Thoughts On A Sunday

This is an abbreviated edition of TOAS as I spent today with members of the WP Clan celebrating Easter.

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A week ago we were cleaning up after receiving 18 inches of snow here at The Gulch. Today, much of that snow is gone, between warmer temperatures and a couple of says of heavy rain. Not that the snow is gone, but there isn’t a lot of bare ground showing. Driveways and roads are clear and most roofs are also snow free.

Yesterday saw high winds with gusts of 40-50 mph. The winds generated white caps and two foot swells out on the lake.

I wish I could say we’re past any winter weather, but the Weather Guys^TM have said we’re likely to see snow starting Wednesday and on and off on Thursday and Friday. Winter isn’t over yet...at least according to Mother Nature.

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Oh good grief!! Is there nothing global warming can’t do?

First, it’s going to turn Earth’s surface into something that will resemble Venus and we’re all gonna die. Then it’s going to usher in another Ice Age...and Venus-like temperatures at the same time and we’re all gonna die. The latest claim about the power of global warming?

Global warming will increase plastic pollution.

This is what is going to kill us this time:

Typically viewed as unrelated problems, global warming and plastic pollution are instead inextricably trapped in a “vicious circle” where one feeds the other, researchers in Sweden report in Nature Communications. The mutually-reinforcing relationship escalates global warming, the degradation of materials, plastic waste and the leaching of toxic chemicals into the biosphere.

Plastics that we rely on every day will deteriorate more rapidly because of rising global temperatures, and one effect will be a demand for more plastics. Xinfeng Wei, a researcher in polymeric materials at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, says meeting that demand will further compound greenhouse emissions that drive up the global temperature.

“A self-reinforcing cycle is formed, creating a vicious circle between climate change and plastic pollution,” Wei says.

In 2019, plastics generated 3.4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, or about 1.8 billion tons, mostly on account of their production and conversion from fossil fuels, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). By 2060 that amount is expected to more than double.

Everything generates greenhouse gases, not just plastics. But one has to ask whether plastics can be re-engineered to reduce emissions as well as toxic chemical runoff? Do all plastics cause this problem or just some of them? If plastics were actually capable of being properly recycled would this reduce the problem, have no effect, or make the problem worse?

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Equity Based Algebra?

Just when I think California can’t get any stupider it proves me wrong.

When the woke claim things like math is racist, one has to figure they’ll also come up with some nonsense as a means of fixing the problem, one that doesn’t exist. So here’s California’s latest bit of delusional silliness – equity based algebra.

The CMF (California Math Framework) is a series of policy and curriculum "suggestions" designed to bring "equity" to the math scores of minority students. Some of [the] outrageous suggestions already adopted are almost beyond belief. Julia Steinberg has listed a few in The Free Press.

-Most students won’t learn algebra until high school. In the past, when that was expected of middle schoolers, the CMF tells us, “success for many students was undermined.”

-This means calculus will mostly be verboten because students can’t take calculus “unless they have taken a high school algebra course or Mathematics I in middle school.”

-“Detracking” (ending advanced courses) will be the law of the land until high school; students will be urged to “take the same rich mathematics courses in kindergarten through eighth grade.”

Also, "letter grades will be discouraged in favor of 'standards-based assessments.'" It's not very clear what "standards-based assessments" are, but it sure sounds academic and harmless, right?

The worst of it boggles logic and reason.

It only gets worse from there, pushing equity which in this case means pulling students down to the lowest common denominator. That is not how one ensures success of students. It just makes sure they all fail...but at least it will be fair, right?

What a bunch of pure, unadulterated woke bullsh*t.

Read The Whole Thing.

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And that’s the (abbreviated) news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where we’re going to be swinging back and forth between spring and winter weather, there are already some boats back in the water, and where yet again we will not be able to escape Monday.

Yeah, Like This Is Going To Work Out

The Biden Administration (well, actually WRBA) keeps trying to ram electric vehicles down the motoring public’s throats. It’s using the EPA as a means of doing so.

