That’s six outages since the beginning of December. The shortest outage lasted an hour-and-a-half. The longest lasted 22 hours.
This is the most winter power outages I’ve seen, ever, and winter has another couple of months to run. The snowiest part of the winter runs between mid-February and mid-March.
It has been suggested these outages are what I am calling “cascade failures”. One storm brings down a number of tree limbs and damages others. During the next storm the damaged limbs come down and other limbs are damaged. The cycle then repeats. That the storms that brought about outages had either heavy wet snow, high winds, or both wasn’t surprising. The only storm we experienced that had very few outages across the state was the one that dropped over 14 inches of snow here at The Gulch, the snow being drier and ‘fluffier’, and the winds were very light.
As I have mentioned in previous posts, I haven’t had to use the Official Weekend Pundit Generator during the previous two winters, it being fired up once a month or so to ensure it was in working order. And then in a period of seven weeks I’ve had to use six times.
Some neighbors have complained that with the recent doubling of their electricity bills that power should be more reliable, but I had to remind them that it wasn’t the utilities fault for the higher bills, but that’s a story for another time.
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The story of ‘woke’ crybullies continues, in this case a female student journalist is demanding an apology from he university she attends - Shippensburg University – because they dared showing two males in a photo highlighting Engineering studies at the university.
It’s bad enough they showed one male, but two?
Allyson Ritchey, the assistant PR director for the student paper The Slate, said that early last month the official Shippensburg U. Instagram page posted a pic of “two male-presenting students” (pictured), but less than a day later changed the original caption to “Hands-on learning at the Milton and Doreen Engineering Lab!”It sounds more like she is projecting her hostility upon anyone with ‘XY’ chromosomes. For someone who is so concerned with diversity she seems more than willing to divide people based upon their particular group.
Despite the change, there was “no comment or apology publicly made,” Ritchey wrote, adding that “if an offensive post is made […] an apology should be made. Simply changing the caption is like putting a bandage on the situation.”
She added: “For a university that, according to its own website, ‘celebrates diversity’ to make such a claim about engineers is insensitive and discrediting to the students at Shippensburg who do not fall into the stereotype. This brings forth the societal notion that engineering is unfriendly to women and other non-male identifying individuals.”
It seems diversity is some kind of “Holy Grail” despite not really being important. This is particularly true when such diversity is shoved down one’s throat. (At that point is it really diversity or is it, as has become more prevalent, nothing more than virtue signaling as a means of feeding a narcissist’s ego?)
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Mike Taibbi continues exposing more of the misdeeds of Twitter, particularly in regards to misinformation which spread false allegations about Trump’s supposed misdeeds.
Matt Taibbi released the most recent Twitter Files on Friday. The focus of this batch is the role a dubious source played in helping shape the false narrative of Russian influence on Twitter.Just another bit of data showing Twitter’s corruption.
To some Twitter exec’s credit, they were uncomfortable with the dubious claims that pretty much anything a conservative, MAGA supporter, et al. said was considered “Russian misinformation.” Even accounts that had no ties to any known Russian bot or activity were deemed to be spreading Russian propaganda unknowingly and should therefore be silenced.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. This is the same “logic” used to assert that all white people are racists. Even if they don’t think they are, they are racist. Without knowing it on a conscious level. Or something. It’s an intentionally crafted no-win construct that is now being applied to “misinformation” as well as “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.”
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This is something that has been irritating me for a long time, and has now reached the point that it pisses me off. What is ‘this’?
Demanding tolerance of the abnormal.
What’s worse is this demand is being made by people who are intolerant of anyone who disagrees with them. It’s hypocrisy.
One of the left's primary goals has always been to convince us that we are not normal if we do not affirm its ideology, a well established tactic among totalitarians. People who believe in normal things are under attack in America. We are assaulted on a near continuous basis by leftists who practice and promote behavior that is clearly abnormal. Frighteningly, some of this behavior is not merely abnormal, it's evil.They have relabeled pedophiles as “Minor attracted persons”. But they are pedophiles, predators hurting and damaging children. Yet we’re supposed to tolerate them?
The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary provides many definitions of normal. Among them are: “conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern, characterized by that which is considered usual, typical, or routine; according with, constituting, or not deviating from a norm, rule, procedure, or principle; occurring naturally.
If we contrast these accepted definitions of normal with many policies and practices of the left, a trend emerges. Much of what today’s left promotes does not comport with what is recognized as normal. Instructing children how to think and behave like racists, as happens in many government schools through variants of Critical Race Theory, is not normal. It's harmful.
Some seem to support grooming children for activities that should never be imposed upon children. Yet we’re supposed to tolerate this?
Abortion right up to the time of birth...or even after? An abomination...yet we’re supposed to tolerate this?
Claiming obesity is healthy and promoting it as such while castigating those disagreeing with them as “Fatphobic”. Working out is “Fatphobic”. Eating healthy is “Fatphobic”. Yet we’re supposed to tolerate this dangerous falsehood?
Examples of this nonsense abound.
Ordinary people are often intimidated into going along with abnormal ideologies because it’s easier than being screeched at by somebody who demands we affirm their abnormal behavior. This intimidation prompts many people to tip-toe around the fact that much of what we see in America today just isn’t normal and sometimes, we keep quiet even though we know it’s not normal. This is how normal becomes redefined.It’s time we tell the folks pushing this nonsense too far and that “We ain’t gonna play their game no more.” Normalizing the abnormal is just one more step in the decline and fall of any society. Remember the fall of Rome.
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None of this is to suggest we should discriminate against people with such beliefs as they try to do to us. Many of these people have been deceived, coerced or extorted into affirming abnormal behavior and ideas for self preservation or a false sense of power. By the same token, other Americans have every right to withhold their acquiescence of abnormal behaviors without fear. A little more ‘live-and-let-live’ would go a long way. But live-and-let-live is a two-way street.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where winter has finally arrived, the snowmobile trails are open, and where the lake is finally starting to freeze over.