Friday Funny - N'Hampsha Humah - Pumpkin Spice Pandemic

One thing Fred neglected to mention is when this spreads to Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks, and Aroma Joe's. That's when pumpkin spice coffee appears.

This pandemic seems to happen every year, spreads rapidly, hangs around for a while, then disappears almost without notice.

Tech Tuesday - Quantum Inertial Guidance

We are familiar with GPS – the Global Positioning System – a means of using orbiting satellites that allow for navigation on land, on the sea, and in the air. It has been around for some time, originally developed for the US military but later used for civilian and commercial purposes, even though the accuracy available to non-military uses isn’t nearly as good as that available to the military.

It’s use is pretty much ubiquitous as we see it in our cars in the form of built-in navigation systems, our cell phones for both E-911 calling location and navigation by way of various smart phone apps, in chart-plotters in our boats, and in navigation suites in our aircraft. I can access GPS info from a simple GPS Tools app on my smart phone. I can call up maps that can show me where I am and where I want to go. It’s all tied into GPS.

It isn’t just the US that has a GPS satellite constellation. Europe has their own, called Galileo. Russia has GLONASS. China has BeiDou.

However, before those satellite based systems there was LORAN – Long Range Navigation – that used land-based radio transmitters to provide navigation support for ships and aircraft. The system dated back to World War II and had its limitations, though as time and technology got better, so did the usability and reliability of the system. But it still had its limits.

In between LORAN and GPS there was what was called Inertial Guidance Systems, the original ones employed gyroscopes and accelerometers that were used to calculate position and velocity. This was a military system used in aircraft, submarines, and missiles to navigate. As long as the system knew its starting point it could help to navigate that aircraft, submarines, and missiles to a destination. As time has gone by Inertial Guidance has gotten better as the technology developed. Mechanical gyroscopes were replaced with laser gyroscopes, with each mechanical gyro replaced by a loop of optical fiber fed with a laser. Accelerometers which used a mass and inductor to measure the changes in speed in three axes have been replaced by Micro Electro Mechanical integrated circuits, also known as MEMs that were more sensitive to motion. These improvements increased both the sensitivity and accuracy of Inertial Guidance Systems.

One would think that even those systems would be replaced by GPS because of the accuracy of GPS, but you’d be wrong. The one reason Inertial Guidance is still used is because for some application GPS isn’t available. For instance, submarines can’t receive GPS signals while they are submerged. Also, during war it is possible for GPS to be jammed which can make it useless. That’s why the military still uses Inertial Guidance System in bombers, submarines, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles, just to name a few. But as good as the modern Inertial Guidance Systems are, they still have inaccuracies that will increase over time, something called drift and something that has plagued such systems since the beginning. But those days may soon come to an end if the efforts of the US Naval Research Lab comes to fruition.

Their solution: Quantum Inertial Navigation. (Note: This link takes you to a page that includes a number of articles but the referenced article is on the right-hand side of the page.)

Quantum inertial navigation is a new field of research and development that can increase inertial measurement accuracy by orders of magnitude.

"Our interferometer operates in a different regime than most other modern implementations of an atom interferometer," said Jonathan Kwolek, Ph.D., a research physicist from the NRL Quantum Optics Section within the Optical Sciences Division. "By operating with cold, continuous atoms, we have opened the door to a number of advantages as well as novel measurement techniques. Ultimately, we would like to use this technology to improve inertial navigation systems, thus reducing our reliance on GPS."

--snip--

Depending on the measurement platform, errors in the location estimation will accumulate and result in loss of accurate position information. Current commercially available inertial navigation systems, for example, can navigate with an error accumulation of roughly one nautical mile over 360 hours. NRL intends to develop new technologies to extend that time such that navigational drift does not limit mission duration.

"The field of inertial navigation aims to provide navigation information anywhere GPS is unavailable," said NRL Associate Director of Research for Systems Dr. Gerald Borsuk. "The advent of atom interferometry allows for a novel approach in inertial sensing, which has the potential to address some of the deficiencies in current state-of-the-art technologies."

GPS has become a backbone to the functionality of both our civilian and military world, providing high-accuracy distributed position and timing information anywhere in the world. However, there are certain battlespace environments in which GPS cannot function, such as under water or in space, as well as an increasing threat to GPS availability in the form of jamming, spoofing, or anti-satellite warfare.

With an increase of orders of magnitude in accuracy, that means the error of present commercial systems of 1 nautical mile over a period of 360 hours could be reduced to 0.01 or 0.001 nautical miles over that same 360 hours, or even less.

It delves into what we in the engineering game call ‘FM’ – Freakin’ Magic. As the late great Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Thoughts On A Sunday

We’ve gotten a little taste of fall today with cooler temperatures along with a breeze. At least it was a sunny day. We’ll be back to summer weather later this week with temperatures in the 80’s, perfect boating weather!

This will also be a busy week, with our State Primary for county, state, and federal offices running the gamut of County Commissioner, Clerk of Probate, New Hampshire House and Senate, Governor, and the US House of Representatives. I will be spending all day Tuesday at our local polling place. I have no idea how many of the registered voters in our town will actually cast their votes as this is one of the ‘weirder’ elections we have, and it will be the third of four elections held this year which started with the New Hampshire Presidential Primary in February, then our Town Meeting in March, the State Primary this week, and the National Election in November. It means a lot of hours while the polls are open and a few more after they close to tally the votes.

==++++==

I saw this and I knew I had to include it in today’s post.

Frankly, it didn’t surprise me at all that the California Democrats are trying to lay the blame for their policy failures upon California Republicans. Considering the GOP makes up only 21% of the California Assembly and 22% of the California Senate it would seem impossible the GOP could be responsible for any of the self-inflicted ills plaguing the Pyrite State as the Democrats hold super-majorities in both chambers of the California legislature.

It sounds like they’re trying to blame the ‘victims’ for the insanity of their policies and the damage they have caused across the board.

What bothers me is that this attitude isn’t limited just to the Democrats in California.

==++++==

This is a question we need to start asking, that question being “Will Tim Walz do to the nation’s education systems what he did to Minnesota’s?” Sultan Knish brings to light that under Governor Walz, a former high school teacher, less than half of students in Minnesota can read.

The recent release of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCA) test scores for 2024 by Education Commissioner Willie Jett, a Walz appointee, were described by the Minnesota Star Tribune as “stagnant with only about half of students meeting or beating grade-level standards in math and reading.” The paper struggled to describe an empty glass as half-full.

The actual numbers showed that 49.9% of Minnesota students reached grade-level proficiency standards in reading, only 45.5% did so in math and only 39.6% managed it in science: a more accurate description would be that well less than half of Walz’s school students are proficient.

The educational glass in Minnesota isn’t half full, it’s more than half empty.

A majority of Minnesota students aren’t proficient in math or science and a little less than half can read at grade level. These are catastrophic numbers that show a school system that has failed at its most fundamental function despite billions of dollars in runaway spending.

Is this something we can expect to see coast-to-coast under a Harris-Walz administration? Not that it isn’t already happening, but under the auspices of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz might we expect the trend to accelerate? After all, an undereducated populace is easier control and rule.

This would be yet another reason to homeschool our children.

==++++==

By way of Pirate’s Cove comes this list of Stupid People of the Week from This Ain’t Hell.

Taking a look at the list I’d have to say the folks who made the list are indeed quite stupid.

==++++==

Honestly, this didn’t surprise me in the least, particularly in light of so many other people of note who have been abandoning the Democrat Party because it has become the de facto Communist Party.

Who is the latest to tell the Democrat Party adios?

That bastion of civil liberties, Alan Dershowitz.

Prominent attorney Alan Dershowitz announced his departure from the Democratic Party, citing several "anti-Jewish" lawmakers that make up the ranks of the party and the recent Democratic National Convention in which Vice President Kamala Harris became the party's presidential nominee.

Speaking with radio host Zev Brenner on "Talkline with Zev Brenner," Dershowitz cited the DNC, which he said gave legitimacy to anti-Israel speakers, and anti-Israel protesters outside the gathering.

"It was the most anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist convention I've experienced," he said. "I was disgusted at the Democratic National Convention. Absolutely disgusted."

Seeing how the Democrat Party has become increasingly antisemitic and is openly supporting groups whose only purpose is to see Israel destroyed, it is the only smart move. While Dershowitz has stated he will become an Independent, he has not stated for whom he will cast his vote for president, at least not until after November 1st.

It’s interesting to see how many old-style classic Democrats are abandoning their party since it no longer represents Democrat ideals.

