Freedom in a Dangerous World

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” - William Pitt the Younger

How does anyone who holds individual freedom as their highest ideal defend themselves from the on-slot of vested interests both foreign and domestic?

For most this will appear to be an odd question as it would seem self-evident that the sacrifice of one’s freedom is essential to protect one’s wellbeing.  Is freedom doomed by the very act of defending freedom? The key to avoiding an intellectual melt-down is the acceptance that we live in an imperfect world and it will always be an imperfect world. Man may never achieve a Utopia and would probably lapse into conformity if he did. Epictetus said: If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it. So the battle for freedom must be fought on every question with the measure being progress toward greater liberty.

Today Freedom is under attack from all quarters. Terrorists and internet hackers in pursuit of short-term aspirations, see individuals as nothing more than a means-to-an-end. Governments and other world bodies seize the opportunity to redistribute wealth and watch our every move. Criminals lurk in places we least expect, ready to pounce. The plea of necessity is loud and growing in volume. Are we evolving into a tyranny predicted by Karl Marx?

Oakley has a point

One of These Things is a lot Like the Other...

Both Al-Qaeda and the Liberal Party of Canada are organizations that seek to challenge Western civilization. One uses overt violence to pursue its goals while the other uses the numbing mantra of moral equivalence. They both seek to be unchained from the strictures of reason, individual freedom and the right to self-defence.  They represent vested interests that wish to operate with impunity in their spheres without interference or even criticism. These interests are as diverse as the Taliban and the Ontario teachers unions, but the assignment is always the same: gain and maintain power.  The only thing that stands in their way is our tradition of freedom and our confidence to defend it.

Response to a common Complaint

Who do you think pays when corporations pay more tax?

That's right you and me. I presume by fair you mean anything but fair -
punitive attacks on success are considered fair by the left.

If by success you mean making money through predatory pricing and poor wages/benefits for employees, then yes, I am for punitive measures.  However, I don't see how making sure businesses pay taxes like everyone is punitive.  If their greed makes them raise prices because they have to pay taxes, eventually they will fail, when people can no longer afford what they are selling.  Right now, I work just as hard as my elite business executive friends, yet I earne 1/5 the salary and pay more taxes...how is that fair?  Thea

I don't know of anyone who has been successful in business who relies on pricing that does not recoup costs and can't retain employees because of poor conditions. That is unless they are subsidized by governments or taking advantage of illegal immigration. Chinese oil companies and Brazilian aircraft manufacturers come to mind. Perhaps you can think of someone.

A business is not a person – (even people on the right don't seem to get this – Bill O'Reilly) They rely on customers to pay their expenses and if they are efficient they can make a profit and stay in business. Ultimately the customer will always pay – an added expense like a new tax will come right off the bottom-line. This is basic economics – if investors can get a better return at another company they will move their capital there – it is not a question of greed. The freedom to create wealth has produced unprecedented advances in standard of living and life extension over the past two hundred years.

I feel for you when you are prevented from getting the true market value for your work. Unfortunately your industry has been monopolized by the government and is artificially holding the real cost down by restricting wages and engaging in predatory pricing. I support your quest for private sector wage levels – that is if you also accept private ownership.

The alternative is to turn the entire economy over to centralized government planners and we will all be equally poor – see Cuba.

The Technology Already Exists!

AREVA offers its clients electricity management solutions which enable them to adapt their production levels to meet demand. The group is developing solutions for the production of hydrogen through water electrolysis and the generation of electricity through fuel cells.

Building for the peak

The price of electric energy is going up at an astonishing rate and all indications are that if we continue with our existing policies it will reach economy crippling levels very soon. The reasons for this are many and varied, but the government’s desire to appear to reduce emissions is the primary explanation. So-called clean technologies are expensive and nowhere near as efficient as plants that burn fossil fuels. To compound this problem the cyclical nature of electric power consumption requires the industry to build an infrastructure that will meet the needs of peak usage. Most of this infrastructure will lay fallow during off hours - pushing up the cost.


