2022 In The Rear View Mirror

The end of 2022 is only 7 hours away as I write this. I figured I’d spend a few minutes looking back on the year. With a few personal exceptions, this is a year I am glad is coming to an end. Lat’s take a look at the insanity.

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It has been a year that has seen the delusional and mentally ill, particularly those who are in power in Washington DC, tear this nation down and trying to sell us on the idea that the destruction they are wreaking is “good for us”.

We’ve seen the ‘woke’ – delusional narcissists all – try their darnedest to twist reality and society into something unrecognizable as they try to show they are “more virtuous than thou” while burning down the house that is our society they say they are trying to redeem.

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Vladimir Putin, ex-chekist, decided invading Ukraine in order to ‘reintegrate’ it into Russia was a good idea, using the excuse of Ukraine being a neo-Nazi state. His ‘special military operation’ was supposed to be able to take over the government of Ukraine in three days and the country in about a month.

Eleven months later Russia has lost much of their gains as Ukraine, with materiel aid from the West, has pushed the Russians back, retaking Ukrainian territory from the Russians. They have also been striking targets in Russia itself, primarily military bases, supply depots, other military infrastructure, bridges and roads. Russia had to call up reserves – the so-called ‘mobiks’ – poorly trained or untrained Russian civilians to fill the depleted ranks of the Russian military in Ukraine.

Russia never achieved air superiority and they lost a lot of planes and helicopters to the MANPADS Ukrainian troops used. They also lost a lot tanks and infantry fighting vehicles to shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles, forcing the Russians to pull early Cold War era armor – T62’s and BMP1’s – from storage to replace the T72, T80, and T90 tanks and BMP3 IFVs destroyed by Ukrainian troops. Ukraine also managed to damage or destroy a lot of Russian artillery and anti-aircraft systems, much of which Russia cannot easily replace.

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Finding out that the mRNA vaccines used to ‘save’ people had major health side effects including myocarditis, blood clots, and strokes in children and young adults certainly caused me to question the ‘science’ so often touted by Dr. Fauci, President Biden, Twitter, the NYT, WaPo, and a host of other DNC propaganda operations.

Also, findings that as a percentage more people vaccinated against Covid got Covid as compared to the percentage of unvaccinated people who got Covid also had me questioning the science.

On advice from a friend of mine who is an epidemiologist I haven’t received any more boosters. (He also suggested this based upon my increasingly severe reactions to the vaccine. Call it a twofer.)

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That the Twitter files released by Elon Mush have shown that Twitter was censoring content or suspending users, following guidelines and ‘orders’ from the FBI and DOJ, which made Twitter an organ of the US Government and not a corporation not answerable to the public or bound by the US Constitution.

The wokerati were upset when Musk started firing Twitter employees he found had no purpose being there other than collecting a paycheck. There were far too many Chiefs and barely enough Indians. Many of those let go had no real responsibilities. That Twitter was also losing money didn’t help, so Musk did what any CEO would do – trimmed costs. Getting rid of deadwood is what any responsible CEO would do, not just Musk. But he was castigated for doing what needed to be done.

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We keep hearing that the annual inflation rate is somewhere around 8.7%, but seeing what I’ve been paying for food, gas, propane, heating oil, electricity, tools, parts, tires, clothing, and various other goods and services as compared to the previous year, it looks to me like inflation has been closer to 20%.

It doesn’t help that the White House and Congress seem to be doing whatever they can to make things worse by dumping trillions of dollars of money we don’t have into the economy and actively working to make sure energy prices will go higher by choking off natural gas, oil, gasoline, and diesel supplies, pushing EVs even though our electrical grid can’t supply the power needed to support them. That they are also considering mandates similar to those in parts of Europe that will cripple our agriculture which will further restrict supplies and drive up prices even more.

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I am finding the sheer ignorance of our GenZ population is scaring me. Considering it has been happening on purpose means they have absolutely no frame of reference, no history to use as comparison for the things they are being sold as “The Truth” which means they will be incapable of discerning purposeful lies designed to bring about a totalitarian state as they surrender one right after another to The State, or in this case, the Deep State.

