether or not the thing he had his name all over constituted a crime.
Yeesh.
Never mind the Pee Dossier, never mind the trickle of less than flattering information about Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe and Evelyn Farkas and Brennan and Clapper the rest of them trying to tip the scales and leak shit to the press and out-and-out try to bait Trump officials into perjuring themselves. The basic fact is that the assistant AG wrote a memo justifying the firing an FBI head who clearly had it coming to him...then appointing a special counsel to investigate himself...and then declaring himself to have not taken part of a crime. Lovely.
Kids...if you're reading...this is not what accountable government looks like. In fact, this is what an out-of-control Deep State looks like: all court intrigue and a colossal circle-jerk for the purpose of...what for all the world looks like...generating a smoke screen in the press to divert attention away from wrong-doing by the very people claiming the mantle of Protectors of the Republic(TM).
Damn right.
Too bad you'd be riding on rocket fuel. Fuel and oxidizer packed in close proximity is something we didn't push too hard on in aviation on account of it being too dangerous for everyday use and tremdendously mass SWaP inefficient compared to liquid fuel powering an air-breathing engine. But suddenly you want it in your car.
It's not the government's business (see 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution), it's not my employer's business, and it's not of your business.
Yeah. More examples of US Government-mandated racialism.
Look at my big surprised face.
Now just watch the other businesses that supply the Other People's Money that prop up de Blasio's bourgeois socialism start to decamp to less crazy jurisdictions and New York will be right back where it was in the 1970s: broke, crime-ridden, and ready to elect Republicans again.
And how pray tell does one get reliably hot temperatures if not by burning fossil fuels?
Option 1: Giant conspiracy
Option 2: Feds don't have technical know-how to crack a brand new, designed in Cupertino/made in China phone.
I'm on pretty firm ground assuming stupidity. I'm on less firm ground assuming hyper-competence.
Apple and FBI. Quite public, too.
Minus last week. Minus pee dossier. It's irrelevant pop clickbait. Time was, I used to think of that sort of thing as Not Serious Journalism written by Not Serious People.
to both talk shit about right-leaning news outlets and by their presence to make us believe we need some white knight (like NewsGuard!) to ride to the rescue.
Monoculture. Spend enough of the formative years of your life (ie most of your twenties) around loud people who think "there are two genders" is both fake news and a neo-Nazi dogwhistle and of course you'll start believing that 2+2=whatever the powers that be say it is. I'm not surprised. I'm saddened that the country I love has allowed itself to get so complacent that it has descended to this level of madness, but I'm not surprised. All this shoddy thinking is hardwired into the human mind. America just had the good luck to have not excited to that particular eigenstate for the first several hundred years of its history. One hopes we can damp it out before we turn into Venezuela.
BuzzFeedNews rated as trustworthy. Nope.
I guess Microsoft is competing with Google in the Wokelympics.
I've been in the military industrial complex my whole adult life. I've wasted money. I've bought gizmos it turned out that I didn't really need, done things the expensive way because it was the fastest way, or because I just didn't know any better. I've charged my time for my work on X while skimming a couple of hours here and there for pet project Y, or just screwing around reading the internet when I had a mental block. A few thousand a year here and there, maybe peaking around 10k for the worst of it.
I wasn't terribly proud of doing that. Still am not. But at least I didn't sell some schmuck who didn't know any better a promise to break the laws of physics with nothing but a pencil and paper (no wastebasket required). Whew. I can sleep soundly again.
To anyone who wonders how I can have the job I claim to have and be a small-government RightwingNutjob instead of a big-government LeftwingNutjob...stargates and UFOs and EmDrives is your answer.
Yeah...if it doesn't work without state subsidies, then it doesn't work at all.
No, they aren't. If I wanted to be self-sufficient for a full 24 hour cycle, with perfectly clear skies in the day and no need to run heat or AC, I'd need two Powerwalls for a cost of about $12k. If I needed to run a heat pump at night, make that $24k. If it was an average winter day, $36k. If I wanted to last more than 24 hours, $40k or more. If the batteries were all centralized, it would be back down to 36k. Per household. Amortization doesn't work like you think it does. If I have to run the heat, so does my neighbor. If it's cloudy where I am, it's cloudy next door too.
