We were fortunate here at The Gulch, seeing far more rain than snow, and what snow we did see – about a half inch – disappearing by late Friday afternoon. There was still plenty of snow on the higher elevations in our town yesterday, including the location of The New Manse once it is built. (That still looks to be a couple or three years off at this point.)
It was mostly on again/off again rain during Saturday, something we have needed. The weather didn’t stop some folks from taking their pleasure boats out for a spin on the Big Lake. (I saw a couple of boats out on Paugus Bay while taking one of the feline contingent of The Gulch to the vet for a check up. I envied them.)
Some of the work on The Gulch mentioned in yesterday’s post has started. In this case I am making changes in the Official Weekend Pundit Office, removing some furniture, moving wall-mounted shelves, putting in a new computer desk to hold my work computer and dual monitors. (Using just the laptop screen hasn’t been cutting it for some work, hence the change.) These additions don’t replace the Official Weekend Pundit Computer and monitor as I keep work and ‘play’ equipment separate. (For me ‘play’ is sometimes indistinguishable from work as it usually means I’m writing, but for myself or this blog.)
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It appears the shooter at the FedEx facility in Indianapolis was ‘known to authorities’.
Brandon Scott Hole was a nutcase known to both local and federal law enforcement officials, had been reported to be dangerous and violent by family members, and nothing was done until after the fact.
This seems to be a recurring theme lately – a dangerous person known to authorities murders a number of people in a mass shooting, and those same authorities are surprised when that known dangerous person kills. In many cases that person ‘known to authorities’ shouldn’t have had any weapons to begin with because they are convicted felons or under protective orders from a court. If an earlier report that Hole was using a machine gun is correct, meaning a fully automatic weapon, then it was one he obtained illegally.
I have to wonder how many other ‘known to authorities’ mass shooters we’ll be seeing over the next few years? If I were paranoid, I would say just enough to give SloJo, WRBA, and the totalitarian Progressives to strip law abiding citizens of yet another Constitutional right? (The Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Religion are teetering on the brink of extinction, courtesy of MSM and social media corporations, Covid nannies, and woke ignoramuses.)
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With so many schools, public and private, having gone ‘woke’, parents are withdrawing their children from those schools. Some are enrolling them in other schools and others have decided to homeschool. This trend has been accelerating since Covid.
When schools reopened in our town, a full 11% of parents decided their children would not be returning. Many decided to homeschool because they saw their children were actually learning and not being indoctrinated. (I have known many homeschooled kids since moving into town almost 20 years ago and without exception they were better educated with a broader and better understanding of the subjects they studied. They also tended to be more mature than their peers in public school.)
This isn’t a phenomenon seen just here in rural ‘flyover’ country. It has also appeared in Manhattan, and has done so in spectacular fashion. In this case, a father withdrew his daughter from the prestigious Brearley School and sent a letter to the 600+ families of the school, explaining why he was doing so.
Our family recently made the decision not to reenroll our daughter at Brearley for the 2021-22 school year. She has been at Brearley for seven years, beginning in kindergarten. In short, we no longer believe that Brearley’s administration and Board of Trustees have any of our children’s best interests at heart. Moreover, we no longer have confidence that our daughter will receive the quality of education necessary to further her development into a critically thinking, responsible, enlightened, and civic minded adult. I write to you, as a fellow parent, to share our reasons for leaving the Brearley community but also to urge you to act before the damage to the school, to its community, and to your own child's education is irreparable.As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.
It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob. What follows are my own personal views on Brearley's antiracism initiatives, but these are just a handful of the criticisms that I know other parents have expressed.
I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died.
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Germany has invested heavily in renewable energy, specifically wind, and phased out nuclear power. It also been using coal plants as backups to wind, but have been working to reduce their dependence on them. Right after the first of this year Germany shut down and disconnected 11 coal-fired plants from the electrical grid as a means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
Then the winds stopped blowing.
Eight days after the phase out began, a number of the disconnected coal plants had to be reconnected and restarted to meet demand due to that lack of wind.
My question is this: Why didn’t they foresee this event? It wasn’t like it wasn’t predictable.
Germany went from having the most reliable and resilient electrical grid in Europe to the worst, and all of it done on purpose in pursuit of a goal based upon an unfalsifiable hypothesis. Germany would he been better served by keeping their nuclear plants and building more. Nuclear is also a means of reducing carbon dioxide but is not vulnerable to weather. The newer Generation III and IV plants are safer, more efficient, and if modular design is used can be built quickly.
Ask what the German public thinks about wind turbines and you’ll find that while they were enthusiastic about them at first, the reality of their downsides has shifted opinion away from them. Between increasingly poor grid reliability, the sound, the light flicker, and particularly the health effects of infrasound, many Germans wish they would go away.
Has Germany become an object lesson about how not to deal with reducing carbon emissions?
Yes.
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This is an interesting look at people’s perceptions versus reality. Even with hard facts and evidence, some people are unwilling to change their minds or perception of what’s true. This is true across socio-economic, political, and religious lines.
Let’s take a look at a few of them from the point of view of voters:
During the late 1800s when the renowned scientist Louis Pasteur was trying to overturn the medical community’s deadly belief that germs are not communicable, he wrote: “The greatest aberration of the mind is to believe a thing to be, because we desire it.” The results of a scientific survey conducted just after the 2020 presidential election show that voters from across the political spectrum have failed to heed that warning.The study linked the article do some further breakdowns of misconceptions and show us this problem does indeed exist across political lines, something everyone needs to aware of. They also need to question what they believe to be true. As John Maynard Keynes once said, “When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?”
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76% of Trump voters think that the average income of middle-income households fell during the Obama administration. In reality, their inflation-adjusted average income rose by $5,300 during this period.
88% of Biden voters think that police are more likely to use lethal force when arresting black people than white people. In reality, police are 42% less likely to use lethal force when arresting blacks than whites.
The survey also found that a considerable portion of Trump voters have adopted some progressive fallacies spread by the media. For instance, 38% of Trump voters (and 86% of Biden voters) think that the number of strong-to-violent tornadoes in the U.S. has generally increased since the 1950s. In reality, they have slightly decreased.
Indeed. I find myself constantly challenged and always have to question what I think I know. I have found from time to time that what I and “everyone else” knows just ain’t so.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where winter tried to make a return even if only for a day, warmer weather is returning, and where preparations for summer are becoming increasingly apparent.