Published

16 hours ago

October 30, 2025

Alice Rush

What Malaysia is doing with respect to renewable energy (see left) is a reminder of two things:

1) This planet will eventually achieve a sustainable approach to energy and transportation. The only open question is how much damage we will inflict in the process.

and

2) Big Oil can only hold on so long, before the scale of clean energy development makes solar, hydro, etc. so cheap that fossil fuels can no longer compete.

There is a white paper for sale online that purports to tell the reader “who will get hurt in oil/gas investment.” The obvious answer: anyone who owns stock in these companies when their price/share starts to spiral downward.

Malaysia’s Path to Clean Energy

Renewable Energy

What Some Amazing People Have Done with Their Wealth

Published

7 hours ago

October 30, 2025

Alice Rush

When one gets to arguing about the greatest baseball players of all time, or, in this case, the greatest rock guitarist, people’s blood gets to roiling. I’m willing to take that risk, and so here’s my assertion: it’s a three-way tie between Steve Howe of Yes, Jimmy Page of Led Zepplin, and David Gilmour of Pink Floyd.

I’m sure all three became unfathomably rich, but perhaps Gilmour has the best, most heart-warming, story to tell.

(Gilmour) earned so much money that he called it “obscene.” He once said he would wake up in the morning and write cheques to charity — just to make sense of the fortune he had. But one day, he decided to go even further. After selling his London home for £4.5 million, Gilmour gave all the proceeds to Crisis, a charity that supports the homeless. “I don’t need the money and I just thought it would be a good thing to do,” he said humbly.

In his quiet wisdom, Gilmour reflected on the simplicity he longed for: “You collect Ferraris and then you’ve got to collect buildings to house the Ferraris, and then you need more people to look after the people who are looking after things. Life gets very complicated. And eventually, at least in my case, you think, ‘I don’t need this stuff.’ And suddenly life gets simpler.”

I’m sure there are many different reasons to support those least able to support themselves, but simplifying one’s life sounds good to me.

What Some Amazing People Have Done with Their Wealth

Renewable Energy

Undersea Cabling

Published

8 hours ago

October 30, 2025

Alice Rush

Many of us boomers grew up in the 1960s and can remember to our astonishment that the reason we could pick up our phone and call someone in Paris was the transAtlantic cable. Speaking for myself, it blew my mind that the technology of the day enabled us to navigate a boat across an ocean and spool out 4000 miles of thick wire (with even thicker insulation around it) from the East Coast of the United States to the shores of Europe.

As if that weren’t enough, there are similar cables that went back to the age of telegraphy in the mid-19th Century. On July 13, 1866 the cable laying ship Great Eastern sailed out of Valentia Island, Ireland and on July 27 landed at Heart’s Content in Newfoundland, completing the first lasting connection across the Atlantic. It was active until 1965.

I considered myself cool when I strung two cans connected by a string from my bedroom to my best friend’s in our neighbor’s house in 1961 or ’62. See photo below. My room: house on the left, second floor.

This may be a long way of saying that the graphic at left is total bulls***. The distance is 2700 miles, and the idea of transmitting energy for no reason is stupid beyond words.

Undersea Cabling

Renewable Energy

Horrendous Attack on Free Seech

Published

13 hours ago

October 30, 2025

Alice Rush

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich writes:

… a new presidential directive called NSPM-7 … may be the most sweeping attack on the First Amendment that I’ve seen in my 60 years in politics.

NSPM-7, which stands for the National Security Presidential Memorandum #7, defines a sweeping range of commonly held political beliefs as indicators of “domestic terrorism,” including “anti-capitalism and anti-Christianity,” “extremism on migration, race, and gender,” and opposition to “traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

Unless you’re completely indifferent to the Constitution of the United States, this concept of “domestic terrorism” should scare the living hell out of you.

Our Founding Fathers would be appalled.