Thoughts On A Sunday

We’re back into the chilly weather up here at Lake Winnipesaukee with the high temps in the upper 40’s and a stiff breeze making it feel even cooler. We haven’t seen below freezing temps here yet, but we’re likely to later this week. For the most part the leaves are off the trees with the exception of some of the stubborn oaks and the sumacs, which are just now shifting from bright red to bright orange leaves before they, too, fall off.

I am still working in The Manse’s garage, getting the last of the ‘summer’ stuff put away and the winter stuff brought out in anticipation of winter weather. About the only non-winter stuff task that remains is changing the oil in the Official Weekend Pundit Portable Generator and then firing it up for its monthly test.

And speaking of winter, it seems there is some disagreement about the general winter forecast for the Northeast with NOAA saying it will be warmer than average with lower than average snowfall and a couple of others saying we can expect normal temperatures but above average snowfall. Time will tell which one(s) are right.

One last thing: I am so glad the election is in the past because we won’t have to hear the awful political ads playing at every commercial break, droning on and on about how bad their political opponent is when it comes to This, That, and The Other Thing.

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If I hadn’t already known about the antiquated computer systems being used by the FAA I wouldn’t have believed this.

FAA says air traffic control will phase out floppy disks in the next two years.

That the FAA is still using floppy disks...and computers that require them is scary to think about. The last computer that I owned that had a floppy drive was one I had built back in 2005. It also had a Zip drive as well. One would think the government agency responsible for air traffic control would be using more advanced technology by now.

he US Federal Aviation Administration said on Thursday it will ‌replace by the end of 2028 the outdated floppy disks used for weather and other critical information at more than 400 air traffic control facilities across the country.

The Enterprise Information Display System will replace four systems dating back to the 1980s and will put important operational ​information in one place so controllers can quickly see air traffic updates…

'We're moving away from outdated, manual processes ​and replacing technology that once relied on floppy disks with a modern system that allows controllers to instantly share critical flight alerts, restricted airspace schedules and pilot reports,' FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said in a statement.

Like the author of the above, I would have expected to see a headline like this back in 2006, not 2026. That it’s going to take two years to complete the move away from floppies is disturbing to no end.

And people wonder why I don’t fly any more.

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While the Democrats will scream about this move, Trump is well within his rights (and the power of his office) to do so.

Trump Orders Justice Department to Investigate Democrats Over Impeachment Threats

It’s the same crap they pulled the last time, trying to weaponize laws and procedures meant to deal with wrongdoing by government officials into something to eliminate them just because the Democrats don’t like them. No matter how evil we think these creatures are, we’re underestimating them.

President Trump says he has ordered the Justice Department to investigate Democrats who have threatened to impeach Attorney General Todd Blanche and other members of his administration.

Trump made the announcement Saturday afternoon in a post on Truth Social, days after Democrats won majorities in both the House and the Senate.

“The Democrats are going around threatening a lot of people, including the Attorney General of the United States,” Trump wrote, adding that they were also threatening others with impeachment and “many other forms of punishment.” He said Democrats admit they have “no reason to do so” and described the conduct as criminal.

I guess they figure they can drive some of the officials out of office with the continual harassment, lawfare, and threats of jail, or worse. The one comment I have to make about this is that should they succeed I see it as a path to one of two outcomes: a dictatorial single party state or a second American Civil War.

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It seems that at least one recently re-elected Democrat lawmaker didn’t even wait until he was sworn in again in January before he threatened to kill someone.

Missouri Democratic State Rep. Arrested Shortly After Reelection Over Deadly Threats

A Democratic state representative in Missouri was in handcuffs only the day after his constituents reelected him because of his potentially murderous behavior.

It’s never exactly a shock when Democrats turn out to be criminals, because the party makes a practice of glorifying crime and giving easy sentences or no sentences at all to criminals, whether foreign or domestic. From illegal migration to drastically reduced sentences for murderers and rapists to the cover-up of mass fraud, Democrats sure love crime.

Also being the party of elitism, Democrats tend to think that the rules, which include criminal laws, should never apply to them. One Democratic politician who seems to have that attitude is Anthony Ealy, whose election victory suffered an interruption when police arrested him for threatening to kill someone.

