Thoughts On A Sunday

We experienced the remnants of Hurricane Ian yesterday: It was cloudy until around noon and then the sun came out.

Somehow we survived it.

Ironically it’s been quite windy all day today with temps in the 50’s, but not due to Ian. We can thank Canada for today’s fall weather.

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One thing that happened Friday was the Official Weekend Pundit Computer went down. It froze and accepted no input. A reboot didn’t help.

Looking at my records I realized I’ve been using that computer – an HP – for 10 years. I have dug deeper into the problem with the help of my dear brother. What’s ironic is that I had planned to restage the computer with a new hard drive loaded with one of the Arch Linux distributions – probably Garuda Linux – a little later this year. It is fortunate I had made backups of all the data on the computer, missing only a few of the more recent files. I don’t think it will be an issue to recover those last few files since the crash of the Official Weekend Pundit Computer was not due to a hard disk failure.

It looks like I will have to come up with a new computer if I cannot correct the hardware error that caused the crash.

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When I first saw this I thought it might have come from the Babylon Bee since there’s no way it could be true.

It turns out that it’s true...and does not bode well for our nation: The Democrats are pushing an American apartheid.

In this case Kamala Harris announced that federal aid for Hurricane Ian will be distributed based on skin color.

The Biden administration will focus on “giving resources based on equity” by directing funds to “communities of color”. pic.twitter.com/uixPpyQWdU

Yeah, that will help generate more racial harmony...and help cement a GOP victory in November.

They just can’t help themselves, can they?

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I can agree with this wholeheartedly.

Only the Western Woke think the world loves them for their virtue. The rest know that the world really loves them for fried chicken, video games and consumer goods. What used to be called whiskey, democracy, sexy.

The only thing virtue signaling does for these mentally ill woke a**holes is make themselves feel better. No one else gives a sh*t and they cannot be made to do so. It’s time to heap as much derision and abuse upon the woke as we can as it may be the only way to make the woke realize that they’re ill.

Everyone is sick to death of the self-righteous woke. It’s as Tom Knighton stated, “Only the woke don’t know they’re over.”

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It looks like Dish Network is going through the periodic pain of negotiating with a content provider asking for a large fee increase, the content provider in this case being Disney. Because they can’t reach an agreement, Dish has been forced to remove all Disney network programming which includes channels like ESPN, Disney Channel, Freeform, and ABC.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this happen to Dish or our local cable TV provider. I’ve also seen it happen to DirectTV. Of course when the satellite or cable operator caves and agrees to pay the higher subscriber fees, the customers see their satellite or cable bills go up and blame their satellite/cable operator. This is a dance that occurs every few years between the content providers and satellite and cable operators. It doesn’t always lead to programming being blacked out, but it happens often enough because the content providers know they’ll get their subscriber fee increases.

I can only recall one time where a small number of service providers refused to bow to a content provider and had no problem dropping programming. If memory serves, the content provider was Viacom who provided channels like MTV, VH1, and Nickelodeon, just to name a few. The service providers were small rural independent cable operators who couldn’t justify the fee hike Viacom was demanding, so they dropped all Viacom programming. What’s ironic is that the cable operators only received a couple of complaints about the dropped programming and their customers actually saw the video portion of the cable bills drop.

Considering how awful a lot of the TV programming is these days, I’m surprised more cable and satellite operators aren’t telling the content providers “We’ll be willing to pay more once you start providing decent content rather than the garbage you’re peddling now.”

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The Climate Change faithful keep making the claim climate change is fueling more and more powerful hurricanes. However, there are peer-reviewed papers that say just the opposite.

With Hurricane Ian (now a tropical storm) exiting the east coast of Florida, there is no shortage of news reports tying this storm to climate change. Even if those claims actually include data to support their case, those data are usually for cherry-picked regions and time periods. If global warming is causing a change in tropical cyclone activity, it should show up in global statistics.

The latest peer-reviewed study (March 2022, here) of the accumulated wind energy in tropical cyclones since 1990 (when we started have sufficient global data) showed a decrease in hurricane activity. There was an increase in Atlantic activity, but this was matched by an even larger decrease in Pacific activity, due to a shift from El Nino to La Nina conditions during that time.

So, yes, there is climate change involved in the uptick in Atlantic activity in recent decades. But it’s natural.

We haven’t been seeing nearly as many hurricanes (and a smaller number of tropical storms), and those we do see aren’t making landfall as often as in the past.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the leaves are changing color, the cooler weather is here, and Halloween is 4 weeks away.