4/02/2023

Thoughts On A Sunday

Yesterday was a sad day here at The Gulch.

One of the feline contingent, Cole, passed away yesterday. He was 17 years old and had been fighting a health issue over the past couple of months, but in the end he lost the battle. He died in my arms, with me telling him I loved him and that he was “a Gu’boy”.

He and I went through a lot together over the past 17 years, both joyous and saddening. He was comforting. He loved to cuddle, purring contently all the while. He would groom BeezleBub after he took a shower because “he couldn’t do it hisself”.

On weekend mornings he would wake me up, letting me know it was time to get up and feed the feline members of the household. (During the week I usually am up by 5:30AM. On weekends Cole might let me sleep in until 6AM, and sometimes even 6:15AM, but not much past that because the food dishes were empty and I, the Food Giver Person, needed to fill them.)

Be at Peace, Big Kitty. May your supper dish always be full and your bed always filled with catnip.


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I find it hard to believe that Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House, let alone a member of the House.

Her understanding of the justice system in this country, and of the Constitution as well, is abysmal. That she tweeted the following shows that she was never fit to serve in Congress.

...everyone has the right to a trial to prove their innocence.

Hopefully, the former President will peacefully respect the system, which grants him that right. (Emphasis added – ed.)

First, the accused doesn’t go to trial to prove their innocence. The trial is for the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The prosecution has to do that work. The defense is there to disprove the prosecution’s case.

Second, ‘the system’ Nancy references doesn’t grant any rights. Rights are inherent and are enumerated by the Constitution, and specifically the Bill of Rights. The system must work within that framework or it provides no justice, just oppression and tyranny.

What’s scary is that a lot of Democrats in Congress, state legislatures, and government believe the same thing as Pelosi.

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This is something I have understood for some time as I actually ran the numbers and they didn’t add up.

‘Wind Power Fails on Every Count’: Oxford Scientist Explains the Math.

Wind power has been historically and scientifically unreliable, claims an Oxford University mathematician and physicist, with his calculations revealing the government to be pursuing a “bluster of windfarm politics” while discarding numerical evidence.

After the decision to cut down on fossil fuels was made at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, the “instinctive reaction” around the world was to embrace renewables, Professor Emeritus Wade Allison, who is also a researcher at CERN, said in a 2023 paper (pdf).

Allison noted that because solar power is “extremely weak,” it was inadequate to “sustain even a small global population with an acceptable standard of living” before the Industrial Revolution.

“Today, modern technology is deployed to harvest these weak sources of energy. Vast ‘farms’ that monopolise the natural environment are built, to the detriment of other creatures. Developments are made regardless of the damage wrought. Hydro-electric schemes, enormous turbines and square miles of solar panels are constructed, despite being unreliable and ineffective; even unnecessary,” Allison said in the report, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

I have debated about wind and solar with true believers and in every case was able to demolish their arguments with the math, and I am not talking about high end math. It’s straight up arithmetic.

I once did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about how many solar panels it would take to replace the output of the Seabrook (NH) nuclear power plant, assuming the solar panels aren’t perfectly side-by-side and the storage needed was available in order to equal the 24/7 output of Seabrook’s 1300MW capacity – it would take ~120 square miles of solar panels. (This calculation assumes winter sunlight hours as we are above the 43rd parallel up here in New Hampshire). That means destroying 120 square miles of forests and the carbon-sinking those forests provide to replace the ~2 square miles taken up by Seabrook. It’s better and more environmentally friendly to build a new nuclear plant, and in the end, cheaper to do so.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice on the main part of the lake is gone, the winds have been helping to break up the remaining ice, and where boating season starts in 6 weeks!