James Doogue

El Salvador has become the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency Bitcoin legal tender when 1 Bitcoin was worth US$52,656 on 6 September 2021.

When Bitcoin peaked at A$66,938 in November 2021, El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele, probably thought he was a financial genius.

By 10 May 2022 Bitcoin had dipped to A$44,700. Like many gamblers, President Bukele chased his losses and cheerily tweeted that his country just bought 500 more Bitcoin, 'on the dip'. The current low price was not a problem, but an opportunity.

El Salvador has spent an estimated US$205.6 million on this Bitcoin gambit. About US$105.6 million of taxpayers’ money was used to purchase bitcoin, and another US$100 million rolling out bitcoin ATMs, developing software, and giving US$30 worth of Bitcoin to so far 4 million El Salvadorans who opened the special wallets.

Each time its value has dropped, Bukele has bought more Bitcoin, live-tweeting the purchases.

Having drunk from the same broth as his President, El Salvador’s minister of finance Alejandro Zelaya told a press conference on 13 June that the risk of the bitcoin fund was "extremely minimal” and that the country hasn’t lost anything as it hasn’t yet sold its holdings.

At the current price of US$20675.70 El Salvador's reported 2,300 Bitcoins are worth just US$47.6 million. They will need Bitcoin to increase in value by more than 330% just to break even on their investment to date yet the President and his Minister of Finance keep smiling.

They remind me of the Monty Python And The Holy Grail's Black Knight as he loses a limb. 'It's just a flesh wound.' Then when he's left with just a head and torso he refuses to be defeated and says to the King he's been duelling, "We'll call it a draw then."

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:57 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 310 words, total size 2 kb.

Chuck Callesto
@ChuckCallesto
·
BREAKING REPORT: America’s largest retailer has canceled Mike Lindell, to the tune of $10 million - Walmart PULLS ALL MYPILLOW PRODUCTS from stores...

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:35 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 30 words, total size 1 kb.

Warner Todd Huston

When I was a kid we had Steve Jobs, Johnny Cash, and Bob Hope. Today, we have no jobs, no cash and no hope.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:15 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 31 words, total size 1 kb.

Dennis O'Brien

So why don’t we drive them my dears?
These automobiles with no gears.
For speed they’re a match,
But there is a catch:
The problem, you see, is amperes.

Saw 2 Teslas on a trip to Brisbane and back, and I actually saw one on charge at my local Coles, which appears to be putting in more charging points — all is rosy on the EV front?

Well no, not really — see, despite what the snake-oil salesmen say, (and whisper in politicians’ ears) there are lots of problems with electric cars, otherwise we would all be driving one and would have been driving them for generations. The technology at its heart is nearly as old as the internal combustion engine but the problems have been there from the start.

I’ll only concentrate on the number one problem, which I have mentioned here before — charging times. Australia is a land of vast distances and many of us drive these distances, quite often completing the trip without an over-night stop but requiring a refuelling stop or 2 along the way. Time is often a constraint. Now I can "recharge” my petrol-powered car with a full tank of fuel in about 2 minutes, tank filled and payed for, and be on my way — 600 kms or more.

Were it a Tesla I could only safely run down the battery to around 30% and then charge it to around 90% (this by the way is the true range — only about 60 to 70 percent of the battery rating, perhaps only 400 kms or so; but that takes an over-night charge or an hour or so for a fast charge (not something you want to do to your $10,000+ battery too often as it will shorten its life). Clearly the Tesla is not suited to long-range travel.

The last time I looked, the Tesla battery (depending on the model) had a battery pack rated at around 250 kilowatt hours, so to go from 30% charge to 90% will require the injection of 150 kw hours of electrical energy (ignoring what will be considerable losses in the charging circuitry and battery). To give the layman (or laywoman) some idea of how much energy that is, how much it is sucking out of the already overloaded grid, imagine 150 single bar heaters all glowing red-hot for an hour. That’s how much mainly coal and gas fired electricity is getting pumped into that battery. But let’s just say for argument’s sake that the fast-charger can do this in an hour:
At 400 volts DC (voltage applied at the battery, and again round figures, don’t get nit-picky), the charger will deliver (I’ll average the current out as it will in reality not be a linear curve but will be considerably higher early in the charge cycle gradually decreasing as the battery becomes charged) 375 amps for the full hour — that’s why that charging cable is so thick! Power (in watts) is current multiplied by voltage, and this formula cannot be violated, it is set in stone, or if you like, Lithium.

By the way, a simple calculation shows that to charge the battery fully from flat to 250 kw hours capacity in 2 minutes as I can my car, and were it possible, it would require 18,750 amps of current for that 2 minutes — I haven’t calculated the cable size needed but the heat losses alone would melt everything, including the pole transformer and the operator.

