10/02/2016

Thoughts On A Sunday

It's been quiet here around Lake Winnipesaukee. The summerfolk are pretty much gone, their cottages and camps closed up until late next spring. There are a few holdouts, but most will be done by the end of Columbus Day weekend.

The leaf-peepers have not yet arrived, at least not here. There are some colors up north of the White Mountains, but other than a few trees that tend to turn early, everything is still green.

That will change soon enough.

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The Democrats still claim there is very little, if any voter fraud. Yet we've seen a number of dead being registered to vote in places like Virginia. Hackers have been going after voter rolls in at least 20 states. Whether it is to create false registrations or to steal voter information isn't known, but in any case it's troubling.

One of the more vulnerable aspects of voting is the use of voting machines, specifically electronic voting machines. They are, after all, computers and computers will do what they're programmed to do. A hacker can rewrite code to make sure a certain candidate wins or loses regardless of the actual votes cast. It's one reason why a number of states are still using paper ballots and will continue to do so. My home state is one of them. While there are machines used to tally the votes cast on those ballots, hand counting to verify the results is often done, particularly if a particular race has a difference of 1% or less.

While it is still possible to commit election fraud by such a system, it is more difficult. It requires fraudulent voters to actually cast votes. So-called 'ballot box stuffing' is almost impossible to pull of because the ballot boxes remain in sight of the overseeing officials at the polling locations at all times. There's no “Gee, I found this ballot box in the trunk of my car. We should count them...” incidents. All counting is performed at each polling place, not a central location where the ballot boxes have to be transported.

While old fashioned, it works.

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Watts Up With That asks the question “What brought down the South Australia electrical grid?”

Answer: Violent fluctuations from the Snowtown wind farms.

It looks like a natural disaster but brought on by the fragility of the South Australian power system caused by the size of the variations in wind power.

The failure is most likely to have been triggered by the violent fluctuations from the Snowtown wind farms [...]. Shortly after 3 pm there was a loss of 200MW with a partial recovery some twenty minutes later of 100MW. The total wind farm supply for South Australia also shows these variations [...].

This shows the fragility of power sources that can so easily vary, in this case because of heavy storms that failures all over the grid. That the wind energy was varying all over the place just made it that much worse as there isn't the granularity of control as seen from conventional fossil fueled, nuclear, or hydro plants.

And the watermelons want to base a large percentage of our power generation on systems that are too susceptible to the vagaries of weather. That's never made any sense to me, at least not on an engineering level.

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I don't know who those guys in the Patriots uniforms were down in Foxborough today, but they sure as heck weren't the real Patriots. No offense. No defense. Stupid penalties against them and missed penalty calls against the Bills. Hey lost 16-0 at home. They've never been shut out at home.

Frankly, I expected a lot better from them even with their third string quarterback calling the plays. That the Patriots lost to the Bills, a team that isn't nearly as good as they are, shows there was some serious disconnects between the players. It's like they were just going through the motions.

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David Starr has it right in regards to Wall Street – they need to have some skin in the game.

Right now the system is set up where they've privatized the gains but socialized the losses, meaning if the do well they and the stockholders make money, but if they do poorly, the taxpayer bails them out. That gives them no incentive to not play poker with their clients' money because they know Uncle Sugar will bail them out. As David writes:

Since the risky games are high yield (except for when they become high loss) they keep on playing them.  Step one, is making it perfectly clear to everyone, that the next Wall St operation to go broke will stay broke, no bailout, and the executives will be prosecuted for fraud. 

Forbid banks playing the stock market.  Glass Steagall had it right. 

David has a list of things that need to be done in order to give some discipline to Wall Street. As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

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A number of Dems are castigating Donald Trump for using the tax code to his advantage. It's the tax code passed by Congress. Hillary is painting him as a tax cheat because he didn't pay more taxes than he owed.

But you notice not one mention is made about multimillionaires and billionaires who happen to be Democrats and support Democrat candidates who use the same tax code exactly the same way.

It's the old Democrat double standards coming into play...again.

No surprise there.

Another question the Democrat-owned MSM is failing to ask: Which IRS employee is behind this? Do they realized they committed a felony be doing so? Do they really care?

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the summerfolk have dwindled away, the temps have plummeted, and where Monday is approaching far too quickly.