Category: General Interest

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Wind Turbine Farm

Wind Turbine Farm

Australia currently has 13.3 gigawatts of installed wind energy capacity across roughly 90 operating wind farms. To meet the federal government’s renewable energy targets Energy Minister Chris Bowen admitted Australia needs to build 40 wind turbines every month until 2030. That is approximately 3840 new turbines on top of what already exists.
Let that number sit for a moment. 3840 wind turbines. In eight years. Across regional Australia.
Now let us look at what each one actually involves before a single blade turns.
A modern wind turbine stands between 140 and 200 metres tall. That is taller than a 50 storey building. Before the tower goes up the foundation has to go in. A typical foundation for a modern turbine requires between 550 and 850 cubic metres of concrete. At the MacIntyre wind farm in Queensland each foundation required nearly 2000 tonnes of concrete.
The reinforcing steel in each foundation runs to between 60 and 110 tonnes of reo bar. That steel reinforced concrete base is buried permanently in the ground. When the turbine reaches the end of its life in 25 to 30 years that foundation stays there forever. It is effectively impossible to remove without destroying the surrounding land.
The civil work and foundation for each turbine costs between 300000 and 600000 dollars. The tower itself between 500000 and 1.2 million dollars. Transport crane hire and installation another 500000 to one million dollars. Electrical connections and cabling another 300000 to 800000 dollars.
That is between 1.6 million and 3.6 million dollars per turbine before you count the cost of the turbine itself.
Multiply that by 3840 turbines and the civil and infrastructure cost alone runs to between 6 billion and 14 billion dollars. Just for the holes in the ground the concrete the steel and the cranes.
Then there are the roads.
Wind turbine blades on modern turbines run between 60 and 85 metres long. Each blade is transported separately on a special oversize load vehicle. Each movement requires pilot vehicles front and rear. Special permits. Road assessments. Road widening in many cases. Bridge strengthening. Removal of roadside trees and overhead infrastructure along the route.
A wind farm with 100 turbines requires 300 blade movements plus movements for towers foundations and nacelles. Across roads in regional Australia that were never designed for this traffic.
The cost of that road damage and infrastructure upgrades falls on local councils and state governments. Which means it falls on ratepayers and taxpayers. No wind energy company is picking up the bill for the regional roads their supply chains destroy.
And here is something nobody mentions. More than 3000 existing wind turbines across Australia will reach the end of their operational life by 2045. Those turbines need to be decommissioned. The fibreglass blades cannot be recycled. They are being buried in landfill. The concrete foundations stay in the ground permanently. And who pays for decommissioning is largely unresolved in most lease agreements across the country.
Then there are the transmission lines to carry all this electricity from where it is generated to where people actually live.
The Central West Orana renewable energy zone transmission project near Dubbo. Original estimate 650 million dollars. Current confirmed cost 5.5 billion dollars. Eight times the original estimate.
VNI West connecting Victoria and NSW. Started at 3.9 billion dollars. Now heading towards 11 billion dollars.
Project EnergyConnect connecting South Australia and NSW. Started at 1.53 billion dollars. Now over 4 billion with another 1.1 billion being sought from consumers on top of that.
HumeLink in southern NSW. Originally 1.3 billion dollars. Now 4.88 billion dollars. And its carrying capacity was reduced at the same time. More expensive and less capable.
Every dollar of every blowout goes onto your electricity bill for the next 30 to 50 years.
Then there is Snowy 2.0. The pumped hydro project that is supposed to store energy when the sun shines and the wind blows and release it when they do not.
Original cost 2 billion dollars. Current cost past 12 billion and still climbing. The 12 billion figure has been declared unachievable by Snowy Hydro’s own chief executive. The tunnelling machine was stuck underground for 19 months. Independent critics say the real total including transmission will exceed 20 billion dollars.
Then there are the batteries.
