Thoughts On A Sunday

BeezleBub and I launched the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout – aka The Boat – Friday evening. My friend Scott came over with his truck to haul The Boat on its trailer to the town boat ramp and a few minutes later it was in the water and on its way to its summer berth.

There's still some work that needs doing on The Boat, but it doesn't need to be on dry land to accomplish those last tasks.

Let the boating begin!

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Via Maggie's Farm comes this horror story: “The Germans could not kill Walter Gibson. But Britain’s National Health Service was up to the task.”

If you want a preview of what our health care system will be like after Obama and Congress get done with it, here it is.

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You can tell the 'summah people' are back in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire.

Deb and I were making our last shopping stop at the local Walmart yesterday afternoon, entering the shopping plaza via a clearly marked one-way road. Apparently one of the newly arrived 'summah people' decided he didn't want or need to wait at the traffic light at the exit of the plaza, so he went the wrong way down the entrance road to beat the traffic AND DAMN NEAR KILLED US. (Never mind that there were two easily visible signs at the top of the road on either side saying “Do Not Enter”.)

He looked at us as if we were being an inconvenience to him, squeezed past us, and continued down the entrance road and out onto the highway. I know drivers from Boston can be aggressive, but I didn't know they had gotten that bad. (I am making the assumption the driver was from the Greater Boston area, considering the Massachusetts license plates on his Cadillac Escalade.)

I'd hoped that kind of foolishness wouldn't start quite so soon. I was obviously deluded.

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C.S. Lewis had the right of it when it came to “tyranny exercised for the good of its victims.”

It sounds eerily like what we're going through today.

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Could this new high-speed unmanned tank be the forerunner of a Bolo?



There's also a nice photo gallery.

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EMC2 has received another round of funding from the US Navy to build the WB8 polywell fusion reactor.

Polywell fusion is a the brainchild of the late physicist Robert Bussard. Unlike the 'traditional' magnetic containment (tokamak) or inertial containment (laser) fusion systems, polywell fusion research and development cost has been low, costing a fraction of what the other two systems have cost.

So far each iteration of the polywell reactor, labeled 'WB' for 'whiffleball' (the reactor resembles a whiffle ball, hence the name), has matched Bussard's theories and calculations. Each iteration was larger than the previous, and each one's performance scaled as Bussard theorized.

If EMC2 succeeds it will revolutionize the nuclear Navy (as well as the rest of the military) and US domestic power production, moving us past every other energy technology in one leap and releasing us from the grip of foreign oil producers forever.

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The difference in interpretation of the First Amendment in regards to Free Speech by the leftists and everyone else is quite telling. George Will calls the leftist viewpoint an end run on free speech. It appears they want to limit speech that criticizes government (or at least government under their control).

A visiting law professor at Duke, writing in the Cornell Law Review ("The Anti-Corruption Principle"), she makes an astonishingly sweeping argument for emancipating government from First Amendment restrictions on its powers to regulate political speech -- speech about the government's composition and conduct.

The next step would likely be a complete ban on such speech, meaning anyone pointing out government misfeasance, malfeasance, corruption, or other bad or unconstitutional actions could end up in prison.

Hmm. I believe that's called tyranny. Why am I not surprised someone from the left is proposing something like this?

As Will says, the leftists proposing this see that “political speech is not a right but a privilege, something granted by government.” So where does it say that in the Constitution?

That's right, I almost forgot. These folks see the Constitution as a 'living document', with no need to go through all the rigmarole of actually amending it in order to define new 'rights' or eliminate old ones.

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In regards to the government's 'takeover' of Chrysler, President Obama can blame no one else but himself for the debacle foisted upon institutional investors, particularly pension and retirement funds. He can't lay the blame on speculators this time.

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Watt's Up With That has a pretty good treatise by Leonard Weinstein, ScD, disproving the 5 main claims about Anthropogenic Global Warming.

As I have stated on more than one occasion, the AGW theories have major flaws, including the fact that they can neither be proven or falsified, meaning they are nothing more than pseudo-religious dogma. AGW must be taken on faith, and faith is not science. Public policy should not be based upon AGW dogma.

(H/T Pirate's Cove)

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Jack Cashill at American Thinker asks “Who wrote Dreams Of My Father?” He doubts Obama did it himself and he explains why it matters.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

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Also from American Thinker: How green is green energy technology? Nowhere as green as you've been told.

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Dr. Sanity dislikes Obama's rhetoric, finding it impossible to listen to because he feels as if he's being manipulated and lectured to by someone less virtuous and knowledgeable than himself.

I don't blame him in the least.

Understand that I listen to people for a living. I hear various degrees of honesty, sincerity, and real emotional pain being expressed on a regular basis. I also hear some of the most self-serving, dishonest and completely irresponsible utterings that it is possible to imagine. Yet, in my professional career, I have to freely admit that I have heard nothing like the deceitful and self-aggrandizing utterings of Barack Obama, which seem to get more and more pathological with every speech he gives. His most recent scam, in the National Archives in front of a fake copy of the U.S. Constitution just about takes the cake. This is not irony, so much as it is the grandiosity of tyranny.

Bill Clinton--who I actually liked for the most part; even his amusing narcissism, which seems so childishly innocent in retrospect--was completely harmless compared to the sociopathic statist that is our current POTUS.

Next time you listen to the Obamessiah's speeches, listen to what he doesn't say. Listen to the vagueness, the vacuity. Listen to the lack of specifics and the blatant emotional manipulation. Listen to the cognitive dissonance between what he is saying in his seductive, sedating style; and what he is doing with his deliberate, statist national policies and his foreign policy that not only demeans America by apologizing for her very existence; but severly handicaps her ability to act in the future. Watch how he badmouths the previous Administration, then surrepticiously implements the same policies that kept us safe over the last 8 years.

As Bird Dog at Maggie's Farm comments: “Besides his smarmy condescension, what bugs me most about listening to the O is how self-referential he is. He never just talks about a thing: he always talks about himself and the thing. Perhaps he believes his hype.”

Without a doubt.

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I have always advocated against those looking at science through a filter of emotion or incomprehension from getting involved in debates about science and technology. They argue from feeling rather than logic and knowledge. They cannot be reasoned with because reason has no place in their minds. This video gives us a glimpse of the problem.



(H/T LGF)

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the summer folk have returned, 'summah people' have made their presence known, and where our boating season has begun.