Thoughts On A Sunday

The unofficial start of summer arrived with the Memorial Day Weekend. Traffic was heavy starting late Friday afternoon and only got worse from there.

I had to go to our town hall to register my boat Friday after work(something I had forgotten to do before storing the gear onboard in preparation for launching it), and there was a line of people waiting to do the same thing. Everyone in line was there to register their boats prior to the weekend. The local marinas were also very busy trying to launch as many boats as they could because everyone wanted their boats in the water in preparation for this weekend.

Saturday morning started just as busy as Friday had ended – lots of traffic. The supermarket parking lots were full at 8AM, something I rarely see. Our usual breakfast haunts were busy as well, filled with summerfolk up for the weekend. Deb and I still managed to get a booth at one of our favorite diners after dropping her car off at our mechanics to get her tires changed over. (Yes, she still had her winter tires on her car. Maybe that’s why winter dragged on so long and our spring has been so chilly and snowy.)

The seasonal restaurants have been busy, with waiting lines being the norm, particularly with the nice weather we’ve had. (The ice cream joints have been particularly busy.)

And so starts summer up here at Lake Winnipesaukee.

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Some may not believe this is important, but to those of us who believe in freedom, particularly religious freedom, the Trump Administration’s launch of an investigation into religious discrimination against Chick-fil-A is of great importance.

The city of San Antonio’s city council voted to remove Chick-fil-A from the San Antonio Airport, citing the owner’s religious beliefs in regard to LGBTQ and gay marriage as being discriminatory even though none of Chick-fil-A’s employment policies or customer relations policies discriminate in any way. The discrimination involved came from the city council, not the restaurant chain. San Antonio wasn’t the only airport to pull this stunt.

The current fad of banning Chick-fil-A from airports in blue cities may be coming to a quick end. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) launched an investigation into the current spate of airports that reneged on agreements to lease space to the chicken giant to score political points…

--snip--

It is against federal law for airports that receive federal funds to discriminate based on religious affiliation or beliefs. Two airports, San Antonio Airport in Texas and Buffalo Niagra in New York, have kept Chick-fil-A out, citing the CEO's stance against gay marriage. The Buffalo decision appears to have been spurred by New York Assemblyman, Sean Ryan (D), who took credit for the ban on his Facebook page and denied that the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority had any need to be involved in what he was planning with the airport's concessionaire, Delaware North. "I don't believe there is anything to discuss with the NFTA on the issue," wrote Ryan. "We can't allow companies who support anti-LGBTQ groups to do business at state owned facilities."

It isn’t the company itself that’s discriminatory. It’s the owner, if you are going to believe anything these idiots claim. I wonder what these same folks would say of the owner were Muslim rather than Christian? I can tell you exactly what they would say: absolutely nothing.

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You know higher education has gone totally off the reservation when one college suspended a young single mother because she posed with a gun at a gun range.

Florida’s First Coast Technical College has a low view of the U.S. and state constitutions, according to a federal lawsuit by a student who says she’s been suspended indefinitely.

Dia’mon Dallas is suing the Florida college for violating her First and Fourteenth Amendment rights and retaliating against her in violation of the Florida Constitution.

The college, which is part of the St. Johns County School District, suspended Dallas after another student reported a Facebook photo of her and her fiance “holding legally purchased and lawfully possessed firearms at a gun range in Palatka,” according to the lawsuit.

The photo constitutes “purely off-campus Facebook communication with friends,” has no connection to a “school-related activity” and could not “interrupt the school environment,” according to the suit, meaning the college’s sanction on Dallas is retaliation.

So, the student in question was shown holding a legally obtained firearm at a legal gun range off-campus that had no connection with the college in any way, shape, or form, but some idiot or group of idiots decided that she did something wrong that required her suspension.

I hope Miss Dallas is awarded millions by the court for violation of her civil rights by the college and that the award stands as a warning to other college administrators that our constitutional rights are inviolate, even by Progressive self-righteous and willfully ignorant college administrators on the behalf of SJW snowflakes who were offended by a Facebook photo of a fellow college student exercising her First and Second Amendment rights.

