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Solar Energy’s Real Problem By Ryan Yonk and Devin Stein

Posted By on May 26th, 2016

Ivanpah, the world’s largest solar power plant located in California’s Mojave Desert, caught fire last Thursday, causing damage to one of the plant’s three towers. This latest engineering setback is the least of the plant’s woes. Prohibitive economic realities are the true problem.

Earlier this year, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) decided to postpone its continued support of the struggling facility, which was touted as the future of solar power when it opened in 2014. But after receiving $1.6 billion in loan guarantees from the Department of Energy (DOE) and $535 million from the U.S. Treasury Department, the facility’s promising future is turning out to be a multi-billion-dollar waste of money.

Ivanpah is unable to meet its intended electricity generation of 940,000 megawatt-hours per year, despite its designation as the largest concentrated solar plant in the world. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) received only 45 percent of the electricity it expected from Ivanpah in 2014 and 68 percent in 2015.

Output is so low, in fact, that it fails to meet Ivanpah’s power purchase agreement, which requires a set amount of electricity production for a certain price.

Ivanpah’s managers found that the facility needs to produce much more steam than initially thought to run efficiently, which requires substantially more natural gas than originally planned to supplement the concentrated solar each morning. Weather predictions underestimated the amount of cloud cover the area receives, which prevents the facility from consistently producing high levels of electricity.

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Genius: a film review By Marion DS Dreyfus

Posted By on May 26th, 2016

In its subtlety, sophistication, and, surprisingly, its quiet pace, which requires more interaction and involvement from the viewer, Genius, directed by Michael Grandage, sets a new standard for melding a superior and literate script with a superb cast and thoughtful direction that, at least to this audience, sets a new standard.

Hollywood has become associated with the cheap, the tawdry, the overexposed (in all senses), and the CGI trick trompe l’oeil green-screen that robs the actor of real opponents or adversaries, and the viewer of credulity.

Not Genius.

Colin Firth as legendary editor of the century’s most protean writers Max Perkins does something few films before attempt: he makes editing supremely watchable and deeply professional. It is not a career that is given to easy encapsulation or animation, but Firth accomplishes that. His Perkins is a solemn soul, a deeply integritous soul, whose commitment to excellence and none less is visible in his pauses, pregnant taciturnity and hesitancies. Lovely Laura Linney is luminous and touching, managing to say more in her facial composure and difficulties than most could say with paragraphs of dialogue.

Editors elsewhere are a faceless, unacknowledged suitcase of ciphers, even as Perkins/Firth tells Jude Law/Thomas Wolfe — they are often invisible, if they have succeeded in their task to bring forth a better work from the mountain of pages presented them. (We choose to think the result is both better and truer than had it been left untouched, as many writers seem to prefer.)

Jude Law magnificently embodies the quicksilver ebullience, self-doubt, flamboyance and wit of the brilliant Wolfe. Guy Pearce is a tormented and constipated Fitzgerald, and Vanessa Kirby as his blocked, maddening and maddened wife Zelda is also fine. Nicole Kidman is amazing in her capture of the imperious but besotted Aline Bernstein, such that one cannot look away from her nuanced moment by moment histrionics-cum-bleeding reality. What a powerful ensemble is amassed here, with each person possessed of his own rhythm, his own arguable pace, yet melding intoxicatingly into this moving, enlightening, mesmerizing film, one that easily bests the lesser mere entertainments of the year for genuine emotion, heart, and intelligence.

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Clinton’s Email Deceptions The State IG finds she knew the security risks she was taking.

Posted By on May 26th, 2016

Hillary Clinton has said for more than a year that her use of a private email server as Secretary of State violated no federal rules and posed no security risk. Only the gullible believed that, and now everyone has proof of her deceptions in a scathing report from State Department Inspector General Steve Linick.

The report obtained by news outlets Wednesday is ostensibly an audit of the email practices of five secretaries of State. But the majority of the report, and the most withering criticism, focuses on Mrs. Clinton. The IG concludes that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee broke federal record-keeping rules, never received permission for her off-grid server, ignored security concerns raised by other officials, and employed a staff that flouted the rules with the same disdain she did.

“Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary,” says the report. “At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”

State still has never received emails from her private account for the first six weeks after she became Secretary, and the IG notes that it found (by other means) business-related emails that Mrs. Clinton did not include among the emails she has turned over.