The government tells us that when the sun stops shining and the wind stops blowing the big batteries will keep the lights on. Here is what they can actually do.
The Waratah Super Battery in NSW is one of the largest in the country. It can power 970000 homes for one hour. Or 80000 homes for a full day. Australia has 11 million households.
The standard grid scale battery in Australia currently stores between two and four hours of electricity. Four hours is what the industry calls long duration storage. When the sun goes down on a hot summer night and the wind drops the batteries have two to four hours before they are empty. Then what.
The Australian Energy Market Operator says Australia needs 22 gigawatts of battery storage by 2030 and 49 gigawatts by 2050. We currently have about 3 gigawatts. That means increasing battery capacity by more than 700 percent in five years and over 1600 percent by 2050.
And here is what nobody is telling you. The batteries being installed right now through the 2020s will need to be replaced in the 2040s. You pay for them once and then you pay for them again. Just in time for the 2050 net zero deadline.
So what does all of this actually cost.
The federal government has already paid more than 29 billion dollars in subsidies to the renewable energy industry over the past ten years. The 2024 federal budget committed another 22 billion on top of that. The home battery subsidy program has been expanded to 7.2 billion dollars over four years. Grid scale battery investment hit 2.4 billion dollars in a single quarter in early 2025 alone.
Wood Mackenzie analysis shows the battery pipeline in Australia alone represents more than 80 billion dollars of potential investment.
And the Australian Energy Market Operator’s own modelling puts the total annualised capital cost through 2050 for grid scale generation storage transmission and distribution at 128 billion dollars. That is not a figure from critics. That is the government’s own energy market operator using their own least cost optimal pathway numbers.
128 billion dollars. For a system where the standard battery lasts two to four hours. Where the biggest battery in NSW can power 80000 homes for one day.
Where 3840 new wind turbines need to be built in eight years across regional roads that cannot handle the transport. Where transmission lines blow out to eight times their original cost estimates before the first pole is in the ground.
And every single dollar of it comes from one of three places.
Your taxes. Through direct government spending and through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation which has been given 32.5 billion dollars of taxpayer capital to lend cheaply to private energy companies.
Your electricity bill. Through network charges that recover the cost of transmission lines over the next 30 to 50 years added to every power bill in the country.
Or both at once. Through government underwriting schemes that guarantee private investors a minimum return. Meaning if the projects lose money the taxpayer makes up the difference. Private companies build the wind farms and solar farms. They take the profits. When the returns fall short you cover the losses.
Some people will say that is federal money not state money or that is state money not federal money. It makes no difference to the person paying the bill.
Federal spending comes from federal taxes. State spending comes from state taxes. Transmission blowouts come from your electricity bill. When all levels of government are spending money on the same program the taxpayer pays all of it regardless of which parliament wrote the cheque.
The federal government alone has committed over 100 billion dollars in direct spending loan guarantees and investment underwriting to this program. The states are spending billions more on top of that. The total is what matters. And the total comes out of your pocket one way or another.
There has been considerable public debate about whether the Future Fund which holds the retirement savings of Australian public servants should be used to help rebuild Australia’s oil refining capacity and protect our fuel security.
The government ruled that out. Yet that same government found 128 billion dollars worth of ways to fund a renewable energy system that stores electricity for two to four hours at a time and still cannot guarantee power on a calm cloudy night.
Nobody in government will say the full number out loud in a single sentence. Ask your local member to do it. See what happens.
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Paul Stookey