It’s time for these idiots to grow the f**k up and join the rest of the adults in the real world…or they should commit themselves to the nearest mental institution because they are living in a fantasy world in their own minds are are a danger to themselves and others.

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As a follow-on, there’s this bit of insanity from Congressional Democrats. In this case it is the so-called Equality Act they are pushing that is trying to normalize purely politically driven insanity and allowing them to redefine reality at will.

Call it the equivalent of redefining 2+2=5, Pi as 3, or e=2.5 even though the math would never work. Have they considered the unintended consequences of such legislation? Probably not. They rarely do, from my experience. The damage such legislation will cause if it ever became law would be far reaching and would spare no one. Then again, the purpose of the Equality Act may be to sow just such destruction.

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Gee, it couldn’t have happened to a more partisan bunch of news fakers.

For weeks the rumors of layoffs at CNN were circulating. CNN corporate denied there were any plans in the works for layoffs.

Then this past Tuesday CNN announced layoffs.

The majority of CNN's Atlanta division, which focused on health care, was let go. The only ones left behind were Sanjay Gupta and Elizabeth Cohen.

--snip--

“There are no mass layoffs at CNN. I have no idea where that crazy rumor came from. We have recently offered a voluntary buyout option for employees, and just over 100 people voluntarily decided to take it. That's it,” executive vice president Allison Gollust told Fox News on May 7. “We have nearly 4,000 people at CNN… and around 100 of them exercised the option for a program that was offered. That's it. Those are the facts.”

Of course this is from the same CNN corporate office that said there weren’t going to be any layoffs. I’m betting this is only the beginning.

Next on the hit list is probably MSNBC as their ratings aren’t much better than CNN’s.

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If you don’t believe that cutting taxes can spur on the economy, then how do you explain this?

This is the greatly increased hiring of workers by Connecticut boat dealers after the state cut the boat sales tax by a little more than half.

…Boating companies in the Nutmeg State have seen record sales which have allowed boat dealers to hire 85% more workers after the Connecticut state government cut the boat sale tax from 6.35% to 2.99% starting last July.

Rick Dieterich, owner of Springline Yacht Sales, sold more than $3.6 million worth of equipment in 2018 following the state's tax cut, and is on track to do more than $4 million worth of sales in 2019. Dieterich credits the tax cut with his boom in business. "He said the average sale is in the $400,000 range but called them 'working people's boats,' for which buyers typically take out a 20-year mortgage."

But still, sales like those have helped marinas and boat dealers across the state stay in business and put more people to work. According to Kathleen Burns, executive director of the Connecticut Marine Trades Association, "average boat sales were up 41 percent per month, marinas reported an occupancy rate increase from 65 to 78 percent, and 85 percent of all dealers hired additional full-time personnel since July 2018." Even during the winter season, sales were up 8% when in previous years that season saw low unemployment and profits for the boating industry.

While the stronger economy certainly has also been a big boost, the cut in the boat tax has certainly added considerably to the boom. We’ve seen this before when Congress had passed a luxury goods tax that put big dent into the sales of aircraft, boats, and top-end automobiles even while the rest of the economy was in good shape. It had the exact opposite effect of the one intended, collecting far less in revenue than anticipated and causing loss of jobs in those industries. The old saw about “the rich won’t mind paying more in taxes” has been proven wrong yet again.

But that won’t stop the state of Connecticut of making that mistake again as Governor Ned Lamont wants to reinstate the full tax and kill off the job gains made. Then again, the Connecticut legislature hasn’t ever seen a tax it doesn’t like. Maybe that’s why the state is broke and its economy hasn’t recovered like those of most of the rest of the nation.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the summerfolk have made their presence known, the cash registers around the lake are ringing up sales, and boats have been crowding the lake on this first unofficial weekend of summer.

Thoughts On A Sunday

I spent part of the day Saturday at our local airport for its open house. One of the local aviation interest groups holds what they call “Touch a Plane, Touch a Truck” event which allows local residents the opportunity to get up close and personal with aircraft and ground vehicles of all kinds. One of the more interesting aircraft there was an old Soviet Air Force YAK-52 trainer, similar to the old AT6 Texan trainer used by the US Army Air Corp and US Air Force.

