The American Thinker has published some of my articles describing how Big Tech became entwined with the government.

Obama-Biden Administration Was Creeping Fascism (March 8, 2024)

The Obama administration started by hand-picking tech corporations, who then quickly and consequently became what we now call “Big Tech.” Combined with other measures, this effectively gave the administration control over the flow of information, including the news.

As newspapers, journals, and magazines transitioned to the Internet, Google and Microsoft took authors’ copyrighted content without compensation and offered access to it through their search engines. Improvements in Google’s search engine meant exploiting other people’s work more efficiently.

The Obama administration failed to enforce copyright laws on written works, in violation of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. …

By 2009, the news media was able to connect its financial difficulties to Google. Rupert Murdoch attempted to work out a compromise with Big Tech, but the administration waged war on him.

Instead of enforcing copyright laws, the Democrats arranged for Big Tech, specifically Google, to pay only selected outlets, such as The New York Times. This resulted in the media becoming entirely dependent on the Big Tech corporations Obama chose. The administration also signed special agreements with these Big Tech corporations and patronized them with thousands of government accounts, effectively eliminating all other competitors.

Big Tech are State Actors (July 14, 2021)

Google’s YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have been state actors since about 2010. They claimed to be neutral, non-discriminating in their political and scientific views and denied any political bias—until about a year ago. Then they reversed the narrative and said that they are private companies that can discriminate against whomever they want.

I can list half a dozen ways in which they are state actors. The pressure on them from Democrat officials, asserted by Trump in his lawsuit, is one of them. Obamanet, or net neutrality, is another one. But most obviously, they became state actors when federal and state government agencies opened accounts on their platforms and started to use them for interaction with the public. By accepting (and luring) multiple government accounts, they became public forums and state actors.

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The state actors’ status of these platforms, coming from their endorsement and active use by the US and state governments, benefitted them enormously, far beyond the visitors’ traffic to governmental accounts. The public, political parties, and other entities understood the large presence of the US government on the Big Tech platforms as a guarantee of freedom of speech and equal treatment by the platform owners.

Today, it seems normal for government agencies at all levels to have accounts (interactive public spaces) on three proprietary platforms, owned by non-competing and colluding corporate behemoths on their terms, allowing those behemoths to abuse at will citizens interacting with those agencies. This practice of third-world dictatorships was started by the corrupt and radical Obama administration.

Google and YouTube are State Actors (March 9, 2020)

The Obama Administration has delegated to Google (together with Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Netflix) “powers traditionally exclusively reserved to the State” and “traditionally associated with sovereignty” (Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co., 419 US 345 – Supreme Court 1974). Then, those actors usurped more powers.

The smoking gun can be found in the FCC Obamanet orders of 2010 and 2015. The 2015 Obamanet Order, officially called Open Internet Order, has explicitly obligated all internet users to pay a tax to Google and YouTube in their ISP and wireless data fees. The Order even mentions Google and YouTube by name. The tax incurs tens of billions of dollars per year. More specifically, the Order said that by paying ISP fees (including mobile wireless), each user also pays for the services that ISP gives to platforms and content providers like YouTube, even if the user doesn’t use them.

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June 26, 2024 at 11:58AM

10 out of 10 based on 1 rating

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June 26, 2024 at 09:40AM

By Paul Homewood

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More sleuthing from Ray Sanders!

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https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/observations/weather-extremes

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Chertsey is officially a Class 3 site, accurate to 1C. But as Ray reveals the weather station is slap bang in the middle of a field of solar panels.

https://www.bing.com/maps/?cp=51.398563%7E-0.4949&lvl=18.0&style=h

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There are 1820 panels at Chertsey:

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As you would guess, solar panels get extremely hot when the sun shines. And that heat quickly warms up the atmosphere above it. It is hard to think of a worse place to stick a weather station.

The solar farm began operations in 2022, and Ray has asked the Met Office whether their Class 3 assessment was made before or after this. But the solar panels will have caused a step up in temperatures.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the siting issues which we have identified recently are not just one-offs. The whole of the Met Office’s temperature recording network is infested with glaring problems to such an extent that its UK temperature dataset is being seriously inflated as a result.