==++++==

From the “Just When I Thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department comes this latest bit of stupidity from Illinois.

Illinois Democrats Crack Down on Shampoo Bottles.

Shampoo bottles? Really?

Freedom is a current theme of Democrats. By “freedom,” the Party of Government means freedom to indulge in degeneracy and kill any children who result. Everything else is to be tightly regulated by Big Government — even shampoo bottles:

The days are numbered for small shampoo bottles in Illinois hotels because of a new law signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Hotels with more than 50 rooms are banned from providing single-use plastic bottles of shampoo, mouthwash and other toiletries starting July 1, 2025.

Illinois Democrats couldn’t find a reason to make shampoo bottles mandatory; therefore, they are forbidden.

Providing guests with the convenient bottles will result in fines of up to $1,500.

From big ways to small, Democrats never rest from their mission to make your life worse.

I have to wonder who’s brilliant idea this was and why they thought it was needed.

==++++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the summerfolk are gone, the leaf peepers will be arriving starting in a few weeks, and where I’m still enjoying my boating season.

Smart Phone Bans Make Sense In Classrooms - Maybe It's Time To Disconnect Now And Then

When I saw the headline of this post I had no reason to doubt the veracity of it’s claim as I had seen some of the effects first hand.

Growing Body of Evidence That Phone Bans in Class Can Make a Big Difference in Student Performance.

Banning smartphones in class improves student performance, especially for lower-income students, and forces kids to interact with each other in ways they never did before. These conclusions and others are from a spate of academic studies that are just now being published after a few years of phone bans in several states.

--snip--

Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University in England says that “parents, schools, and policymakers are being scared by some really unhelpful rhetoric in the media.” He believes that parents and educators are looking for “immediate solutions because it feels like we’re in an emergency and need to do something quickly.”

Etchells is wrong. Students attended school for hundreds of years without the distraction of smartphones. And we are in an emergency. The plunge in test scores is alarming and needs to be addressed.

I have to agree that smart phones are a problem and have done so for a long time, whether it’s in schools, at home, at work, or out with friends or family. As I have written elsewhere, “I find it ironic that a technology that was seen as being able to bring people together instead separates them.”

I can’t count the number of times I have walked into a break room, cafeteria, or restaurant and seen them filled with people...and none of them are talking to each other. Instead they’re texting, web surfing, on Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat. Their heads are bowed almost as if in prayer and their attention is focused entirely on the screens of their smart phones and not the people they’re sitting with. They don’t actually talk to each other. They’ll text the person sitting next to them rather than talk to them.

It’s no different in classrooms.

Banning smart phones in classrooms makes sense as it brings students’ attention back to their teachers, their education, and away from the addictive environment portrayed on the screen.

There is a movement afoot to keep the distraction of cell phones out of classrooms, and it is rare these days of division. People and politicians on both sides are lining up to take action on a shared goal. Make Cell phone use in the classroom a thing of the past.

--snip--

Is it better than nothing? I don’t know, but cell phones are undoubtedly a distraction, and I can’t say I wouldn’t be paying more attention to it than classroom instruction…

The classrooms have problems of their own, but smart phones add to the problem.

As I mentioned earlier, I have seen just how distracting and isolating smart phones can be. I have seen – personally and on YouTube and Rumble and Locals – a couple at a restaurant and one of them has their nose buried in their phone, texting away. Their attention is not on their dinner companion at all. Their companion might as well not be there. I saw on more than one occasion the ‘invisible’ companion realizes their date wasn’t paying any attention to them, so they got up and left.

On the two occasions I witnessed personally, the woman was oblivious to anything but her phone and the man she was with finally had enough and left. On one of those occasions the man just left and on the other the man stopped long enough to pay the bill before leaving. And on both of these events the woman didn’t realize her dinner companion had been gone for some time. That’s sad.

Of course you probably want to ask me if I have a smart phone? I do. I tend to use it for four things – making phone calls, texting (generally a couple of times a day), taking pictures, and as a paperweight. That’s it.

Then again I grew up in the pre-cell phone/pre-Internet era, so my peers and I didn’t have to deal with the level of distractions kids and younger adults experience today. I don’t have that Fear Of Missing Out that so many others have. I don’t need to be connected all the time. I don’t feel naked or anxious if I don’t have my phone with me.

I guess I’m a throwback to a simpler time despite the fact that I work in the telecommunications industry.

Friday Funny - N'Hampsha Humah - Live Free Or Die

Ayuh. Everything he said is true. Some of our liquor stores even have their own exits off the Interstates!

Tech Tuesday - Something 'New"

Many years ago I used to do a semi-regular post about technology, explaining the new technology in use or coming down the road. Some was groundbreaking while some was an upgrade to older technology that made it better. After a number of posts in a local forum dealing with the differences between the different Internet technologies in use or being installed here in New Hampshire, I remembered that I used to post about such things here and that maybe it was time to start doing so again. Maybe it’s the lecturer in me or maybe it’s that so many people have absolutely no idea how the technology that people use every day actually works. It used to be that most people had at least a basic grasp about how things they used daily – incandescent lights, cars and trucks, radios, TVs, telephones, and so on – actually work.

It used to be that our cars and trucks were something most of us could work on, performing oil changes and chassis lubrication, doing tune-ups which often included installing new spark plugs, plug wires, rotor, distributor cap, points, and condenser as well as setting the ignition dwell and timing, changing out wheel bearings or brake shoes, replacing a starter relay or a defective generator/alternator, and so on. A lot of people were “shade tree mechanics”, handling a lot of car maintenance on their own. Those days are long gone as cars and trucks have become much more sophisticated, more complex, and for the most part, a lot better. Oil changes and tuneups were done frequently, usually every couple of thousand miles for oil changes. Now oil changes are required every 7 to 10 thousand miles and tuneups as we knew them might be done every 100,000 miles and that usually entails just changing the spark plugs. Back then cars were ready for the junkyard after 100,000 miles on the odometer. Now they’re barely broken in with that many miles.

Telephones used to have dials rather than buttons and were connected by wires to the wall or baseboard in our homes. There was no such thing as caller ID, speed dial, or voice mail. Only the wealthy had mobile phones, not to be confused with cell phones which only came into use in the 1980’s. Those mobile phones and 1980’s cell phones could only make calls. There was no texting. These days cell phones are ubiquitous and landlines are fading away. Cell phones are also ‘smart’ which allows you to text, browse the web, take digital photos, shoot HD video...and make phone calls! While cell service isn’t quite ubiquitous (and won’t be unless such service becomes available by way of low earth orbit satellites) they are more numerous than landline phones.

Television was analog and you were lucky if you could pick up TV stations from the three major networks – ABC, NBC, and CBS – and even luckier if you were able to pick up PBS or some of the ‘independent’ TV stations. Some TVs used so-called ‘rabbit ear’ antennas located on top of the TV. You were lucky if you had an outdoor antenna mounted on the roof, and even luckier if it also had an antenna rotor so you could steer the antenna to point in the direction TV station’s transmitter. Cable TV didn’t really come into play until the 1970’s and satellite TV until late 1980’s. Digital TV started replacing analog TV in the 2000’s and analog TV transmissions ended in 2009. Today TV service has so many options between ‘traditional’ cable TV, Fiber To The Home (FTTH) offered by the telephone companies, some electrical utilities, increasingly some cable TV operators, and satellite services like DirectTV and Dish. Traditional “over the air” transmissions still exists, but not quite the same as back in the Good Old Days of analog TV as the new digital transmission format allows more than a single channel to be transmitted simultaneously.

Having dealt with technology in a number of areas over the past 50+ years or so does give me some small insight into that subject, past, present, and future. Hopefully I can actually make my posts interesting, and most important, understandable and relevant.

Look for my first Tech Tuesday post next Tuesday, September 10th. Be mindful that these posts will not occur every week, but will happen more often than not.

Thoughts On A Sunday

We’re getting another taste of summer weather today as we’ll expected to see temps in the 80’s along with higher humidity. Not that I’m complaining. I doubt we’ll see more than a few more days like this between now and Columbus Day. I won’t make it out on the lake today as I’m waiting for the summerfolk to depart before I venture out. To all intents and purposes the lake will be “ours” again and I’ll be spending quite a bit of time out on its waters from hereon out. It will be particularly nice during foliage season as it is easier to catch the fall colors from the lake and to see them from places that can only be reached by water.

