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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

Honeybee Burger has an interesting business model: open a national chain of restaurants that offer only their proprietary plant-based burgers (along with fries, drinks, and desserts), i.e., no products containing beef, chicken or fish. Their pitch to investors is linked above.

They say, “Honeybee Burger is a 100% plant-based food company that is aiming to become an iconic national fast-food brand. Our mission is to help save the planet by getting more people to choose plant-based food over animal-based food by focusing on America’s most popular and iconic fast-food: burgers!” (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

For those who may not remember, Dr. Deborah Birx is the epidemiologist who, last fall, found herself in the unfortunate position of conducting an on-camera dialog with then-President Trump when he suggested that she should look into some perhaps “unconventional” treatments for COVID-19, including shining light into the patient’s lungs and somehow having the patients ingest liquid bleach. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Please check out at least the first few seconds of the video here.

While you’re smiling, realize that Iceland is actually a very good candidate for emigration if the United States loses its democracy.  This looked like a real possibility just a couple of months ago, and we’re still not out of the woods.  If the Supreme Court allows full-on voter suppression and the 14th and 15th Amendments become meaningless, our electoral process will be a simple formality that perpetuates the American oligarchy.

At that point, a great number of us will want to pack our bags and move to a country that still features a government of, by, and for the people, and again, Iceland is a fairly decent example.

Do you know what they did when some white collar criminals conspired to commit a massive fraud that crashed their economy, parallel to what happened here in 2008?  They threw them in prison!   That’s right, they didn’t let money and power push them around; they implemented real justice, as bizarre as that may seem to us here in the States.

Prime Minister since 2017, Katrín Jakobsdóttir is both a pacifist and a heavy-duty environmentalist. She could no more be elected here than she could fly to the moon in a kayak.

Lots of intelligent, well educated people–mostly English speaking, living in a decent level of harmony with one another.  Sounds like a winner.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Before you conclude that the sign here has no value (because no one could expect the road to continue into the water), realize that Americans live in a country where more than 50 million voters believe the former president’s narrative that there was a mass conspiracy in each of the six swing states to steal the election, even though 60 different courts saw no evidence of this.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Hydrokinetics

Here’s one more attempt at ocean wave energy. Note that this one is not just bad, it’s pitiful.

As waves pass a floating barge, water enters an L-shaped chamber (shown left) as the wave rises and exits when it falls.  This, and get this now, pushes air (not water) through a turbine.  So what you have here in essence is, a tiny wind turbine.

What makes hydrokinetics work at some level is high density of water, compared with air.  This throws that advantage out the window.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

I’m with you on this one, Jim.

I’ve always been heavy into boycotting.  I won’t go into stores with Fox News on, or those that are owned by bigots.

That goes double for places of business that allow the carrying of weapons of war.  It’s just sickening.

Simply refuse to be a part of our gun-crazed nation.

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury, now in its 51st year, has never failed to delivery incisive political humor.  Here’s a current piece that gets to the core of party affiliation in these insane times.  To set up the punch line at the end, I’m sure Trudeau considered “inflicting pain on poor people,” or “morphing democracy into oligarchy,” or “turning the country into one big firing range,” or some such, but it wouldn’t have been as funny.

Kudos. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

The level of insanity that is now in the United States has reached a point where there is a palpable feeling in the air that it’s only going to get worse, but no one can imagine how that’s possible.  The storming of the U.S. Capitol seemed outrageous at the time, but isn’t something going to happen that ups the ante even further?

There are still ~50 million voters who believe Trump’s claim that the election was stolen from him, and most of them are highly armed, like the two members of Congress shown here.

We went from John McCain to Marjorie Taylor Greene in less than five years.  What’s next?

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

Jerrold, an old acquaintance, sent me this video yesterday, which made claims including these:

WHERE YOUR TAXES GO – ILLEGAL ALIENS – from the L.A. Times

95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens.

Over 2/3’s of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal whose births were paid for by taxpayers. (more…)

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by craigshieldsPosted on Posted in Sustainability

A reader notes: There was a movie called “Soylent Green” in the 1970s where the food was made out of people.  I won’t be eating any of that fake meat.

First of all, I wouldn’t call it “fake.” Plant-based meat is made from the protein called heme, which is what makes beef taste like beef.  Heme is a substance precursive to hemoglobin, which is necessary to bind oxygen in the bloodstream, and it’s biosynthesized in both the bone marrow and the liver. Fortunately, it’s also found in plants, and so it could be argued that it’s immaterial in what life form’s body the protein was synthesized.  

Second, I wouldn’t be too sure, depending on your life expectancy.  Considering the trajectory of the science behind plant-based meat, as well as meat that is grown from the DNA of a living cow, it’s very likely that young people today will be consuming an awful lot of meat that doesn’t come from slaughtered cows before they leave this Earth.

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