Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz last year signed one of America’s most aggressive climate laws, mandating that 100% of the state’s electricity come from carbon-free sources by 2040. Even if he doesn’t ascend to national office, he may end up leaving not only Minnesota but other states in the dark. As we show in a new paper, politicians like Mr. Walz are destroying the electricity markets that are essential to economic success and even individual survival.
We analyzed seven Great Lakes states with connected electricity grids—Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. For decades, these states have bought and sold electricity in regional markets, benefiting from the abundance of reliable power generated from sources like coal, natural gas and nuclear. But through a combination of state mandates and utility company decisions, all of them are moving away from those reliable sources toward unreliable wind and solar power, in pursuit of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
Where will states like Minnesota turn when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining, two inevitable daily occurrences? Mr. Walz and net-zero backers surely assumed they could buy backup power from across the region, but other states assumed the same thing. In a classic tragedy of the commons, Mr. Walz and other leaders act as if they don’t realize their neighbors are also on track to run short of power.
Minnesota is moving to close its largest power station—the coal-fired Sherco plant—by the end of the decade. It has already shut down one of the plant’s three units, with the second going offline by 2026. The largest solar project in the Upper Midwest is supposed to replace it, but when it fails, Minnesota will have to rely on other power sources to keep the lights on.
Can it look to Wisconsin? That’s getting harder. The Badger State has its own net-zero mandate and is rapidly decommissioning power plants, while its largest utility plans to phase out coal power within a decade. Likewise Illinois, where a net-zero requirement has already contributed to power-supply issues, with multiple plant closings under way.
In 2020, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued an executive order committing the state to net-zero emissions by 2050. The state Legislature subsequently expanded the mandate, requiring electricity providers to use 100% “clean energy” sources by 2040. Utilities are already closing coal plants, have closed nuclear ones, and are dramatically ramping up wind and solar.
When subzero temperatures sweep across the Great Lakes every January, states will increasingly ask each other for power that doesn’t exist. Ditto when heat waves crest in July and August. Factories will lose power—a death knell for competitiveness—while families will lose air conditioning or heat. In Michigan, we estimate that a wind-, solar- and battery-based grid will cause blackouts lasting as long as three days during extreme winter weather. People will die.
Michigan is cloudy most of the winter. How’s that supposed to work? And what about the cost?
It’s going to be interesting watching Ford and GM produce cars with rationed energy as costs go through the roof.
According to a new report, the British punk rock band may have been prophetic in 1979 in a way never foreseen in its apocalyptic lyrics. This week, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said that the police will not necessarily confine its arrests for speech crimes to London or even the United Kingdom. Rowley suggests that Americans and other citizens could be extradited and brought to London for online postings.
London has been hit with days of violent protests over immigration policies, including attacks and arson directed at immigration centers. This violence has been fueled by false reports spread online about the person responsible for an attack at a Taylor Swift-themed dance event that left three girls dead and others wounded. Despite false claims about his being an asylum seeker, the culprit was an 18-year-old British citizen born to Rwandan parents.
News outlets and pundits have condemned the false reports and the violent protests. However, the police are moving to arrest those who are repeating false claims or engaging in inflammatory speech. Rowley is warning that they will not stop at the city limit or even the country’s borders.
He warned “We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you.”
Rowley was asked by a reporter about the criticism by Elon Musk and others over the response of the government. Musk noted a video of someone allegedly arrested for offensive online comments with a question, “Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?”
Pundits and politicians in the United Kingdom have called for an investigation or the arrest of Musk for merely speaking publicly on the controversy.
The reporter said that high profile figures have been “whipping up the hatred,” and that “the likes of Elon Musk” are involved in the online speech. She then asked what the London police are prepared to do “when it comes to dealing with people who are whipping up this kind of behavior from behind the keyboard who may be in a different country?”
“Being a keyboard warrior does not make you safe from the law. You can be guilty of offenses of incitement, of stirring up racial hatred, there are numerous terrorist offenses regarding the publishing of material. All of those offenses are in play if people are provoking hatred and violence on the streets, and we will come after those individuals just as we will physically confront on the streets the thugs and the yobs who are taking — who are causing the problems for communities.”
The message is chilling because free speech has been in a free fall in the United Kingdom as well as other Western countries. I discuss this trend in my new book, The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.