To cite Heinlein’s Commentary on Santayana’s aphorism, “Those who have no history have no past...and no future.”

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And so much for now. I think if I keep listing the things I have noticed over the past 12 months I shall become even more cynical than I already am.

Just When I Thought They Couldn't Get Any Dumber - Part 1,349,667

The thing is there are people who believe such a thing exists...and they are our future.

We are friggin’ doomed.

Thoughts On A Sunday - The Day After Christmas Edition

Here it is, the final Thoughts On A Sunday of 2022...and I’m writing and posting it on a Monday.

As explained in yesterday’s ‘post’, I was away from my keyboard as I spent the day down at the older WP Sister’s place to celebrate Christmas. One thing I can say that was a pleasant surprise was the traffic on the way down and back, being a lot lighter than I expected. It was smooth sailing in both directions. The other thing that was a pleasant surprise was that there were only a couple of drivers I saw pulling bonehead moves on the highway. I’ll usually see dozens on the way down and back from my sister’s. I guess they must have either traveled the day before or stayed home this year.

It was a long day, a tiring day, but a great day.

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Who says there’s no such thing as karma?

It looks like the Europeans are finding out the government mandate for EVs is backfiring on them as it is now cheaper to fill a gas tank than to recharge an EV.

I can see a similar thing happening here considering the price of electricity is going up, a lot of this driven by choking off the the supplies of natural gas which many utilities use to generate electricity, the dismal failure of renewables to meet the promises made by our ‘betters’, and the increasing fragility of our electrical grid. There’s also the rapidly rising costs of the batteries needed, a not unexpected thing considering the increasing demand for EV batteries, even if some of that demand has been artificially driven by the aforementioned government mandates, both here and abroad.

Yeah, this is gonna work. Yeah...any time now.

Yeah. Right.

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Is this a sign the Apocalypse^TM is nigh?

McDonald’s has announced the opening of their first fully automated restaurant. It is located in the Forth Worth, Texas area.

Let’s be honest here: McDonald’s customer service was never anything to write home about. It’s no great loss for patrons that they won’t be greeted with the barely intelligible grunts of minimum-wage McDonald’s employees who are probably high and who hate their jobs.

The noteworthiness is that this development is a bellwether of current trends and things to come. Other fast food giants like White Castle are flirting similarly with fully replacing outdated human resources with tech.

To quote an observation made elsewhere in the post, “You asked for $25 minimum wage. You get: First fully automated McDonald’s in Texas.”

When technology for some jobs becomes cheaper than paying a human being wages (and benefits, in some cases), you can expect technology will eventually replace the human being(s).

As I have mentioned once or twice before in earlier posts, our local McDonald’s had gone under renovations early this year. The changes were profound. One of the biggest changes was ordering kiosks replacing three of the order registers at the counter, leaving only one. The remaining register is not manned constantly. The amount of indoor seating has also been reduced while the number of drive-thru lanes has been doubled. Customers can also order and pay for their food ahead of time using the McDonald’s app on their phone. Then all they have to do is go in to the restaurant and pick up their food. They don’t have to interact with any of the employees to get their food.

Welcome to the 21^st Century!

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Some people shouldn’t serve in Congress because they or just to dumb, too willfully ignorant, or have malice for their nation and their constituents, or some combination of the three.

The latest example of this is Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) who claims the electoral college is “a threat to democracy”.

First, Rep, Raskin should be reminded that we are not a democracy. We are a Constitutional Republic.

Second, the Founders understood the perils of a Tyranny of the Majority, so they set up Congress and the Electoral College to help prevent just such a thing. Having the more populous states ‘lording it over the smaller states’ was seen as a dangerous thing, making them vassal states to the large states, hence the existence of the Senate. The same is true of the Electoral College because the large states would be electing the President and the small states would be ignored. That is what the Founders wanted to prevent.

