9/25/2022

Thoughts On A Sunday

We experienced a blackout here at The Gulch Friday evening, the lights going out just past 7PM. It had been very windy and cool all day and apparently a tree limb decided it was time to break loose and take down some power lines on the other side of the shoreline road. After a call to the power company to report the outage, apparently limited to just our small neighborhood here around The Gulch, they contacted me a few minutes later to let me know it was going to be at least three hours before power would be restored.

It was time to break out the Official Weekend Pundit Portable Generator.

This would be the first time it was used to power The Gulch as we hadn’t had any outages requiring me to take it out of storage. It has been run a few times in the two years I’ve had it, either as a test or to power equipment at a remote project.

I pulled the genset out of the garage, retrieved the 40lb propane bottle, connected it to the genset, switched off the main house breaker, connected the genset to the outside house connector, fired up the genset and then flipped on the breakers on the genset. The lights in The Gulch came on.

The genset handled the power draw of The Gulch without a hitch. The only things the genset couldn’t handle were the stove and clothes dryer, but it wasn’t like we would have needed to use either of them over that short span of time. For a longer outage it still wouldn’t have been an issue because I can use the microwave or cook with the Official Weekend Pundit Gas Grill and take any washed clothes down to the laundromat to dry them, assuming I couldn’t use a laundry rack and dry them out on the porch.

All in all, it was a good full-up test of the generator’s capability to power The Gulch.

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It now officially being Fall, foliage season around here can’t be too far behind.

We’re already seeing the swamp maples changing color to their brilliant red. They start a few weeks ahead of all the other trees, a harbinger of what’s to come.

Peak foliage color around here usually occurs between October 10th and October 20th. Some have been concerned the drought experienced in New England will affect both the intensity and peak foliage timing, but central and northern New Hampshire weren’t affected by the drought – rainfalls were normal or slightly below normal – so there are expectations the brilliance and timing of the foliage will be normal as well.

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I don’t see how anyone but the willfully ignorant or the deluded couldn’t see this coming.

Why the mass exodus of law enforcement from blue cities? Blame the blue city officials driving it.

Democratic city mayors continue to complain about astronomical police overtime expenditures and dismal recruiting numbers in the post- George Floyd era of unrest. But this is a Frankenstein monster of the " progressive " Left’s own making. For the past two years, leftist activists have relentlessly vilified law enforcement and pushed policies to strip them of their funding and authority. So it’s no mystery why many are retiring or leaving hostile jurisdictions for a more hospitable environment in the suburbs.

Now that the extent of the damage the Left has wrought is becoming apparent, the same mayors and city councilmembers who voted to slash police budgets are backtracking and suddenly acting to increase funding. It’s no coincidence that their change in heart occurred during a consequential midterm election year. President Joe Biden, for example, is calling for more police funding. This is curious, especially since he delivered an insulting diatribe at the Police Week memorial ceremony last year, in which he chose to highlight police abuses and misconduct rather than the sacrifices made by officers.

This mass exodus has had the expected side-effect in those urban bastions of blue-think: rising violent crime rates, dropping property values, an exodus of businesses and workers along with a similar exodus of residents seeking a safer living and work environment. Yet those same blue city officials are baffled by the results of their actions and the anger being directed towards them by their subjects. (I refuse to call them constituents since so many of these officials treat them more like subjects.)

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Is conservatism being prohibited?

Yes. Yes it is.

First, Scott Adams’ “Dilbert” comic strip has lost 77 newspapers, apparently because it ridiculed “woke” doctrine…

A second case comes from the U.K. and involves PayPal. The Telegraph reports:

It all moved up a gear this week when PayPal closed the accounts of the Free Speech Union and the anti-lockdown Daily Sceptic with no explanation given. The latest victim is the UsForThem campaign, which sought to highlight the impact of school closures during lockdown. They use PayPal to fundraise, but the account has been suspended. Given PayPal’s dominance of the market, it’s quite a problem.

Tech giants are universally hostile to free speech, so shutting down the Free Speech Union–which gets a third of its membership fees through PayPal–is no surprise. The other two are anti-lockdown and anti-school closure organizations.

Finally, Mike Lindell is back in the news. You may remember that the FBI caught Lindell red-handed driving through a Hardee’s and confiscated his cell phone. The warrant supporting that seizure has now emerged.

--snip--

Of course the “identity theft” and “damage to a protected computer” have to do with Lindell’s role in questioning the integrity of 2020 election results.

Mike Lindell is a wealthy man who wasn’t trying to steal someone else’s identity for fraudulent purposes, and he doesn’t go around bashing computers with a baseball bat. This all has to do with his opposition to the regime.

I think Lindell’s theories about Dominion are probably wrong. Dominion has sued him and others, I believe, for vast amounts of money. Those issues presumably will be thrashed out in court. But why does the FBI swing into action to suppress any suggestion that our loosest election ever might not have been on the up-and-up?

Then you have Twitter and Facebook declaring verifiable facts and events as mis-/disinformation, even info that came from the US government because it doesn’t fit the Progressive narrative. Any questioning of the narrative must be quashed and those doing the questioning must be silenced, or worse, prosecuted and imprisoned.

It looks like the Democrats are trying very hard to make any opposition to their political ideology be declared ‘extremist’ and therefore illegal.

That whirring sound you’re hearing? That’s the sound of the Framers of the Constitution spinning in their graves.

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The electricity rates here in New Hampshire went up 100% last month, much of it attributed to the spike in natural gas prices. Much of the natural gas in New England comes from overseas – Libya and Yemen – thanks to the efforts of the NIMBY’s, BANANA’s, and Watermelon Environmentalists block construction of a new pipeline into New England. The foreign natural gas costs a lot more than US natural gas and has to shipped across the Atlantic.

These same folks also blocked transmission line construction that would have brought cheap green hydro power into New England from Quebec.

Now it’s Massachusetts’ turn to deal with higher electricity rates, with rates slated to increase by 64% on November 1st and for the same reasons.

It doesn’t help that the natural gas prices have spiked due to actions taking by SloJo his first day in office and much later, the sanctions placed on Russia after they invaded Ukraine. (To be fair, most of the price increases happened well before Russia invaded, Biden’s claims notwithstanding.)

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I guess it’s never too early to start with a disinformation campaign based upon TDS.

In this case it’s focused don Ron DeSantis and it’s claiming he’s “worse than Trump”.

I figure this theme will soon be cranked up to ‘11’ the closer we get to the Presidential primaries which start in January 2024.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where Fall has finally arrived, there’s still plenty of boating to do, and the foliage will start changing in a couple of weeks.