It’s true that a number of the summer businesses will be closing after this weekend though others will remain open for a few more weeks, though mainly on the weekends. (One such place, one of my favorite local ice cream stand/restaurant will only be open weekends from now and will close for the season before the end of September.) The summer traffic will soon be replaced by foliage tourists, also known as “leaf peepers”, as the colors of the leaves change from green to the reds, oranges, and yellows that draw tourists from all over the world. Around here the peak foliage usually appears around the first or second week of October and along with it peak tourist traffic. It still won’t be as heavy as we see during the summer, but it does mean tourist dollars will be flowing into the area. Then it will taper off and our area will be ours again. Yes, there is also plenty of winter tourism as folks come up ‘from away’ to go skiing, snowmobiling, snowshoeing, ice skating, and ice fishing, but nothing like we see during summer.

Despite my opinions on all of this, I do have to say that this summer passed by far more quickly than I expected. It feels like Memorial Day was just two weeks ago and the Fourth of July was last week. Where did the summer go?

==++++==

As much as I have expected the political campaigns for the various state and federal offices to go negative, I have to admit surprise to see just how negative they have become in a relatively short period of time. One of the nastiest turns has been for the Democrat race for New Hampshire governor, with the two major candidates going at each other “hammer and thong”. Not that the GOP front runner has been able to escape negative ads, though a majority of those have been put up by an allegedly non-partisan pro-abortion group.

Seeing as our state primary election is in a little over a week, I expect the levels of negativity to skyrocket the closer we get to primary day.

And so it goes.

==++++==

Speaking of negative campaigns, I have to wonder if these observations will be used to slam Kamala since they show her true colors:

- Harris has never spoken to any family member of the Abbey-Gate bombing. Trump was at Arlington at their request, as was his photographer. This is pretty gross.
These families have been ignored by the media, ignored by Harris, stood by while Biden checked his watch during the…

- Harris will send your kid to war ignore it if they get killed then whine about someone else laying the wreath to remember them.

- Kamala Harris conducted a more in-depth investigation into Trump comforting the grieving family of a soldier killed on her watch than she has into why those 13 soldiers died.

- It takes a special level of sociopathy for Kamala Harris to get on her high horse and wag her finger about respecting Arlington National Cemetery when the people she’s lecturing were there because *she* got people killed.
The moral vapidity of DC perfectly illustrated.

- NBC SHOULD BE ASHAMED.
NBC News asked Gold Star mom Kelly Hoover if it was “appropriate” for President Trump to visit Arlington National Cemetery.
"Are you in my shoes? I invited him. My son was murdered under the Biden-Harris administration."

Read the whole thing, particularly the comments.

There’s more on this here and here.

==++++==

Might this be a new trend with TDS – Trump Derangement Syndrome – in Hollywood, that being spontaneous healing taking place in some members of the Hollywood Left?

Whether it’s the thought of Comrade Kamala forcing price controls, the realization that the senile president of the United States has likely been vacationing on a beach the past three and a half years, or that inflation is quite literally out of control — no one can be sure.

But Hollywood actor Michael Rapaport is sure of one thing: that he was wrong.

“I was the first in line talking s**t about Trump,” Rapaport told Sage Steele in an interview. “I was all day every day.”

It shows us there’s some hope, even in Hollywood.

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

==++++==

From the “Just When I Thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department comes this gem:

”Son” and “Daughter” Deleted From Newspeak Dictionary

Vermont public health officials are encouraging teachers and parents to ditch the phrases “son” and “daughter” this back-to-school season in the name of classroom equity.

“Use ‘child’ or ‘kid’ instead of ‘daughter’ or ‘son,’” reads an Inclusive Language for Families document published Wednesday on Facebook by the Vermont Department of Health.

The inclusive language guide is part of the department’s initiative for health equity, the central pillar of the state’s five-year strategic plan for health improvement.

Why doesn’t his surprise me in any way, shape or form? I figured it would reach this level of stupidity way back when ‘politically correct’ speech started being a thing, seeing it as a different name for 1984’s Newspeak. I’m sorry to see that I was right. Anyone pushing any of this, particularly in schools, needs to be fired for inflicting us with this divisive nonsense. They say it’s not offensive language, but I am thoroughly offended by the rape of our language and the logic behind language being replaced because of feelz.

Friggin’ morons.

==++++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where it’s the “last gasp” of summer, people are partying like it, and where this coming Monday is a holiday!

Saturday 'Stuff'

Seeing the debacle that was the Harris-Walz interview on CNN I have to wonder what Kamala’s campaign managers were thinking. Her 18 minute dog-and-pony show, shepherded by her running mate was total cringe, from beginning to end. Do they really think this was a winning move for her?

I have to think this ‘performance’ will motivate her campaign to try to weasel out of the upcoming debate, either by coming up with some ‘emergency’ which would ‘prevent’ Kamala from participating, or trying (again) to change the conditions of the debate which would allow her to know what questions will be asked ahead of time, have the carefully crafted answers on hand via her notes, and to keep the microphones live all the time which would allow one candidate to interrupt the candidate speaking, whether to deflect one candidate’s answer or to shout over their response. You know the campaign is in trouble when even die-hard Democrats are slamming the Harris-Walz ticket, seeing them as out of touch with the middle class, pushing unconstitutional tax plans and price controls that would devastate the economy.

While I did not watch the Biden-Trump debate because I knew it would be a total sh*t show from the beginning, I will watch the Harris-Trump debate, assuming it actually takes place, and will do so with fascination to see just how much Kamala will destroy her chances of being elected. I have a feeling it will be a train wreck.

==++++==

One thing that surprised me today was the lighter traffic than I expected, seeing as it is a holiday weekend. While I didn’t expect to see a lot of people at Walmart when I shopped there at 7:30 this morning, there were more than a few. A second shopping trip at one of big box discount stores around lunch time showed not nearly as much traffic as I would have expected. Even the big box discount store didn’t seem to have as many people in it as I would have expected, even for a normal non-holiday weekend. Not that it was deserted by any means, but there were no long lines to check out, no queue of vehicles waiting to get in or out, no queues at the big box discount store’s gas pumps. The only traffic hold up seen was after we had left the store with our groceries, coming to a two-lane to one-lane merge a bit up the road as people jockeyed into position for the ‘zipper’ merge, the hold up lasting about 15 seconds or so. That was it. The rest of the way was clear sailing.

While it was cloudy through most of the day, there was no rain, so it wasn’t the weather affecting traffic. It wasn’t that the ‘usual suspects’ coming up for the holiday weekend never made the trip as the parking lots and driveways at the various summer homes, condos, restaurants, and beaches were as full. I’m not sure why folks weren’t out on the roads for their usual ‘summer weekend at the lake’ activities.

It was really weird.

==****==

NOTE: This post was delayed a bit as I did not craft it on my usual ‘writing’ computer, but on one of my new miniPC Linux boxes.

I have to give a mea culpa for this as I didn’t do quite enough homework before I started a backup on my laptop, not realizing the initial backup on that computer would take hours...and hours...and hours. It is presently in its eighth hour of the backup process, though not because I have so many files and data that needs to be backed up, but because it is so damn slow! The app that performs the backup is excruciatingly slow and is also quite thorough which is why it is taking so long. What I should have done is merely copy the data files onto the external drive I use for backups. It would have taken all but 20 minutes at most to copy what I wanted to backup.

Lesson learned.

I performed the backup because I was preparing to update the O/S from Ubuntu Linux 22.04 to 24.04. I will usually backup or copy my important files before doing any such update. Not that I have ever had a problem when updating Linux in all the years I’ve been using Linux. But I am a firm believer in Murphy’s Law and I know that if I didn’t backup my files that something would happen.

Friday Funny - Beer vs Women

Thoughts On A Sunday

As I mentioned in last night’s post, it was Old Home Day in our little town yesterday, a celebration of our town by residents past and present. It is not unique to just my home town, but is quite common all across New Hampshire and likely much of New England, though perhaps known by other names. While this year’s celebration wasn’t one of the biggest by any means, it was still a lot of fun. There weren’t quite as many food vendors or craft booths as we sometimes see, there were a lot more amusements and games for the kids.

There hasn’t been much of a fall-off in boat traffic on the lake even though I have been seeing boats being pulled from the water in increasing numbers. During and after Labor Day weekend that number will increase dramatically. It will also see me out on the lake a lot more often now that the less well behaved summerfolk - aka “Cap’n Boneheads” - will be gone for the most part. It will be ‘our’ lake again.