Some, like Raskin, will make the argument that such a tyranny will not come to be, but there is a lot of evidence here in the US to prove that argument is false. All we have to do is look at the states since the two disastrous SCOTUS decisions - Reynolds v Sims and Baker v Carr - which created exactly those kinds of tyrannies in states like California, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, where the more populous portions of those states have marginalized the more thinly populated parts, making them vassals – providers of tax revenues without receiving much in the way of state revenues – feeding the voracious tax appetite of the cities, and getting little or nothing in return. One look at the parts of New York outside the Metro New York City area and the I-87 corridor illustrates that. So does Illinois for any area outside of the Metro Chicago area as does California anywhere away from the coastal area.

Rep. Raskin is a much bigger danger to our ‘democracy’ than the Electoral College would ever be.

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And that’s the slightly abbreviated news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where it’s still cold, the lake is slowly starting to freeze over, and where I don’t care that it’s Monday because I am off for the holiday!

Thoughts On A Sunday

Because today is Christmas Day, I will be with other members of the WP Clan. I will not be posting the usual TOAS today. Instead, there will be a Thoughts On A Sunday - The Day After Christmas post on Monday. So go spend time with your family and have a very Merry Christmas!

The Bomb Cyclone Aftermath

The so-called ‘Bomb Cyclone’ that made its way across the country made its presence known here in New Hampshire yesterday. While we didn’t get the snow and blizzard conditions seen elsewhere, we did get a lot of rain and high winds. The one thing we also had a lot of?

Power outages.

We here in the hollow where the Gulch is located was more fortunate than most folks in town since we didn’t lose power...until 6pm last night. Most other parts of our town had been out since sometime yesterday morning.

The outage was no problem since we had the Official Weekend Pundit Generator all set to go – the extra 40lb propane tank was full and I had a ginned-up cover for the generator to keep the rain away from its electrical panel. By 6:30pm it was hooked up and powering The Gulch. We had lights, heat, TV, computers, refrigerator, and most important, the microwave oven.

The other thing I did was call the power company to inform them of the outage. This is something I do even if I know it is highly likely that other people have already called them as this serves two purposes: It lets the power company know of the outage just in case no one else called it in and gets us on the ‘call back’ list so we get updates on the progress of the power restoration efforts.

One thing I did last night before going to bed was swap the propane tank – the one we used during the previous two outages and hadn’t yet refilled – with the full tank. This meant I wouldn’t have to get up in the middle of the night to change tanks when the ‘old’ one was empty. The idea of having to go out at 2am when it was 12ºF with a wind chill of -10ºF to change the propane tanks didn’t fill me with excitement, so it made sense to change them early. This would allow the generator to run for another 16+ hours before I swapped in the old tank. That should hold us until the power is restored, assuming the power company’s estimate – received during one of their call back messages – is anywhere near accurate. (I always add at least an hour to their restoration time as that seems to be the standard ‘fudge factor’ for their estimates.)

One other thing I did before turning in was to grab one of the gas caddies we usually use to fuel the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout and head to to fill it. I don’t often do this but this was more of a just-in-case precaution as at times there can be problems with the regulator on the propane fuel line freezing up which caused the generator to shut down. Since the generator is a duel-fuel unit, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to fill it. (If we don’t use it for the generator I can use it to fuel the trusty RAM 1500 since I don’t like storing gasoline for more than a couple of weeks, if at all.)

It was an eerie trip.

There were no lights in the rest of the neighborhood. No lights along the road. It was an ocean of darkness as far as the eye could see with the occasional island of light – places with emergency power - and it was like that until I crossed into the next town over. It was like a switch had been flipped since it appeared they hadn’t suffered anywhere near the number of outages we had. This was good because it meant that at least one gas station would be open.

I filled the gas caddy, hauled it back into the bed of the trusty RAM 1500, strapped it down...and then couldn’t get the tailgate to latch. I could see it was because some of the ice that formed when the temperatures plummeted 40ºF in a short period of time had jammed the latches, so the tailgate remained down. Then it was that disquieting trip back to The Gulch with the only lights seen being those same islands of light I saw on the way to the gas station. There were no streetlights, no traffic lights, no house lights, no light of any kind. It wasn’t until I was close to The Gulch that I saw lights, but in this case they were on the opposite shore of Lake Winnipesaukee a good eight or nine miles away. The next lights I saw were those at The Gulch as I pulled into the driveway.

