Thoughts On A Sunday

I spent a small part of my time yesterday at the Official Weekend Pundit Storage Unit, removing some items and relocating them to The Gulch. One item was an old sideboard that has been in the family for over 240 years. It was replacing a table we gave to the older WP Sister, said table being used primarily to support a lamp, a few family pictures, and a cordless phone charger.

Other things removed were a number of Sterilite containers that made their way into the attic.

The storage unit is slowly being emptied out as things are moved, disposed of, sold, or given away. My ex still has some furniture and containers in the storage unit, but she will be removing them once she has moved to a new house.

While we managed to shed ourselves of a lot of ‘stuff’ before we sold The Manse, there was still enough ‘stuff’ left over that we had to rent a storage unit to store it. It hasn’t been easy to admit that we kept too much ‘stuff’, something I think we’re all guilty of at one time or another during our lives. I am hoping we will be able to reduce the amount of ‘stuff’ to a minimum so the need for the storage unit will no longer exist. That will be another $150+/month I won’t need to spend anymore.

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There appears to be a growing consensus that this year’s “unprecedented” warmth and humidity has not been caused by anthropogenic CO2 but by the Tonga-Hunga volcano eruption last year.

The underwater volcano put 161 megatons of water into the upper atmosphere, increasing the amount of water/water vapor by over 10%. In case anyone’s forgotten, water vapor is a particularly efficacious greenhouse gas, having a much greater effect on atmospheric and surface temperatures than CO2 could even hope to have. Both NASA and the ESA have been studying the effects of that much water being injected into the atmosphere.

One thing they both agree about is that this huge increase in atmospheric water will have a worldwide effect on climate for a number of years.

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I have to wonder if it’s time for Trump to say “No”? Athena Throne certainly thinks so.

For me, the no-longer-American justice system crossed the Rubicon when they raided a former president’s private home. That was unprecedented and tragic enough for me to lose my respect for the DOJ. And naturally, once our country tilted over the top of the waterfall, it has only picked up speed on its plunge to the disastrous chasm below.

It’s time for former — and possibly future — President Trump to grab that branch that’s sticking out halfway down and refuse to fall any further.

In Fulton County, Ga. — which was featured prominently in the film “2000 Mules” for likely illegal ballot harvesting — despicable and racialist Soros DA Fani Willis has been working on her own Get Trump! indictment.

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What if Trump simply says, “No”?

I would pay good money to see the look of frustrated rage on the Leftists’ faces when they realize he’s not coming. Trump should force their hand. Make them send armed forces to arrest him like the thugs they are. Show the captivated world that yes, it’s true — America is gone, replaced by just another failing fascist state.

I would also expect this would trigger a call for protests and perhaps even armed rebellion, something the Left automatically assumes would fail.

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There’s a new paper published by JAMA that delves into the efficacy of gun laws in reducing shootings. The paper’s conclusion?

Gun laws don’t matter...but race does.

The JAMA paper, which was quickly picked up by CNN as “Structural Racism may Contribute to Mass Shootings” and by Bloomberg as “Mass Shootings Disproportionately Victimize Black Americans”, acknowledged what conservatives have been saying about gun violence.

“There was no discernible association noted in this study between gun laws and MSEs [mass shootings] with other studies showing similar findings,” it noted.

The issue wasn’t gun laws, it was race. “The study found that in areas with higher black populations, mass shootings are likelier to occur compared to communities with higher white populations,” CNN reported. “The findings disrupt the nation’s image of mass shootings, which has been shaped by tragedies like the Las Vegas festival shooting and Sandy Hook in which most of the victims were not black,” Bloomberg added.

What is interesting about the paper is that it appears ‘woke’ medicine has infected as more than once it uses the phrase “structural racism” as the cause for of a majority of the shootings. “Such is the state of woke medical science which tries to fix racism with more racism.” Such it always seem to be with the Left that the solution to any problem is to double down by using the very thing they claim they are fighting against to cure the problem, real or imagined.

While the focus of the paper is the alleged structural racism that drives gun violence, the one thing the anti-gun and gun grabber groups will try very hard to ignore is the finding that gun laws have no effect on the mass shootings the paper covers. This is something the rest of us have understood for a long time. Then again, I think “the rest of us” have a better understanding of human nature than the Left.

I expect there will be a lot of back-and-forth between Second Amendment activists and the Gun Control advocates about this paper’s findings.

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Is it any surprise that voters are unenthusiastic about the upcoming presidential elections, particularly when it comes to donating to candidates’ campaigns?

We’ve known for quite some time that Democrats are, in the main, not super enthusiastic about Joe Biden. Despite more or less doing what he was nominated to do—defeat Donald Trump and restore a sense of relative normalcy to American politics—huge swaths of his partisans are naturally disappointed that, despite having control of the White House and House of Representatives and nominal control of the Senate for two years, they haven’t gotten everything they wanted. This was inevitable.

The lack of grassroots engagement is a warning sign for Biden ahead of a tough election cycle, raising questions about whether the 80-year-old incumbent is exciting the Democratic base the way he will need to win a second term. The new data also suggests that the threat of Donald Trump, once a huge driver of Democratic fundraising, is not motivating donors like it used to.

When a majority of the likely Democratic voters see the deteriorating Biden, their standard bearer, as decreasingly capable of performing the duties of his office, why would they give their hard earned money to support his reelection campaign?

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where we’re enjoying the cooler and drier weather, the lake is busy with a lot of activity, and where it’s hard to believe that we’re already in August.