The report says she has also stonewalled requests to obtain her server. And “through her counsel, Secretary Clinton declined [the IG’s] request for an interview.” Former Secretaries Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and current Secretary John Kerry all sat for interviews. CONTINUE AT SITE

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The American Dead in Foreign Fields On Memorial Day or any other day, the cemeteries for those Americans who fell in battle offer profound lessons. By Uwe E. Reinhardt

Posted By on May 26th, 2016

If you have not ever done so, I urge you to program into your next trip abroad a visit to an American military cemetery. There are quite a few in Europe, and some in Asia. You can find a list online.

These cemeteries are settings of an awesome serenity and beauty, immaculately kept by the American Battle Monuments Commission. As Americans, we must thank the architects who designed these settings and the workers who over the decades and to this day have kept them in their immaculate condition.

My wife, born in China and reared in Taiwan, and I, born in Germany and a longtime U.S. citizen, first visited the World War II cemeteries when our American-born children were young. We would tell them: Here rest some of the warriors who sacrificed their lives so that your parents and people in many parts of the world would be free from tyranny and could pursue their dreams in freedom. We made it clear to our children that this was not just a grown-up talk—that it was real and part of their proud heritage.

The lesson must have stuck. Last year our eldest child, now a fully grown man, urged me to come along to visit the battlegrounds in Germany, near the Belgian border, where U.S. troops fought so bravely and where so many of them—too many—met their early death.

This time we visited the large American cemetery near the Belgian town of Henri-Chapelle, about 20 miles west of the German city of Aachen. There rest the warriors who fell in the brutal, four-month-long battle of the Hürtgen Forest, followed by the Battle of the Bulge and the eventual push of American forces all the way to the Rhine River.

You can walk along the gravel paths of these cemeteries, and among the thousands of markers—crosses and Stars of David—beneath which the warriors rest. Pick a marker at random and adopt the soldier whose name is chiseled into that marker. Make him your father, or brother, or cousin, or a friend. Imagine him alive, and how you might have hugged him as he shipped out to the distant front. CONTINUE AT SITE

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BREAKING: State Dept IG Finds Hillary Clinton Violated Government Records Act and Refused to Speak to Investigators

Posted By on May 26th, 2016

Politico reports that the State Department inspector general has concluded that Hillary Clinton violated State’s recordkeeping protocols. The finding is contained in a much anticipated report provided to Congress today.

Significantly, the report also reveals that Clinton and her top aides at State — Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan, Huma Abedin, and possibly others — refused to cooperate with the IG’s investigation despite the IG’s requests that they submit to interviews.

The report is devastating, although it transparently strains to soften the blow. For example, it concludes that State’s “longstanding systemic weaknesses” in recordkeeping “go well beyond the tenure of any one Secretary of State.” Yet, it cannot avoid finding that Clinton’s misconduct is singular in that she, unlike her predecessors, systematically used private e-mail for the purpose of evading recordkeeping requirements.

“Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary,” the report states. By failing to do so, and compounding that dereliction with a failure to “surrender[] all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service,” Clinton, the IG finds, “did not comply with the Department’s policies.”

This articulation of Mrs. Clinton’s offense is also sugar-coated. By saying Clinton violated “policies,” the IG avoids concluding that she violated the law. But the IG adds enough that we can connect the dots ourselves. The “policies,” he elaborates, “were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.” To violate the policies — as Shannen Coffin has explained here at National Review — is to violate the law.

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Israeli companies develop 3D bioprinter for stem cells

Posted By on May 26th, 2016

Israeli 3D print electronics developer Nano Dimension Ltd. (Nasdaq: NNDM; TASE: NNDM) today announced that it has successfully lab-tested a proof of concept 3D Bioprinter for stem cells. The trial was conducted in collaboration with Haifa-based Accelta Ltd., which that has developed proprietary technologies for the unique production of high quality media, stem cells, progenitors and differentiated cells for drug discovery, regenerative medicine and research.

The feasibility study confirmed that the combined know-how and technologies of the companies enabled printing of viable stem cells using an adapted 3D printer.
Nano Dimension CEO Amit Dror said, “3D printing of living cells is a technology that is already playing a significant role in medical research, but in order to reach its full potential, for the field to evolve further, there is a need to improve printing speeds, print resolution, cell control and viability as well as cell availability and bio-ink technologies. By combining our high speed, high precision inkjet capabilities with Accellta’s stem cell suspension technologies and induced differentiation capabilities led by a world-renown group of experienced engineers and scientists, we can enable 3D printing at high resolution and high volumes.”