According to other reports this guy “was becoming to wacky even for state Democrat leadership” and had been removed from all committee assignments. He had even been asked by Missouri House Democrat leadership to consider not running for re-election.

You know it’s got to be bad when even the party leadership didn’t want him to run.

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This does not bode well for New York City.

It looks like NYPD officers of the Muslim faith are getting a pass when it comes misconduct…with one former officer having been accused of murder and others accused of harassing a law abiding citizen walking her dog.

To quote Ed Driscoll, “Gooder And Harder, Fun City.”

Those New Yorkers who actually showed up to vote during the mayoral election (and those who couldn’t bother to vote, over 50% of registered voters in NYC) are getting exactly what they wanted...and it’s only going to get worse. The above are only two examples of the planned collapse of New York City with the full cooperation of the Democrat Party.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where the weather has been getting colder, the leaves are being cleaned up...for the most part, and where Monday is yet again coming around to harsh our weekend.

The Fallout

I will admit my disappointment that the elections results from the November 3rd mid-term elections were less than stellar for the GOP, and dare I say, for the nation in general. I certainly didn’t expect the blowout that took place with a lot of Republicans being voted out of office, even in nominally Red states.

I worked the election in our town and I can say I wasn’t surprised at the heavy turnout. When the doors at our polling place in town opened at 7AM there was a line out the door and down the street of people waiting to vote. It was busy for most of the day with brief lulls here and there lasting a half hour at most. We had an over 60% voter turnout in our town. (It was probably closer to 70%, but I don’t remember the exact numbers.) This was pretty much the case across the state. I have feeling it was much the same elsewhere in the US.
I had hoped we would see either the open US Senate seat here in New Hampshire or the open 1st Congressional district got to the GOP candidate. Neither of those played out. I was hopeful that at least the 1st Congressional district would have gone to the GOP candidate, Antony DiLorenzo, a businessman employing a lot of New Hampshire residents. Instead it went to a political newcomer with no real history of accomplishments that I think got elected because of her last name – Shaheen – the same last name as our former governor and now former US Senator Jeanne Shaheen.

We also saw a shift in our state legislature with both the state House and Senate going from GOP majority to Democrat majority. The one saving grace there is that Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte was re-elected so the Democrats will not have free reign within the state.

I could go on and on about the election outcome in other states, but that would make this post 100,000 words long. The one thing I can say that I think we will be living the reality of that ancient Chinese curse:

“May you live in interesting times.”

I have a feeling the next two years are going to be interesting...and I have to wonder if the folks who voted for Democrats this year may end up with buyer’s remorse as the see the folks they voted into office won’t be delivering upon their campaign promises, but will have a major negative effect on the economy. I am waiting for more taxes, more government spending, even bigger deficits, and even more ‘benefits’ being bestowed upon illegal immigrants who shouldn’t even be here.

All I am hoping for is that they don’t do so much damage to the country that there will be no coming back.

Friday Funny - Trying To Live Free Or Die

Thoughts On A Sunday

There’s something I’d like to mention right at the start: For some reason my humble little blog saw over 650,000 visitors in October. I have no idea why. At best I might see less than a tenth of that every month. I only post three days a week, and only one post on each of those three days. My stats page also says I have had over 3.3 million visitors over the past 24 years. (There are a couple of year’s worth of data missing as I did host this blog on other platforms here and there, but I doubt that would have a major effect on the visitor count.) Oh, and I am not boasting as I really haven’t paid a lot of attention to the blog stats. I usually look at the stats to see which posts saw traffic over previous month. I hadn’t paid attention to the weekly or monthly stats

I must be doing something right. Now if I could only figure out how to fix the commenting so I can turn it back on….

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It was Halloween yesterday and the little ghosties and goblins were out last night trick or treating. We generally don’t see any here at The Gulch as we are off the beaten path and we don’t have any families in my neighborhood with kids. The same was true over at The Manse. (Interestingly enough the two are on opposites sides of the same hill.) Both The Gulch and The Manse are in neighborhoods that have about half of the homes being seasonal residences that are not presently occupied by the owners. Many of the ‘seasonal’ families do have children, but we only see them in the summer, something that isn’t all that surprising in a town that is basically a ‘lake’ town.