Our town beach dialed back its operations last weekend, primarily because the lifeguard staff had to get back to high school or college. People are still using the beach, but doing so at their own risk. Labor Day weekend will see the beach close for the season and some much needed demolition and construction start as the town beach bathhouse, a badly deteriorated relic from the early 60’s, is being replaced. That pretty much puts the wraps on the summer season for us. It also means we’ll start getting ready for foliage season, the reappearance of Pumpkin Spice everything, and the invasion by leaf peepers that will start arriving near the end of September.

Oh, joy…

==++++==

I have noticed this, just as Glenn Reynolds has and have seen more than a few real life examples.

People Without Meaningful Lives Seek Power Over Others.

One student shared that he would prefer to live in 1700, if he had more money than others and power over them. My first reaction was amusement; I thought the student was practicing his deadpan humor skills. He wasn’t. For him, having power was an attribute of a meaningful life.

If only my student’s mindset were an aberration.

During the reign of Louis XIV, French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal diagnosed why some lust for power. In his Pensées, Pascal wrote, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Pascal explained that, out of the inability to sit alone, arises the human tendency to seek power as a diversion.

“What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition.” That is why “war and high office are so popular,” Pascal argued.

Pascal argues individuals seek to be “diverted from thinking of what they are.” I would argue a better choice of words is what they have made of themselves.

Some of those include people seeking revenge from past wrongs, in some cases dating back to their childhoods. They want to make sure it never happens to them again and, at some level, to get some revenge against those that wronged them. How better to do that than to obtain power?

==++++==

From the “Just When I Thought They Couldn’t Get Any Stupider” Department comes this gem:

Massachusetts advising residents to stay indoors and imposing a 6 p.m. curfew until October because of mosquitoes.

Why?

Because of a single human case of Eastern Equine Encephalitis – EEE – which is spread by mosquitoes.

A curfew? Really? That seems like an over-the-top response for something that could be just as easily prevented by judicious use of one of the many mosquito repellents containing DEET which are available in just about in every store.

==++++==

When discussing the mRNA COVID vaccines, we need to be careful about dividing people into the two broad groups of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.

The truth is that many vaccinated people didn’t want to be injected and now deeply regret it.

Consider me one of those. At least I only got the first couple of injections and after an adverse reaction to the second shot my physician strongly suggested I receive no more. I followed his suggestion. I regret I ever got even one shot.

==++++==

Bird Dog over at Maggie’s Farm writes about outdoor showers, something we had at the Official Weekend Pundit Long Island Sound Beach House for decades, even after the WP Parents remodeled/renovated it in the mid-1990’s. It came in handy during summer because it let us wash off the sand, salt, and sun tan lotion once we walked back from the beach. All of the homes in that neighborhood had them. Friends I visited regularly out on Martha’s Vineyard also had one for the same reason.

We used it even if we were taking a regular shower as it was nice being able to shower outdoors. If thought I could get away with it I would build an outdoor shower stall here at The Gulch. I was going to build one on the new house I’d planned to build – The Redoubt – until materials cost doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled which made the new house unaffordable to build. (I was pretty much locked out of building once costs doubled. The tripling and subsequent quadrupling of materials costs merely added insult to injury.)

I do agree with Bird Dog on his observation about using an outdoor shower: It just feels amazing.

==++++==

This should surprise no one as we know the “swamp dwellers” say it doesn’t matter who gets elected in November as it is they who run the show and that they’ll do what they want no matter what. These are the same nation-destroying bureaucrats – the so-called Deep State – that will bring this nation to its knees and they will delight at its destruction...as long as they can remain in power.

This alone should be a major motivation for Trump to start dismantling the administrative state and to do so with a chainsaw. He should follow Argentina’s President Milei and clean house, firing the overwhelming number of needless federal government bureaucrats and paper-pushers whose only purpose in life seems to be to perpetuate and expand their various agencies, departments, and bureaus while at the same time intruding deeper into people’s lives for no other reason than they can and that it fulfill their need to have power over others.

It could also save us a trillion dollars a year or so. Goodness knows we need to stop wasting money we don’t have on things we don’t need or want. Getting rid of a good-sized portion of our federal government bureaucracy which contributes nothing to our nation or its economy would be a good start.

==++++==

Okay, I haven’t quite figured how this would possibly work, but apparently someone who doesn’t really understand economics claiming that if gas prices fell back to what they were during the Trump Administration it would cause the economy to crash.

Of course the person making that claim is assuming that Trump would just command the price of gas to go down rather than ridding the energy industry of the burden laid upon it during the first few days of the Biden Administration as well as the follow-on rules, regulations, and restrictions imposed upon the industry. Lower energy prices aren’t likely to cause a crash, particularly if the prices go down gradually, unlike what we saw during the Biden Administration which saw the rising energy prices trigger inflation across the entire economy.

==++++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the summer is winding down, the summer businesses are doing likewise, and where Labor Day weekend is only a week away.

A Busy Day

As you may have noticed there's no post tonight. It's not from disinterest. Rather, this was a the day our town celebtated what is called Old Home Day, a day for present and past residents to celebrate our town. For me the day started well before 6AM, getting ready to to take the WP Mom to our church for an 8AM start of the festivities. Later there was a parade, then the opening of the field where the various food vendors, crafts stalls, games, and so on. There was live music. Oh, and did I mention there was food?

I also managed to squeeze in a run to the dump between the morning and afternoon activites.

And then there were the fireworks!

I just got back and realized I hadn't queued a post ahead of time and I am too tuckered out. So I will have to make up for it in Sunday's post!

Friday Funny - Twilight Zone...Southern Style

Thoughts On A Sunday

While the calendar says it still two weeks until Labor Day weekend we’re still seeing the summer season winding down. In some places school starts after next weekend. For those families with children involved is school sports, those sports have already started practice. That certainly limits the time those families can visit the Big Lake. Other than Labor Day weekend, I doubt we’ll see the usual summer traffic over the next two weeks.

I have to say I am surprised just how quickly summer has passed. It feels like the Fourth of July was just last week and Memorial Day two weeks ago. I haven’t been out on the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout nearly as much as I had hoped though I expect that like last year I will more than make up for it after Labor Day weekend. Most of the summerfolk will be gone and the lake won’t have nearly as many boats (and Cap’n Boneheads) on it, making it nicer (and safer) out on the lake. That seems to be how it’s worked out for me the past few years, some of it caused by weather and some by being busy with other things.

One of the other signs of summer’s end is the number of boats I see being pulled out of the water and prepared for storage. The boatyard that maintains and stores the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout has been busy, getting boats prepped for winter storage. They won’t be seeing my boat until late October, as per usual. Until then I plan to spend quite a bit of time out on the lake.

==++++==

One thing that I dislike about this campaign season is the number of single issue voters out there, more than I remember seeing in the past.

I don’t dislike single issue voters. I pity them. Too often they don’t think things through. They tend to ignore the downsides of other positions the candidate(s) they support may have that are detrimental to their family, their town, county, state, or the country as a whole.

One of those single issues that blinds voters to other positions held by a candidate is abortion.

I have heard so many campaign ads pushing a candidate’s pro-abortion stance while ignoring the other positions a candidate holds, even those that are clearly destructive to things like our economy, our legal system, and our rights, just to name a few. Certainly the Democrats have been trying to push abortion as the Number 1 issue of this year’s election. It isn’t. To quote Frank Zappa, “It ain’t even Number 2.”

We can only hope that some of them will wake up before it’s too late and will look at the entire picture before voting.

==++++==

You know things aren’t going well when a campaign official for Harris admits they’ve blatantly lied about Trump’s connection to Project 2025.

From USA Today comes this tidbit:

Project 2025 is a political playbook created by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of other conservative groups, not Trump, who said he disagrees with elements of the effort.

Steve MacDonald adds:

There is nothing new here, but the slip of this other mask—someone admitting the Harris campaign was deliberately deceptive—is surprising and may have to be memory-holed. Let’s not let them get away with that.

I have to wonder what else the Harris campaign has got up its sleeve between now and the election. If nothing else, it’s going to be ‘interesting’...and not in a good way.

This isn’t new news as it’s been out there for a few weeks now, but it bears repeating as I have recently been hearing the “Trump is fully in on Project 2025 and all of his proposed policies are based on it” meme again...and again.

==++++==

If we need more proof that renewables aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, here the latest: SunPower Corp., a major, nationwide provider of residential solar panels and helped build the largest solar plant in the country has filed for bankruptcy.

The company is laying off its employees and is ceasing direct sales. What does it mean for their residential customers who bought their products?

The warranties and maintenance they depend on are now history...and they still have to repay the loans they took out to pay for their solar panels even if the company is bankrupt and closing its doors.

This is a large well-known solar company yet it hasn’t survived. How many other companies are in the same boat?