That's the rub isn't it. It would cost me next to nothing to just have solar panels only and no battery to cover my peak electrical consumption on a sunny day. Or even on an average day. But the whole thing doesn't work if everyone tries to use the grid as a battery. Someone is going to have to pay for that storage capacity, and it's going to cost roughly the same whether it's sitting in your basement or sitting a few miles away on the electrical substation. And batteries cost a shit ton of money when they get that big.
It takes thirty years because most of it is spent fighting off nuisance law suits and quasi-astroturfed protests from the likes of the Sierra Club. If you change the law to limit these kinds of lawsuits (and it'd need to be a serious change in both state and federal law to do that, not some bandaid legislation that's rushed through), then suddenly you can build them as fast they get built in other parts of the world that don't have a green parasite problem.
Speaking of the Sierra Club: fun fact is that they're behind the Thirty Meter Telescope protests on Hawaii. It hasn't broken ground yet, and if it gets built, it will see first light in the mid 2020s. If the natives had been riled up to block construction, it would be building right now and would have seen first light in the next couple of years. But on paper, the time to build it from start to finish would have been 15 years, of which 5 was spent fighting off idiot treehuggers.
How much waste do you think there is, honestly? It isn't a lot.
Oh, and I forgot to add: to cover my electric bill in full, I'd need to cover both front and back yard in solar panels and batteries. Since I live at 42 degrees north in New England, if I also want to keep my house at a paltry 60F during the winter without burning fossil fuels of one form or another, I'd need to about triple the amount of everything. Which would buy me enough inefficient heating oil to last several more lifetimes.
Conclusion: greenies are full of shit/can't do math/don't care if we all freeze.
Unfortunately the environmentalist fake news machine has been in high gear for nearly forty years convincing millions of otherwise intelligent people that nuclear power equals three-eyed fish and glow-in-the-dark babies. Same people who want to shut down coal-fired power plants but also don't like natural gas pipelines or LNG terminals to replace the electricity. Same people who demand solar on every roof but would flip a shit if they knew how "dirty" solar panel and power electronics manufacturing is.
As usual, I blame society. For real this time. Too many people seem to have grown up with the idea that it's possible to have all the good stuff without paying for it in some way, either with cash, lack of reliability, pollution of one form or another, and usually some combination of all of the above.
For the record, I'd prefer to live down the street from a nuclear plant than a gas or coal or oil-burning power plant. And I did the math: if I covered my roof in solar panels, I'd lower my electric bill by at most 50-60% on sunny days, and only 30% averaged year round. If I covered my whole property in solar panels and battery energy storage, I might reduce my electric bill to zero, but with the money it would cost to do that (batteries being the biggest drain), I could buy enough electricity, even at inflated Taxachusetts rates of close to 25cents/kWhr, to last me more than a lifetime, and certainly way more than the lifetime of the batteries. Aggregating this stuff in centralized facilities won't make it cheaper by any significant amount.
I'm proud that I don't buy the latest shiny every year just because the cool kids on $LATEST_AND_GREATEST_SOCIAL_NETWORK told me to.
12 year old car, mid-range previous year's model phone, and still the same microwave I had in college almost twenty years ago. None by financial necessity, but because they ain't broken and because I have better use for that money sitting under my mattress than lining the pockets of billionaires some more.
It's not always in the classwork. In the serious disciplines, it's not in undergraduate classwork at all. Where you will find it is in the administration and in the policies that affect the behavior of faculty, staff, and graduate students who are paid by the institution, rather than paying money to it. It's in hiring practices. Right now, many of the higher tier places are falling over themselves trying to pad their numbers with minority or female hires. You'll have to work a little extra hard to land a tenure track position if you don't check one of those boxes and are up against someone who does. Places like Harvard let that bleed into undergraduate admissions, but in most places it's confined to the side of the university that paying customers don't see, but paid employees do.
I wouldn't be surprised at all, since you're making my point for me. If people are being told, 'go into debt to get this piece of paper and you're guaranteed a good paycheck,' and people are believing it en masse, then it's a problem that needs to be fixed by less money into the system, not more.