The kids who were trick or treating last night most likely went to our ‘downtown’ village which has a lot of homes and where the main roads are closed to vehicular traffic, making it safer for the kids walking from home to home. From my understanding it was quite busy which is something nice to hear.

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The first day back on Standard Time has been disconcerting. I know my cat certainly hasn’t liked it as it meant she got fed an hour later than usual this morning and she let me know her displeasure.

I have never cared for the twice yearly change and would be quite pleased to stay on DST year round. That we live on the eastern edge on the Eastern Time Zone certainly has something to do with it. Were we to remain on Standard Time year round we could look forward to sunrise on June 21st taking place at 4:06AM here at The Manse. Thanks but no thanks. I’d rather have a late sunrise (8:15AM) on the first day of Winter and have sunset at past 5PM that same day. Some claim it would be dangerous for kids to be going to school in the dark, but for a lot of kids around here that’s going to happen anyway as some have to catch a school bus at 6AM to get to school on time which is more than an hour before sunrise when on Standard Time. As I have said more than once, I think New Hampshire and Maine should stay on DST year round, or change from the Eastern Time Zone to the Atlantic Time Zone if we have to remain on Standard Time.

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I will be working the polls on Tuesday, being an election official and all that. It will be a long day that starts well before the polls open a 7AM and it won’t end until well after the polls close at 7PM. If history serves as any example I expect we won’t finish the hand counts (mostly write-ins) and finalizing and signing the vote tallies until 9PM. If nothing else, this election will certainly be interesting.

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Is it time to abandon ObamaCare, aka ACA? It certainly hasn’t kept its promises as it has seen health insurance premiums rise while also reducing the amount of health care available. Some are saying that was its purpose to begin with, to force socialized medicine upon us.

The more I look the more I am beginning to thinks that is indeed the case. It doesn’t help that it looks like Obamacare premiums are expected to rise 13% next year.

On Friday, the federal government published the proposed 2027 insurance rates for 30 states with marketplaces managed by the federal government. According to an analysis by the health research organization KFF, the average cost of health insurance premiums in the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace is expected to rise by 13 percent next year.

Projections show that premiums for employer plans could rise by about 10 percent in 2027, while premiums for federal workers are also set to increase by over 10 percent.

A KFF poll found that health care affordability remains a major economic concern for voters heading into the midterm elections. Approximately 60 percent of registered voters said they were worried about being able to afford healthcare for themselves and their families.

Of course I expect the Democrats will point their fingers at Trump for this even though this is what Obama wanted the ACA to do.

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Sometimes parody is closer to the truth than most people realize. All we need to do is look to Alaska to see how that may be the case.

Alaska Democrats Caught Busing In Thousands Of Dan Sullivans https://t.co/Lz7bRBBynp

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 31, 2026

Somehow, this doesn’t seem so farfteched.

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This is an abbreviated version of TOAS as I have had to deal with a slight problem rather unexpectedly. It’s nothing to worry about. Rather it’s something annoying that I can’t put aside easily.

This has been the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where the weather can’t seem to make up its mind, most of the leaves here at The Gulch have fallen from the trees, and where I’ll have to clean the gutters at the front of the house tomorrow after work.

New Nukes? - Part 2

As I promised last week, this post will be bringing forward information about the developing nuclear renaissance taking place, specifically in the US. While most news about this renewal in interest in nuclear power had dealt with the theoretical, it has now shifted into actual hardware and new plants being built. Despite what the proponents of renewable energy have been selling, renewables will never be able to meet our growing demand for electricity, particularly in light the ongoing development and construction of data centers. Since I doubt we’ll see new coal plants being built and natural gas fueled combined cycle powerplants are limited in some areas because there aren’t enough pipelines to feed them, that pretty much leaves nuclear. As I have mentioned both in other posts and comments, “This isn’t your grandfather’s nuclear power.” My post of last week delved into some of the why’s of the push for a return to nuclear power, but not so much the nuts and bolts or the progress that has been made to date. It’s time to fix that lack.