So ended my day.

And how was your day, all things considered?

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Update: Our power was restored at 2:36pm this afternoon.

According to the power company there were 3800 customers in our little town without power until this afternoon. That means that most of our town was without power due to the storm.

Thoughts On A Sunday

Today dawned bright and sunny, a great way to offset the snow (and power outages) we experienced yesterday. The driveways were clear and in most cases, dry. The parts of the roof I cleared with the roof rake yesterday were fully clear which would make the possibility of ice dams very low. All in all, it was a good ‘aftermath’ of our first real snowstorm. We couldn’t ask for better.

We’ve been cleaning up The Gulch in preparation of the youngest WP Sister visiting for a few days. There is a bunch of baking in the offing while she’s here as she and I will be making pulla, a Swedish cardamom bread we all grew up with. My grandmother made it all the time and it was something we all grew up loving.

Something I told my sister is that we had to make at least one extra loaf as I’ve worked out a trade with a friend who is of Swedish descent: one loaf of pulla for one loaf of her limpa. Seems like a fair trade to me.

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Talk about entitled and self-important.

It seems a number of students at a private art school in New York have occupied one of the campus buildings and demanding instructors bestow A grades for the semester before they will leave the building.

According to the Instagram account New School Occupied, the students occupied the TNS University Center on Dec. 8 in support of faculty on strike for higher wages and better healthcare. While the strike ended on December 10, the occupants published a new set of demands that day that included A’s for all students, the resignation of school leadership, and the dissolution of the Board of Trustees.

“We demand that every student receives a final course grade of A as well as the removal of I/Z grades for the Fall 2022 semester,” the demand letter read. “Attendance shall have no bearing on course grade.”

So A’s will be given even if students didn’t attend classes? Then what incentive is there to attend class or do the coursework?

Just flunk them...then expel them. What makes them think they’re running things?

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We have remember this little statistic: Democrats tend to get us into big wars and Republicans generally don’t.

If one looks at the three Obama terms, the administration has sucked up to our enemies, denigrated, insulted, and then ignored our allies, doing incalculable damage to our foreign relations and proving to the world that we’re being governed by idiots and slackers.

It looks like WRBA is working harder to undo much of the work the Trump Administration accomplished, between awful deals with our adversaries, and destabilizing relations between states like Israel and Jordan.

Yeah, that’s going to make things better.

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It’s amazing what happens when the Left finds out that the rules apply to them, too.

Shock...and claims of victimhood.

Aaron Rupar was among several left-wing journalists whose Twitter accounts got suspended Thursday for promoting the “doxxing” of Elon Musk’s private jet. Having been permanently suspended myself — for nothing — all I can say is, “Gosh, it’s terrible what’s happening to you.”

Because the “Trust & Safety” crew at Twitter was apparently 100% left-wing, it was always conservatives who had to fear banishment for Thought Crimes, and now that Elon Musk has started cleaning house, the Left is claiming victimhood because not only have they lost the power to silence their enemies, they themselves are now at risk of being silenced for engaging in abusive behavior that they’ve become accustomed to dishing out, but never taking.

There old “We can get away with doing reprehensible things on Twitter but you can’t” frame of mind has been replaced with “What do you mean it’s against the rules to doxx, denigrate, and lie about people we hate – you – and that we can no longer do that?” claim of victimhood.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where we’re still cleaning up from the snowstorm, making preparations for Christmas, and trying to avoid as much of Monday as we can.

Our First Real Snow Storm - Generator Stuff

It was our first snowstorm of the season, at least something that counts as a snowstorm. We received 10 inches of snow here at The Gulch while the other areas in our town received up to 20 inches. The differences in snowfall can be attributed to the three hills surrounding The Gulch. Unless the storm is a Nor’easter we are shielded by those surrounding hills which tends to lower the snowfall totals we see here. However, if the storm is a Nor’easter, we see much higher snow totals.