==++++==

I expect this is one paper that will be devoutly ignored, if not attacked and castigated because it doesn’t meet The Narrative^TM. What does the paper say?

A Chinese group has looked at all the different kinds of 2,000 year long proxies in the PAGES dataset and found that history looks quite different depending on which proxy you pick. Only the tree rings show the HockeyStick shape that matches the climate models. In other proxies, temperatures have fallen for most of the last 2,000 years, especially in the Southern half of the world. And even after the recent warming, we are not yet back to the temperatures the Romans lived through.

So yet again, we see that that current temperatures are not unusual except according to tree rings, which we know are affected by rising levels of CO2. (The paper does not mention CO2 or carbon or fertilizer).

I figure the Climate Change faithful will be attacking this paper in 3...2...1…

And while we’re at it let’s add this to the mix just for fun: Number Of Typhoons In The Pacific Trending Downward Over 70 Years!

Of course this must also be devoutly ignored because it also doesn’t meet The Narrative^TM.

==++++==

Just how petty can Facebook get? How about this petty:

It is now censoring ads for the new “Reagan” movie.

Dennis Quaid was on with Joe Rogan talking about his new movie, Reagan, coming out on August 30th and how Facebook is now censoring the advertising for the film. The film looks incredible, and I cannot wait to see it. The trailer gives you all the patriotic feels, and the Facebook Commies don’t want you to see that. Because we can’t have you feeling patriotic about the country you live in. What do you think this is, a free country?

According to Dennis Quaid, Facebook says that it’s because the film is trying to “sway an election.” Which is really rich coming from Facebook, who literally censored half of America during the last election to help…sway an election. Once again, lefties are just projecting.

Talk about hypocrisy! And people wonder why I don’t like Facebook. Yes, I use it, but minimally and only for keeping in touch with family and friends. Even then I only check in once or twice a month.

==++++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where it’s rained all morning and a good part of the afternoon, weekend traffic is trailing off a little earlier than usual, and yet again Monday is returning to harsh our mellow.

Lord, Save Us From Kamala's Dangerous Economic Ignorance

Listening to Kamala Harris’s economic plans, there wasn’t one that I hadn’t heard of before. Of course she’s going to crib from others because she really has no idea how to fix the economy. It seems she started by peeking at Donald Trump’s paper and stealing his idea for not taxing tips. This from a woman who supported adding 80K+ IRS agents and wanting to tax the bejeezus out of the rich, the ‘rich’ being anyone with a job.

Then she talks about subsidizing first time home buyers, giving them $25,000 to help with the down-payment. But she doesn’t mention where she’ll get the money to do that. I guess she’ll just have the Treasury crank up the printing presses and add even more to the $3.5 trillion annual deficit being run by the Biden-Harris Administration.

Another thing she brings up is price controls, something that has never worked, ever. You’d think she would have learned that from history, particularly when President Nixon tried it, imposing wage and price controls in 1971 as a way to fight inflation. It failed spectacularly and fueled worse inflation than if he had done nothing. (Yes, there were other measures he took that also added to the problem, like taking the US off the gold standard, in effect rendering the Bretton Woods system inoperative.)

The long defunct Soviet Union used wage an price controls which made the Soviet economy unresponsive to changing economic conditions, even regular cyclical changes caught the Soviets off guard and they couldn’t seem to adapt because their economic bureaucracy was laden down by inertia. Does Kamala think it will be any different here? Of course she does...and she’s wrong.

She’s also going after businesses, particularly food retailers, for “price gouging” even though I doubt she could point to any supermarkets that have done so. I’ve even heard references to dealing with “looters and hoarders”, something right out of Das Kapital and Atlas Shrugged. (I have no doubt she’s familiar with the first, but not the second.)

So many of the things she’s talking about doing that have been tried before, but they didn’t work. They sounded good, but in real life they made things worse.

Do we really want someone who has no understanding of economics, is ignorant of history, and will do as much damage as she can to the American economy all in the the name of “equity”?

Friday Funny - Southern Woman

Trying some stuff from YouTube. This one has always made me laugh...and shiver.

Thoughts On A Sunday

The humidity that has been hanging over New England over the past week has finally departed, with some of that ‘departure’ taking place as heavy rain. There was some flooding here and there in Vermont and parts of northern New Hampshire over Friday and into early Saturday. By Saturday afternoon the air was drier and the A/C was shut off, at least here at The Gulch. It’s going to be nice over the most of the week, something all of us will appreciate.

We’re coming to the last few weeks of summer and it seems folks are trying to squeeze in as much vacationing as they can before the kids return to school. Our town beach closes at the end of the day on Labor Day, though there won’t be lifeguards on duty past the 25^th of the month. Some of the summer businesses will remain open until the end of September and others until Columbus Day, being open only on weekends until then.

Of course by then we’ll be at the beginning of leaf-peeping season and we’ll be dealing with a different tourist demographic…

==+++==

This perfectly explains our younger generation’s lack of understanding about how communism actually works.

==+++==

Hmm, it seems the British Crown Prosecutor has decided has warned that he might extradite Americans who have the audacity to express their disdain for the UK’s shift to a totalitarian state.

Yeah, like that’s going to work...unless the Biden Administration will hand over Americans who disturbed their sensibilities by pointing out how the UK is becoming to resemble the dystopian hell described in Orwell’s 1984.

==+++==

Was a photo showing a crowd waiting for Kamala Harris in Detroit as she stepped off of Air Force Two faked? Snopes is ‘unsure’ whether or not the photo is real or had been manipulated to add people that weren’t actually there.

Some people zoomed way in on the camera phones the crowd were holding. But the thing that got me was the absence of any reflection of the crowd on Air Force Two.

--snip--

How did Harris and Tim Walz even make it through that huge crowd that isn't reflected anywhere on the plane? We certainly hope Snopes doesn't give up trying to find a source for this photo and let us know for sure it's real.

One has to wonder why, if this photo was faked, someone thought it was necessary to do so. Did they think they had to make Kamala seem more popular than she really is, particularly at the airport in Detroit?

I think I can safely state that I won’t be wasting any more of my time on this matter. I have other things more important to ponder, great and small.

==+++==

To give you an idea just how odious the Harris-Walz ticket is we must ponder Tim Walz’ lack of understanding of the First Amendment, something he showed when he said “There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”

The Supreme Court has held that labeling speech as hateful does not render it unsayable. Indeed, the First Amendment is specifically designed to protect speech in the event that government authorities attempt to suppress it on such grounds. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his opinion on behalf of a unanimous Court in the 2017 case of Matal v. Tam: "Speech that demeans on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, age, disability, or any other similar ground is hateful; but the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express 'the thought that we hate.'"

Walz is hardly the first political figure to make this mistake; high-level government and media actors who ought to know better frequently suggest that bad, wrong, and hateful speech is illegal. But his invocation of the dreaded specter of misinformation is especially concerning, given the current moral panic around the concept.

The Left seems to think the First Amendment only protects speech they approve of, period. However, the Founders and the Supreme Court thought differently and it pisses off the Left.

One of the arguments the Left uses is that the First Amendment does give anyone the right to yell “Fire!” in a theater. However, it does, particularly if the theater is on fire whether the Left thinks it’s on fire or not.

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather is even better than it has been, summer is passing by far too quickly, and Monday is coming back again far too soon.

Tired Of It Yet?

I didn’t think it was possible, not so early. But here it is and I am already tired of this election season.

No, strike that. I am sick to death of it.

It isn’t the campaigning. I expect that.

It isn’t the BS being sold by the media. That’s nothing new. I’ve seen it for decades so I have a pretty decent media BS filter.

It isn’t all of the “impartial” polls that are totally meaningless at this point, even the ones that oversample from one one political party which no one can deny skews poll results.

It isn’t the speeches as they pretty much go with any election season, whether they are great, awful, or somewhere in between.

It isn’t even the in-person glad-handing by candidates wanting my vote (or my money) that bothers me.

What it is that I am tired of is all of the political ads, the many many many ads showing up everywhere...and I mean everywhere. I’m used to seeing them on TV or hearing them on the radio, but they pop up on my computer when I’m on the web or even worse, when I’m browsing YouTube for funny/interesting videos or watching dash cam videos of people doing really dumb stuff on the road. They are friggin’ everywhere.

What’s bad is that, as usual, so many of them are misleading, with some of them lying by omission. Sometimes they’ll say “So-and-so voted for/against This, That, and The Other Thing, something against what we believe!!”, but when you check (many times those ads will show a reference to the legislation if it’s a video ad), you find out that the legislation they were talking about wasn’t exactly about the subject the ad claimed. That’s bad enough, but not unexpected.