One of the bits of interesting news is that Amazon is funding the construction of a dozen small modular reactors at the site of an old coal power plant in Indiana.

Amazon is funding development of a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear plant in Indiana and would be the first customer to buy its power, the companies announced Monday. Utility company American Electric Power (AEP) would operate the plant. X-energy, which designs small modular nuclear reactors and went public in April, would supply the reactors.

The new power plant would consist of 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors and be located on the site of a demolished coal power plant just south of Terre Haute. The deal is the second commercial agreement between Amazon and X-energy, and it’s three times larger than the first, which was announced two years ago.

Amazon has invested heavily in X-energy, leading a $700 million Series C-1 round in October 2024. The two companies have said they ultimately plan to build 5 gigawatts of new nuclear generating capacity in the U.S. by 2039.

Unlike many newly announced power plants, these reactors would be connected to the public electric grid, though Amazon says the power would also serve its data centers.

I have a feeling that this will be a common scenario of those building such nuclear plants to provide power for data centers: selling the excess to the electrical utilities. Since Jeff Bezos’ Amazon is doing this, I have no doubt that Bill Gates Terra Power will use the same model to power his data centers. Call it a “twofer” with the data centers getting the power they need while also making extra money selling power to the utilities. And since these reactors are relatively small compared to the One Big Nuclear Plant of the past and are modular in design and construction, the time to build will be much shorter and the costs a lot less since all of the module components are built on an assembly line rather than being custom built one at a time.

It must also be understood that there isn’t just one reactor technology being used. Some use a more traditional U₂₃₅ type fuel cycle, some are using pebble bed gas cooled designs, some liquid metal cooled reactor designs, some molten salt reactor (MSR) designs, and some liquid fluorine thorium reactor (LFTR) designs. The one thing they all have in common is that they are not just knockoffs of granddad’s Generation II reactor designs. One of the nice things about the MSR and LFTR designs is that they can use the ‘depleted’ fuel from old Gen II reactors to fuel these new reactors. That can help eliminate the need to store that depleted fuel for 25,000+ years as is done now. We have tons of such fuel sitting in storage casks waiting to be put to use.

A lot of this technology is no longer on the drawing board. It is being built. Some reactors using the new designs have been built and have reached criticality, meaning a self-sustaining nuclear reaction, proving that the designs work. Here’s a look at what’s being done in the US:


It’s not just the US forging ahead with new nuclear power technologies. Believe it or not Denmark has also been a leader in one of these technologies.


I don’t recall seeing this amount of work being done on nuclear power since the early 1960’s. Sorry, I don’t have any memories of the ‘excitement’ of nuclear power in the 1950’s since I was too young. But I saw presentations made at school assemblies about the promise of nuclear power while I was in elementary and junior high school. That there isn’t just one path to create a nuclear power renaissance is promising. That there are also some states, mine included, that want to see such a renaissance, to see a resurgence in the use of nuclear power to meet our present and future energy needs is also promising.

Let’s hope it all comes to be.

Friday Funny - Halloween: Vote For My House

Thoughts On A Sunday

It is fully fall here at the lake. The foliage is just a little past peak color and we’ve been seeing some overnight temperatures at or just above freezing. (No frost here at The Gulch yet.) Summer clothes have been swapped out for fall/winter attire more appropriate for the temperatures and weather. The Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout has been pulled from the water and I have emptied out the boating gear and done some cleanup and it’s ready for its trip to one of the local boatyards for winterization and shrinkwrapping. Then it’s back to The Farm where it will be until the start of boating season next May.

The trusty RAM 1500 will be having a little more bodywork taken care of and then to one of the local mechanics garages to have the heating looked at and repaired. And then it will have its annual undercoating performed to protect it from winter road conditions (meaning the salt used to keep the roads from freezing up).

There will be some curtains that will need to be swapped out here at The Gulch, replacing sheers with thermals in order to help keep fall and winter chills in abeyance. There are also things that need to be moved in the garage to make it easier to deal with the winter weather once it arrives.