We clearly can no longer trust the Met Office to address these quality issues.There is a pressing need for a truly independent review of their methodology and quality control. And when I say independent, that is exactly what I mean – not a repeat of the Climategate whitewash.

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BTW

The video is a rather smug piece of virtue signalling. In fact, Affinity Water are not interested in reducing emissions. It clearly makes good business sense to build your own generation system, thereby cutting out the middleman. In their case, that means not paying their share of all of the network costs, environmental levies etc.

The simple fact remains that they will still need the grid to supply electricity when their wonderful solar panels can’t.

If they really want to go green, how about turning off the grid supply completely?

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June 26, 2024 at 09:19AM

“Our affection for Texas runs deep, but so does our concern over its grid. It’s time for a candid conversation about the state’s energy policies—one that acknowledges the true costs and challenges of a blindly pro-renewables approach and seeks solutions that ensure the resilience of the grid and the well-being of Texans.” (Doug Sheridan, below)

Texas is turning to government-aided natural gas to fix its broken political grid. Yes, wind and solar did that in one of the natural gas meccas of the world.

Doug Sheridan, a reliable voice on social media, posted this at LinkedIn:

It was big news last week that the Texas PUC received 125 applications for 56 GW of new gas-fired generation. The legislation behind the initiative—which appropriates $5B in state grants and loan guarantees to the plants—was intended to spur 10 GW of new gas-fired capacity on ERCOT.

We’ve seen commentary about what the supposedly massive “oversubscription” means, with plenty of energy industry insiders hailing it as a rebuttal to the massive buildup of renewables on the state’s increasingly shaky grid. We’re not so sure.

The subsidized fund for gas-fired generation is far from a solution to the grid’s large and growing problems. More likely it’s a political fig-leaf to cover up poor grid management by state leaders—that is, a way to say, “Don’t blame us, we tried to fix it” should the system suffer catastrophic failure due to the non-performance of renewables.

The truth is many of the same state politicians who championed this particular law have actually enabled the very situation on the grid they now supposedly decry. We say supposedly because, to be clear, there’s absolutely no *mea culpa* here—from anyone. We don’t get those anymore.

We suspect analysis of political contributions from renewable energy interests to Texas politicians would show there’s too much in the way of donations flowing to the political class to expect they’d ever disallow more damaging renewables on the system. Again, we may be wrong on this point, but we doubt it. In time, we hope to do that analysis.

Leaders in Austin seem determined to tempt fate in other ways as well. As reported by David Blackmon, Lt. Gov Dan Patrick is now referring to a “Texas Miracle”… presumably of economic growth and prosperity. Careful Sir, there are too many problems lurking on the Texas grid to be claiming miracles at this point.

When it comes to the 125 applications for new gas-fired capacity, many questions remain. Certainly more honest and complete math needs to be done. Our sense is that honest analysis would show that Texas rate- and tax-payers are now effectively financing the kind of inefficient duplicate backup generation capacity critics of renewables have been warning about for years.

The lack of public understanding of what’s going on as it relates to the Texas grid is also a concern. That’s because it limits the public’s ability to act as a governor in real time to politicians… and their policy makers and moneyed interests. Unable to punish politicians at the polls in advance of breaking our grid, it leaves only the regrettable option of punishing them after the fact.

Our affection for Texas runs deep, but so does our concern over its grid. It’s time for a candid conversation about the state’s energy policies—one that acknowledges the true costs and challenges of a blindly pro-renewables approach and seeks solutions that ensure the resilience of the grid and the well-being of Texans.

Final Comment

Hear, hear. The wind/solar/battery experiment in Texas has wounded a once reliable grid by replacing consumer-driven, taxpayer-neutral, economic, reliable energies with inferiors. And where has anyone calculated what the benefits are in terms of avoided “climate change”? Instead, the wilds of Texas are being industrialized, a not-so-green outcome that Big Green does not want to contemplate. Kudos to the Doug Sheridans for speaking truth to political power to such wind/solar/battery apologists such as Doug Lewin on the Texas electricity ‘market’.

The post The Politicized Texas Grid: Sheridan Calls for Transparency (and Mea Culpas) appeared first on Master Resource.

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June 26, 2024 at 08:56AM