Criticizing Smart Meters
The National Institute for Science, Law and Public Policy (NISLPP), a legal entity created by the Washington D.C. law firm Swankin & Turner, released a report last year, “Getting Smarter About the Smart Grid,” criticizing the President’s stimulus program and its emphasis on smart meters. It’s a strong report, and it explains the challenges of integrating renewable energy into the electrical grid.
The report criticizes the billions spent on smart meters that fail to enable the smart grid. The new meters fail to improve energy efficiency, enhance energy management, help balance supply and demand, or facilitate the integration of renewable sources as claimed. Instead the meters drive up costs, collect unnecessary personal data, and divert resources from improving the grid. Apparently, New York avoided some of these problems.
Central Hudson explained their ERT enabled meters do not collect personal data, do not improve energy efficiency and management, and don’t balance supply and demand. Lacking these capabilities, the ERT meters don’t have the problems associated with smart meters identified in the report.
Instead of smart meters, the report advocates improving the operation and reliability of the grid. In New York, the President’s stimulus money was spent on ‘phaser management units’ and ‘smart grid enabled capacitors,’ technologies designed to improve the operation, management, and reliability of the grid. The report recommends separating generation from distribution and treating electrical distribution as a public service, something New York did 12 years ago.
One surprising recommendation is to supplant existing baseload capacity with natural gas peaker generating plants. The report views the expanded use of natural gas as a prerequisite to the widespread adoption of renewable energy sources.
Ken Panza
Woodstock
2014
Well, we’re about to turn the page on 2013 and there are a bunch of happy campers out there one would think. President Hawaii 5 O must be holding his putter pretty tightly as the Democare situation progresses. Lady Chappaqua and Governor Crispy are about ready to start doing battle and one could only hope that two better candidates will appear somewhere on the horizon. In 2008 we were promised “Hope and Change” and I’m pretty sure most of us are hoping for some change this year, maybe even some dollars. Reid, Pelosi, Beanor, and McDonald (sic). Really?
The best New Year’s resolution we could make would be for a revolution or a renaissance that would bring us back to reality and some sort of technological slowdown that would allow us all to catch our collective breath and start thinking more, acting appropriately towards each other, and re-humanizing. 2014; it’s not too late!
Greg Safris
Woodstock
Anti-Female Semantics At WAAM
“Beaver is one of those slang terms that dehumanizes and depersonalizes a woman, and she becomes just that body part so you can do to her what you wish.” — Anonymous
“Now and throughout history, pejorative language has played a major role in the longstanding victimization of women…It is imperative to become fully conversant with how the victimization of women has been and continues to be facilitated by dehumanizing terminology.” — William Brennan, Ph.D. Female Objects of Semantic Dehumanization and Violence
“I welcome the chorus of voices calling for an end to the violence that affects an estimated one in three women in her lifetime. I applaud leaders who are helping to enact and enforce laws and change mindsets. And I pay tribute to all those heroes around the world who help victims to heal and to become agents of change.” — Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
Facts and Figures (UN) — Up to 70 per cent of women experience violence in their lifetime; Between 500,000 to 2 million people are trafficked annually into situations including prostitution, forced labor, slavery or servitude, according to estimates. Women and girls account for about 80 per cent of the detected victims; It is estimated that more than 130 million girls and women alive today have undergone FGM/C, mainly in Africa and some Middle Eastern countries; The cost of intimate partner violence in the United States alone exceeds $5.8 billion per year: $4.1 billion is for direct medical and health care services, while productivity losses account for nearly $1.8 billion.
Deconceptualism — conceptual art without a concept. Stern’s idea for the current solo show at WAAM, Beavers of Woodstock, is weak. “One of the criticisms of recent conceptual art in the UK is that the concepts or ideas have been weak. Writing in The Jackdaw magazine in 2013, the art theorist Michael Paraskos suggested that current conceptualist art retains the forms of historic conceptual art but is almost devoid of ideas. For that reason he suggested a new name for this kind of art, deconceptualism. Deconceptualism is, according to Paraskos, conceptual art without a concept.” —Wikipedia
I call it Hate Speech and I do not defend hate speech under the banner of freedom of speech. ‘Freedom of speech’ means that you won’t be prosecuted for what you say, not that you won’t be criticized for it.
Llyn Towner
Woodstock
Forward March
Despite the overwhelming majority of Americans who oppose war with Iran, New York’s two Senators seem hell bent on pushing the U.S. ever closer to a military confrontation. Back in February, both Schumer and Gillibrand joined nine other Democrats in cosponsoring what was called the “back door to war” bill that would have pre-endorsed an Israeli attack on Iran and brought the U.S. into the resulting conflict.
This month, Senator Menendez’s war with Iran bill was again cosponsored by our two New York Senators. The bill attempts to dramatically increase sanctions on Iran to disrupt the peace talks now in progress.
What in the world would make Schumer and Gillibrand cosponsor such legislation? They are going against the views of a vast majority of their constituents. They are opposing their own President, who has repeatedly warned that a new Middle East war would be extremely dangerous.
There is only one thing more important to our two senators than the voters, the president or the fear of a nuclear standoff with Russia. When push comes to shove, both Schumer and Gillibrand take their orders from the Israeli Lobby. In fact, Israel is the most dangerous country in the world, not so much because it is a nuclear power, but because it controls the U.S. Congress.
Israel is an apartheid state whose religious extremism could keep the U.S. at war in the Middle East for decades to come. That is until we demand our senators represent Americans rather than Zionist warmongers.
Fred Nagel
Rhinebeck
Mandela And Abu-Jamal
Nelson Mandela’s passing is a heartbreaking loss, but it is the height of hypocrisy for the American government, which supported the apartheid regime in South Africa and assisted in Mandela’s capture by the white supremacist authorities, to pay tribute to Mandela now that he is dead. it is also the height of hypocrisy for the American government, with the support of the corporate media, to claim to honor South Africa’s freedom fighter while continuing to incarcerate America’s own freedom fighters, such as radical journalist and former Black Panther party member Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Both Bob Fass of WBAI-fm radio (New York City) and Baruch College professor Johanna Fernandez have made valid comparisons between Mandela and Abu-Jamal. Mandela was denounced as a “traitor” and a “terrorist” while he was imprisoned for fighting to end apartheid, and Martin Luther King was lambasted for promoting “lawlessness: when he led nonviolent actions against America’s own apartheid system of de jure segregation in the south — just as Mumia Abu-Jamal is wrongly incarcerated and vilified as a “cop killer” for reporting on police brutality and surviving the Philadelphia Police Department’s attempt to murder him.
No one is canonized until he or she is victorious — but no law abiding person ever brought about radical social change. As Henry David Thoreau said, “When society is unjust, the only place for a just man is in prison.” To paraphrase Dr. Fernandez, Americans could best honor Nelson Mandela by freeing America’s Mandela — Mumia Abu-Jamal — and the millions of other innocent and nonviolent people incarcerated in this country.
R.B. Wilk
Woodstock
Join the family! 