The YAK is configured with tricycle landing gear while the AT6 was a tail-dragger.

There were also fire engines, police vehicles, construction equipment, and a huge snowblower mounted on the front of a loader that’s used to clear the runway and taxiways at the airport after snowstorms.

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That wasn’t the only excitement taking place around here as our town also christened its new fireboat today, replacing a very old and well-worn fireboat that served our town for years. Considering the lengthy coastline of Lake Winnipesaukee and the 200+ islands scattered around the 72 square miles of the lake, a fireboat is a necessity.

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Three elections in the anglosphere have confounded the polls, giving results that were the exact opposite of what the polls would say what happened. Could it be that people are lying to pollsters to keep from being harassed by all of the “right thinking people”?

Brexit, Trump and now the drubbing of Australia’s Labor Party show just how wrong the pollsters have been. If this is any indication I have a feeling this will only get worse for the various polling organizations. When people can be attacked, both verbally and physically, for expressing their opinions, they won’t speak about it but will make it known in the voting booth. As the Progressives have become far more vocal, doxing opponents, and in some cases, physically assaulting opponents and/or damaging their property, their opponents have gone underground, showing their true opinions when it really counts and generating election upsets.

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I’ve written this here before, but it bears repeating as the over-the-top #MeToo movement has generated one heck of a backlash and unintended (but totally predictable) consequences. Those consequences?

Fewer men are willing to mentor women in business because they do not want to risk their own careers should a false accusation be made against them. All it takes is an accusation to end a career. It needn’t be proved. The accusation alone is enough to convict the accused. Even of it is found the accusation is proven false, the damage will have been done and the accused will be permanently painted as an abuser or rapist.

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Why is the Pentagon interested in UFO sightings when in the past they worked so hard to debunk them? Could it be that these days UFO’s are more likely to be advanced aircraft/spacecraft belonging to the US or other nations?

Umm. Yes.

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Despite the warnings of “true believers” about the coming climate catastrophe, most people are now balking at the prohibitive costs of implementing various climate policies. Seeing the effects of those ill considered policies, from rapidly rising energy costs to increasing unreliable energy sources, is it any wonder that the people being affected by such policies are rethinking their support of those policies?

What’s worse is that the proponents of those policies choose to ignore the unproven theories upon which the policies are based are more destructive than doing nothing at all. All one needs to do to see a small example of the disruption such policies have created is to look at what’s happened to South Australia after it implemented a change to renewable energy to generate electricity. To say things have not worked out is understating the problems being experienced there. What we must keep in mind is that the true believers want to do the same thing to the rest of us.

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And that’s the somewhat abbreviated news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where summer is fast approaching, the slips around the lake are rapidly filling, and plans for summer vacations are being made.

The Best Comeback Against Gun Control Advocates Ever

I think we’ve all heard the arguments both for and against gun control, with much of the arguments for being emotional in nature and those against being based on statistics. (That is my observation, not from some questionable media source or blog. I can read crime statistics just like anyone else willing to make the effort.)

One of the lamest arguments I’ve heard is equating licensing gun ownership to licensing drivers. One must understand that driving is a privilege and keeping and bearing arms is a right. (By that reasoning the argument could be made that free speech needs to be licensed, too.)

Then I saw the following on the ‘Net and realized those against the idea of gun control could also use a variation of the automobile licensing argument to their advantage:

To stop drunk drivers from causing accidents and killing sober drivers just prevent sober drivers from driving.

That’s how gun control works.

That’s one of the best analogies I’ve seen to dismantle the gun control argument. And you must remember, driving is a privilege that can be revoked at any time for any reason if the state feels it is justified, even if the reason is total bulls**t. That the gun control advocates want to be able to take away your guns for any reason is something that should scare the bejeezus out of every law abiding citizen.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It was another traveling week for yours truly, with a second trip down to Virginia in a month. In this case I was in Richmond to run some tests on a customer’s equipment. That part was routine and there were no surprises. But there were two things I noticed all throughout the Richmond area.