It’s that they are far more numerous than in the past, particularly now they they are showing up in places I’ve never seen them before like my work laptop (which uses Chrome), my tablets, and even my phone. I don’t get them on my home computers, thank goodness, but then I use Linux on those (including the one I am using to write this post) and they all use the Brave browser which has a built-in ad blocker...which doesn't work on ads on YouTube, unfortunately.

I’m not sure how much longer I can stand this seeing as we’re still about three months away from the election in November. It’s only going to get worse between now and then and I have no doubt I am not the only one that will be wholly sick and tired of it all well before November.

Friday Funny - Not Happening, At Least Not Tonight

OK, it seems Blogger has become hostile, at least to me. I can't post pictures to my blog, even pictures that I can prove are mine. Support is non-existent. The only 'help' I can find is a FAQ which doesn't address the issue I'm having.I'm going to keep digging to see if this problem can be resolved.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been a weird weekend with a mix of thunderstorms and sunny skies. Saturday started with a thunderstorm just past midnight and rain that was on and off until mid-morning. It became sunny in the afternoon but the clouds returned late in the day and the rain returned in the evening and again lasted until mid-morning. I am not really complaining about the weather as it gave me a good excuse to do an overdue major cleaning in and around The Gulch. The only time I left was to do a little shopping at Walmart early Saturday morning and to go down to one of the local general stores to get a BLT for lunch. (They have great BLTs.)

I have also been nursing an ailing member of our feline contingent, Pip. She’s the last of the original feline contingent from The Manse. I won’t go into the details about her ailment other than to say it has caused some swelling in one ear which is causing her some discomfort. I wish there was more I could do for her, but all I can do at the moment is make sure she’s comfortable and that she has enough food and water.

==++++==

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that Donald Trump is doing his best to lose the election? After his debate with Joe Biden I thought that Trump understood that keeping his mouth shut was the best strategy, one that had the Democrats confused and unsure about what to do.

After the assassination attempt he was again much quieter than many expected, as if contemplating how close he came to dying and taking stock about what was important. This lasted through most of the RNC convention, and then the “old” Trump reasserted itself. I don’t think he could help himself.

I would like to think his campaign advisors were telling him “Don, less is more. You don’t need to comment about everything, particularly about things that the Democrats are already damaging themselves with. If nothing else, the low-key approach is driving them crazy! So keep your trap shut, okay?” But he couldn’t help himself.

He’s back to pissing off people with his off-the-cuff remarks, alienating the very people he needs in order to win. Heck, he’s pissing me off, and I support him. He’s his own worst enemy. He has to remember that this isn’t his TV show The Apprentice, but real life.

Donald, I like you. I support you. But you need to learn when to shut the hell up!

==++++==

To steal a quote from the Instaprof: Compare and contrast.

This man went to a Kamala event wearing a Trump shirt, and a Trump event wearing a Kamala shirt. The difference in how he was treated was stunning.

This isn’t the first time I have seen something like this. The differences between the two parties is stark – one is accepting of those who disagree with them and is willing to converse with them while the other is intolerant, hostile, confrontational, and in some cases, violent.

I’ll leave it to you to figure which party is which.

==++++==

This is one thing I hope will be brought forward during the Presidential election campaign: Kamala Harris is hostile to the Second Amendment. She wanted to use an illegal registry to harass gun owners and confiscate firearms.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris once threatened to use databases of gun owners to send police to their homes to confiscate firearms.

Ms. Harris described her gun control stance in August 2019 at a Democratic presidential primary forum that took place shortly after two deadly mass shootings in California and Texas.

She said she was “prepared to take executive action” to implement comprehensive background checks, crack down on gun dealers and ban the import of so-called assault weapons.

“Take executive action” means she knew there was no way she could get legislation passed to do those things because it was likely the Supreme Court would strike it down as violating the Second Amendment. We already know Harris has little use for the Constitution, seeing it more as an impediment to the state taking complete power over our lives from cradle to grave.

==++++==

Is Canada on the verge of collapse and dissolution? If things keep going as they have under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, I’d say the answer is ‘Yes’.

Between whittling away at Canadians’ civil rights, heavy deficit spending and the confiscatory taxes that go with it, Ottawa’s willful neglect of the country’s citizens and “sit down, shut up, and do what we tell you” attitude, is it any wonder Canadians have had enough of Justin “Castreau” and the Leftists that keep him in power? What will be the tipping point that will have Canadians saying “Enough!” and will move to dissolve the Dominion of Canada?

There is a very real fear and presentiment across the land that the country is disintegrating, Many Canadians now feel, whether implicitly or overtly, that Canada is on the cusp, teetering on the verge of collapse and dissolution. The National Post reports that “A majority of Canadians looking at the country they see around them say everything seems to be broken. Concerned about rising costs, the state of health care, affordable housing, jobs and more, half of us are also angry about the way Canada is being run.” Similarly, an Ipsos poll found that 7 in 10 Canadians agree that “Canada is broken.” As Lee Harding writes in the Western Standard, our rulers “in our own capital city [are] full of self-aggrandizement, handing out contracts to their friends, serving foreign interests, burying us in public debt, and laying heavy taxes on people.” Sounds like it could be the U.S. under Biden and Harris.

Nine years and three terms of Liberal rule under the incompetent and scandal-ridden Marxist prime minister Justin Trudeau have led to a state of affairs in which, as one representative young woman lamented, “This country is falling apart. There’s no more freedom. Everyone is working just to survive and everyone is miserable.” Another concurs: “Every single system is flawed in Canada and it’s so sad, this used to be the best country in the world, now everything is backwards.” “Canada feels Like a house of cards waiting to collapse,” says the Jacobin, “Canada is in deep crisis. It's unfashionable in centrist circles to say so, but it's true. The country is literally on fire.” The Financial Post, for its part, defines Canada as “A leader among the so-called ‘breakdown nations,’” with the worst rate of growth among 50 developed economies.

It’s even worse that what’s laid out above due to an incompetent government and a Marxist Prime Minister who managed to criminalize so-called “hate speech”, said hate speech to be defined by a censorship bureaucracy with penalties for such hate speech going up to and including life imprisonment.

Hmm...where have we seen something like this before? Maybe the old Soviet Union? Or present day Russia? Or Cuba? (Could it be that PM Castreau is taking after his biological father. Fidel?)

So what happens if Canadians do reach the point where they’ve had enough? Will Canada fracture and the various provinces will go their own way? Will Quebec finally become an independent nation? Will other provinces apply for statehood in the US? Will others band together to form their own nation?

I can see Alberta, Saskatchewan, and maybe Manitoba applying to join the US. In some ways they are more like the bordering US states than they are the rest of Canada. I have no idea about the Maritime Provinces or what they would do, though I know two of them had considered applying for statehood if Quebec voted for independence from Canada, those two being Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. What would Newfoundland and Labrador do? Which way would Prince Edward Island go?

As far as the rest, who knows? I doubt Ontario would join the US as it seems to be the ‘California’ of Canada. I have no idea if British Columbia would do so or go their own way. Then there’s the question of the Territories – the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and the Yukon - and what their status would be.

What’s the chance that this will happen? I haven’t a clue.

==++++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has been schizophrenic, people are still driving stupid, and where Monday is looming large...again.

Paternity Fraud - Something That Must Be Addressed

While I haven’t been keeping all that much attention to the issue of paternity fraud, I did find it interesting that one state has decided to try to nip this problem in the bud, having passed legislation that makes paternity fraud a crime.

Tennessee passed two laws addressing paternity fraud, the first making it a Class B misdemeanor and the second removing the five year statute of limitation to “challenge an acknowledgment of paternity on the basis of fraud, duress or mistake.” While neither is quite as powerful as some would have liked, it is a step in the right direction. One proposed bill that failed would have made paternity tests mandatory at birth, but it died before making it through committee.

Some think mandatory paternity testing at birth would eliminate paternity fraud. Others think it is an invasion of privacy. I’ll admit I am not sure one way or the other but I do understand why some people are in favor of it, particularly men who found out well after the fact that children they thought were theirs were fathered by someone else.

There have been some claims that 30% of all children born in the US are not the biological children of the reported father, but that number seems way too high. However I can believe that 30% of all children tested for paternity aren‘t related to the man thought to be the father. It makes sense because if a child us being tested it’s likely because there is some question as to the child’s paternity. If every child was tested at birth I think the percentage would be a lot lower.