And we haven’t even reached Election Day yet!

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I found this on Instapundit earlier and found it intriguing for two reasons as it involves Elon Musk, one pro and one con.

The first paints Musk as a savior as ‘X’ seems to be the only thing keeping democracy alive in France.

The second refers to an “Elon Musk hit piece movie” that flopped bigly in movie theaters and has already been pulled.

It seems that some people only see him as an evil trillionaire who is enslaving the planet and others see him as a self-made trillionaire who is doing things people have only dreamed about doing, has made millionaires of many of his employees (even some of the janitors), and has even more ambitious ideas to expand humanity’s reach outside Earth’s atmosphere.

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Yeah, this sounds right on the money.

I get tired of Democrats claiming to be on the “right side of history” when both their past and their present are so utterly sordid and destructive. So, if you are a Democrat, let me tell you about MY side of history and YOUR side of history. My side of history is Cato the Elder, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Irving Babbitt and William F. Buckley.  Your side of history is Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, Josef Stalin, Mao’s Little Red Book and Noam Chomsky. My side of history is George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.  Your side of history is Tories who fled to Canada, Jefferson Davis, Woodrow Wilson, Bull Connor, George Wallace and Nancy Pelosi. My side of history is freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of religion and spirited debate.  Your side of history is ThoughtCrime, Speech Codes, religious persecution and Cancel Culture. My side of history is Brown v. Board of Ed., Loving v. VA, Gitlow v. NY, and Heller v. DC.  Your side of history is Dred Scott, Korematsu and Roe v. Wade. My side of history is Jackie Robinson.  Your side of history is Colin Kaepernick. My side of history is head held high, standing straight, hand over heart.  Your side of history is sullen glances at the ground, kneeling. My side of history is the family as the foundation of society. Your side of history is mutilating confused children. My side of history is the rockets’ red glare.  Your side of history is imagine no religion. My side of history is firefighters going up the stairs into the Twin Towers.  Your side of history is 28-year-old men playing Call of Duty in their mothers’ basements. My side of history is smoked brisket.  Your side of history is a no-foam, no-sugar, soy latte. My side of history is Lincoln freeing the slaves and General Patton liberating Buchenwald.  Your side of history is Fort Sumter, the Gulag and Pol Pot’s killing fields. My side of history is Mel Brooks.  Your side of history is Amy Schumer. My side of history is all men and women are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.  Your side of history is critical theory and only some lives matter. My side of history is 20-year-olds storming Omaha Beach. Your side of history is 20-year-olds in their safe spaces with adult coloring books. My side of history is American men and women disabled by an IED.  Your side of history is American men and women disabled by anxiety. My side of history is the Kentucky Rifle, the Springfield 1861, the M1911, the M1 Garand, the M14 and the AR15.  Your side of history is whimpering submission. My side of history is Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers, Apollo 11 and Jonas Salk.  Your side of history is “global warming,” 100+ genders and porous cloth masks stopping viruses. My side is of history is laughing babies.  Your side of history is selling aborted baby parts on the open market. My side of history is the Sistine Chapel and Monet’s water lilies.  Your side of history is an inverted crucifix in a bottle of urine. My side of history is construction.  Your side of history is deconstruction. My side of history is civilization.  Your side of history is nihilism. And, MOST OF ALL: My side of history is liberty.  Your side of history is tyranny. *finis*

— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) May 12, 2023

Nothing more need be said.

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Yeah, this is going to work out well. NOT.

Ideologues Try Their Hand At Ordering Up An Electrical Grid Powered Only By “Renewables”

That sounds more like fever dream by folks who are seriously ill.

In my post several days ago on October 18, I recounted the story of how ignorant Chinese Communist Party ideologues in the late 1950s convinced themselves that they knew how to achieve limitless agricultural production by just ordering each community to produce large, arbitrary amounts of food. Do you want to double grain production? Then just plant twice as many seeds in the same acreage! The ideologues had no idea how agriculture actually worked in the real world. Within a couple of years, there was widespread famine, probably the largest in world history. Tens of millions died horrible deaths of starvation.