So why not find a way to make the electrical grid pay for itself 24/7? The answer of course is to use excess electricity generation capacity to produce a clean efficient portable fuel – Hydrogen. The production of hydrogen fuel would create a whole new revenue stream for the power utilities that they could use to reduce the cost of electric power. Ironically this would have the greatest effect on the efficiency of alternative electricity sources such as wind or solar power. They are notoriously difficult to attach to the power grid because of their fluctuations in output. Taking them off-line to produce hydrogen would allow them to use 100% of their output to create usable energy.

The problem is we don't have an infrastructure that can distribute and store hydrogen. So what can government do to fix this problem? It would appear obvious. They should remove the cost of government from any project that will enhance a hydrogen fuel distribution grid. They have already spent recklessly on alternative energy projects such as wind and solar power – an investment in a hydrogen infrastructure would help make that technology more cost effective. Government should aggressively encourage the expansion of hydro-electric capacity in the far north with a primary objective of producing energy that can be piped to population centers without line-loss.

A hydrogen infrastructure cannot be built over night – so a sector by sector approach would have to be adopted. Government could influence taxis and buses to burn hydrogen fuel with tax rebates and then move to a similar program for the trucking industry. This would allow the infrastructure to keep pace with growing consumption and before long many private vehicles would make the switch.

So let’s do this before we are too broke to pay our hydro bills!

What will happen to us?

What will happen to us? From the Boston Globe

The underlying premise of this article, which takes a macro-economic view of our species, is at odds with what it means to be human. One must never forget that there is no such person as humanity – thinking of us in those terms can only lead to a calculus where millions will die. What separates us from the lower forms of life is our awareness of our own mortality on an individual level. This understanding guides us toward strategies that should enhance and extend the precious time that we have left. The subversion of our individuality by elites that collectivize us for “our own good” has left a trail of woe and destruction throughout our known history. The battle for the future of mankind lies with philosophy, not with technology.


The notion that free men are self-destructive boarders on absurd – only a sinister philosophy that would promote self-sacrifice for some “greater good” could end in the corruption of our self-interest. Liberty makes life worth living and mankind will survive by defending it.

Presently the greatest threat to freedom is the “precautionary principle” that says we should curtail liberty in order to prevent a theoretical and as yet unproven threat. This maxim will be used over and over again to exert control over our actions and extract our wealth until we become helpless. Our self-interest has always been the guide for free men to deal effectively with known threats and it will continue to protect us in the future.

Little Englanders again?

Responding to anti-American comments on Linkedin Group "Friends of Great Britain"

Christopher J Burton • I see the greatness of Britain when I look at her progeny. Freeborn British pioneers have created the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. They unified the Indian Sub-continent to an unprecedented degree and spread Western liberty throughout the world. It distresses me to see a resurgence of “Little Englanders” who would like Britain to retreat into obscurity and quaintness.

The world needs leadership that confidently embraces the Western concepts of freedom that are embodied by Great Britain. The United States is not the villain in this story. Beware of the Eastern economies that are causing the de-industrialization of the West with the deft use of currency manipulation. Beware of the irrationalism and violence emigrating out of the Middle East and remember that it is the centralizing forces of government control that have enslaved Europe over and over again.                 

Breakthrough promises $1.50 per gallon synthetic gasoline with no carbon emissions

From: gizmag
UK-based Cella Energy has developed a synthetic fuel that could lead to US$1.50 per gallon gasoline. Apart from promising a future transportation fuel with a stable price regardless of oil prices, the fuel is hydrogen based and produces no carbon emissions when burned. The technology is based on complex hydrides, and has been developed over a four year top secret program at the prestigious Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford. Early indications are that the fuel can be used in existing internal combustion engined vehicles without engine modification.