You may ask what got me on to this topic? Simply, it was this video, something I came across while browsing YouTube earlier today:


After watching this video I must admit that I was pissed off. That this woman seemed to show little shame for having deceived her now ex-husband about the paternity of their two children just made it worse to me.

I think it’s time for states to pass legislation to make paternity fraud a crime. I also think paternity fraud should be considered a factor when it comes to things like child support after a divorce. Why should a man pay child support for kids that aren’t his? Let the mother go after the real father for that.

Is it harsh? Yes. But why should the man who was deceived be punished a second time for this fraud committed against him?

Friday Funny - The Final Exam

It appears the party that 'owns' the video I would have embedded doesn't allow it, so instead I will place the link for the video here: Final Exam.

Thoughts On A Sunday

I was pleasantly surprised when I woke this morning, feeling refreshed and with no aches or pains. After yesterday’s Island Cleanup Day I thought I’d have a few, even if minor. But none were evident, so I consider myself lucky. Considering I was the oldest person there offloading island residents’ boats of all their junk, demolition debris - lots and lots of old wood, much of it rotted - microwave ovens, window air conditioners, stove parts (including one cast iron potbelly stove), old windows, more than a few lengths of galvanized iron pipe, copper pipe, PVC pipe, braided steel cable, copper wiring, gas grills, charcoal grills, countless broken Adirondack chairs, a couple of canoes of which one was in pristine condition, a couple of paddleboards, more than one sailboard, swim raft floats, mattresses, bed frames, dinged up cookware, chairs, lamps, picture frames, toilets, sinks (including one kitchen sink), small outboard motors, 20lb and 40lb propane tanks (empty, thank goodness), more than a few gas cans and outboard motor gas tanks, a lawnmower, an electric chainsaw, and on and on. More than a few island residents made more than one trip, with one making 4 trips with her boat filled with demo lumber.

All in all it was a good day and while not one of the biggest Island Cleanup Days we’ve seen, it did keep everyone busy.

==++++==

I don’t know about you, but I am already tired of the Lame Stream Media’s fawning over Kamala Harris. I know they are trying to promote her nomination, but considering just how awful she’s been, I am surprised they are doing so. The DNC seems to be doing its best to memory hole her history in California, in the US Senate, and her pronouncements, speeches and Twitter posts as a means of making it difficult for the GOP to use it against her. The problem is that the “Internet is Forever” and so many people have screenshots of her posts, copies of video, and of course, posts made by those who have never been been a friend of Kamala, be they Democrats, Independents, or Republicans.

I think the DNC is making a mistake placing their hopes on such an odious candidate like Kamala Harris, considering that, in my opinion, she was more of a ‘poison pill’ VP choice rather than someone who could step into the role of President if the need ever arose.

If nothing else it’s going to be interesting over the next couple of months...as in “May you live in interesting times” old Chinese curse kind of ‘interesting’.

==++++==

Sorry, but I saw this headline and couldn’t resist adding it:

Meghan Markel Urged Not to Endorse Kamala

This might be the funniest story since Kamala Harris took over as the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee. According to a report from Newsweek, Meghan Markle, who was reportedly an actress once, is being urged not to endorse Kamala Harris because it "would have a negative impact on both women."

They say this like this is a Bad Thing…

==++++==

Speaking of Kamala, it seems that GOP VP candidate J.D. Vance has no use and no respect for her, particularly after she had the ovaries to question his and Trump’s loyalty to our country. That’s rich, coming from a Communist-in-all-but-name.

In remarks Saturday evening at President Trump’s campaign rally in St. Cloud, Minnesota, Trump’s running mate Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio scorched presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris for questioning his and Trump’s loyalty, saying, “What the hell have you done to question our loyalty to the United States of America?”

--snip--

“I saw the other day, Kamala Harris questioned my loyalty to this country. That’s the word she used, “loyalty.” And it’s an interesting word (Semper fi), loyalty. Because there is no greater sign of disloyalty to this country than what Kamala Harris has done at our southern border.

And I’d like to ask the vice president what she has done to question my loyalty to this country? I served in the United States Marine Corps. I went to Iraq for this country. I built a business for this country. And my running mate took a bullet for this country.

So my question to Kamala Harris is, “What the hell have you done to question our loyalty to the United States of America?”

And the answer my friends is, nothing.

Indeed. This is something else that has to be hammered home again and again and again. Don’t let Kamala get away with it.

==++++==

Kamala has been a failure as the border czar despite her claiming she was never assigned that task (overwhelming evidence to the contrary). Another failure that can be laid at her feet?

Broadband czar.

Biden tapped Kamala Harris to serve as the rural broadband czar in 2021. Part of her task was overseeing the implementation of a $42 billion program to connect Americans in rural and remote parts of the country to the Internet. According to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) member Brendan Carr, however, after almost 1,000 days, not a single person has actually been connected to the web.

Internet service providers (ISPs) and lawmakers on Capitol Hill contend the Biden-Harris government’s burdensome regulations—including climate change mandates, union worker requirements, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies—have brought progress on expanding rural Internet access to a halt.

Note:Links in the original post were not included in the quote above as there were too darned many of them. If you want to see them all please go to the original post. - ed.

I suppose she’ll deny she was ever named as the Broadband czar as well. So, what the hell has she been doing the past three-and-a-half years?

OK, enough of Kamala for now. I’m starting to feel a little nauseous.

==++++==

I’ve wondered this, too.

How can every country be warming faster than all the others, at the same time?

The answer is simple: It’s all a con. Such claims fit the Climate-change-is-all-the-fault-of-the-Evil-Humans narrative. And as we all know The Narrative must be supported at all times. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lie or makes no sense or has absolutely no data to support it in any fashion. The Narrative is all that matters.

Well, I have three words that challenge that narrative: Hunga Tonga-Hunga.

‘Nuff said.

==++++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather’s been great, the drivers have not, and where the islands of our little town are just that much cleaner!

People Driving Stupid - Part Eleventy-Eleven

Today was spent down at our town docks for Island Cleanup Day, a day for island residents in our town to load up their boats with junk and demo detritus from their island homes and bring it to the town docks for our DPW to offload and dispose of. This is an annual event and one I have volunteered for pretty much every year I’ve lived in my town. I only missed one year – last year – due to a family gathering to celebrate the first birthday of my great niece. I more than made up for it this year.

However, this post isn’t really about Island Cleanup Day as it is about a discussion that took place during the day, that being about whether others have observed more people than ever “driving stupid”. That expanded to also cover people out on boats “driving stupid” as well.

As I have mentioned in a few other posts, since mid-Spring I have noticed a lot of people driving erratically, poorly, or outright dangerously. Too many of them I have found are driving distracted, usually paying more attention to their smart phones rather than the road. More than a couple of people I was working with today have seen the same thing. The other thing that goes with that is there have been more traffic accidents, with more than a few of them being fatal.

Our town saw two fatal accidents within a few days of each other, one being a head-on collision where both drivers died when one car crossed over the double yellow line. No report has yet been issued about the cause, but if it were due to distracted driving it wouldn’t surprise me. The other accident was a hit-and-run which killed a pedestrian, the driver later being found to be suffering from dementia and shouldn’t have been driving in the first place.

New Hampshire has seen a lot of fatal traffic accidents, with one in a neighboring town that was very similar to the one in our town where one car crossed over the double yellow line and hit the other car head on. In this accident an 8-year old girl died from her injuries. Again, no accident investigation report has yet been issued, but again it wouldn’t surprise me if it were another case of distracted driving.

One of the other people I had the opportunity to talk with was one of our town’s police officers. I asked him if he was seeing a lot of people “driving stupid” today and his immediate response was to roll his eyes and say “You have no idea!”. He related a couple of the stupider things he’d seen that day...and it was still well before noon.

A number of us also described some of the stupidity we’d seen out on the lake, and while distracted driving of the kind seen on the roads may not have been the cause of what we’ve seen, there were still too many “stupids” out there. Considering the heaviest boat traffic is during weekends it isn’t a surprise that we see so many “stupids” during the weekend. It’s one reason I tend to do all of my boating during the week.

On those few occasions when I do go out during the weekend it’s usually because I have guests. While I do enjoy the company, I find that I get back to the dock at the end of the cruise feeling exhausted because it takes a lot of work to keep me and my friends safe while we’re out on the lake. Talking with the others working at Cleanup Day, they have experienced the same thing.

How about you folks? Have you been seeing a lot more people “driving stupid”? It wouldn’t surprise me if you have.