We also discussed the arrest of a woman who was praying to herself near an abortion clinic. English courts have seen criminalized “toxic ideologies” as part of this crack down on free speech.
The London police are now deputized to stop or arrest those engaged in speech deemed inciteful or inflammatory. Last year, the police stopped a man from walking in the street because there were pro-Palestinian protesters and his presence would be inciteful because he was “quite openly Jewish.”
The United Kingdom has a myriad of laws criminalizing speech with vague terms allowing for arbitrary enforcement. For example, Public Order Act 1986 prohibits any expressions of racial hatred, defined as hatred against a group of persons by reason of the group’s color, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins.
Section 18 of the Act specifically includes any speech that is “threatening, abusive, or insulting.” An arrest does not have to be based on a showing of intent to “stir up racial hatred,” but can merely be based on a charge that “having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.”
The country has also targeted social media companies to force them to censor users for speech deemed threatening, abusive or insulting by the government.
These ambiguous laws are written on the same “trust us, we’re the government” rationale. The police insist that they will use their discretion wisely in what speech will result in arrest.
Ordinarily, one would expect the U.S. government to push back on the suggestion that these laws could be used to arrest and extradite its citizens for the use of free speech. However, the Biden-Harris Administration has been a proponent of censorship and blacklisting for years. At the same time, leading Democrats have called for European-type laws to be adopted or enforced against U.S. citizens for their views on social media.
We previously discussed how Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton called on foreign countries to use or pass censorship laws to prevent Elon Musk from restoring free speech protections on Twitter.
The effort of these politicians would allow free speech to be reduced to the lowest common denominator as countries export their anti-free speech laws. When Clinton called upon Europeans to censor Americans, this is precisely what such actions would look like. These foreign countries could force Americans to curtail their speech under the threat of ruinous financial penalties or even arrest.
As some of us predicted, these laws have expanded as the desire to silence others becomes an insatiable appetite. Advocacy groups have pushed the police to crackdown on their critics. Now, the threat to “throw the full force of the law at people” may be extended to the people of other nations.
Much fanfare has been lavished on the concept of Artificial Intelligence in the past five years to the point that its primacy is treated in the media as a forgone conclusion. The idea that algorithms can “think” has become a pervading myth, a sci-fi fantasy come to life. The reality is much less impressive...
We continually hear from globalists at the World Economic Forum and other elitist institutions that AI is the catalyst for the “4th Industrial Revolution” – A technological singularity that will supposedly change every aspect of our society forever. I keep waiting for the moment that AI does something significant in terms of advancing human knowledge or making our lives better. The moment never comes. In fact, the globalists keep moving the goalposts for what AI really is.
I would note that WEF zealots like Yuval Harari talk about AI like it is the rise of an all powerful deity (I discuss the globalist worship of AI in my article ‘Artificial Intelligence: A Secular Look At The Digital Antichrist’). Yet, Harari has also recently downplayed AI as a sentient intelligence. He argues that it doesn’t need to achieve self awareness or consciousness in order to be considered a super being or living entity. He even suggests that the popular image of a Terminator-like AI with individual agency and desire is not a legitimate expectation.
In other words, AI as it stands today is nothing more than a mindless algorithm, and thus, it is not AI. But, if every aspect of our world is engineered around digital infrastructures and the populace is taught to put blind faith in the “infallibility” of algorithms then eventually become the robot gods the globalists so desperately desire. That is to say, AI dominance is only possible if everyone BELIEVES that AI is legitimate. Harari essentially admits to this agenda in the speech above.
The allure of AI for average people is the pie-in-the-sky promise of freedom from worry or responsibility. As with all narcissists, the global elite love to future-fake and buy popular conformity now on false promises of rewards that will never come.
Yes, algorithms are currently used to help laymen do things they could not do before, such as build websites, edit essays, cheat on college exams, create bad artwork and video content, etc. Useful applications are few and far between. For example, the claim that AI is “revolutionizing” medical diagnosis and treatment is far-fetched. The US, the nation that arguably has the most access to AI tools, is also suffering from declining life expectancy. We know it’s not covid because the virus has a 99.8% average survival rate. You would think that if AI is so powerful in its ability to identify and treat ailments the average American would be living longer.