According to Stephen Voller CEO at Cella Energy, the technology was developed using advanced materials science, taking high energy materials and encapsulating them using a nanostructuring technique called coaxial electrospraying.
“We have developed new micro-beads that can be used in an existing gasoline or petrol vehicle to replace oil-based fuels,” said Voller. “Early indications are that the micro-beads can be used in existing vehicles without engine modification.”
“The materials are hydrogen-based, and so when used produce no carbon emissions at the point of use, in a similar way to electric vehicles”, said Voller.
The technology has been developed over a four-year top secret programme at the prestigious Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, UK.
The development team is led by Professor Stephen Bennington in collaboration with scientists from University College London and Oxford University.
Professor Bennington, Chief Scientific Officer at Cella Energy said, “our technology is based on materials called complex hydrides that contain hydrogen. When encapsulated using our unique patented process, they are safer to handle than regular gasoline.” Read more here.

The Spirit of Great Britain - Avro Vulcan

This is the result of competence and confidence from years gone by.  This is the spirit we must regain in order to build the technology that will provide us with an advanced Hydrogen energy infrastructure. Hudson’s Bay will become the greatest source of energy the world has ever seen.

£500 on electricity bills to pay for green energy

Electricity bills will have to rise by up to £500 a year to pay for a new generation of environmentally friendly power stations, it emerged.

N.W.T. hydro proposal goes back to review board

The Taltson hydroelectric expansion proposal has faced opposition from Dene in Lutselk'e, N.W.T., who do not want power lines to cross the Lockhart River, which they consider to be a sacred area. (CBC)

A proposed major hydroelectric expansion project in the Northwest Territories is going back to a review board, after federal Indian and Northern Affairs Minister John Duncan rejected the board's recommendations.

Duncan said he is not prepared to approve Dezé Energy Corp.'s $700-million Taltson expansion project based on the assessment submitted by the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board, which completed its environmental assessment of the proposed work in August.
In a letter to the board, dated Dec. 10, Duncan said the scope of the board's review on the project is not complete, particularly on the issue of power lines from the Northwest Territories Power Corp.'s Taltson River dam to the territory's three diamond mines north of Yellowknife.
Duncan said the review board made its recommendations without knowing what route the power transmission lines will follow, raising major questions about the expansion project's overall environmental impact.
"The report fails to fully assess the potential impacts of a transmission line as a necessary part of the development, and therefore, the assessment of the development is incomplete," he wrote in the letter, which was obtained by CBC News on Tuesday.
Line route a contentious issue
The proposal to expand the 44-year-old Taltson dam, located about 56 kilometres northeast of the Alberta-N.W.T. border, is being spearheaded by Dezé Energy, which is a joint venture between the Northwest Territories Energy Corp., the Akaitcho First Nation and the N.W.T. Métis Nation.
The joint venture wants to supply the diamond mines with hydroelectricity from the dam, so the mines could cut down on their diesel use.
Dezé Energy initially wanted to run a 700-kilometre transmission line from the dam directly to the diamond mines, crossing the Lockhart River by the eastern arm of Great Slave Lake.
But that proposal has been strongly opposed by the Lutselk'e Dene First Nation, who say the transmission lines would run through an area considered to be sacred to them.
Dezé Energy has said alternative routes that have since come up would cost much more to execute than the Lockhart River proposal. Read more here.

The Most Dangerous Thing About the Ocean Is Sharks

The claim that sea level is rising dangerously, so that coastal cities will flood and islands will be submerged, has become a staple of global warming alarmism. Today’s Associated Press story on the Marshall Islands is a classic: “If an island state vanishes, is it still a nation?”

Read more here.

Climate models used by IPCC fail to predict past climate patterns

By Robert Zimmerman:
A recent paper published in Hydrological Sciences Journal states that climate models used by IPCC cannot even predict known past climate patterns. Key quote:

It is claimed that GCMs [General Climate Models] provide credible quantitative estimates of future climate change, particularly at continental scales and above. Examining the local performance of the models at 55 points, we found that local projections do not correlate well with observed measurements. Furthermore, we found that the correlation at a large spatial scale, i.e. the contiguous USA, is worse than at the local scale. However, we think that the most important question is not whether GCMs can produce credible estimates of future climate, but whether climate is at all predictable in deterministic terms.

