8/14/2022

Thoughts On A Sunday

The heat wave we experienced for two weeks is now long in the rear view mirror. It’s been pleasant since the heat and humidity departed at the beginning of last week. The cooler weather hasn’t dimmed the enthusiasm of the summerfolk as they’re just as busy at the beaches, out on the lake, in the restaurants, and at the ice cream and farm stands.

The summer has been passing so quickly as it seems Memorial Day was only a couple of weeks ago and the Fourth of July was just last wee. It’s hard to believe that Labor Day weekend is only three weeks away. The summerfolk are certainly cognizant that summer will be coming to an end all too soon and are making the best of the time we have left.

It always seems that way. This year it’s even more so considering neither BeezleBub or I haven’t spent much time out on the lake in the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout. Normally we’d be out two or three times a week, but with the high gas prices, particularly at the marinas (about $1 or more than at the local gas stations), a day out on the lake can run through $100 in gas. I don’t know about you, but I can’t afford more than a few days like that, particularly in light of very high home heating oil prices of ~$6/gallon expected over the winter. For me that means around $1200 for each delivery.

Like a lot of folks up this way, I am on a budget plan, paying money every month throughout the year as a means of reducing ‘fill up’ shock when heating oil is delivered. This year that monthly payment is $350 versus last year when it was $168 and the year before when it was $110 a month. Thanks, SloJo!

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Now it seems a Marxist professor, Nina Turner, has decided there is no debate about forgiving student loans and leaving the American taxpayers to pay for them all.
That’s simply unhinged.

Student debt cancellation means spending trillions of the American people’s tax money to pay off the bills of a relatively affluent slice of society. One study even found it would benefit the top 20% six times more than the bottom 20%. It’s a regressive taxpayer bailout.

So, it’s little wonder that this proposal is unpopular with voters. Full student debt cancellation—Turner’s position—is supported by just 37% of the public, NPR polling finds.

Like the typical Marxist, she believes no one should be able to profit from knowledge. She comes right out and says that in her tweet. So if I develop a technology that could create abundant and cheap green energy, I should not be allowed to profit from all my work and effort? Yeah, and you know what I would do then? I wouldn’t let anyone know I have it, would be clandestine about it, selling it on the black market. And if the thieving Marxists like Turner wanted to take it away from me I would make sure they got none of it and that all the records, prototypes, and designs would dissolve in nuclear fire...taking them with it.

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Here’s yet another example of just how well strict gun control has been working.

54 people in Chicago shot over the weekend.

It doesn’t help that the Chicago PD is further handicapped by strict limits on who they can pursue and under what conditions.

And people wonder why Chicago’s crime and homicide rates are skyrocketing?

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I’ve mentioned all kinds of double standards over the years. Some are small and trivial. Others are huge and entirely in our faces. This one is one of the latter.

Trump is hounded by the Democrats and his home raided by the FBI for documents ‘someone’ said are classified.

Obama takes over 30 million documents from the White House when he left office and never got audited or raided. No one knows how many of those documents are classified. Obama has never answered that question.

What’s the difference between Trump and Obama?

Trump is a Republican. Obama is a Democrat.

Double standard much?

And then there’s the questions about all of Hillary’s classified e-mails on her unsecured e-mail server...which were never answered and for which Hillary was never punished.

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It looks like California’s carbon offset program is in trouble.

California has been using its forests carbon dioxide uptake as part of their carbon offset. However, their forests have a problem: they’ve been burning down.

Researchers have found that California’s forest carbon buffer pool, designed to ensure the durability of the state’s multi-billion-dollar carbon offset program, is severely undercapitalized. The results show that, within the offset program’s first 10 years, estimated carbon losses from wildfires have depleted at least 95% of the contributions set aside to protect against all fire risks over 100 years. This means that the buffer pool is unable to guarantee that credited forest carbon remains out of the atmosphere for at least 100 years. The results, published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, illustrate that the program, one of the world’s largest, is likely not meeting its set requirements.

Carbon offset programs have become popular action plans to combat the climate crisis. California’s carbon offset program was established to utilize the ability of trees to absorb and store carbon and applies to around 75% of statewide emissions allowances.

The program allows forest owners to earn ‘carbon credits’ for preserving trees. Polluters buy credits so that they can emit more CO2 than they’d otherwise be allowed to under state law. Each credit represents one ton of CO2. This exchange is supposed to balance out emissions to prevent an overall increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.

They don’t have enough trees in order to take up all that CO2 the carbon credits were sold to take up, and with one set of wildfires after another, the CO2 taken up by those trees have been returned to the atmosphere. Considering California’s recent records regarding wildfires, particularly since the state prevented reasonable forest management practices such as prescribed burns and brush cutting to remove fuel loading over the past couple of decades. A perfect formula for disaster.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather is gorgeous, the summerfolk are enjoying themselves, and where I hear the call of the ice cream stand...