Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Donald in less than 100 days has destroyed our global alliances, collapsed the stock market and absolutely made America great. (Statement thick with sarcasm)

He has done such a good job that Fox Business yesterday stopped showing their stock tracker… the age of FAFO is in full swing. Those that voted for the malignant narcissist are losing their 401k’s just as Donny and Elon are trying to decimate Society. I guess since very few if any people that lived through the Great Depression are still around we have to relive it, guess we can look forward to another World War.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

DOGE, Trump and Musk policies and seemingly random cuts to departments and programs will most definitely hurt many people, but that is a sacrifice that Donald and Elon are willing to make.

Cuts to HHS, some will suffer and others will die… sacrifices are needed.

Tariffs will raise prices, we must stop complaining about the minor inconvenience.

Jobs will be lost, people will suffer but the wealthy will be fine.

All these sacrifices that we will feel , Donald is willing to ready to make.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

So today is the big impose tariffs on our allies day. The day that dear leader has the masses believing that by imposing these tariffs that Canada, Mexico, China and anyone else he is slapping these tariffs on will just start handing the treasury millions of dollars. Sadly doesn’t work that way… importers of goods from those countries pay the tariff, let’s just call it a tax, and they intern pass it on to us.

The “business man” also seems to believe that magically manufacturing and supply lines will just appear. Factories that have been shut down for decades will by the will of Trump reopen , fields will suddenly produce more vegetables and fruits, just like professor Dumbledore snapping his fingers in the great hall and feeding all the students at Hogwarts.

We don’t live in Donald’s imagination and his mistaken interpretation of how this will work is going to cause a  recession or worse.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

The scales have forever in our body politic been between We the People and Money and Corporate Greed and any time a party is on the side of the people they are considered Left.

Lincoln recognized the rights of a million enslaved people above the corporate plantations of the south… that leftist ideal of humanity caused the Civil War.

Even though we in name got rid of slavery we didn’t impose many restrictions of corporate greed. Theodore Roosevelt turned his gaze on the rights of workers above that of the Steel Mills, Railroads, and Oil Companies and supported unions. Another leftist ideal hurting corporate profits.

FDR brought in Social Security so that seniors could retire with dignity. Even Eisenhower supported unions and he was a Republican.

Since Reagan the role of government has been viewed as trying to harm the people which is 100% opposite of the truth . The bias has been spewed for so long the public believes that corporations and the ultra wealthy need to have more breaks because they are the only ones that can save us.

The scales have been tipped so far to the right that even ideas that would have been considered in the center, 50 or 60 years ago are considered ultra leftist. So when Republicans want Democrats to move more to the center that Center is no longer in the middle. If you took a ruler and saw the center was at 6 inches the Democrats were 6 to 12 inches and the Republicans were 0 to 6 inches. That scale has been moved now the Republicans are 0 to 9 inches on the conservative side and the Democrats only have 2 inches of wiggle room so if we try to get toward the center, the center is actually very much still in the conservative realm. 

Bernie Sanders is considered to be ultra left-wing in today’s body politic but in reality Bernie is right of the ideas that Eisenhower had in 56 so it’s hard to justify moving to the center when the center doesn’t even balance the scale anymore. 

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

I hate to even use the word illegal when it comes to immigration because people are not illegal they may be undocumented, but they are not illegal. We don’t have any legal worker issue if we didn’t have employers actually soliciting people in Mexico or Central America to come work in their fields or food processing plants, so let’s prosecute the employers not the employees that are just trying to support their families.

Sadly, this will never happen because we never prosecute the wealthy that are trying to take advantage of a situation where they can increase their profits and decrease their overhead.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

We are still the USA but the U isn’t want it used to be.

Starting with breaking trade agreements with partners that have been going on for decades, we’ve become untrustworthy and our allies no longer want to deal with us. Believing the he holds all the cards Donald has entered peace talks over territory with the aggressor party and excluding the party that had their country invaded. Ukraine is not involved in the peace talks with Russia, even though Russia was the invading party. even though Hamas was the party that first took lives in Israel the Palestinians aren’t being included in the peace stocks with Israel, even though all Palestinians are not Hamas.