So I hear the cries "But battery technology will make advances!” — makes no difference. We are stuck with Nature’s basic electrical laws — someone tell Albo, or (if you can find him) ScoMo.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:08 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 623 words, total size 4 kb.

Steven Chase

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:47 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 102 words, total size 1 kb.

Timothy Birdnow

Now there's a national tampon shortage!

Maybe we should get them out of men's rest rooms. How many are sitting in vending machines in those places, unused?

This is proof America has become a communist country. The hallmark of communism is bare shelves and shortages of basic goods.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:22 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 53 words, total size 1 kb.

Selwyn Duke

Pro-Trump Republican Wins Raise Alarm About U.S. Democracy

The level of projection with leftists is staggering. When people don't make the electoral decisions the Left would like, we hear "It's a threat to democracy!" (We have a republic, actually.)

And in the article above, from The Guardian — which is only a guardian of establishment deception — the writer states that in Tuesday's primaries, "Republican voters chose candidates who fervently embraced Donald Trump’s lie about a stolen election." Because this is "hard news." LOL.

Actually, it's a FACT that the election was stolen, and polls show that a majority of Americans don't have confidence in our elections.

The Democrats should become known as the Third World Party.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:00 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 177 words, total size 1 kb.

Timothy Birdnow

Even our machines are RACIST!

Computer Trained on 4Chan Becomes 'Hate Speech Machine'

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:29 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 16 words, total size 1 kb.

Timothy Birdnow

An interesting discussion on Facebook. Dr. Roy Spencer observes:

I don't really follow this AI stuff, but I don't see how a computer that is programmed to respond like a human does, in any way, becomes "sentient". It is simply spitting back what it was programmed to say, no matter how complex the programming was. We anthropomorphize non-human objects just because they act in some way "human". That doesn't make them human.

google suspends engineer following claims an AI system had become "sentient"

Peter Hatgelakas responds:

Roy, awareness is a miracle for sure, but our minds are just biological-chemical computers that have become so sophisticated that they have given us self awareness. It may be possible someday that we may synthesize an equally sophisticated machine with similar logic circuitry to also become self-aware. In the book, "Dune”, mankind achieved this and it was almost to his doom. Thus a law was created that man was forbidden to create a thinking machine that mimicked his thought process. In place of that, a race of human computers were created.


Tim adds:

"awareness is a miracle for sure, but our minds are just biological-chemical computers that have become so sophisticated that they have given us self awareness." I have to disagree; we have no evidence proving that assertion. Roger Penrose argued the human brain does not work along any known principles of physics and there needed to be a whole new physics of the brain. Consciousness may or may not be tied to the base physical properties of the extremely complex neural net, but it may transcend it too. I would add there is a whole lot more going on in many ways. For example, there is evidence that information has mass.https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/583906/does-information-have-mass If that is so then consciousness may be more than we understand. We KNOW that the observer influences things at the quantum level. How is that if it is just a simple neural net that makes our consciousness? I'm not trying to be mystical here, but I think our understanding of the matter is woefully lacking. It has become an article of faith by many scientists that the material aspects of the brain explain all consciousness. I suspect this is spectacularly wrong, rather like old ideas of the aether or whatnot.

Peter adds:

AI is just a misnomer. AI, "artificial” in the sense it is an illusion”. The AI software is just more sophisticated logic, it is not self determinate, nor is it aware. Decisions are only made within the constraints of software engineering guidelines. I would say we are a few hundred years away from that development, and our current silicon based machines do not provide the kind of platform for it. Think about it, circuits have to be made on the fly. The hardware has to be dynamically driven, just as it is in a living organism.

Tim responds:

I agree. The brain rewires itself too, something I do not believe the current computers are capable of doing. Learning often involves the creation of new neural pathways that strengthen over time and use.

Tim adds:

A couple of points to ponder about this. First, the programmer said the machine was sentient because it started speaking in a language that nobody knew. Huh? We call that gibberish. When a human being is brain damaged and suffers from Broca's Aphasia we do not conclude they have become more intelligent - we conclude their brains are damaged. That is what this appears to be.And he said the machine was arguing with him like a child. Since when is arguing a sign of intelligence?

Roger Penrose said the brain does not follow the known laws of physics and he proposed we seek a new physics of the brain. It appears to transcend the sum of it's parts.

And there is so much we do not understand. We aren't even 100% sure the standard model for neurons is correct. There is an alternate theory that says there are solitons - sound waves - that are the primary driver of neural impulses. That would explain why opioids work, for example; the standard model can't explain that (by changing the density of the material in the nerves the soliton wave cannot propagate.)