Peter Paul and Mary

He wrote it in one hour. He gave away every penny it ever made. And it became the most beloved wedding song in America.
In the fall of 1969, Paul Stookey got a phone call that would quietly change his life — though he had no idea at the time.
His bandmate and close friend Peter Yarrow was getting married. Peter was one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary, the folk trio that had helped define a generation. His bride was Marybeth McCarthy, niece of Senator Eugene McCarthy. Peter asked Paul a simple question: would he write a song and sing it at the ceremony?
Paul said yes immediately.
But privately, he knew something. This was not a song he could write on his own. Not this one. This needed something beyond his ability.
A short time before the wedding, Stookey went down to the small basement studio of his Connecticut home. He picked up his twelve-string guitar, sat in the quiet, and prayed.
“Lord,” he said, “nothing would bless this wedding ceremony more than Your presence. How would You manifest Yourself?”
Then he picked up a pencil.
For the next hour, words came. Not slowly. Not with struggle. They arrived as though they had been waiting. Stookey later said he did not feel like he was composing. He felt like he was transcribing. The pencil moved across the page and all he had to do was allow it.
The first words he wrote were: “I am now to be among you at the calling of your hearts.”
Just one hour before the ceremony, he sang it for his wife Betty. She loved it, but she caught something. “They won’t understand ‘I am now to be among you,’” she told him. “They’re going to think you’re presuming to be God.”
Stookey thought about it. She was right. He changed one word.
“He is now to be among you at the calling of your hearts. Rest assured this troubadour is acting on His part.”
On the evening of October 18, 1969, at Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in Willmar, Minnesota, Paul Stookey stood before the congregation as Peter Yarrow’s best man. He held his guitar and sang the song for the first time.
It was meant to be a private gift. A blessing between friends. He assumed it would never be sung again.
Several weeks later, backstage before a Peter, Paul and Mary concert, Peter leaned over and made a request. His wife was in the audience. Would Paul sing the song for her?
Paul stepped to the microphone and played. The audience went still. There was something in that simple melody — unhurried, vulnerable, honest — that reached people in a way no one had expected.
He kept singing it. And people kept asking.
When the trio took a leave of absence from performing in 1970, Stookey recorded the song for his debut solo album, Paul And…. The single, “Wedding Song (There Is Love),” was released in 1971. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 and climbed to number 24. On the Easy Listening chart, it reached number 3.
But here is where the story becomes extraordinary.
Paul Stookey refused to claim the song as his own.
He had a dilemma. He believed the song had been given to him, not created by him. If he copyrighted it under his name, he would profit from something he felt was never his. But if he claimed nothing, the record company would simply keep the royalties.
So he found a third path. He established the Public Domain Foundation, a charitable trust to receive every royalty the song would ever generate as a composition. He kept none of the songwriting income.
The record company called him with exciting news — The Tonight Show wanted him to perform “Wedding Song” on national television. They told him it could launch a solo career.
“No, thanks,” Stookey said.
Over the decades, the Public Domain Foundation has distributed more than two million dollars to charitable organizations across the United States — soup kitchens, children’s programs, hospitals, music education, and causes Stookey will never see the results of. That two-million-dollar figure was reported in the 1990s. The total has only grown since.
“Wedding Song (There Is Love)” has been covered by Petula Clark, Captain and Tennille, Mary MacGregor, Nana Mouskouri, and many others. It has been performed at countless weddings across America and around the world for more than fifty years. Acoustic guitarists learn it. Brides request it. It has become, for many families, the song that means the beginning.
And Paul Stookey has never taken a cent of the songwriting royalties.
Every year, he turns down requests to perform the song at weddings around the country. His answer is always the same.
“It’s not my song,” he says. “It belongs to every bride and groom who ever had a good friend strum a guitar and sing at their wedding. God gave me a song. It was mine to give away.”
When asked how he explains the song’s origin, Stookey keeps it simple.
“Into every songwriter’s life comes a song, the source of which cannot be explained by personal experience.”
He wrote it in one hour in a basement in Connecticut. He sang it once for two people he loved. He gave away everything it ever earned.
And more than fifty years later, that hour of work is still blessing strangers on the most important day of their lives.
Some songs are written.
Some songs are given.
The difference is what you do with them after.
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Rat-Proof Grain Store

Rat-Proof Grain Store Rat-Proof Grain Store 2

The Romans had no rat traps or poisons so they had to protect their grain stores from rats through other methods or risk starving. They built elevated grain stores with no rat accessible entry points.

Building floor a metre off the ground
Smooth stone pillar supports
With overhang impossible to climb around
No low level entry points
Ventilation via small openings at top of wall
Human access via removable ramps

to view the video: https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1CnTxu1Buf/

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Build A Raised Garden Bed With Cinder Blocks

Build A Raised Garden Bed With Cinder Blocks

Stack twenty-eight cinder blocks in a rectangle on the ground. No drill. No saw. No screws. No lumber that rots in ten years. Fill with soil and plant.