There is no evidence of a single benefit to AI on a broader social scale. At most, it looks like it will be good at taking jobs away from web developers and McDonald’s drive-thru employees. The globalist notion that AI is going to create a robotic renaissance of art, music, literature and scientific discovery is utter nonsense. AI has proven to be nothing more than a tool of mediocre convenience, but that’s actually why it’s so dangerous.
I suspect the WEF has changed its ideas about what AI should be because it’s not living up to the delusional aspirations they originally had for it. They’ve been waiting for a piece of software to come to life and start giving them insights into the mechanics of the universe and they’re starting to realize that’s never going to happen. Instead, the elitists are shifting their focus increasingly into the melding of the human world and the digital world. They want to fabricate the necessity of AI because human dependency on the technology serves the purposes of centralization.
But what would this actually look like? Well, it requires that the population continues to get dumber while AI becomes more integral to society.
For example, it is widely accepted at this point that a college education is no indication of intelligence or skill. There are millions of graduates entering the workforce today that display an unsettling level of incompetence. This is partially because college educators are less capable, ideologically biased and the average curriculum has degraded. But, also, we need to start accounting for the number of kids coasting their way through school using ChatGPT and other cheat boxes.
They don’t need to learn anything, the algorithm and their cell phone camera does it all for them. This trend is disturbing because human beings have a tendency to take the easiest path in every aspect of survival. Most people stopped learning how to grow food because industrial farming does it for us. They stopped learning how to hunt because there are slaughterhouses and refrigerated trucks. Many Zennials today are incapable of cooking for themselves because they can get takeout to their door anytime they want. They barely talk on the phone or create physical communities anymore because texting and social media have become the intermediaries in human interaction.
Yes, everything is “easier”, but that does not mean anything is better.
My great fear – The future that I see coming down the road, is one in which human beings no longer bother to think. AI might be seen as the ultimate accumulation of human knowledge; a massive library or digital brain that does all the searching and thinking for you. Why learn anything when AI “knows everything.” Except, this is a lie..
AI doesn’t know everything; it only knows what its programmers want it to know. It only gives you the information its programmers want you to have. The globalists understand this and they can taste the power that they will have should AI become paramount as an educational platform. They see it as a way to trick people into abandoning personal development and individual thought.
Look at it this way: If everyone in the world starts turning to AI for answers to all their questions, then everyone in the world will be given the same exact answers and will come to the same exact conclusions. All AI has to do is actively censor any information that contradicts the official narrative.
We got a taste of this Orwellian condition during the covid pandemic when Big Tech companies like Google used algorithms to bury any and all data that proved covid was not the threat that government officials said it was. You could not go on YouTube for at least three years and look up alternative information on covid or the vaccines. The algorithm forced everyone to sift through a long list of establishment sources, many of them promoting blatant lies about masking, social distancing, the covid death rate and vaccine safety.
The powers-that-be don’t even need to directly censor or remove information they don’t like. All they have to do is let the algorithm dictate the search results and bury the truth on Page 10,000 where no one will look.
How would the effect the average person? Say AI is programmed to dictate scientific discourse. What if AI says that man-made climate change is an undeniable reality and the “science is settled” while never presenting the mountain of counter-evidence to the contrary? No one will look up the real data because AI will make it impossible to find. Everyone will assume AI is telling them all there is to know about the subject, but it gets worse than that…
Many readers might remember a few months back when Google AI system “Gemini” was programmed to force DEI onto its users. Whenever a person asked the AI to create a historical image the algorithm made everyone black or brown and often female. Depictions of white men were suspiciously rare despite historical accuracy. This meant endless images of black and brown Highlanders in Scotland, black Founding Fathers in America, female Catholic Popes, Asian knights in Medieval Europe, and hilariously, even black Nazis in WWII Germany.
AI developers often claim that once an AI is created they don’t really control what it does and how it grows. The Gemini incident proves this is a lie. AI can definitely be controlled, or at least molded by coding to promote whatever propaganda the programmers want it to promote. There is no such thing as an autonomous AI; there is always an agenda.