Read more here.

QUESTION: Didn’t the New York Times refuse to print the Climategate emails because they said that was “wrong”

From HillBuzzs
Here’s Joe Leiberman calling for a Congressional investigation of the New York Times for publishing sensitive diplomatic cables leaked by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks…including material that identifies key targets for terrorists at US installations around the world.

I remember the New York Times making up a lame excuse for why it was not properly covering Climategate…where the Times said it was because it was “wrong” to publish “private emails” going back and forth between scientists who were concocting false results to support whatever doomsday scenario Al Gore’s Cult of Anthropogenic Global Warming came up with that day.
Do you remember this?
How can the New York Times be allowed to have it both ways?
Do they have any credibility left at all? Read more here.

ClimateGate One Year Later. Elite Media Still Lying

See more here.

Andrew Kenny: A Year After Climategate, The Corruption Of Science Persists

It is a year since the so-called Climategate e-mails were leaked. Since then, we have had freezing winters in Europe and the US, and revelations of gross misrepresentations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The lasting impression is of massive corruption of science.

Leaked from the Climate Research Unit in England, the e-mails showed the scientists behind the climate scare plotting to: hide, delete and manipulate data; to denigrate scientists presenting different views; to force journals to publish only papers promoting climate alarm; to subvert "peer review" into "pal review"; and make the reports of the IPCC nothing but alarmist propaganda. The corruption spread through governments, universities, scientific societies and journals. You have to look back to the Lysenko episode in the Soviet Union in the 1940s (when a crank persuaded the Soviet establishment that agriculture did not follow Darwinian evolution) to find such perversion of science.
The worst nonsense after the scandal was this: "Well, some climate scientists committed a few minor transgressions but the basic science is sound." In fact, the basic science is nonexistent.
Read more here.

Cancun Climate Summit Ridiculed in World Press

While United Nations global-warming dignitaries were invoking ancient Maya goddesses for help in hammering out a wealth-redistribution “climate” treaty, prominent columnists and publications around the world were heaping scorn and ridicule on the whole COP16 extravaganza currently underway in Cancun — even heralding the end of the whole “scam.”

From the United States and Canada to the United Kingdom, the amount of negative press for the climate hysterics — and their whole expensive confab in Mexico — is growing daily. And as UN leaders and climate negotiators ramp up the fear mongering and propose ever-more ridiculous scams and taxes, the barrage of ridicule will likely continue.
“Scams die hard, but eventually they die, and when they do, nobody wants to get close to the corpse,” noted Washington Times editor emeritus Wesley Pruden in an opinion piece released last week. “The global-warming caravan has moved on, bound for a destination in oblivion.” Read more here.

Creation of hydrogen research center urged

MANILA, Philippines – Sen. Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. sought Friday congressional approval of his proposal that would establish a Hydrogen Research and Development Center to pave the way for the use of hydrogen as an alternative energy source.

First zero-emission bus just the ticket to help air quality

From: London Evening Standard,
by Mark Bunden
A bus that emits water instead of ex- haust fumes was today unveiled as part of London's first non-polluting fleet.

Hydrogen fuel cell buses will be used on the RV1 tourist route from Tower Gateway to Covent Garden, passing the South Bank and London Eye.

It is hoped the UK's first zero-emission route will lessen the effects of pollution, which contributes to the deaths of more than 4,300 Londoners each year.

Mayor Boris Johnson said: "The buses are a marvel of hydrogen technology, emitting only water rather than harmful pollutants. They will run through the most city's polluted part, helping to improve London's air quality.
"This is just another way our city is harnessing low-emission, pioneering public transport to improve quality of life." The first new bus will pick up passengers from December 18, with seven more added next year. They are powered with electricity generated by the fuel cell. It combines hydrogen and oxygen to produce power and emits water as a by-product. Yet more energy is harnessed as the vehicle brakes.
David Brown, TfL's managing director for surface transport, said: "This is an exciting new chapter as we embrace new technologies to build on the work we are doing to improve air quality." Read more here.