The blocks sit flat with the holes facing up. Two courses tall, offset like brickwork so they interlock. A filled bed weighs over a ton — it’s not going anywhere. The walls are eight inches thick. They don’t bow, tip, or fail.

Lay cardboard underneath first to smother the grass. Fill the bottom six inches with rough compost or leaves, the top ten inches with quality soil mix. Water deeply, let it settle overnight, plant the next day.

Here’s what makes this better than wood.

The herb pockets:

– Each block has two open holes on top. Fill each one with potting soil and plant one herb per hole

– Fourteen blocks on the top course means twenty-eight herb pockets running along the entire perimeter of the bed

– Basil, thyme, oregano, chives, parsley, cilantro — a different herb in each hole. They cascade over the block edges by midsummer

– The main bed grows your vegetables. The block holes grow your herb garden. Two gardens from one structure.

No tools. No skills. No rot. A bed that outlasts the lumber version by decades and grows herbs on its own walls.

 

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Low-Fuss, High-Return Edibles

Low-Fuss, High-Return Edibles

The vegetable garden everyone admires often belongs to the person who does the least.

Not because they’re lazy — because they planted things that don’t need replanting, don’t need spraying, and produce year after year from the same roots.

Most food gardens run on annuals. You start over each spring, buy new transplants, prep the soil again, and hope the season cooperates. Perennial food plants skip that cycle entirely. They establish once and keep producing — some for decades — with almost no input beyond occasional harvest.

6 perennial food plants that keep going without you:

– Jerusalem artichoke — plant the tubers once and the stand comes back taller each year. The tubers taste like a nuttier, sweeter potato, store in the ground all winter, and you dig them as needed. The only management is deciding where you want the patch to stop spreading.

– Egyptian walking onion — grows bulbils at the top of each stalk that bend the stem to the ground and root themselves. The plant moves about a foot per year, producing mild green onion tops for cutting and perennial bulbs underground.

– Alpine strawberry — fruits from June through frost without runners or netting. Small, intensely flavored berries produced continuously rather than in one heavy flush. Self-seeds gently in paths and borders and handles part shade well.

– Sorrel — a salad green with a bright lemon flavor that survives winter and produces harvestable leaves from early spring through late fall. Cut it to the ground and it returns within a week.

The food garden that lasts isn’t the one you tend the most. It’s the one planted with species that don’t need you to start over each year.

The harvest that keeps coming is the one you stopped worrying about.

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The Weed Squad

The Weed Squad

You already know weeds signal soil problems. What most people miss is that many of them are actively fixing the problem while you pull them out.
Dandelions don’t just indicate compaction. Their taproots drill through hardpan that most garden tools can’t reach. As each root decays, it leaves a vertical channel that carries water, air, and earthworms into soil layers that haven’t been loosened in years.
Pulling the dandelion removes the drill. The compaction stays.
White clover does something different — it pulls nitrogen from the atmosphere and converts it into a form plant roots can use. The conversion happens through bacterial colonies living in tiny nodules on the roots. Mow it or let it shed naturally and the nitrogen transfers into the surrounding soil. The fertilizer was already in the lawn. It just looked like a weed.
🌱 Three ways to let weeds work for you instead of against you:
– Leave dandelions in compacted areas through one full season — when the taproots die back naturally, the channels they leave behind improve drainage and root penetration for whatever you plant next
– Stop spraying white clover in the lawn — it feeds the grass around it for free and stays green in dry stretches when turf goes dormant
– Chop comfrey leaves and drop them as mulch around tomatoes or peppers — comfrey roots pull minerals from deep soil layers that shallow vegetable roots can’t access, and the leaves concentrate them at the surface where your crops can use them
The garden sends repair crews before you call for them. The weeds that showed up uninvited are doing work you’d otherwise need to buy amendments to replace.
The weed you keep pulling is the amendment you keep buying
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Pest Traps – Sacrificial Plants

Pest Traps - Sacrificial Plants

The smartest pest control in a garden isn’t a spray. It’s a plant so irresistible to the pest that it abandons your vegetables to feed on something you planted specifically to be destroyed.