To summarize, globalists want the proliferation of AI because they know that people are lazy and will use the system as a stand-in for individual research. If this happens on a large scale then AI could be used to rewrite every aspect of history, corrupt the very roots of science and mathematics and turn the population into a drooling hive mind; a buzzing froth of braindead drones consuming every proclamation of the algorithm as if it is sacrosanct.
In this way, Yuval Harari is right. AI does not need to become sentient or wield an army of killer robots to do great harm to humanity. All it has to do is be convenient enough that we no longer care to think for ourselves. Like the “Great and Powerful” OZ hiding behind a digital curtain, you assume you’re gaining knowledge from a wizard when you’re really being manipulated by globalist snake oil salesmen.
Los Angeles MayorKaren Bass said her city is working to make the Summer Olympic games car-free when they’re held in her city in 2028.
“We’re already working to create jobs by expanding our public transportation system in order for us to have a no-car Games,” she said in a Saturday release. “And that’s a feat for Los Angeles, as we’ve always been in love with our cars. We’re working to ensure that we can build a greener Los Angeles.”
Ahead of Sunday’s closing ceremony at the Paris Olympics, Bass is attempting to address a big issue for the next games: Los Angeles traffic.
Bass said the only way to access the Olympic venues will be public transportation. The city will borrow 3,000 buses from all over the country and ask businesses to allow their employees to work from home, The Associated Press reported.
“Part of have a no-car Olympics means getting people not to drive,” Bass said.
The AP noted that officials in Paris have been praised for how accessible the events have been, since nearly every venue has been reachable by public transportation.
Bass also highlighted Los Angeles’s efforts to invest in small businesses during the next games.
The mayor said the city plans to meet with its major employers and talk about staggering work hours, “which is something that was done 40 years ago” and before today’s technology
“I think the workforce, probably around the world, certainly around our country, is grappling with remote work now,” she said. “So I do think that there might be some employees that we could say, ‘Could you be remote for 17 days?’”
“It’s going to be a lot easier because we did go through COVID, so people will have some reference point in recent history as to how you could do that,” Bass said.
Bass, the first female mayor of Los Angeles, will receive the flag Sunday from Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, the city’s first woman to hold the office.
:: Rescue workers clear building debris at the site of a Russian attack in Kyiv
:: Ukrainian officials said Sunday a 4-year-old boy and his 35-year-old father died in the attack
Reuters was not able to confirm the date or location of the video.
A 4-year-old boy and his 35-year-old father died in the attack, Ukrainian officials said on Sunday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's chief of staff Andriy Yermak said the house was hit by drone debris, but the emergency services said it was missile debris. Reuters could not independently verify the reports.
A recent surge in GPS “spoofing”, a form of digital attack which can send commercial airliners off course, has entered an intriguing new dimension, according to cybersecurity researchers: The ability to hack time.
There has been a 400% surge in GPS spoofing incidents affecting commercial airliners in recent months, according to aviation advisory body OPSGROUP. Many of those incidents involve illicit ground-based GPS systems, particularly around conflict zones, that broadcast incorrect positions to the surrounding airspace in a bid to confuse incoming drones or missiles.
“We think too much about GPS being a source of position, but it's actually a source of time,” Ken Munro, founder of Pen Test Partners, a British cybersecurity firm, said during a presentation at the DEF CON hacking convention in Las Vegas on Saturday.
“We're starting to see reports of the clocks on board airplanes during spoofing events start to do weird things."
In an interview with Reuters, Munro cited a recent incident in which an aircraft operated by a major Western airline had its onboard clocks suddenly sent forward by years, causing the plane to lose access to its digitally-encrypted communication systems.
The plane was grounded for weeks while engineers manually reset its onboard systems, said Munro. He declined to identify the airline or aircraft in question.
In April, Finnair temporarily paused flights to the eastern Estonian city of Tartu due to GPS spoofing which Tallin blamed on neighboring Russia.
GPS, short for Global Positioning System, has largely replaced expensive ground devices that transmit radio beams to guide planes towards landing. However, it is also fairly easy to block or distort GPS signals using relatively cheap and easy to obtain parts, and limited technological knowledge.
“Is it going to make a plane crash? No, it's not,” Munro told Reuters.
“What it does is it just creates a little confusion. And you run the risk of starting what we call a cascade of events, where something minor happens, something else minor happens, and then something serious happens."