But per usual the one thing that is being devoutly ignored is that electric vehicles require electricity to charge them.

Little mention has been made about where all this electricity needed to charge them is going to come from. Yes, some noise has been made about using renewable sources to do so, but the truth is that renewables will never be able to do so. Too many renewables true believers cannot seem to do math, cannot figure out that the amount of land needed to provide the electricity just to charge EVs, let alone for other uses also being mandated by WRBA. They can’t be built fast enough nor will they provide anywhere enough electricity when it’s needed.

Lo and behold, when you push people to electrify everything in their lives – cars, cookers, heating systems – while bribing them to go all-electric with lavish government subsidies, it turns out they use more electricity. Who would have thought? I guess this is why we need all those brainiac experts to analyse the ultra-complicated technical details of environmental policy.

One such expert worries in the Times: ‘The numbers we’re seeing are pretty crazy.’ America’s paper of record warns that in the past year the nation’s utilities have nearly doubled their estimates of how much more power they’ll need to provide in the next five years, during which an extra California’s worth of demand will be dumped on the US grid. So allow me to lead you through all the ‘well, duh’ bullet points of this hugely entertaining piece.

Electric vehicles need electricity. Surprise! Apparently simply stippling the landscape with new EV chargers, which Joe Biden’s farcically titled Inflation Reduction Act is meant to finance, isn’t quite enough. Gosh, darn it. Nobody pointed out that the chargers have to be connected to actual electricity. So far, it looks as if no one in government has worried about where it will all come from. Oh well. That’s understandable. These important people have so many other weighty matters on their minds.

Burning fossil fuels to not burn fossil fuels is a tad inconsistent.

Making electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines requires electricity.

When you throw trillions of government dollars at reviving manufacturing, you get more manufacturing.

Manufacturing requires electricity.

Intermittent wind and solar power require fossil fuel backup.

There are other points brought up that dismantle the argument for forcing everyone into EVs, and switching heating/cooling, stoves, clothes-dryers, and so on to electricity. Our electrical grid can’t possibly meet the demand all these changes require.

The environmentalists won’t let the utilities build the power plants we need to build – nuclear – be they SMRs of traditional design or molten salt reactors that are much safer to operate and can use ‘depleted’ fuel from older reactors – uranium and plutonium – burning them until all of the long-lived radioisotopes are gone. Generating electricity from diffuse sources is never cheap. It also isn’t reliable. It is also variable, something electric grids really don’t like. (This is something South Australia found out the hard way when they went full renewables after shutting down their last coal-fired plants.)

Friday Funny - Hunting Versus Assault

Here's a better way to explain the difference between a hunting rifle versus an 'assualt' rifle to anti-gunners in a way they might actually understand:

Thoughts On A Sunday

Just when we thought winter was in our rear mirror, Mother Nature decided it wasn’t quite over yet. We received a little over 17 inches of snow here at the lake, with areas to the west and north of us seeing over 2 feet of snow. (Ironically, the Weather Guys ^TM had forecast only 6 to 12 inches to fall here.) One of the saving graces was that there was little wind with this storm though there were times when the snow was falling at up to three inches an hour in some areas.

I did go outside to shovel a couple of times during the snowfall to keep the amount of snow I needed to move at any one time to a minimum. However, I still spent about two-and-a-half hours this morning shoveling. I also pulled out the roof rake to remove snow from the roof in order to prevent any ice damming.

What’s ironic is that with the exception of a couple of snowbanks left over from winter, all of the snow was gone. Now it looks like we’re back in the depths of winter rather than the first week of spring.

At least I did not have to venture out on to the roads yesterday, having taken care of what little pre-storm shopping I needed to do early Friday afternoon. Not that I wouldn’t have if the need arose as the trusty RAM 1500 4x4 is more than capable of handling the weather. But why head out if there’s no need?