That may or may not be true, but it shows how little we know. We do not know the brain is the sole repository of consciousness. There are certainly things in quantum physics that require an observer (and that suggests there is more to it than a Newtonian machine) and there is the evidence information has mass. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/583906/does-information-have-mass

The brain rewires itself, and when we learn we establish new neural pathways which are then strengthened through use. Neuroplasticity. There are people who have literally had half their brains removed and lived a normal life because what is left rewires itself into a whole new brain.

These machines are just that - static in physical structure, limited to what we put in them. I don't see any way they are comparable to ours.

Sadly, nursery rhymes and Disney have everyone anthropomorphizing everything. It's why we talk about "Gaia" and pretend the inanimate parts of the Earth are somehow alive and just like us. Disney has given us pantheism as our modern belief. And we apply it everywhere to everything these days. It's one of the things that are wrong with our modern society. We care more about some bait fish than we do people, and so California drains all the water away. They think "a boy id a dog is a fish is a goat is a bear".

But we aren't and a machine is not a man. I don't think it ever will be.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:25 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 954 words, total size 6 kb.

Selwyn Duke

Leftists are impugning this bishop for doing his job. They need to be told, as I once heard a clergyman put it, the bishop is "in marketing, not design."

Bishop Punishes School over Black Lives Matter, Pride Flags

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:50 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 44 words, total size 1 kb.

Timothy Birdnow

I agree. Nobody wants to examine Russia's view on this.

I blame Putin for the war by and large; he wants to restore the old Tsarist territories to Greater Russia. But the Russians do have legitimate causes for concern.

Lew Rockwell observes:

At a moment when American intelligence officials are reporting that Mr. Putin thinks he is winning the war, the strategy is to drive home the narrative that Russia’s military adventure will be ruinous, and that it is a conflict Mr. Putin cannot afford to sustain.”

Let’s make sure we understand this. Critics of US policy have pointed out for a long time that America has surrounded Russia with nuclear bases. It helped overthrow a pro-Russian government in the Ukraine. Naturally, this made Putin nervous. He does not want an invasion of Russia though the Ukraine, as happened in World War II, when Russia lost millions of lives. Now, the brain dead Biden gang of neocons is saying to Putin, "You are exactly right! We do want to degrade Russia to a minor power and use the Ukraine as a base for attack!”

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:40 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 191 words, total size 1 kb.

Steven Chase

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 10:23 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 202 words, total size 1 kb.

Willis Eschenbach

Why we're losing ...

Islamic Jihadi terrorists attacked a church in Nigeria, killing dozens of Christians.

The President of Ireland blames it on "climate change".

The Jihadis know they are in a war against the West ... while we pretend there's no war.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 09:31 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 91 words, total size 1 kb.

Jim Church

What a load of horse manure coming from a government that deliberately targets the stifling of energy projects, mineral exploration and development, and even green-lights the sale of critical mineral projects to Chinese buyers!

World Cannot Allow Russia, China to Dominate Critical Minerals Market

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:57 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 181 words, total size 2 kb.

Timothy Birdnow

Poetic justice.

Fauci Tests Positive for Covid 19

I thought the vaccine he has been peddling was supposed to prevent that!

Anyway, at his age, I suggest we pray for the creepy guy.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 37 words, total size 1 kb.

This was posted by the author on Facebook:

By Michael Smith"
Victor Davis Hanson, possibly the greatest living American historian, said something that stuck with me:
"Science is dying; superstition disguised as morality is returning. And we’ll all soon become poorer, angrier, and more divided."
I’m sure VDH wouldn’t go as far as I would, but what he is describing is a descent into a modern version of the Dark Ages.
I don’t recall a period during my lifetime when the world had so much promise, prosperity, and potential, only to uniformly be burdened with so many terrible leaders who controlled so much power.
It is like going into a kindergarten classroom filled with kids of the rich and famous and dropping an open box of fragmentation grenades in the middle of the room for them to play with.
From the "meh” leadership of Europe and the UK to a Western Hemisphere "blessed” with commies, incompetents, and incompetent commies, the leadership cupboard is bare. All the members of the British Commonwealth, past and present, have gone nuts – Australia and New Zealand are firmly in the grip of Mask Nazis and enviofascists. Of course, Putin, Xi, and the Mad Mullahs have always been megalomaniacs and the Middle East under Islam has been a powder keg since the discovery of oil.
I guess this is what happens when Biden fulfills Obama’s "fundamental transformation”

