From Solyndra to Soccer Balls - Your Tax Dollars Keep Swirling the Bowl

Doug Powers points out that a portion of the $7 Billion boondoggle that Obama wants to spend on electrifying sub Saharan Africa, he wants to spend on... soccer balls.

Now, putting aside little questions like, "Where's he going to get the $7 Billion to pay for this scheme...out of his Czar and vacation budgets?, or is he going to borrow it from the Chinese? Or another quantitative easing that steals a little bit from every man, woman and child in America?", there's the question of efficiency. How many hydroelectric dams could you build for $7 Billion and expand the grid? And rather than tantalize the children with anemic little lights to read books we only assume they might have, that they can't be bothered to read during the daylight, why not buy books or hire teachers, when you can buy electrical generating soccer balls???

Obama deprives American schoolchildren from touring the White House because of the supposed effects of the budget sequestration, yet he proposes spending an additional $7 Billion dollars for the promise of humanitarian stunts and gimmicks? Give me a break!


For a little background on the technology behind the Solyndra soccer solution, here's a piece originally published Mar. 6, 2011:
sOccket to me!

...four Harvard students are betting that the popularity of soccer around the globe can help reduce the use of kerosene.

They came up with the idea for the sOccket, a soccer ball that generates and stores electricity during normal game play. The stored electricity in the ball can then be used to light an LED lamp, or charge a cellphone or battery.

“Soccer is something you will find in every African country,” one founder, Jessica Lin, told Green Inc. “People play for hours a day, so we thought, ‘Why not try to get a little more out of that energy?’ and that’s where the idea ultimately came from.”

...Early prototypes of the ball use an inductive coil mechanism similar to the technology found in shake-to-charge flashlights. The movement of the ball forces a magnet through a metal coil that “induces” voltage in the coil to generate electricity. For each 15 minutes of play, the ball can store enough energy to illuminate a small LED light for three hours, according to initial trials.

Now if we could only get that kind of performance out of our politicians!


Update: According to one source, the price off each sOccket ball is $99.

Cross posted at LCR.