**This post will be updated throughout the show. Refresh the page for additional links.**
All lights on! Earth Hour 2009 — Saturday at 8:30 p.m.
Driscoll: The New Endarkenment
Women, minorities fear being left out of stimulus projects
Video: Newt: Obama Intends To Be Dictator
Welfare for Freed Gitmo Detainees?
Hillary Clinton leaves flowers for Our Lady of Guadalupe, asks ‘Who painted it?’
Leaving the basilica half an hour later, Mrs. Clinton told some of the Mexicans gathered outside to greet her, “you have a marvelous virgin!â€
Man-caused disaster – sounds like what happened November 4, 2008.
Hi Tammy,
Been listening to the Steele segment you just did. He lost his cred with me from the time he made the acceptance speech to the sparce RNC uppities that were there that day and fright through many of the interviews up to and including the Rush debacle. He is NOT the one to lead this party. No way. As you said he should be thinking of making a change real soon OUT of the RNC office.
I know you could name a lot of other HOuse Repubs that are far more qualified than Steele. He really exposed himself. Really.
LLoyd
Earth Hour…..I fired up 2 more servers (5 total), outside flood lights, A/C down to 65 degrees, all lights on in my house and ran an extension cord to the back yard so I could power my 2-1000 watt portable flood lights. Thanks for the extra power! No brown outs or spikes! It was a moving experience for me. Power! All at the flick of a switch or 30. I however, did toss my empty Pepsi can in the recycling bin…..it was my neighbors bin. I now have a warm, snarky-smug feeling!
Tammy,
Leaving lights ON to save energy used during turn ON is a hoax. I’ve designed ballasts for the lighting industry which have shipped hundreds of millions of units. Suffice it to say I have measured many lamps, ballasts and associated hardware. The energy required at turn ON is at most a few seconds of operation.
Think about it – if it took minutes or hours of energy to turn ON a lamp the bulb would explode in a fireball from the amount of energy released…or at least trip a breaker.
For cheap florescent ballasts (magnetic start, spiral, etc) it does make sense to leave them on instead of turning them off briefly. Each lamp strike erodes the coatings off the lamp filaments (yes, even FL have filaments) which reduces lamp life. Only programmed start electronic ballasts do not reduce lamp life when struck. Even incandescent bulbs lose life when cycled on/off due to mechanical stress (thermal cycling of the filament…think bending a paper clip back and forth until the metal fatigues and fails).
Scientific American did a decent article recently:
http://tinyurl.com/ypbjgn
BTW, during earth hour I turned on every light in the house, cranked up the AC, turned on the stove and even put the SHAMWOW! in the washing machine. Whoo hoo!
-Rusty B.
Hillary’s not a Catholic, so this is forgivable in my mind. Our Lady of Guadalupe is a very special apparation, and one I hope to visit in my lifetime.
I did attend a prayer vigil for the pending beatification of Mother Marianne Cope several years back, held in a neighboring city. She was beatified and declared Blessed, a necessary first step toward sainthood, in 2005.
There are numerous statues of the Virgin Mary crying tears of blood which have been verified, along with other apparitions similar to Our Lady of Guadalupe.
One of my favorite places to visit and pray is in my home state, on a hill overlooking the Mohawk River near Amsterdam. In the early 1600’s this was a Jesuit mission, and the Blessed Kateri, an Indian woman, was martyred there.
Another is the church of St. Anne deBeaupre, just east of Montreal near Old Quebec. When I was a child we visited, and it was just a small church then with the walls and pillars literally covered with the crutches and prostheses of people who were miraculously cured by going there to pray. It is much larger now, and the crutches have been taken down, but people in need of hope still go there to pray
Earth hour is bad for the environment!
If a significant number of people switched of everything possible, the load dip would cause a cascade of extra pollution. As the load dips, peaking plants cycle off-line or worse go to “running idle”. If the dip is expected to be just one hour, they pull the generators off-line and keep the boilers hot (just below boiling), which just throws away energy in the form of heat.
Most utility companies have some nukes in the mix to provide base load, and those are generally ramped up or down as the base load shifts. The nukes will be ramped down, to prevent overproduction, shifting the power mix toward fossil fuel. When demand returns, the peakers go to full fire, while the nukes have to ramp up slowly, under very carefully regulated conditions. Then the peakers can idle down and cycle off as demand falls off gradually as the evening moves toward nightime.
I hope the Earthies are happy knowing that they probably caused more net fossil fuel use, and created lots of turmoil in the power industry while they sat back and massaged each other’s egos with this crap.
How these jack-asses come up with these ideas leave me numb. DNI Dennis Blair’s suggestion that we owe these GITMO detainee’s anything from our welfare system, housing system, educational system is outrageous.
If you recall, Admiral Stansfield Turner was the DCI in Carter’s administration. A more reknowned fat-head has rarely been seen in, on or near the Potomac. His comment, which became the death-knell of human intelligence, was to the effect, with all these satelliltes and planes why do we need human operatives. That policy killed intelligence gathering and immediate access throughout the Middle East. 1978 meet 2009.
Yes there have been interims with real practitioners; not just closet cavaliers and egg-heads.
But once a bit of ground is lost in the field, you rarely get it back. Once we get the reputation of not supporting sources or assets, we lose our reputation for integrity in “the game”.
I’m not saying that the sea air affects the common sense of admirals (I have friends of the same rank and service as Blair and Turner who have been quite effective), but we may be seeing the remake of the another of the “worsts” of Carter.
But, if you like “Down Hill” that’s where this toboggan seems to be going.