A meme has been going around Facebook asking, "Did you know that it would take an area of just 254 kilometres squared filled with solar panels to power the entire world?" No sources, no calculations from known data, nothing. Just a bald faced assertion. Really? Let's see if someone with a degree in philosophy, not in engineering, can do a quick bac...

What will the environmental effects of the Clean Power Plan (CPP) be? Recall that the stated media driven, post-Kyoto Protocol (to which the US did not subscribe), goalis to reduce the Earth's temperature increase between now and 2100 to less than 2 ℃. The short answer is: zilch. NERA Economic Consulting estimates that CPP by 2030 will reduce the g...

What is the EPA's Clean Power Plan (CPP)? It is a cap and trade scheme intended to reduce emissions from existing power generators such as coal generators. It was proposed by the EPA in June, 2014, and the final rule was unveiled by President Obama on August 15, 2015. The final version of the plan aims to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from ...

Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner. Thomson/West, 2012. $69.93 new, $43.27 used, and Kindle edition at Amazon.com. As they say on the Internet, IANAL. I am not a lawyer. So what am I, a non-lawyer, doing reviewing a book on reading legal texts? A book that might well be a law school text or part of an...

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. – The Matrix, 1999 What if I were Morpheus, and you had just taken the red pill? Where...

The opponents of the Transfer of Public Lands (TPL) from the federal government to the states use several arguments against the proposal. Two of them are: The states can't manage their public lands.The states will sell off the public lands for development. Really? Tell that to Adirondack Park in upstate New York. Adirondack Park was set up by the N...

After five years of gridlock, last week a majority of four of six commissioners at the Federal Election Commission finally voted to update the FEC's regulations to comply with the Citizens United decision. For years, the three commissioners representing the Democrats insisted that along with updating the regulations the commission should add new "d...

In Nazi Germany, eugenics was an accepted branch of medicine. Its purpose was to "cleanse" the German people of individuals who were considered genetically less desirable. One would hope that this abhorrent practice would be confined to the dark history of the Third Reich. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Eugenics was well established in Americ...