First, a lot of pedestrians and bicyclists seem to have no problem with wandering along and across heavily traveled streets with little regards for their safety. I don’t know how many times we almost collected one of those people on the hood of our rental car. I am tempted to look up the traffic accident statistics for the Richmond area to see how many car vs. pedestrian/bicyclist accidents take place compared to the rest of the nation.

Second, the one thing I noticed were the large number of empty store fronts in and around the city. I mean there were a lot of empty store fronts. Some were relatively new looking and others were in established strip malls.

It doesn’t look like things are going so well in the capitol city of Virginia, while things are booming in Norfolk and the Washington DC area. I guess there aren’t enough US government employees in the Richmond area..

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Another thing I found surprising? The CDC report showing Hepatitus A cases have increased by 300 percent over the three past years.

It seems all kinds of diseases we had either controlled or conquered are returning with a vengeance. Measles is back and spreading now that the vaccination rate has declined. The same is true of mumps. Typhus has made a big comeback for many of the same reasons as Hep A - the living conditions of drug addicts and the homeless. There are also the seemingly limitless supply of illegal immigrants crossing the borders, some of which carry once eradicated diseases including drug resistant versions of things like tuberculosis.

To quote the Instaprof, “The 21st century isn’t turning out as I’d hoped.”

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Gee, somehow they sound surprised about this.

The more people see of Hillary Clinton, the less they like her.

I haven’t liked her for years, particularly when she decided she needed to become a senator from New York. She was okay as a First Lady, but once her wider political aspirations came to the forefront I realized she was just another ambitious politician who finally displayed her dark side. Everything prior to that was an act.

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So Alyssa Milano is calling for a “sex strike” as a means of protesting the recent “heartbeat” bills passed?

As if that’s going to work because I know I have no desire to have sex with her. She’s not my type. Now if she were a blonde or redheaded Irish girl that might be a different story….

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Did Representative Al Green (D-TX) reveal the real reason the Democrats want to impeach President Trump?

Yes. Yes he did.

Rep. Al Green (D., Texas) said … that if Democrats don't begin impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, "he will get re-elected."

Green, who has called for Trump's removal from office since 2017 and introduced articles of impeachment that year, told MSNBC that he dismissed the idea that impeaching Trump could help him politically.

"I'm concerned if we don't impeach this president, he will get re-elected. If we don't impeach him, he will say he's been vindicated," Green said. "He will say the Democrats had an overwhelming majority in the House and they didn't take up impeachment. He will say that we had a constitutional duty to do it if it was there, and we didn't. He will say he's been vindicated."

Hasn’t he?

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You know the insanity has spread and is intensifying when California college students equate Chick-fil-A to pornography and Hooters restaurants. (Yeah, I didn’t understand their reasoning either.)

The Cal Poly academic senate passed a resolution Tuesday calling for the removal of the franchise, which has been a campus dining staple for 25 years, according to KCBX. However, the establishment signed a five-year renewal contract with the university just last year, reported the San Luis Obispo Tribune. It also happens to be the only Chick-fil-A in the entire county, grossing $2 million in 2018 sales.

According to Academic Senate Vice Chair Thomas Gutierrez, Chick-fil-A’s donations to “anti-LGBTQ” groups are grounds for removal of the establishment from campus. He claims that these donations don’t align with the university’s values.

But it isn’t Chick-fil-A making those alleged donations, but the owner of the company. It’s not quite the same thing, is it?

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Now #MeToo is getting people killed.

In this case a man gets on a bus in Logan, Utah. A 16-year old girl on that bus calls her 17-year old brother and tells him that the man sexually molested her on the bus. A few minutes later the man gets off the bus and the 17-year old brother sucker punches the man, knocking him to the ground where the man’s head strikes the pavement, causing head injuries and rendering the man unconcious. A few days later the man dies in the hospital from his head injuries.

The kicker? The video from the surveillance camera on the bus shows the man never touched the girl but had merely walked past her. The girl lied, and an innocent man died.