The companies will consider the formation of a new venture for these future solutions and do not intend to invest significant capital directly to expand this activity. Such funds would be raised by and for the use of the joint venture.

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Israel — the startup nation by Ben Rothke

Posted By on May 26th, 2016

In January, I attended the Cybertech conference in Tel Aviv, on a trip sponsored by the America–Israel Friendship League and the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Also on the trip was Richard Stiennon who wrote about it here. In his illuminating article, he calculated the number of information security vendors per country.

Predictably the United States came out on top with 827 firms. Surprisingly, Israel was second with 228. What’s astonishing from Stiennon’s research is that Israel has more security companies than the next 5 countries combined. How is it that Israel has more security firms than the UK, Canada, India, Germany and France combined? The question is even more compelling given that Israel has a population of roughly 8 million; while those five countries have roughly 1.5 billion inhabitants.

An excellent resource with detailed listings of Israeli technology startups is the IVC Research Center High-tech Yearbook. It has trend analysis and YOY investor activity, along with detailed profiles of investors, including venture capital funds, private equity funds, incubators, angels and corporate investors investing in Israel.

For a visual listing of firms, the Israel CyberScape map from Bessemer Venture provides a listing across 14 information security domains.

So just how did Israel become a global information security superpower? Here’s a few of reasons.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set the goal of making Israel one of the world’s five leading global cyber powers. When a government makes something a priority, and backs it up with financials incentives including research and development grants, which Israel has done; that’s a compelling initiative to generate interest.

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GLOBAL WARMING? THINK AGAIN

Posted By on May 26th, 2016

From Jan Poller
These scientists made their own clouds, and what they found could require us to rethink how fast the earth is warming.

A new experiment looking at clouds is about to change the way we think about climate change.

For decades, scientists have thought that the tiny particles that form clouds — and play a big role in keeping the planet cool — were produced as a counterintuitive side effect of pollution.

So, while it was understood that we were putting loads of planet-warming gases into the atmosphere and heating things up, it was also thought that at least some of those particles were getting trapped inside clouds and helping to keep that warming from being even more catastrophic.

But a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, which looked more closely at these tiny particles, found that they can be produced naturally. This will help us understand just how cloudy the world actually was before we started polluting it, which is key to figuring out the rate at which our planet is heating up.
A cloud conundrum

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recognizes aerosols as the single biggest source of uncertainty in human-driven climate change. Part of the problem is that we have no way of measuring just how cloudy the planet was in the preindustrial era.

Thanks to this uncertainty, and despite our precise measurements of the effects of human-induced greenhouse warming on climate, the estimates for projected climate change have entertained a wide range of numbers for projected warming, and these numbers haven’t changed for the past 35 years.

The models predict that if carbon dioxide doubles over the next century, then the planet will warm anywhere from 2.7 to 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit — a critical difference that should inform the way we prepare for the future.

So, what’s the deal with aerosols? Turns out that there are two sources of the particles:

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It’s Not Disney World – The VA Scandal Two Years Later-By Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on May 26th, 2016

Today, nearly half a million veterans still wait to see a VA doctor.

So, we opened the books on the VA. Here’s just a sample of our findings:

The VA spent $1.7 million on ’employee engagement’ and other satisfaction surveys with Gallup (2010-2014). There is no indication these polls found, flagged or identified the most egregious scandal in VA history.

The VA paid $303 million in salaries to non-essential positions: Painters ($185 million), Interior Designers ($64 million), and Gardeners ($54 million). While veterans were dying, the VA managers were rewarding the efficiency of these positions with bonuses (2012-2015.)

$751.1 million spent on ‘household’ and ‘office’ furniture including furniture rental, draperies, curtains, carpeting, modification, repair and maintenance (2010-2015). Much of from luxury, upscale manufacturers.

While the veterans wait weeks to see a doctor, we found:

The VA lawyered up and added 175 attorneys.

Dramatically increased their spending on public relations (PR).

‘Reformed bonuses’ so millions of dollars continued to flow to many of the same employees who gamed-the-system during the scandal.

and much more…

Read our Forbes column, It’s Not Disney World – The VA Scandal Two Years Later.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: HILLARY CLINTON’S 1969 COMMENCEMENT SPEECH AT WELLESLEY

Posted By on May 25th, 2016

From the candidate that a majority of Americans- including Democrats- do not consider trustworthy….her words:

‘Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said “Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust.” What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted?”