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.
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I’m not sure it’s as simple as this, insofar as Bush 41 and 43 weren’t criminal sociopaths.
I happened to be driving through Manhattan on the very day that Colin Powell was addressing the United Nations just a few miles away and claimed, and I think honestly, that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction,” and must be stopped by a U.S. military invasion.
Contrast that against what we’re doing in Iran. Fifteen years ago, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), included Iran, the P5+1 nations (the United States, China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany), alongside the European Union made an agreement in which most of the developed world agreed that Iran must not have a nuclear weapon.
That stood firmly in place until Trump’s latest war crime, which is costing lives and choking the world economy, solely to defend our president’s neuroses.
The Brennan Center at NYU’s seminal report on this issue, The Truth About Voter Fraud, found that most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices. The report reviewed elections that had been meticulously studied for voter fraud and found incident rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent.
Does that stop liars like Mike Lee from spreading disinformation of the subject? Of course not.
There is no judgement day. There is no Saint Peter standing in front of the Pearly Gates discerning good from evil and acting according.
That’s a lucky break for Mike Lee.
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