You sacrifice one cheap, fast-growing plant to save an entire row of expensive crops. The pest gets what it wants. Your harvest stays clean.

Nasturtiums are the easiest place to start. Aphids, cabbage moths, and flea beetles tend to prefer nasturtium foliage over most vegetable crops — the leaves are soft, thin, and easier to feed on than the tougher tissue of your brassicas. Plant a ring around the vegetable bed. When the nasturtiums are covered in aphids, your cabbages are clean. That’s the system working.

Trap plants worth adding to a vegetable garden:

– Nasturtiums around bed edges — draw aphids and leaf-chewing insects away from brassicas and cucumbers. Cheap, fast-growing, and the flowers are edible if the pests don’t get them first

– Blue Hubbard squash at the end of a squash row — vine borers and squash bugs strongly prefer it over most other squash varieties. One sacrificial plant absorbs the pressure so the rest of the row stays productive

– Sunflowers near tomatoes — aphids climb to the growing tip and cluster there, visible and exposed. Ladybugs and lacewings find them quickly. The sunflower becomes an elevated feeding station for beneficial insects while your crops below stay clear

– Alyssum between rows — attracts hoverflies whose larvae consume large numbers of aphids. The trap and the predator recruitment happen on the same plant

The plant you sacrifice saves the harvest you keep.

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Live Longer – Take Up Tennis!

Racket Sports

Tennis players live 9.7 years longer than sedentary people.

Not 9.7 months. 9.7 years. Nearly a decade.

The Copenhagen City Heart Study tracked 8,577 people for 25 years and ranked every sport by how much life it adds.

Badminton: 6.2 years. Soccer: 4.7. Cycling: 3.7. Swimming: 3.4. Jogging: 3.2.

Tennis almost triples jogging.

A separate study of 80,000 adults found racket sports cut all-cause mortality by 47% and cardiovascular death by 56%. Swimming hit 41%. Aerobics hit 36%.

The question is why racket sports destroy everything else.

Three mechanisms stack on top of each other.

First, the physical demands. A tennis rally requires explosive sprints, lateral cuts, and sustained aerobic output. You’re training fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscle fibers simultaneously. Most cardio only trains one system.

Second, the cognitive load. You’re reading spin, predicting angles, adjusting position, and executing motor patterns in real-time. Your brain is solving spatial puzzles at 80+ mph. That hand-eye coordination and strategic processing builds neural connections that protect against cognitive decline.

Third, and this is the one researchers keep coming back to: you literally cannot play alone. Every racket sport requires another person on the other side of the net. That forced social interaction triggers neurochemical benefits that solitary exercise cannot replicate. Strong social connection alone increases your chance of longevity by 50%.

Jogging is you and your thoughts. Tennis is you, a strategic opponent, and a community.

Dr. Daniel Amen is right. The data is overwhelming. If you want the single highest-ROI activity for a longer life, pick up a racket.

Click to view the video: https://x.com/aakashgupta/status/2044649799320998377?s=20

 

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Carnivore Diet Handled RFK Jr’s Atrial Fibrillation

RFK jr On Carnivore

RFK Jr. starts most mornings with steak for breakfast, a big bowl of grass-fed yogurt topped with cream, and a generous side of sauerkraut or kimchi.

A year ago, full-body MRIs showed HHS Secretary Kennedy’s organs coated in dangerous visceral fat, despite his lean appearance and four months of atrial fibrillation episodes. His doctor prescribed a strict carnivore diet of meat plus fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, and grass-fed yogurt—no carbs—which he followed for about 250 days. Follow-up scans revealed a 40% drop in visceral fat after 30 days, then the lowest 1st percentile levels, with 20 pounds lost and regained as muscle, and no heart issues since. Kennedy noted half the cabinet follows it too, while emphasizing individual metabolisms vary and sharing sparked personal diet stories from weight loss to energy boosts.

https://x.com/newstart_2024/status/2044513009708466532?s=20