At the end of that post I noted that, here in the West, equally ignorant ideologues were engaged, actually for a few decades now, in ordering up an energy transition to replace electricity generation by fossil fuels with generation mostly by intermittent wind and sun. Today’s energy transition ideologues have a lack of knowledge of how an energy grid works that is comparable to the ignorance of the Chinese ideologues of agriculture. How is this one working out?

From some of the examples I have seen, I can say that it hasn’t been working out all the well. If you keep reading the linked post above it delves into one such experiment that hasn’t been working all that well because proponents didn’t do their arithmetic. What sounds good doesn’t always meet what the real world dishes out. They still depend on diesel fueled generators to meet their needs because the renewable system provides under a half of the power required. And so it has been in other places that have tried switching a large portion of their electrical generation over to renewables. But that doesn’t mean they won’t keep trying...and failing again and again.

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Something I have been seeing over the past year has becoming more prevalent, that ‘something’ being more people deciding that they no longer want to be held in thrall to Microsoft, and more specifically, Windows 11. While I never really cared for much for Windows, I didn’t particularity dislike it. In fact, I didn’t really have any real problems with it until Windows 11 showed up.

At work Windows has been the “go to” OS for most of our operations. Yes, we did use a version of Linux on some of our higher end instruments as the employed single board computers rather than just a micro-controller and we didn’t have to pay use Linux. But then Windows 11 came out and we found that a lot of our desktops and laptops couldn’t support it as it required more memory, a TPM ‘security’ co-processor, and a few other hardware upgrades. A lot of our computers that were only a few years old couldn’t handle Windows 11. What happened to those computers?

Most were returned to corporate IT for disposal, most likely meaning sold to third parties for resale on the used market. I expect most of those ended up having Linux installed by either the resellers or the new owners. Some of the computers were retained and had Linux loaded for use in the Engineering department for services and programs that didn’t require Windows to operate properly.

Out in the real world we have seen governments of entire countries decide they weren’t going to use Windows any more and have switched or are switching over to Linux. (France is one of those countries.)

One problem a friend has run across with Windows 11 is having to reverify their computer with their online banking and other apps after almost every Windows 11 update. That’s not a good thing.

Am I prejudiced in favor of Linux? Without a doubt. I have seen few downsides to Linux, at least for what I use it for. That there are Linux distributions out there that look and feel like Windows and can run Windows programs is a plus.

If Microsoft keeps angering the customers who depend upon Windows with their ‘changes’ that have made Windows 11 less than friendly, I expect to see even more people and businesses abandoning Microsoft for Linux.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has been very nice, the foliage is till quite colorful, and where we don’t care if Monday is coming around again...at least this week.

New Nukes?

As I have mentioned here and there, I have been a supporter of nuclear power for a long time. While public sentiment about nuclear power became quite negative in the 80’s and 90’s and construction of new nuclear power plants ended decades ago, attitudes and opinions about nuclear power have been shifting. This is particularly true as new generations of reactor designs have come out and some, such as those used in newer US Navy nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, have begun operating.

While a lot of people have been pushing the use of ‘renewable’ energy sources, they have major drawbacks with some of them being that they are a lot more expensive than proponents claim, take up a considerable amount of land area for the amount of power they generate, are not readily dispatchable because of their intermittent and weather dependent operation, do not have the promised service life and require a lot more maintenance than promised.

The beauty of nuclear is that it is generally available 24/7/365 regardless of the weather, time of day, or time of the year. The one downside, at least to the old style Generation II reactors, was that they took a long time to build, cost a lot of money to build, particularly when “do overs’ are ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which requires changes to portions of the plants that have already been completed, and such changes could also mean that two reactors built side-by-side using the same design would not be identical because the NRC mandated changes. However the new nuclear power plant designs, specifically the reactor designs, are easier, faster, and much less expansive to build, with most of them being built in factories and trucked to the construction site for final assembly. These are the so-called Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs, that are the future of nuclear power. Another plus to these new designs is that many of the are what are called “Walk Away Safe” since those designs do not used a high pressure cooling loop and cannot melt down. Instead, they use a system that operates at atmospheric pressure and in a number of cases, uses convection to circulate the coolant rather than pumps. If there are no pumps, there are no worries about pump failures. (Yes, this is an overly simplified picture of the more modern reactor designs, but I didn’t want to get too deep into this during this post. It is something I will delve into in a follow-on post next week.)

