10/23/2016

Thoughts On A Sunday

It's been a wet weekend, between much needed rain that started Friday night and continued on through Saturday, then changed to snow briefly early Sunday morning. It was 63 degrees Saturday morning. It was 42 today.

In other words, it wasn't an atypical fall weekend in New Hampshire.

With the colder temps we were induced to fire up the Official Weekend Pundit Woodstove for the first time this fall. While we could have used our furnace, as we have on a couple of the cooler mornings, this was different as the high temp for the day wasn't going to be above 50°F and it was quite windy.

While we didn't have to stoke it to the level we would need during the depths of winter, both BeezleBub and I were brought in enough fire wood to last for a couple of days.

And so it begins.

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Isn't this the pot calling the kettle black?

A Vice President who has problems keeping his hands to himself has the audacity to say he “wished he could physically confront Republican nominee Donald Trump over lewd comments the real estate mogul made about women that were captured on tape in 2005.”

Maybe Biden should take a look at his own actions before he condemns others for doing something nowhere near as slimy as he's done.

Yeah, like that's going to happen.

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Skip has the right of it, in this case about the coarsening and devaluing a moral people.

It has taken generations for the Left to get things to this point, but it appears it has reached a tipping point and that does not bode well for our nation.

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Along this same line, Skip also points us to a quote from John Adams:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The Left has worked very hard to make the Constitution go away, to declare it a “living document”, one that means absolutely nothing because it can be interpreted to meet the needs of the state at whim.

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The NFL athletes who refuse to stand for the national anthem have finally met their match in the person of Arek Trenholm, a 16-year old wheelchair-bound Florida teen.

Trenholm, who has spina bifida, uses his arms to 'stand' from his wheelchair when the American flag passes by or when the national anthem is played.

Maybe the athletes and others who refuse to stand for the anthem could take a lesson from Arek.

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Have you heard about the so-called 'miracle' of energy production, that being scientists accidentally discovering a means of producing ethanol from atmospheric CO2? Sounds great, right? But there's a problem that the media have overlooked, that being those pesky laws of thermodynamics.

I have received over a dozen inquiries about this story, with some pointing out that the researchers claimed the energy efficiency of the process was 63%. That’s not true. What they claimed was that the yield was 63%. In other words, 63% of the carbon dioxide fed into the process got turned into ethanol.

The big piece that is missing is the amount of energy it took to drive that process, and the bad news there from thermodynamics is that it necessarily requires a lot more energy to be consumed than is contained in the ethanol that is produced. In other words, if you produced a gallon of ethanol by this process, it is 100% certain that the amount of energy consumed is greater than the ~76,000 British thermal units (BTUs) in a gallon of ethanol.

In other words, the process to turn the carbon dioxide into ethanol uses more energy to do the conversion than the ethanol contains, so it takes more energy to make the ethanol than you'll get back from the ethanol when you burn it for fuel. But then this is also true of the ethanol made from corn used to mix with gasoline if you take into account all of the energy used to plant, grow, harvest, and convert the corn into ethanol.

You just can't get around entropy.

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If Hillary truly ran on her record, both as a US Senator and Secretary of State, she'd lose to Trump by a wide margin. That's why she's running on (bogus) women's issues.

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David Starr answers the all-important question, that being Who should I vote for? Hillary or the Donald?

He makes some good points, but in the end it is up to you to decide.

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Have any of you out there been paying attention to all of the election polls? I know I have, but not so much to see who might be 'ahead' or 'behind'. Instead, I'm curious to see just how wide the difference is between the various polls. At times it's staggering. So why is there such a difference between the results from various polling agencies?

It's not that they're rigged, but that they aren't scientific.

Properly done, an election poll tries to determine as accurately as possible how voters will vote in an upcoming election. To do this, pollsters survey a diverse sample of people who they hope are representative of the entire population. But since this group is never a perfect representation of the population (because it may oversample some voters and undersample others), pollsters "weight" the results. If a sample has few minority voters, for example, the pollsters will inflate the answers provided by minority respondents in order to counteract the effect of undersampling. More complex polls, such as "likely voter" polls, ask a series of questions to screen out people who are unlikely to vote. 

Some polling results depend upon weighting some factors and if they get those weightings wrong (usually by either over or underestimating some factors) the polls will be wrong. Other polls have respondents that are self-selecting, and that can seriously skew the results as the respondents aren't a cross-section of the populace. Yet others are what are called 'push polls', polls that ask a series of questions to drive the respondent to give the 'proper' answer the pollsters are looking for.

In either case, take the results of all of those polls out there with a grain of salt.

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Anthony Watts posts an Andy May review of Daniel Botkin's 25 Myths That Are Destroying The Environment.

Some of the myths:

The first myth discussed in the book is that man is the only creature that changes the environment. In truth, all creatures change their environment and the environment of the world to some degree.

The next myth is that life and the environment are fragile and man is precipitating the next great extinction event.

Myth #3 is that extinction is unnatural, but today there are an estimated 1.5 million species on the Earth and roughly one species goes extinct every year on average. Most species that have ever existed are currently extinct due to the 3.5 billion-year history of life on Earth.

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing. And if you like what the book says, consider buying it...or not.

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It's now official: Venezuela is now a dictatorship. But have we heard anything from the MSM on this matter?

Nope. Not a peep.

Thursday evening, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Socialist government arbitrarily suspended the recall effort against “President” Nicolas Maduro, demonstrating beyond any doubt that the South American country now functions as a dictatorship.

Actions by the establishment press’s gatekeepers at the Associated Press and the New York Times appear to betray an interest in keeping the news downplayed at least until after Friday’s morning network news and cable shows.

At 10 p.m. Friday evening, the Associated Press had no story in its “World Top 10″ about developments in that country. The AP broke the ice sometime Saturday morning. As of 8:26 a.m. Eastern Time (as saved here), its story about the country was ninth on the list, below one concerning the Nobel Prize committee’s inability to contact literature prize winner Bob Dylan.

So the elimination of what little freedoms that remained in Venezuela rates far lower than Bob Dylan? Really?

These people need to be fired. Out of a cannon.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has gotten wetter, colder, and windier, woodstoves have been fired up, and where Monday is yet again returning all too soon.