8/09/2015

Thoughts On A Sunday

It's been another gorgeous summer weekend, weather-wise.

Between a Christian music festival being held at a nearby venue, another concert at Meadowbrook Farm, great boating weather, and the numerous people here getting a last week of training in before next weekend's Timberman Triathlon, there's been a lot of traffic. The biggest problem has been so many people speeding on the local roads around here. Roads with speed limits of 30, 35, or 40 MPH have been seeing people doing 50, 55, and even 60 MPH. It has certainly made it an adventure pulling out onto the state road that runs past our road.

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Carly Fiorina explains why she's running for President.

I agree with her wholeheartedly.

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It appears the EPA may have to wait before imposing new emission limit regulations because 16 states are challenging them in court, claiming they violate the law because they do not take into account economic conditions and the costs the regulations will impose on businesses.

The EPA has already been called on the carpet by the US Supreme Court once for ignoring this requirement. In Michigan vs EPA, the Court ruled the EPA “ 'unreasonably' interpreted the Clean Air Act when it decided not to consider industry compliance costs and whether regulating the pollutants is 'appropriate and necessary'.”

While the agency is afforded a certain level of power to interpret the law, the court wrote, “EPA strayed well beyond the bounds of reasonable interpretation in concluding that cost is not a factor relevant to the appropriateness of regulating power plants.”

I expect the EPA will make some minor changes and go forth with the plans it was going to enforce prior to Michigan vs EPA as they've ignored Supreme Court rulings before and gone on to do as they damn well please.

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And speaking of the EPA and their mandate to protect the environment, who's going to protect the environment from the EPA?

Considering the EPA released about 1 million gallons of mining wastewater containing heavy metals like zinc, iron, and copper as well as a number of toxic chemicals into the Colorado river, I think we need to find someone more competent to deal with environmental issues.

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It appears comedy is dead on college campuses. Thank the Social Justice Warriors, the Permanently Aggrieved and Permanently Offended asshats on college campuses for that. It appears someone will always be offended by something someone says somewhere, particularly when it comes to comedy.

I have a solution for the SJW/PA/PO groups on campus: If you don't like comedy, then stay the hell out of performances by comedians on campus. Then you'll never be offended by anyone...until you find something new to be pissed off about and then you'll make yet another group of people's lives miserable with your whiny drivel.

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When a group of outsiders come in to tell college administrators how they have to handle the overblown “campus rape” crisis when they have never run a college campus, let alone be able to find that campus on a map, you know it's going to get all effed up. It also tends to drive good people who know how to handle such things out of the halls of academia because they can no longer deal with the hypocrisy and “I/We know better than all of you” bulls**t coming from those same outsiders.

But what do you expect from a government that has an incompetent and narcissistic head of state surrounded by sycophants who also have no experience or expertise in the Real World?

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Warmists link Hiroshima and climate change.

Is there anything climate change can't do? Now it's time travel and creation and use of the atom bomb.

Not.

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Carly's kicking ass! As Jazz Shaw states, she's the “real deal”.

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As ambition as Obama's Clean Power Plan is, there's one thing it cannot overcome: the weird physics of the electric grid.

The idiosyncratic physics of electricity will ultimately doom the aspirational goals of the new 1,560 page Clean Power Plan, more than will an army of lobbyists, lawsuits and laborious studies. It is an inconvenient truth that electricity is profoundly different from every other energy source society uses; it is, in fact, weird.

The Clean Power Plan (CPP), as by now everyone knows, sets a course to radically increase the use of wind and solar power everywhere in America. And, cost aside (which it never is in the real world), it should go without saying that neither wind nor solar are available all the time.

In order for the grid to deliver power continuously and nearly instantaneously in the face of inevitable challenges (plant failures, or the highly cyclical nature of demand), operators must have access to unused capacity that is available to be called upon, any time. While wind and solar have very low average availability compared to conventional power plants, what is more important is that they have zero availability for many hours at a time every day. And similarly neither are available, even when operating, to increase output to follow normal daily and hourly demand surges.

That is their weakness. Other plants, even those fueled by 'evil' fossil fuels, will still be needed to immediately respond to plant failures or spikes in demand. Another downside: clean energy, with the exception of nuclear, require large amounts of real estate to implement. That can mean decimating the local environment, something totally un-green, in order to build these clean power systems. You rarely hear any of the proponents talk about that, do you?

To paraphrase a Vietnam War era claim, “We had to destroy the environment in order to save it.” Even that version rings hollow to me.

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Bogie talks about the town replacing a culvert on her road, wishing they had also removed the last of the poison ivy that surrounded it.

The state is going to do something similar on one of the state roads near the town line between our town and the one just to the east of us. The down side – the road will be impassable for three weeks. That means folks living on one side of the town line wishing to get to the other side of the town line will have to make a 9 mile detour. This merely illustrates an old northern New England joke: “Ye' can't get theah from heah.”

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where roads are being fixed even as the summerfolk are using them, the political silly season is ramping up, and where there's still a few weeks before school starts again.