10/20/2019

Thoughts On A Sunday

It was a quiet weekend here in central New Hampshire. The leaf peepers are still with us, foliage colors are at peak or just past peak, and the weather has been cool. The heavy rains and winds we saw late last week knock a lot of leaves off the trees, but there were plenty left to allow the leaf peepers to enjoy.

Late Friday afternoon saw BeezleBub and I moving The Boat over to the boat yard for winterization and storage, a full three weeks earlier than is usual for me. Normally it doesn’t come out of the water and over to the boatyard until the first weekend of November.

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It seems Progressives really don’t like Rand Paul.

First, he’s beaten by a neighbor, hospitalized due to the beating he received, taking months to recover from his injuries.

Then while having lunch with his deputy chief of staff he’s accosted by a couple of New York leftists “concerned about incivility”.

The incident occurred in California, but the woman screamed that Paul and [Deputy Chief of Staff] Gor had “just ran into two people from New York, kiddo, and we’re not putting up with your Republican bulls–t.” At one point, she circles around and flips Paul and/or Gor the bird. Charming.

The incident was captured on video and posted on Twitter. Senator Paul retweeted the video and said that “while ‘the left blames incivility’ on the president, he urges voters to ‘watch this video and decide who the rude ones are.’”

One must remember that one of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is to accuse your opponents of committing acts you yourself are committing. Could it be these New York Leftists are doing just that? They certainly were quite uncivil. If they weren’t exercising Alinsky’s rule, then they were totally clueless and did not recognize either their hypocrisy, their cluelessness, or their incivility.

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

New York Governor Cuomo orders utility to pump imaginary natural gas.

After banning National Grid’s new natural gas pipeline from New Jersey, Cuomo has ordered the company to hook up new gas customers despite its lack of gas supply caused by Cuomo’s ban.

The Cuomo administration is ordering National Grid to provide natural gas hookups to over 1,100 previously denied Brooklyn-based customers.

The Public Service Commission, the state body that licenses and oversees public utility companies, announced Friday that National Grid must provide service to customers or else face “millions of dollars in penalties.”

Previously, 1,157 customers had been denied service due to National Grid’s moratorium on all new gas hookups, announced in May.

Does Cuomo also think electricity comes from the wall socket and that Con Edison can create more electricity from nothing just because he orders them to do so? Obviously, he does because he’s trying to do the equivalent with National Grid and the natural gas supply.

He can blame National Grid all he wants, but the blame is his and his alone.

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The San Francisco city government still hasn’t glommed on to the fact that no one cares if they have banned travel by city employees to 22 states they see as Right To Life states. They have also banned doing business with companies in those same 22 states.

Do San Francisco bureaucrats really think anyone cares one way or the other? Considering what a s**thole the City By The Bay has become, all of it caused by those same bureaucrats and politicians doing their best to make their city into a politically correct ‘woke’ Third World city.

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I don’t know about you, but I’d be really happy if some of our household appliances would work as well as the ones we used before these more modern energy efficient ones. (Link may be paywalled.)

In the past I mentioned the time Deb and I were looking at replacing our tried and true Maytag front loading washer and clothes dryer because they were getting a bit long in the tooth. There was nothing wrong with them per se, but we were merely considering getting more energy efficient appliances. Deb checked with Consumer Reports and found that CR didn’t recommend any of the washing machines we were interested in. As I recall, CR stated something along the lines of “It used to be that any washing machine would do a pretty good job with enough warm water and a decent detergent. However, we cannot recommend any of the machines we reviewed as none of them adequately cleaned the test loads we washed.”

We decided to stay with our 20+ year old appliances because they worked.

While it has gotten a little better, there is still a problem with some home appliances, the latest being dishwashers.

It used to be dishwashers would take less than an hour to wash a load of dishes. Now it can take over two hours and the dishes aren’t totally clean. I know my mother’s Energy Star-rated dishwasher will take 2 and-a-half hours to wash dishes and there are still plenty of times when I have to follow up with handwashing some of them. That was never a problem with her old machine.

The dirty little nonsecret for years has been that modern dishwashers don’t clean dishes well. The culprit is federal efficiency standards, which have been tightened to use less energy. Dishwashers that once took an hour from wash to dry now average two hours and 20 minutes, and even then they don’t always do the job. A GE survey of 11,000 dishwasher owners reports that having to wait for hours for dishes to be done is a major consumer annoyance.

In March 2018 the folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank, began a petition drive to do something about it. The Energy Department published the petition in the Federal Register with a request for comments.

With the almost 3,000 comments they received it was quite clear the American consumer wasn’t happy with their non-washing dishwashers. How energy efficient are these dishwashers if the need to run twice as long or you still have to hand wash the dishes you already ran through the dishwasher?

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the leaves are still brilliant red, orange, and yellow, the lake is untraveled as most of the boats are out of the water, and where cooler weather has been coming and going.