The kicker, part II? The case is still under investigation and no arrests have been made. They know the identities of both the girl and her brother. It is likely the man who died will be laid to rest before his killer is arrested and charged.

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Since the economy is booming and just about everyone who wants to work has a job, it short-circuits any claims the Democrats can make about “how bad the economy is” as part of the ongoing 2020 campaign season. Of course they can try to make the claim that the good economy is only benefitting the wealthy, but the economic numbers are saying the exact opposite.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week that "the evidence shows that most of the economic gains continue to benefit those already well-off." House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer claimed, "wages aren’t growing fast enough to allow millions of workers to keep pace and feel that real economic security is within reach." And Sen. Cory Booker broadly asserted that "Americans are struggling."

This Democratic characterization of Trump's economy is not new. Earlier this year, Kamala Harris said, "The economy is not working for working people.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer complained that “the state of the Trump economy is failing America’s middle class.” And for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the economy is perpetually "rigged" -- whatever that means.

This diversion tactic fails on its merits. Start with unemployment rates, which are at or near record lows for Hispanic, black, female, and young workers. The unemployment rate for Americans without a high-school education, supposedly a group that's been shafted in today's economy, is hovering near a record low. The rate for those with disabilities has fallen by more than 20 percent over the last year to a mere 6.3 percent -- the lowest level on record.

Yet the Democrats will try to sell the idea that the economy sucks and that’s it’s all the fault of Donald Trump and the GOP and that things were wonderful under Obama and the Democrats, something they want to return us to. Yeah, that’ll be a real selling point, telling people who now have jobs that they are better off unemployed and deeply in debt.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has taken a cooler and wetter turn, more boats are appearing at docks, more summer camps are opening up, and Memorial Day is two weeks away.

Thoughts On A Sunday

The boating season here at Lake Winnipesaukee has started. While running errands and taking care of some chores I saw more than a few boats plying the waters, including a couple of marine construction boats heading out to one of the lake’s islands.

Plans for getting the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout launched have been made, with a tentative date of May 14th. I will require the assistance of BeezleBub’s girlfriend to pull the boat gear out of storage and get it stowed away on board before we put it back into the water.

I can hardly wait!

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If you want to survive a gunfight, the best advice is to go back to basics.

As the Instaprof suggests, the first step is to make sure you have a gun.

The second step comes from Robert Heinlein, that being “Get your first shot off fast. That will startle your enemy and give you enough time to make your second shot perfect.”

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Speaking of Heinlein, here are two quotes that are quite timely.

“It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn't the whole population.”

“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.”

Sound familiar?

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Taking a look at today’s economic news – record low unemployment, record labor participation, low inflation, rising wages – one has to remember that Democrats want to take all of that away from you “for your own good” or because “you didn’t build that” or because of income inequality or a whole host of other reasons to explain why we don’t deserve economic success and that only the Democrats can provide what they truly believe we need but are too stupid to realize. They’ve been pushing the false narrative that the minimum wage is supposed to be a living wage capable of supporting a family of four and have instituted in a number of cities with the expected “unintended” consequences of job loss, business closures and relocations. They also seem to believe they can cure poverty by impoverishing the wealthy and regulating businesses to the point where they can’t even change the locks on their doors without permission.

As long as you remember that, the Democrat’s economic policies make perfect sense. Too bad they don’t reflect economic realities and will cause damage to America’s economy.

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If murals portraying George Washington in a high school named after the first President of the United States are “traumatizing” the students attending that school, one has to wonder why they haven’t been institutionalized.

Of course, I must wonder whether that is really the case as I have my doubts that it is the students really complaining. (If they are, it might be at the urging of their teachers.) Instead, I think it is more likely one or more of the administrators and/or teachers who are projecting their own feelings of inadequacy as compared to accomplishments of George Washington. After all, this high school is in San Francisco, one of the centers of a spreading mental illness that causes people to try to erase history, eliminate concepts such as manners, and chooses to reverse hundreds of years of hygiene science by allowing defecation in the streets. Or could it be Russian collusion?

