6/17/2018

Thoughts On A Sunday

The last day of Motorcycle week is upon us as the visiting bikers get in some of the last activities of the festival and many make their way home. Some will linger for another day or two, but most will have departed by early evening today.

The large influx of motorcycles gave me the perfect excuse to not travel, giving me plenty of time to work around The Manse in preparation for putting it on the market. Yesterday and today was spent stripping the decks with a pressure washer (mostly to remove dirt, grime, and loose paint, not strip all of the paint off) in preparation for repainting them some time over the next few days. Some of the yard work was also done, though it is nowhere near being finished. (Then again, it never really is, is it?)

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This is something I think more college kids should be doing. For that fact, so should adults from the Blue urban areas.

On a blustery afternoon in April, I filed into a van along with 10 students from Harvard. We had just spent the last two days in Chicopee, Mass., where we had chatted with the police chief and his force, the mayor and his staff, small-business owners, waitresses and firemen about their struggles living in small-town America.

The undergrads were buzzing with their impressions. Chicopee is about 90 miles west of their prestigious university in Cambridge, but when it comes to shared experience, it might as well have been 1,000 light years away.

As they settled in, I looked at them.

“So,” I said, “who do you think most of the people you just got to know voted for president?”

None of the students had an answer. It hadn’t come up in their conversations and they didn’t know I had privately asked each person who they’d voted for.

So, I let a minute pass and told them.

“Nearly every one of them voted for Trump.”

My students looked stunned, at first. But then a recognition crossed their faces.

We were only a few days into a new course I had developed with Harvard’s Institute of Politics, called the Main Street Project, where students are immersed in small-town America. Even though these kids had almost all been raised in the United States, our journey sometimes felt like an anthropology course, as though they were seeing the rest of the country for the first time. And this was their opening lesson.

Too many kids in college these days, particularly attending one of the Ivies, have little exposure to rural America, so-called “flyover country”. The only thing they know about the people living there is what they've been told in their classes or by the media, and just about everything they've been told is wrong. But they won't know that unless they experience small town America first hand.

The Main Street Project is but one small step to correcting the many misconceptions people have about small town America.

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While the idea of renewable energy sounds great and billions have been spent on promoting and building renewables, the actual fraction of power that comes from those sources really hasn't grown all that much.

I could dig deep on why this is so (as I have done in the past), but a lot of it still boils down to the cost of renewable energy being very high, even with government subsidies. The rest deals with dispatchability, meaning they generally cannot supply power on demand, they are highly susceptible to weather conditions, and they take up a lot of land area compared to the more traditional coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear power plants.

Until those other issues are solved, renewables aren't really a viable alternative to the other sources of power.

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There's nothing I can add to this. Nothing at all.

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Yeah, this worked out so well the last time that they decided to try it again.

The Left has called for a boycott of Chick-fil-A because the corporate owners don't support gay marriage.

In case you don't remember, the last time the Left called for a boycott of this restaurant chain, just the opposite occurred – a buycott. Chick-fil-A saw more customers coming through its doors and buying their chicken sandwiches than before the announced boycott. How much do you want to it will have a similar effect this time as well?

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People complain about how bad the air pollution is here in the US. Most of those making that claim weren't alive in the 60's and early 70's when both the air and water were quite polluted. Since then we have cleaned up the air and water to the point were much of the pollution can be measured in parts per billion or parts per trillion, not parts per thousand or parts per million. In fact, a lot of the air pollution to which we are exposed is not generated here but comes from overseas, specifically China. Yet we have people who fervently believe that we must be punished for the pollution caused by other countries, hence their support of things like the old Kyoto Protocols and the Paris Accord, neither of which really did anything other than demand a lot of money from the US.

But do we hear much about the horrendous air pollution in places like China or India? Of course not.

One tends, as a matter of course, to inveigh against pollution in China. The world has never seen a quicker leap into industrialization than what has happened in China over the past four decades. But, we also know that industrialization is the enemy of the pristine purity of nature. And we are well aware of the fact that China sports an authoritarian government, one that keeps its hold on power by poisoning its people.

We keep those facts and beliefs firmly in mind when we examine the state of today’s largest democracy. That would be India. How is democratic India doing with air pollution? We note the said pollution is not the same as the greenhouse gases that our environmentalists hate so much. Those latter include large quantities of carbon dioxide, aka, plant food. Pollution in India is of another order.

Anyway, India is not doing so well on the pollution scoreboard. If you think that toxic masculinity is a problem, wait until you get a whiff of toxic smog.

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the roar of motorcycle engines are fading away until next year, the vendors are counting cash stuffing their cash register drawers, and where peace and quite is returning even if it is on a Monday.