Friday Funny - A Total Bust

It seems Blogger, or more accurately, Google, is still blocking any attempt to upload pictures on my blog. The Powers That Be at Blogger have been absolutely no help whatsoever. Blogger keeps telling me to log off and then log back on, but that's a non-starter since I also cannot reach the Log Out link in order to log out. It's Blogger's version of Catch 22 and I hate it.

It looks like I will need to figure out a workaround.

In the mean time I will see if I can switch over to more text-based humor.

Thoughts On A Sunday

I mentioned last week how more people seem to be “driving stupid” this summer. The “stupid” continues unabated with even more traffic deaths, with some of those being due to distracted driving.

Another thing I’ve seen that I haven’t noticed before is a huge increase in roadkill, with over a dozen deer killed along a 2-mile long stretch of state road that passes by The Gulch’s neighborhood. Do you know how many roadkill deer I’ve seen on that stretch of road over the prior 5 years?

One.

I know we’ll see even more over the next few months, but I have to ask why the big increase? Is it that there are suddenly that many more deer? It’s a possibility considering last winter was rather mild. Is it that there’s more traffic and more of that traffic has more people “driving stupid”? Sure. Could it be a bit of both? Absolutely.

==++++==

One thing I’ve been hearing about is how this summer proves that human-caused climate change is real, between the record heat waves and heavy precipitation. Those making those claims would be right...if they can prove humans caused the eruption of the Tonga-Hunga volcano in the South Pacific two-and-a-half years ago.

The amount of water that undersea volcano threw into the atmosphere was unprecedented, adding between 100 and 150 million tons of water into the atmosphere, with much of it going into the stratosphere. The water vapor content of the atmosphere increased 13%. As water vapor is an efficacious greenhouse gas, more so than CO2, all that water vapor was going to have an effect on climate.

Some may think that the water would already have been ‘squeezed’ out of the atmosphere much like ash finally settles out of the atmosphere, but unlike other volcanic eruptions, this one didn’t throw a lot of ash into the atmosphere. It is the ash that can have effects on weather, usually causing cooling as the ash reduces insolation. Two of the largest volcano eruptions recorded - Tambora and Krakatoa – each caused a “Year without Summer” due to the sheer volume of ash ejected into the atmosphere. We saw a similar effect after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, but nowhere near the magnitude seen with the other two eruptions.

Tonga-Hunga threw a lot of water into the atmosphere. That water vapor took considerably longer to circulate around the world than any ash cloud. The year after the eruption saw some increased temperatures and higher than normal precipitation. This year, two-and-a-half years after the eruption, we are seeing the full-blown effects of all that extra water vapor with record high temperatures/heat waves and well above normal precipitation. This past winter was also affected.

Here in New England we saw warmer than normal temperatures and precipitation, though most of that precipitation was in the form of rain rather than snow.

One study suggests the effects of the Tonga-Hunga eruption on the climate will be felt for the rest of the decade.

That does imply we’ll continue to see above normal temperatures and above normal precipitations for at least a few more years.

==++++==

It looks like Biden is still trying to buy votes by yet another student loan forgiveness program, even though such loan forgiveness programs have already been stuck down by courts as illegal. SloJoe wants taxpayers to bail out people who took student loans to pay for their degrees, all as a means of buying their votes. Yet the courts keep denying him.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration is doing its best Billy Mays impersonation, announcing, “But wait — there’s more” student loan forgiveness.

“President Biden has announced a new student loan bailout for 35,000 borrowers through ‘Public Service Loan Forgiveness,’ a program that Biden says has brought the total number of people getting debt relief from his administration to 4.76 million,” reported Fox Business on Thursday. “Under the new plan, eligible public service workers get an average of $35,000 in debt relief, a statement from Biden's administration said, totaling about $1.2 billion.”

"These 35,000 borrowers approved for forgiveness today are public service workers – teachers, nurses, law enforcement officials, and first responders who have dedicated their lives to strengthening their communities," read a White House statement. "And because of the fixes we made to Public Service Loan Forgiveness, they will now have more breathing room to support themselves and their families."

Okay, so it’s hard to oppose forgiving the student loans of people like police officers and nurses without sounding like a jerk, but this latest move is so galling because it comes after the White House has tried so many times to pander with student loan forgiveness. How much more obvious can these people be?

I have to wonder what bribe...err…incentive Biden (or WRBA) will try offering next?

==++++==

There’s something to be said for the old Commodore 64 computers. Yes, indeed.

==++++==

Another sign that the Biden-Harris campaign has entered the doom loop?

Kamala’s inability to to reassure major campaign donors that Joe Biden has a chance of beating Trump, or that he will even be compos mentis by the November election. But it’s even worse than that.

Vice President Kamala Harris tried to buck up the Democratic Party’s biggest donors on Friday, telling about 300 of them that there was little to worry about in President Biden’s campaign.

Ms. Harris spoke to the group at a time of extraordinary turmoil among Democrats, with many hoping that she will replace Mr. Biden as the party’s nominee. But several listeners said they found the meeting overall to be of little value and even, at times, condescending, believing that the message ignored donors’ legitimate concerns about the Biden-led ticket.

Ms. Harris, of course, is in a delicate position: She must demonstrate loyalty to her boss but also be prepared to jump immediately to the top of the Democratic ticket if Mr. Biden were to withdraw.

“I will start by sharing something with all of you,” Ms. Harris told the donors, according to a listener on the call who described her remarks on the condition of anonymity, “something I believe in my heart of hearts. It is something I feel strongly you should all hear and should take with you when you leave. And tell your friends, too. We are going to win this election.” …

Some listeners said they did find Ms. Harris’s delivery to be strong, even if it offered little reassurance, and did not place the blame on her. And some of the donors who were disappointed with the call had preexisting concerns about Mr. Biden’s candidacy, which is why they had requested the briefing.

After the call, one group that had promoted it in advance apologized to its members for having done so.

That is not a good sign for the Biden campaign.

==++++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has been great, the summerfolk have been making the most of it, and where I can get out onto the lake on Monday afternoon since none of the weekend summerfolk will be around.

Data Centers Driving Increase In Electrical Demand

This isn’t news to anyone who’s been paying attention, but it looks like the growing number of data centers, particularly those hosting Artificial Intelligence, is straining the electrical grid. Electrical demand has been growing in general, but data centers are really adding to the demand, and more are being built every day. (For full disclosure, the corporation I work for has a “hyperscale” data center division and they are busier than ever, designing and building new data centers.)

Part of the demand is due to an increasing number of data centers across the country, along with the rise of artificial intelligence.

The nation's roughly 2,700 data centers are mostly run by big tech firms like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Apple, and consumed more than 4% of all electricity in the U.S. in 2022. It's projected to more than double to 9% by 2030, according to the Electric Power Research Institute, a research organization and nonprofit focused on energy. It is not affiliated with any companies or type of technology.

But it's already taxing the U.S.' aging power grid, and the demands of AI are just beginning to grow. A ChatGPT query, for example, uses nearly 10 times the electricity of a typical internet search.

If AI continues to grow at the current rate the grid won’t be able to keep up, and the let’s face it, the grid capacity isn’t expanding anywhere near fast enough. This is particularly true of ‘renewables’ – solar and wind – because they can’t possibly meet the demand and they are too weather weather dependent, too variable. What’s needed is more nuclear, particularly modular designs that can be built quickly and installed just as quickly. It could be one reason Bill Gates has invested billions in one such company – TerraPower – to build small modular reactors (SMRs) to power all of these new data centers.

The nice thing is that SMRs and be built and installed almost anywhere, either clustered together like the traditional One Big Nuclear Power Station or spread out for a more distributed power generation architecture. The OBNPS design requires a lot of high capacity transmission lines to get all that power, 900MW or more, from Point A to Points B, C, D, E to Z. With the distributed design many of the SMRs would be located at or near Points A thru Z. There would still be a need for transmission lines, but they wouldn’t need to be the big heavy-duty lines like the ones used for the OBNPS configurations.

There’s one more thing to consider when it comes to electrical demand, that being EVs. SloJoe wants to force us into EVs against our will and all of those EVs will need electricity to recharge. So it will take even more expansion of the grid capacity to meet both demands. We know that’s not going to happen.

Of course the EV demand may not grow as the market for EVs has fallen off considerably and a number of automakers have stopped production on their EVs altogether. As one wag put it on one of the Disqus threads, those who want an EV already have one...or two. It appears no one else really wants them since they really aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, are too expensive to buy, own, repair, and insure. They also don’t hold their value like ICE vehicles. But that’s a story for another time.