In 1936, Victor Arnautoff painted the 13 panels that make up the “Life of Washington” mural at the San Francisco Unified School District campus. Arnautoff was a prominent Russian-American painter who created the murals as part of a Works Progress Administration project undertaken during the New Deal.

Russian-American painter? That’s why! San Francisco, perhaps the most liberal city in America believes their mural colluded with the Russians.

The people in coastal California have lost their minds and the best thing that could happen to the US is that they secede and form their own People’s Republic of Kalifornia (and the rest of the US builds a wall around it to keep them from infecting the rest of the US), or that a major earthquake causes it to slide into the ocean.

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Has Burger King just committed suicide? Not that it’s been all that healthy over the past decade. But offering things like a new menu of meals like McDonald’s Happy Meals may have sounded like a good idea when Burger King’s Powers That Be got drunk that one time and brainstormed this lame concept.

Does anyone really want a DGAF (Don’t Give A F**k) meal?

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It’s telling that even after the successes of the use of stealth technology by the US Air Force during the Gulf War and subsequently in other conflicts, the Russian military has tried its best to denigrate and minimize the importance and efficacy of stealth even as they have been developing their own stealth capability.

The successful employment of the F-117 during the 1991 Gulf War vindicated the utility of stealth. Soviet/Russian opinions, however, were mixed, often assuming a dismissive tone. As former Senior Research Associate at the RAND Corporation, Dr. Benjamin Lambeth, observed in a 1992 RAND study on Soviet/Russian reactions to Operation Desert Storm, “there was a tendency in some Soviet circles after the Gulf war ended to depreciate the tactical advantages offered by the F-117’s low-observability features during the earliest days of Desert Storm.”7 These claims, however, were erroneous, running contrary to findings by the comprehensive Gulf War Air Power Survey (commissioned by the USAF following the war), which concluded that USAF “EF-111s never provided jamming into the Baghdad area during the first strikes, so that F-117s that attacked the first targets in the capital… flew into, over, and through the heart of the fully operating air defences of Baghdad with no support from electronic countermeasures.”

Our stealth technology has evolved since then, is being more widely deployed by the USAF as well as the Navy and Marines, and along with networking capabilities that act as a force multiplier by giving our forces better situational awareness, knowing where the enemy is as well as where it is not.

That’s something not easy to beat.

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A new experiment has proven the Double-Slit Experiment also works with anti-matter which means that it keeps with quantum theory.

Who says there’s nothing new to discover?

All they need to do now is figure out how to build a warp drive.

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From the Just When I Thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider Department comes this.

Apparently the SJWs have their knickers in a twist over Brie Larson’s portrayal of Captain Marvel because she’s a white heterosexual female. They have demanded she step down in favor of a gay woman of color.

Really? This crap has gone too far. Hollyweird should tell them to go to hell, that they aren’t going to bow down to these snowflake idiots who seem to believe their opinions and ‘feelz’ outweigh everyone else’s wants, needs, or demands.

Maybe the only option is to nuke Hollywood from space. It’s the only way to make sure the madness doesn’t spread.

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If we need yet another example of why we should be ignoring the demand we switch a majority of our electrical production to renewables, all we need to do is look to Sweden and the major negative effects that country has been suffering when they started in that direction.

From a financial point of view, the push to renewables has never made sense to me. The numbers didn’t add up, particularly the all-in costs that also took the tax incentives/subsidies into account. From an engineering point of view renewables have never made sense to me either because of both technological issues that have not been resolved (storage) and resistance to construction of the powerlines needed to get the power from wind turbines, solar arrays, and other renewables to where it is needed.

New Hampshire saw that when a major powerline that would bring cheap and clean hydropower from Quebec into the state was killed off because of over-the-top NIMBYism and BANANA foolishness. The objections were based upon appearances even though the more critical and visible paths would have seen the powerlines buried and out of sight. What’s ironic is that many of the same people who worked to kill of the powerline project complain bitterly about the cost of electricity and the size of their electric bills. Talk about cognitive dissonance!

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the number of boats on the lake are increasing daily, more boats are being pulled out of storage, and summerfolk have been starting to get their cottages and lake houses ready for the summer.