One of the other side effects of the snowfall was widespread power outages due to the dense, heavy snow bringing down tree limbs which took down power lines. The power at The Gulch went out around 7:30 this morning and the Official Weekend Pundit Generator was pulled out of the garage, connected to the external power connector, and fired it up. This turned out to be the first ‘long term’ test of the Official Weekend Pundit Generator as power wasn’t restored for over 8 hours. The previous use of the generator lasted 3 hours, so now I have 11+ hours on it and have a better idea of the fuel usage. With average winter power usage, under 2000 watts of power draw, I figured a full 40lb propane bottle – about 11 gallons of propane - will last better than 16 hours. This implies a standard 20lb propane bottle will last at least 8 hours. That means if all my propane bottles are full there’s enough to run the generator for at least 48 hours continuously.

As you may have noticed I haven’t mentioned anything about gasoline.

It’s not that the Official Weekend Pundit Generator can’t use it. It is a dual-fuel unit.

It isn’t that I won’t use gasoline. I will. But it does have one downside, that being it doesn’t store well for lengthy periods of time. It can go bad over time. Propane, on the other hand, doesn’t go bad. It can be stored for years and be just as good as the day it was pumped into the bottle. If there will be a lengthy power outage then gasoline makes perfect sense, particularly since one fuel or the other could be in short supply for one reason or another. Being able to use both gives some flexibility.

One of the things that throws so many people is trying to decide what size generator they should buy. By ‘size’ I mean the generator’s power capacity. The one I bought for The Gulch has 5500 watts/5000 watts of continuous generating capacity. The reason for the two ratings is the difference in the energy density of the fuel being used. The first is for gasoline and the second for propane.

Some folks think they need to have a generator capable of supplying 100% of the power required to run their home with everything turned on. My question for those folks is “When do you ever have everything turned on? Why does your generator need to be able to carry that much load?”

Other folks think they only need a enough for a couple of lights, maybe a laptop or other computer, and the fridge. That’s great if a generator will only be needed for a couple of hours in a temperate climate. But it isn’t appropriate for a lengthy outage, particularly during a summer heatwave or a winter blizzard or ice storm.

The generator for The Gulch is big enough to handle all of the lighting (mostly LED lighting so the power draw isn’t huge), the refrigerator, the furnace (for heat and hot water) or one of the A/C units (depending on the season), the microwave, the computers (two desktops and two laptops), a TV and DVD/BluRay player, and if cable is still operating a cable box, cable modem, and wireless router. Worst case power draw was under 4000 watts, with the average power draw running under 2000 watts. The generator is sized to handle just about anything in The Gulch with two exceptions, those being the electric stove/range and the clothes drier.

About the only other decision that needs to be made is whether to buy a ‘traditional’ generator with a standard alternator or one of them newfangled inverter types which generates a clean 60Hz sine wave regardless of the engine speed. The engine speeds up/slows down as the current draw changes. They also tend to be quieter...and more expensive.

Of course none of this would be necessary if we all had our own Mr. Fusion home fusion units.

Thoughts On A Sunday

The first real signs of winter have shown themselves, in this case a skim of ice on one of ponds in our town. I spotted the ice as I was passing by the pond on my way to our town dump yesterday morning. It didn’t cover the pond entirely, with a few small areas of open water remaining. By this morning those bits of open water were gone and the pond was frozen over shore to shore. Of course it helped that it was in the teens overnight.

And so it begins.

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Anyone paying attention over the past 40 years knows the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was a bad idea, particularly since we know many of those deinstitutionalized patients ended up on the streets, homeless, receiving no treatment. Today many mentally ill are also a good portion of the homeless, even the violent ones.
involuntary treatment of the homeless mentally ill. One has to ask if it is the realization that allowing the untreated mentally ill to wander the streets is a bad idea.

For years, American cities and towns have struggled with how to address those living on their streets who suffer from mental illness but refuse treatment. New York City Mayor Eric Adams' controversial new plan to make it easier to involuntarily hospitalize the most seriously ill has set off a robust national debate about what role, if any, local governments should play in mental health care decisions.