of making the US just one country of many. Nothing exceptional, no super-power, just another kid in the class.
It is as if we were rocking along, going to space, curing diseases, creating prosperity and suddenly, we just lost interest. The world went from Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman to a sullen teenager who doesn’t want to do his homework and just wants to play Call of Duty all day.
There was a scene in 2015’s continuation of the Jurassic Park franchise, Jurassic World after the genetically engineered Indominus Rex escapes containment that captures some of what we are facing with our next few generations. Chris Pratt’s character, Owen Grady, says:
"You made a genetic hybrid, raised it in captivity. She is seeing all of this for the first time. She does not even know what she is. She will kill everything that moves.”
Far from a plot device, it is a fact that animals raised in captivity lack the coping skills for a world outside the fences. A 2008 study conducted at the University of Exeter in England of over 2,000 captive animals (all carnivores) released from captivity found that less than a third of them survived even the first 6 months. Not only do the offspring of captive animals lose their ability to hunt and forage for themselves, but they also lose the ability to care for their own offspring – leading to entire generations incapable of independent survival in their natural environment.
The animal family becomes dependent on a third party for individual survival and eventually for the survival of their offspring. In the early days of the animal rights movements, when animals were released into the wild after a life of captivity, many of the animals were quickly killed by predators or were oblivious to hazards that they had never seen, like those posed by roadways or automobiles.
The West, and America in particular, has essentially raised several generations of humans in an enclosed paddock, fed, clothed, and isolated them from the vicissitudes of the world, and just like the fictional cinematic dinosaur, they don’t even know what they are, so they perceive everything that moves as an enemy - or food.
This is what happens when intellect is given over to an emotion that wants things that are not possible, thinks just because they want something to be true, it is, and believes the stronger the emotion, the truer the truth. Rather than reasoning a way around impossibility, it is an intellect that gets frustrated and just stops, shuts down and pouts.
That is the earmark of a world that has replaced a system of reason based on facts and reality with one based on emotion and fantasy.
It just seems so dumb – and it isn’t so much that communism is growing, although it is, it is that this form of communism is stupid, directionless, and feckless. It is so ridiculous and absurd, that it doesn’t even know what it is.
At least during the Cold War, the USSR was a serious and predictable enemy, so much so, even Democrats at one time understood the stakes. Today’s communism is the tool of a child, with the same variabilities and a two-year-old in a candy store.
Cultures around the world have given over to superstition, unseriousness and fad, elevating emotion over logic – and the results are unfortunately, all too predictable.
There are so many parallels between today and the aftermath of the end of Pax Romana. After Rome fell, the world fragmented into confusion and darkness for several hundreds of years. Science, literature, and human progress took a back seat to fear, poverty and loathing. One wonders if the end of Pax Americana will have the same effect.
In my opinion, the perfect storm of such terrible leadership around the globe might well produce one of two kinds of "dark ages”. One possibility is the one we traditionally considered, the one where civilization regresses for a time, falling back into more of a tribal existence, where going into survival mode inhibits learning and progress. The other possibility is that we just get stuck where we are, we get to keep all our techo-gadgets, but our progress is mired in frivolous, unserious pursuits. Rather than regressing, we simply stop moving forward, we stop improving.
As in both cases, there will always be a class sitting on top that doesn’t suffer the way most of the world does. In my mind, that class is the WEF/Davos crowd. I believe the latter "dark age” scenario is exactly what they are planning and for now, there is nobody to stop them.
That "stopper” was once America.
We can be that again.
If we choose to be.

Tim adds:

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:27 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 1360 words, total size 9 kb.

Steven Schuler

Over the last year, the inflation rate of 8.3% is outpacing the wage increases of 5.4%, and that's been the case for virtually every month that Biden has been in office. By contrast, The Wall Street Journal reports that wages outpaced inflation every year that Trump was in office.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:12 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 125 words, total size 1 kb.

Timothy Birdnow

Here is a lucid explanation of how the Dominion voting machines changed election results in DeKalb and Antree counties in the last election.

I won't excerpt it; you need to read it all to get the gist of it.

Suffice it to say that whether this was intentional or not it did change the outcome of a number of races.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 12:11 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 65 words, total size 1 kb.

Timothy Birdnow

So what is Merrick Garland going to do? File charges against Donald Trump?

Trump was already acquitted of the charge of inciting insurrection at his second impeachment trial.

Attorney General Merrick Garland on #January6thHearings: "I am watching and I will be watching all of the hearings…and I can assure you that the January 6th prosecutors are watching all the hearings as well." pic.twitter.com/Oi4AhYvrAX

— CSPAN (@cspan) June 13, 2022

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:46 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
Post contains 151 words, total size 1 kb.

Alex Dobrenchuk

To think that I was worried Biden was Obama’s puppet. It’s worse, he’s the puppet of his son the crack head.

Hunter Biden damning audio released…

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:17 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 32 words, total size 1 kb.