Approaches to Boost Hydroelectric Capacity in North America

Many companies throughout North America are increasing hydro capacity by retrofitting and/or expanding existing projects, adding powerhouses at non-powered dams, and installing fish-friendly turbines. These methods are attractive because they avoid environmental concerns, and much of this work is eligible for federal funding.
By Ucilia Wang
In the U.S., a national focus on boosting renewable electricity generation has created a flood of project financing and research work.

One example is Alcoa, which has nearly 3,000 MW of capacity to provide for the needs of its smelting and refining system, as well as regional wholesale markets. Among its facilities is 122-MW Cheoah in North Carolina, which was poised to undergo a retrofit when the federal government passed the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). In August 2010, Alcoa resumed construction on the $120 million modernization after securing $12.9 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).1
Work on this project began in mid-2008 but stalled. "The economic crisis hit us hard, and we had to put it on hold," says Bill Bunker, vice president of hydropower at Alcoa Power Generating. "Thanks to the DOE money, we are back on."
Other companies have benefited from the government largesse, including Voith Hydro, supplier of the turbine-generators for Cheoah. In addition, the company is supplying the equipment needed to more than double the capacity of PPL's 108-MW Holtwood project in Pennsylvania.2 This $434 million expansion will increase plant capacity by 125 MW and improve fish passage along the Susquehanna River, said PPL. The company postponed and then restarted the project to take advantage of the ARRA programs to award tax credits and grants for renewable energy projects.
The government's interest in promoting renewable energy also creates new technology development initiatives. In March 2010, DOE, the U.S. Department of Interior, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on technologies that will increase hydroelectric generation while minimizing environmental impacts.
But the hydropower industry hasn't received nearly as much funding as other renewable technologies, notably wind and solar. Industry groups such as EPRI and the National Hydropower Association (NHA) have stepped up efforts to remind lawmakers that hydropower is a clean source of electricity worth more public investments.
In fact, untapped potential for hydropower generation in the U.S. could lead to nearly 14,000 MW added to the electricity supply by 2025, says Doug Dixon, a technical executive with EPRI. The country currently has about 75,000 MW of hydro capacity, he added. Both figures don't account for pumped storage.
NHA points to Navigant Consulting's report that estimates an added capacity of 11,250 MW to 19,900 MW during the same period, depending on whether a national mandate for renewable energy consumption exists.3
Dixon points out that the federal government has beefed up the annual budget for DOE's water power program in recent years. Funding was zero from 2005 to 2007, he says. In fiscal year 2008, $10 million materialized for the budget, which grew to $40 million in 2009 and $50 million in 2010.
"The fact is that hydro is renewable," says Bunker with Alcoa. "It's green power going into the grid. Legislators are starting to realize that."...
Canadian development spurred by feed-in tariff

In Canada, the majority of the hydroelectric development involves new greenfield projects. Developers in this country may be able to take advantage of a feed-in tariff, which offers unique incentives for hydro and other renewable electricity. Many say a feed-in tariff is one of the best ways to supercharge clean power development.
For example, Ontario's feed-in tariff policy, enacted in September 2009 as part of the Green Energy Act, sets premium prices for renewable electricity.1 This tariff has created a flood of proposed projects, notes Kaz Borovszky, business development manager for power generation at ABB. ABB provides power and automation technologies to many industries, including hydro.
Since the tariff was enacted, the government has approved 42 small hydro projects (10 MW or less), Borovszky says. Under the new tariff, hydro producers are paid 13.1 cents per kilowatt-hour for up to 10 MW and 12.2 cents for 10 to 50 MW. The cap on project size is meant to encourage eco-friendly development that doesn't involve a large reservoir or dam. Read more here.