Published

3 months ago

November 26, 2025

Alice Rush

From “The Grio”:

Austin Smith, a former Republican state representative in Arizona, has pleaded guilty to charges for forging signatures on his 2024 re‑election campaign petitions. He admitted to submitting nomination papers with names of deceased individuals and other forged entries. The plea agreement calls for probation, a fine of $5,000 and a five‑year ban on seeking public office. Meanwhile, Smith had served as a senior director (and briefly strategic director) of Turning Point Action, the 501(c)(4) advocacy arm of the conservative youth group Turning Point USA and resigned from that leadership role when the allegations surfaced. Through his dual role as lawmaker and conservative organizer, Smith’s case underlines questions of campaign integrity and the responsibilities of politically active organizations.

I would have thought (and hoped) that election fraud would merit some jail time.

Election Fraud Doesn’t Merit Jail Time? Guess Not

Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

7 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.

I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”

“Exactly.”

I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.

He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”

Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.

“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.

“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”

—

I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.

Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.