Thoughts On A Sunday

It was a busy Fourth of July for the WP crew, between the heavy holiday traffic and the festivities. Even with the ongoing coronavirus precautions, the beaches were busy, the lake had lots of boats plying its waters, the restaurants were busy, and the supermarket parking lots were full. It was an entirely different atmosphere than existed this past Thursday.

One thing that was definitely affected was the traditional Fourth of July fireworks, at least on this side of Lake Winnipesaukee.

Normally, we attend the fireworks at Weirs Beach at 12:01AM the morning of the Fourth, anchored off the beach along with a couple of hundred other boats. However, this year the group that usually sponsors the fireworks pulled the plug on their entire fireworks summer schedule. Another group stepped in, made the arrangements, and fireworks were seen at the beach 9:30PM last night.

We also had fireworks within a stone’s throw of The Gulch, with one of the lakeside residents having ponied up the cash for one of the professional fireworks firms to put on a fireworks extravaganza. All we had to do was go down to the end our street and watch from the road.

While we didn’t partake of some of our usual Fourth of July traditions, primarily grilling burgers and hot dogs, it was still a decent celebration. Yes, a little more sedate than what we usually experience, but under the circumstances, understandable.

********************

It’s amazing how attitudes about gun ownership change when things go to s**t and people realize the police will not be able to protect them. (Article is paywalled.)

Patricia and Mark McCloskey are the couple made instantly famous—or infamous—after a video showed them wielding firearms as they fended off protesters who had trespassed on private property outside their St. Louis home.

--snip--

If soaring gun sales are a guide, millions of Americans are with the McCloskeys. This week the FBI announced a record 3.9 million background checks for June, the highest monthly total since the FBI began keeping the statistic in 1998. Adjusting to reflect checks only for gun purchases, the National Shooting Sports Foundation says this works out to 2.2 million, a 136% increase over June 2019. NSSF spokesman Mark Oliva says about 40% of these checks are for first-time gun buyers.

This is a warning to the Defund the Police movement about unintended consequences. The more progressives push policies that mean cops won’t be around when people need them, the more they are inviting Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights to protect themselves.

Some of this has been coming back to bite the anti-gunners in the butt. They’re finding out it isn’t as easy to buy guns as they have been told. It’s the old “What goes around, comes around” curse hitting them where it hurts.

********************

We have been told by many that the “only way to save the planet is switch everyone over to electric cars.” The reasoning is that it would wean the world off of using oil for fuel. Of course a lot of the folks promoting this have chosen to overlook a few things. But have no fear, the UN has come to the rescue, telling us that electric vehicles will cause devastating environmental side effects.

While the shift to electric cars reflects ongoing efforts to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, the UN warns that the raw materials used to produce electric car batteries are highly concentrated in a small number of countries and their extraction and refinement pose a serious threat to the environment.

The U.N. trade body, UNCTAD, has issued a new report breaking down some of the unintended negative consequences of the shift, which include ecological degradation as well as human rights abuses.

The report notes that metals such as cobalt, lithium, manganese, copper, and minerals like graphite “play a significant role in energy-related technologies such as rechargeable batteries that are used in a variety of applications ranging from electronics to electric vehicles as well as in renewable energies such as nuclear, wind, and solar power.”

Lithium is the one key element in high demand for Lithium-Ion batteries, the technology that makes electric vehicles practical. The problem is that lithium is only easily available and extractable in a couple of places. After that, it becomes much more difficult and expensive to procure. There isn’t nearly as much lithium available to meet the demand if we switched over to electric vehicles. If we add the projected demand for storage tied in with renewable sources like solar and wind, all bets are off. (I suppose storage for renewables could use lead-acid batteries since size and weight isn’t as much of an issue for stationary batteries, but they have their own environmental issues.)

********************

Somehow, I think this is not sending the right message...and it is a paradox to me.

‘White BLM activist’ caught on video, accused of assaulting black man who was removing ‘Black Lives Matter’ signs.

Is anyone else bothered by this?

********************

History is being purged due to sins of the past that in many cases, weren’t sins back then. Now that insanity is making its way through science, purging the names of scientists who do not meet 21st Century “sensibilities” and were not “woke”.

The great geneticist Clarence Cook Little is getting erased for having held views that have since become politically unfashionable. His name was removed from a science building and a transit hub at University of Michigan in 2018.

This week, the University of Maine, Orono, followed UM’s lead, announcing on 29 June it would strip Little’s name from a building. “Little made an enduring positive contribution to science,” a university task force wrote. However, it added, “Major areas of his professional life violate the ideals that are central to the educational mission of the University of Maine and its commitment to the public good.”

--snip--

Absolute political purity is retroactively required of all past figures if they want to escape the memory hole. Let’s hope Albert Einstein never smoked a cigarette; we might have to cancel his theory of relativity.

“Absolute political purity is retroactively required of all past figures if they want to escape the memory hole.” Doesn’t that sound insane?

********************

Climate Change has so damaged and skewed the climate and the resulting weather that we saw record maple syrup production in 2020. This is the same maple syrup production we were told years ago would be gone by now and never see again.

“Whether that that makes you happy or unhappy have some pancakes. There’s plenty of Maple Syrup.”

********************

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where we’ve manged to pull off a Fourth of July celebration, folks have had a good (but socially distanced) time, and where we’ll have to go back to work tomorrow because it’s Monday...again.