Psychiatrist Katherine Koh '09, M.D. '14, works at Boston Health Care for the Homeless and Mass. General Hospital, and knows firsthand the many challenges of getting treatment to this population. She spoke to the Gazette about why New York City's plan is neither as cruel nor outrageous as it may initially sound and details what it takes to keep people off the streets and living with improved mental health.

This also begs the question whether or not there is a more nefarious motivation behind such a move.

Could it be that the New York Powers That Be will be using it as a ‘dry run’ to justify treating anyone they consider mentally ill? Amongst those deemed mentally ill will be anyone having the audacity to hold an opposing point of view. (That would be taking a page from the bad old days of the Soviet Union where opponents of Soviet-style socialism were ‘treated’ for mental illness, such treatments turning them into shuffling Thorazine zombies barely cognizant of their surroundings.)

If they are working to actually help the homeless mentally ill then I would suggest they also focus some attention on the rabidly fanatic ‘woke’ since it has become quite evident with time that they are delusional with some narcissistic personality disorder thrown for good measure. What else explains our entry into what Robert Heinlein described as The Crazy Years.

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I am finding it increasingly difficult to believe the election problems in Maricopa County in Arizona are merely happenstance. Too much has gone wrong in more than one election in the same place. It isn’t chance these problems are taking place. These problems were caused on purpose.

If Twittergate tells is anything, it’s the Democrat party breaks every law, violates our every freedom and inalienable right, in order to get in power and stay in power – all in collusion with our most powerful intel and LE agencies. Election fraud is but one leg of the beast.

They destroyed our election system in 2020. Now they own it.

Voting irregularities abounded during the primaries and resurfaced during the national elections. How is it it has taken weeks to tally votes in Maricopa County while other areas of equal population did so before the end of Election Day? I have a very hard time believing election officials are so incompetent that they cannot perform their duties in a timely fashion...unless the fix is in.

Is it any wonder Kari Lake has filed an election challenge in an Arizona court, alleging election fraud?

“We have put forward evidence that unquestionably shows that this election was stolen with illegal votes and likely fraudulent votes.” Attorney Kurt Olsen.

--snip--

The former conservative media personality warned throughout her gubernatorial bid that the state’s election system was mired in voter fraud.

Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake on Friday announced that she had filed an election challenge, alleging that the total number of illegal votes was greater than her opponent’s margin of victory.

Has Maricopa County been taking lessons from the folks in Chicago, famous for having the dead voting during elections, some for decades after they passed away?

There are too many unanswered questions to believe there haven’t been election shenanigans in Maricopa County.

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No matter how you cut it, this shows just how stupid and overbearing government bureaucracy has become. In this example we how Child Protective Services in Virginia have crossed the line from absurd to ridiculous.

It is apparent that CPS in Thomas Jefferson’s home state has become an inflexible bureaucracy that doesn’t truly understand how to raise children or what children need. As Glenn Reynolds stated, “There are few people less qualified to opine on parenting practices than social services bureaucrats.”

Emily Fields' three kids—a boy, age four, and two girls, ages 6 and 8—were playing outside. The Fields live in the quiet town of Pearisburg in rural western Virginia. It was there, on a May afternoon in 2021, that Fields' 4-year-old kicked a soccer ball across the road toward the neighbor's cat, which he avoided hitting.

The neighbors yelled at him and took his ball. But it didn't end there.

--snip--

"They began to scream and yell," says Fields. "They said that everyone in the neighborhood thought I was a horrible mother, and that my children abused animals, and they were going to call [child protective services] every day until my children were taken away."

The neighbors did indeed call child protective services (CPS). The agency dispatched two caseworkers to investigate the soccer ball incident the very next day.

CPS had also been called to the Fields home three years earlier, when someone reported the kids, then ages 2, 5, and 6, for playing outside while unsupervised.

I don’t know about you, but when my siblings and I were kids we played outside unsupervised all the time, usually with the admonition to be home in time for lunch or dinner. The same was true of the neighborhood kids. CPS was never seen. We weren’t kidnapped. We didn’t burn and pillage the neighborhood nor abuse animals.