The nice thing about these SMRs is that they can be built to provide a specific amount of generation capacity up to about 300MW. The smallest SMR design I’ve read about generates about 15MW of electrical power. The beauty of the wide range of capacity designs means they can be installed almost anywhere depending upon the need and surrounding infrastructure. The can be clustered together to provide a total output equivalent of the older Generation II plants, meaning 800MW to 1500MW. Or they can be dispersed across a wide area in various locations which would not require a lengthy and expensive construction timetable. It could be one reason some companies planning on building hyperscale data centers are investing billions to develop and build SMRs to power their data centers. Both Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have done so, with Gates investing in TerraPower and Bezos in X-energy. Excess electricity capacity can be sold to the utilities, assuming utilities don’t buy some of those same SMRs to add to their overall generation capacity.

One thing that helps as that we are seeing some states deciding their future is nuclear. New Hampshire’s governor, Kelly Ayotte, has been pushing for a nuclear renaissance here and sees SMRs as the way to go. Goodness knows we could use a less expensive means of generating electricity here.

Friday Funny - Taking Their Medicine

Thoughts On A Sunday

It was cold this morning here at the lake, though not quite freezing. No frost on the grass or plants or windshields was seen. Some of that might be because the lake water is still relatively warm which moderated the nighttime temps. A friend of mine in a town about 50 miles northwest of here saw frost on her lawn and plants. The low temp there was 21°F, so it’s no surprise she got some frost.

However, this morning did bring a nice sunrise with a cloudless blue sky and the fall foliage at peak with the full range of reds, oranges, and yellows among the greens of the pines and some of the ‘slow’ deciduous trees. I have been sending pictures of the fall foliage colors around New Hampshire to friends and colleagues in the UK and South Carolina. More than a couple thought they had been edited for more color saturation, but they weren’t.

Unfortunately, from here on the colors will start to dull and the leaves will start falling in greater numbers going forward. It also means cleaning out the gutters along the front of The Gulch in order to make sure they don’t get clogged with leaves. The gutters at the rear of The Gulch all have leaf guards installed since they are unreachable by any of the ladders I own. At least the gutters on the front only require a step ladder to reach them.

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Sorry, but I believe that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, to borrow an old phrase. To what am I referring?

Obama, Whose Own IRS Targeted the Right, Clutches Pearls Over Ilhan Omar Raid and Wow, That Was DUMB

Barack Obama just posted a lengthy defense of Ilhan Omar, solemnly lecturing the country about how the government must never selectively target people for their political beliefs.

--snip--

Can't help but notice he omitted the part where his own administration used the full weight of the intelligence agencies and Justice Department to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign and push a fabricated Russia collusion narrative that consumed years of American politics. The same man who green-lit the Crossfire Hurricane operation and watched the FBI cook the Steele dossier into something resembling an investigation now wants everyone to clutch their pearls over questions about whether Omar was actually 18 when her father naturalized.

So it’s only the Democrats that can do what Obama did to Republicans but when one of their own is investigated it’s somehow wrong? Really?

Yeah. Right.

FLASHBACK: Obama’s IRS singled out Tea Party and other conservative groups for heightened scrutiny based on their names and political positions, delayed tax-exempt applications for years and demanded unnecessary donor information. The IRS ultimately admitted wrongdoing and apologized. Obama insisted there was “not even a smidgen of corruption.”

— Will Ricciardella (@WillRicci) October 18, 2026

‘Nuff said.

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From the “Just When I Thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department comes this winner:

Rutgers Scholar Opposes Integrated Churches Because Black People May Vote Republican

Oh my Goodness! Black people voting Republican?! This just can’t be!!!

Black people should mainly attend churches with just other black people so that they keep voting Democrat, according to a Rutgers University professor.

