She wanders around the house, calling out to her buddies, trying to find them. It happens every day, many times during the day since Minnie and Cole have been gone. It’s been heartrending to listen to.
I knew she needed a new companion, but it took some convincing for the WP Mom to buy in. I also consulted with vet, getting some confirmation about what I should be looking for – a male cat, neutered, at least 5 years of age and good with other cats. Prior to my trip to the Humane Society I did quite a bit of searching online at their website and the websites of other animal shelters, looking at cats waiting for adoption. Fortunately one of them had a number of kitties that matched what I was looking for. So I went to that shelter yesterday, spent a couple of hours with the cats, and found the one I was looking for. An hour after that and I was on my way home with Pip’s new companion, Bailey.
Their first meeting went as expected – Pip came downstairs to see who was meowing away. She saw Bailey and froze. She backed away and went back upstairs. The second meeting went better, with nose-to-nose distance, a few sniffs, and then them going in different directions. The consequent meetings were what I call ‘walk by’ encounters, acknowledgment that Bailey was there, but that’s about it.
I think they’ll work out.
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My question is whether this was due to incompetence or was it done on purpose? I’m betting on the latter because without it the data wouldn’t support the narrative.
Massive errors in FBI’s Active Shooting Reports from 2014-2022 regarding cases where civilians stop attacks.
The FBI report states that only 4.6% of active shootings were stopped by armed civilians. However, the actual stats say it was closer to 35.7%. That’s one heck of an error. Last year alone it was around 41.3%, and if active shootings in gun-free zones are ignored, it’s closer to 53.5%.
So why the discrepancy?
Evidence compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center shows that the sources the media relied on undercounted the number of instances in which armed citizens have thwarted such attacks by an order of more than ten, saving untold numbers of lives. Of course, law-abiding citizens stopping these attacks are not rare. What is rare is national news coverage of those incidents. Although those many news stories about the Greenwood shooting also suggested that the defensive use of guns might endanger others, there is no evidence that these acts have harmed innocent victims.It’s easy to redefine the incidents such that it eliminates most of them. That’s disingenuous. It changes the analysis, minimizes the contribution of armed citizens stopping active shootings. It sounds like this was done as a means of confirming the biases of the gun-grabbers rather than providing actual data.
The FBI reports that armed citizens only stopped 14 of the 302 active shooter incidents it identified for the period 2014-2022. The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include those it deems related to other criminal activity, such as a robbery or fighting over drug turf.
An analysis by the CPRC identified a total of 440 active shooter incidents during that period and found that an armed citizen stopped 157. A previous report looked at only instances when armed civilians stopped what likely would have been mass public shootings. There were another 27 cases that we didn’t include where armed civilians stopped armed attacks, but the suspect didn’t fire his gun. Those cases are excluded from our calculations, though it could be argued that a civilian also stopped what likely could have been an active shooting event.
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For some time I thought it was just my incipient old fogeyism kicking in as I observed that high school students don’t appear to be as well educated as the ones during my days in high school – the early 1970’s – and are nowhere near as ready to live in the adult world as we were. But it turns out I’m not the only one to have noticed that, so maybe I’m not as much of an old fogey as I thought.
Unlike the past it seems a lot of STEM majors can no longer do calculus. That’s surprising considering “back in my day” I took calculus during my senior year in high school. That was true of a lot of the engineering and physics students when I was in college. This tells me our schools aren’t doing nearly as good a job of educating our kids as they used to. It appears they are too busy indoctrinating our kids or pushing a transgender agenda or increasingly interfering with how parents raise their kids.
Across the country, more students are placing into pre-college math, reports AP’s Collin Binkley. “At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents.”This is but one reason I worry for our nation’s future.
“We’re talking about college-level pre-calculus and calculus classes, and students cannot even add one-half and one-third,” said Maria Emelianenko, chair of George Mason’s math department.
Even softball quizzes appropriate for grade school produce appalling results.
--snip--
You can see why grades need to be abolished in both college and K-12.
What do you expect of a society that regards both merit and math as racist?
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It turns out that wind power isn’t cheap despite claims by the Greens to the contrary.
Who’da thunk it?
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Are Toronto and San Francisco on parallel paths?
If the latest real estate sales figures are any indicator, they might be.
New data shows that Toronto’s real estate market is being flooded with hundreds of condos. Investors are bailing out, getting out while the getting is good.
It’s a question of which city’s real estate market will collapse first.
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First, it was Holocaust deniers. Then it was Election deniers. Now, it’s Volcano deniers.
Hunga Tonga exploded deep on the ocean floor in 2022, a once-in-a-lifetime massive geological event that spewed incomprehensible volumes of water high into the Earth’s atmosphere. Never have satellites observed such; never have layers of the atmosphere been studied for chemical and other impacts caused by the volume of atmospheric water and aerosols. Climate scientists warn that this volcano will warm the planet and disrupt rainfall patterns. Amid record temperatures and flooding in 2023, climate politicos howl about human-caused calamity while avoiding the impacts of Hunga Tonga.That amount of water injected into the atmosphere – the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere – will have little if any major effect, but small increases in a trace gas will have major effects? So say the Climate Change faithful.
This volcano is such an elephant-in-the-climate-change room that NASA seeks to ignore inconvenient truths. Of course, science instructs that volcanic sulfur, water, carbon dioxide, and organic matter can all impact climate dramatically (even unto the extinction of dinosaurs). A political ideology blindly focused on greenhouse gases has no time to set aside dogmatic blinders for critical scientific assessment. That assessment is extremely revealing.
The impacts of HTHH were so substantial that scientists were required to develop a new technique simply to measure its height. It caused “puzzling ripples” through the atmosphere that have never before been observed, “leaving experts stumped,” according to Nature. The volcano’s water plume increased stratospheric water mass by 13% and stratospheric aerosol loads five-fold.
According to Space: “[T]he Hunga Tonga cloud burst not only through the troposphere but also ascended through the entire stratosphere, only plateauing at the altitude of 35 miles (57 km), way into the freezing and dry layer known as the mesosphere. This makes the Hunga Tonga volcanic cloud the highest ever observed.”
--snip--
Scientists who don’t know how much Hunga Tonga has impacted current conditions are trying to learn by observation; most climate alarmists register warming by human hand through their fear prism, and so turn away from this volcano like a (real, not anthropomorphic, gain-of-function) plague. NASA connects current warming to human activity with no scientific links whatsoever. The agency should stick to polluting space recklessly with techno-detritus rather than gaslighting an epic volcano. Hunga Tonga does provide a scientific connection to support a causative explanation for both current warming and flooding trends: extraordinary amounts of water in the atmosphere, like a giant terrarium, together with a five-fold amplification of stratospheric aerosol loads.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the rain has returned, the summerfolk are sparse, and where Monday has returned too early.