As we all learned as teenagers, trust, it’s very hard to get back once you’ve broken it, and I feel that we have broken all of our promises and blown any trust that we have with the rest of the world. Anyone who has had a spouse cheat on them, knows that you may forgive, but trust may never come back. 

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

“Elbows up” is a hockey term describing an effective way to protect yourself from an opposing player. The phrase was coined by Canadian hockey legend Gordie Howe, who was famously called Mr.Elbows, for his signature way of keeping at a distance on the ice.

King Donald the Spray Tan Slug and his imperial expansionist wet dream have turned one of our closest allies against us. The wanna be King looks at his pal Putin and his territory grabbing ideology and want to emulate his actions. The United States hasn’t been in an expansionist way for quite a long time and the most recent territorial expansion wasn’t done by force like our initial western expansion but it appears that Donald thinks he is Alexander the great or Genghis Khan and wants to expand US borders by force. The Canadians our northern border country will not put up with this expansionist rhetoric or nonsense. So elbows up Canada I’m with you. We don’t need to expand our borders. We need to increase our friendships. 

Texas broke its solar, wind, and battery records in one spring week

Renewables and batteries are playing an increasingly crucial role for the state in the shoulder season, when coal and gas plants fall offline in large numbers.

By Julian Spector

10 March 2025

As winter turns to spring, Texas is setting new records with its nation-leading clean energy fleet.

In just the first week of March, the ERCOT power grid that supplies nearly all of Texas set records for most wind production (28,470 megawatts), most solar production (24,818 megawatts), and greatest battery discharge (4,833 megawatts). Only two years ago, the most that batteries had ever injected into the ERCOT grid at once was 766 megawatts. Now the battery fleet is providing nearly as much instantaneous power as Texas nuclear power plants, which contribute around 5,000 megawatts.

“These records, along with the generator interconnection queue, point towards a cleaner and more dynamic future for ERCOT,” said Joshua Rhodes, a research scientist studying the energy system at The University of Texas at Austin.

The famously developer-friendly Lone Star State has struggled to add new gas power plants lately, even after offering up billions of taxpayer dollars for a dedicated loan program to private gas developers. Solar and battery additions since last March average about 1 gigawatt per month, based on ERCOT’s figures, Texas energy analyst Doug Lewin said. In 2024, Texas produced almost twice as much wind and solar electricity as California.

When weather conditions align, the state’s abundant clean-energy resources come alive — and those conditions aligned last week amid sunny, windy, warm weather. On March 2 at 2:40 p.m. CST, renewables collectively met a record 76% of ERCOTdemand.

Then, on Wednesday evening, solar production started to dip with the setting sun. More than 23,000 megawatts of thermal power plants were missing in action. Most of those were offline for scheduled repairs, but ERCOT data show that nearly half of all recent outages have been “forced,” meaning unscheduled.

At 6:15 p.m. CST, batteries jumped in and delivered more than 10% of ERCOT’s electricity demand — the first time they’ve ever crossed that threshold in the state.

“Batteries just don’t need the kind of maintenance windows that thermal plants do,” said Lewin, who authors the Texas Energy and Power newsletter. ​“The fleet of thermal plants is pretty rickety and old at this point, so having the batteries on there, it’s not just a summertime thing or winter morning peak, they can bail us out in the spring, too.”

At some level, the March records show clean energy excelling in the conditions that are most favorable to it. Bright sun and strong winds boosted renewable generation, while temperate weather kept demand lower than it would be on a hot summer or a cold winter day. But those seemingly balmy circumstances could belie a deeper threat to the Texas energy system.

“One thing that I don’t think is talked about nearly enough is the potential for problems in shoulder season,” said Lewin.

If unusually hot weather struck during a spring day with lots of gas and coal power plants offline, ERCOT could struggle to meet demand, even if it was much lower than the blistering summer peaks. In fact, this happened in April 2006, when a surprise heat wave forced rolling outages, Lewin noted. Texas officials don’t talk much about climate change, but that kind of hot weather in the springtime is becoming more common.

Last summer produced ample data on how the surge in solar and battery capacity reduced the threat to the grid from heat waves and lowered energy prices for customers. This spring, batteries and renewables are showing they can also fill in the gaps when traditional plants step back.