The neighbors in the story above should be ashamed of themselves and the CPS bureaucrats fired.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where it’s feeling more like winter, the parking lots at the shopping centers are full, and where preparations for some Christmas baking here at The Gulch are being made.

Not The Grinch

Just what we need – Yet another ‘story’ about Elon Musk, this time about ‘firing’ janitors at Twitter. What’s worse is the narrative that he did so just before Christmas.

The problem with the story?

It’s not true.

Musk did decide to cancel the contract with the janitorial service after a number of janitors went on strike after being informed of upcoming job cuts. I can see the need for fewer janitors considering there aren’t nearly as many people employed at Twitter after Musk cut the ‘fat’. My employer cut back on janitorial services when we reduced staff at our location, with cleanings cut back from two times a week over the whole building to once a week in just the portion of the building we were occupying. That required a lot less personnel to get the job done...just like at Twitter.

No one is guaranteed a job, even union jobs. I speak from experience, having been a union member in my youth. Just because you’re a union member doesn’t mean you’re immune from layoffs. It usually means the most junior employees are laid off first.

Depending upon the terms of the contract, and specifically a termination clause, Musk may have had every right to so without advanced notice. Because the contract was canceled, those working under the contract would have lost their jobs at Twitter, but not necessarily at the janitorial service. In this case it depends upon the terms of union contract with the janitorial service.

Is Elon Musk the Grinch who stole Christmas, or did the union janitors bite off more than they could chew and Musk called their bluff?

Something Has Gone Terribly Wrong

It wasn’t until a saw the following that I realized just how effed up things have become and that it’s been done on purpose.

Tell me I’m wrong.

Thoughts On A Sunday

We’ve made it through our first week-and-a-half with our new cable provider and so far so good. While Internet speeds aren’t quite as advertised = are they ever? - they are still a lot faster than our previous provider. They allow me to wait just that much faster than the old speeds!

It’s taking a while for the WP Mom to get used to the different TV channel numbers, for the most part she doesn’t have too much trouble as she uses the voice remote to navigate.

One thing that’s no different is the bombardment of Christmas movies on Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries, WE, and a number of other channels the WP Mom frequents. (I am more of a streamer.) I don’t need to indulge in any sweets when those are on because they’re already too sugary and sweet. If I truly paid attention to them I would probably go into a diabetic coma from the sugary sweetness.

I figure I can put up with it for the few more weeks. Once we get past New Years I expect the Valentine’s Day movies to start. I can hear my pancreas screaming just at the thought.

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It doesn’t surprise me in the least that when our institutions of higher ‘learning’ talk about diversity, they are only talking about diversity of race and/or culture, not diversity of thought or ideology. That kind of diversity is strictly verboten. That kind of diversity will be punished.

Colleges and universities are obsessed with racial diversity. But a new analysis provides even more proof that our higher education system has a different and arguably more important diversity problem: a woeful dearth of intellectual diversity.

The College Fix analyzed a sample of 65 academic departments across seven universities and found that more than half of the departments had zero Republican professors. All told, 92% of the professors at these departments identified as Democrats, meaning there was an 11-1 ratio of Democratic to Republican professors.

This analysis can’t necessarily stand in for all colleges, but it’s quite similar to the figures other analyses have come up with. The general takeaway is clear: Higher education is overwhelmingly dominated by ideological liberals, with a real shortage of differing perspectives on most campuses.

“These results should be another wake-up call that higher education is severely biased and broken,” concluded College Fix editor-in-chief Jennifer Kabbany. “Higher education is one of the most important battlegrounds for the heart, soul and mind of this nation.”

Colleges and universities should be encouraging diversity of thought and ideology, not suppressing it. At that point they are no longer institutions of higher learning but centers of indoctrination and any thinking outside that allowed by such indoctrination will not be allowed.

(H/T Instapundit)

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By way of PJ Media comes the continuing saga of Twitter’s subservience to government, more specifically to the Democrats/Deep State in the US government, delving a deeper into Twitter acting as an agent of the government.