Professor Ryon Cobb argues “while 84% of Black adults identify as Democrat or lean Democratic, that number hides what congregational diversity costs Black politics.”

“Among Black nondenominational Protestants, that figure drops to nearly 60%, with one in three calling themselves independents,” Cobb wrote in an essay for the Brookings Institution.

Cobb, an “inclusive excellence in research” scholar considers it a “loss” when black people vote Republican.

It’s obvious to me that Professor Cobb hasn’t bothered looking at history to see how the Democrat party no longer represents the working man and is still the party of racism, more specifically the party of the “soft racism” of lowered expectations and the belief that Blacks, Hispanics, and other racial/ethnic groups can’t possibly advance without their guiding hand. Far too often that “guiding hand” is used more to hold them back rather than help them advance. After all, if they do advance they may find that they don’t need the Democrat Party or its demeaning and totalitarian viewpoints and policies. Heaven forbid that Blacks ‘leave the plantation’ without their political leaders’ permission.

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Tell us something we don’t already know.

Blue States Have Highest Electricity, Gas, And Taxes Across The Board

We are now less than a month out from the mid-term elections, and the single biggest theme that the Democrats have chosen to run on appears to be “affordability.”

How can this possibly be? We live in the age of immediate availability of information, let alone artificial intelligence to track down anything that might previously have been challenging to find. If you want a state-by-state comparison of costs for any particular thing, you can get it in a fraction of a second. The results are in: the Democrat-run states are less “affordable.”

The Democrats and Republicans propose opposite strategies for dealing with the economy. The Democrats advocate for higher government spending, higher taxes, and more regulation of business; and the Republicans advocate for lower spending, lower taxes, and less regulation of business. The states are the “laboratories of democracy,” where we get to see the consequences of disparate policies play out, and to evaluate the results. Neither party is perfect in implementing what it advocates, so there are always some complexities. But in the main it is easy to collect data that give a relatively clear picture of the results of Democrat versus Republican policies.

My home state is what some people consider a ‘purple’ state despite having a Republican governor, a Republican majority state House, a Republican super-majority in the state Senate and Executive council. Our Congressional slate is made up of Democrats, two in the House of Representatives and two in the Senate. (It is one of the ‘weird’ things about New Hampshire.)

We do have problems with high energy prices, much of which of the blame can be laid at the feet of the governor of the state directly south of New Hampshire, Maura Healey of Massachusetts, who made sure we would suffer a deficit of natural gas by blocking not one, but two different natural gas pipelines that would have brought abundant (and cheap) natural gas into New England from Pennsylvania. (By cheap, I mean US natural gas rather than the natural gas New England has to import from foreign countries at world market prices rather than domestic prices. The problem is that even with these foreign imports demand is outstripping the supply.) That certainly drives up both heating and electricity prices.

One thing we do not have that is a good thing are lots of taxes. We have no income tax. We have no sales tax. We have lowered business which actually resulted in an increase of revenues. Yes, we have high property taxes, but when one looks at the overall burden from state and local taxes are some of the lowest in the country ranking either 48th or 49th as it seems to vary a little from year to year. We have more people (and businesses) moving here.

Is it perfect here? Oh, heck no. It’s not even close. But as compared to the other states here in New England, all Blue states, we’ve got it good. As compared to Blue states elsewhere line New York, California, New Jersey, Illinois, and others, we’re golden.

Now if we could just solve the housing prices problem around here…

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This next item is near and dear to my heart, that being LED headlights and just how awful they are. I certainly have a great dislike for them because they are just too damn bright and blinding. I do have so-called ‘night driving’ glasses which have yellow lenses which help cut down the glare, but they aren’t perfect.

The reason they are so awful? The inaction by U.S. Government to fix the problem. But it looks like the Feds are finally catching up with the rest of the world when it comes to making the use of LED headlights far less problematic.


While this change won’t fix the problem of those vehicles already on the road with ‘awful’ LED headlights, it will help solve the problem going forward...but only if they allow the needed changes.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the foliage colors are brilliant, the weather has been a bit cooler, and where Monday is coming around all to soon.