Friday night, journalist Matt Taibbi provided the first installment of internal Twitter communications. The first dump focused on the suppression of information during the 2020 Election, specifically the censorship of Hunter Biden’s laptop. According to Twitter CEO Elon Musk, there is more to come about shadow banning and other forms of censorship as thousands more pages are released. Still, taking what we have already learned at face value, some former Twitter executives have quite a bit to answer for.

--snip--

Let’s begin with the premise that suppressing the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop affected the outcome of the 2020 Election. The Media Research Center (MRC) conducted one of the only polls about how the information on the computer would have affected the way people voted. MRC’s analysis found that full awareness of the Hunter Biden scandal would have led 9.4% of Biden voters to abandon the Democratic candidate. This would have flipped all six of the swing states Biden won to Trump, giving the former President 311 electoral votes.

The linked post includes other incidents where Twitter’s suppression of free speech had major consequences, not just for the US but other places in the world.

This illustrates the Law of Unintended Consequences coming into play yet again, creating distrust, havoc, and at its worst, death and destruction.

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My thoughts when I heard there might be a walkout by personnel in the New York Times newsroom over a pay dispute?

Would anyone notice...or care?

Probably not.

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As an engineer one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to test equipment, computers, smart phones, tablets, and other equipment is the user interface.

Some are great, are easy to use, and don’t require looking in the user manual to figure out how to turn on the power. Others are awful, make little sense, have circular work flows that mean you can get from one screen to another eleventy-eleven different ways, but never the same way twice in a row.

Our engineering department has a UI/UX (User Interface/User Experience) engineer, someone who designs, develops, and tests the user interfaces for functionality and ease of use. In her I have a kindred spirit because she dislikes poor user interfaces as much as I do and we have, one more than one occasion, evaluated user interfaces on competitors’ equipment and rated them. Some have been very good, in some cases intuitive and easy to use. Others have been awful. Yet others have been somewhere in-between those two extremes. When we have disagreed about one element or another, it’s usually been a matter of degree, not magnitude.

This is an interesting treatise on user interfaces which delves into the good, the bad, the ugly, and the deceptive, and not just in the interfaces on equipment, but in places like retail shops and ads.

It doesn’t get too technical, looking more into the psychological aspects of UI design, but it does give a good look into why UI’s work or don’t work.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where preparations for Christmas continue, decorations abound, and where Christmas will arrive all too soon.

Was Twitter An Instrument Of The Government?

One of the elements of fascism is that industry is subservient to the State. We saw that in both Germany and Italy prior to and during World War II. While industries were still privately owned, meaning they weren’t property of the state, they knew they existed only at the pleasure of the State. (In the Soviet Union all industry was owned by the state.) Both fascism and communism are instruments of the Left. Fascism and communism still exist. What’s frightening is that we see some of that here in the US.

A recent example of this presence:

The revelation that Twitter suppressed free speech under the orders of the government.

As Elon Musk tweeted:

Twitter acting by itself to suppress free speech is not a 1st Amendment violation, but acting under orders of the government is.

That blows the “Twitter can block misinformation/disinformation and not violate free speech because they are a private corporation” claim out of the water. It wasn’t misinformation they were blocking, but free speech and they were doing so as an agent of the government. What did the government want to keep the from public?

As such, the folks who were running Twitter and suppressing free speech should be prosecuted for Civil Rights violations as should those in government ordering them to do so. They willingly violated the First Amendment, knew they were doing so, and did it anyways. They deserve time in a Federal Take-It-Up-Butt Prison...or maybe worse for them, in a SuperMax prison where they are locked in their cell for 23-1/2 hours a day and the only people they see are the guards delivering their meals or escorting them to and from an isolated exercise ‘yard’.

Such consequences would be a warning to others who think things like the Bill of Rights apply only to our supposed ‘betters’ and can be ignored without consequence.

This Can Never Be Stated Enough

By way of Nitzakhon over at GraniteGrok comes this reminder about the Second Amendment and what it actually says and means:

I have to constantly remind our Progressive brethren that the Bill of Rights does not grant rights, but enumerates inherent rights the citizens already have and that government does not.