I figure this is likely to be a “last gasp” winter storm and that we won’t see any more accumulating snow again until next winter...or so I hope. I’d really like to get the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout ready for the upcoming boating season and get it into the water before mid-May.

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I find it ironic that the US warned Russia about an upcoming terror attack, likely from known Islamic terrorist group, and were ignored.

Or were they?

Knowing the Russian propensity to sacrifice their own citizens in order to fit a narrative they’re trying to sell, I wouldn’t put it past them to allow this attack to take place and then blame the attack on Ukraine as a means to garner continuing support for their war against Ukraine. Goodness knows Putin has shown he doesn’t care about the myriad of Russian men sent to the slaughter in so-called “meat assaults”, poorly armed, ineffective body armor, and lack of artillery or close air support while trying to break Ukrainian defenses. Why would he care for Russian citizens who might serve a better purpose as martyrs?

Such an attack is uncharacteristic of Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory. The Ukrainians focus on military targets – air fields, naval bases, navy dry docks, supply depots, refineries, tank farms, logistics centers, transportation infrastructure like bridges, factories, electrical substations and power plants – not civilian targets like apartment buildings, shopping malls, and public buildings like the Russians have.

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First, it’s shoplifting mobs hitting stores, overwhelming store security and absconding with thousands of dollars of merchandise in less than two minutes. They are gone long before police can respond.

Now it’s hundreds of teens storming malls in California, not to shoplift but blocking access to mall businesses, fighting, and “to raise holy hell”.

What started last summer as a social media challenge has morphed into a major challenge for California shop owners, police, and teens.

Hundreds or even thousands of teens descended on one mall and milled about, blocking access to stores, getting into fights and generally raising holy hell. One 16-year-old kid was shot during a disturbance involving hundreds of teens at the Pike Outlets in Long Beach. Another teen was stabbed in the Bay area as a mob of teens descended on a mall in Emeryville.

The sheer number of teens who show up at these "takeovers" is alarming. Thousands of teens confronted police at a fashion mall in Torrance, closing streets for hours. They planned to repeat the event this weekend.

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“Authorities, shop owners, and teens, alike, aren't quite sure why these unruly gatherings are happening with increasing frequency at malls around California. However, many signs point to a social media challenge inspiring large groups of teens to create the disturbances.”

“What may have started last summer as a nationwide social media challenge, has ballooned into a major problem for some Golden State shopping centers.”

It doesn’t surprise me this is a growing phenomenon in California considering how lenient the laws have become in the Pyrite State and with DA’s unwilling to prosecute crimes, even violent ones.

You notice that you don’t see things like this happening in the rest of the US, particularly in states where the citizens are armed and where laws are actually enforced. (Yes, there are shoplifting flash mobs in other states, but mostly in blue cities. I can’t picture something like that happening at the Mall of New Hampshire in Manchester. Too many shoplifters would likely end up getting shot.)

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Cannibalism isn’t just a problem in Haiti. Apparently it’s now a problem in California.

Who’da thunk it?

Yet another reason for us to kick the blue counties of California out of the US.

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Hmm, I have to wonder if any of this might have something to do with the unexpected amount of snowfall we got yesterday?

It seems there has been unprecedented cold in places like Saudi Arabia (where it also snowed), Australia, India, New Zealand, and really really really cold temperatures in Greenland and Antarctica.

It must be all that global warming that’s been taking place.

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Despite the cold temperature extremes mentioned above it actually appears the weather extremes have not become more common as many of the Climate Change faithful claim.

A new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation challenges the popular but mistaken belief that weather extremes – such as flooding, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes and wildfires – are more common and more intense today because of climate change.

Drawing on newspaper archives and long-term observational data, the report, written by Dr Ralph Alexander, documents multiple examples of past extremes that matched or exceeded anything experienced in the present-day world.

Dr Ralph Alexander said: “That so many people are unaware of past extremes shows that collective memories of extreme weather are short-lived.”

Indeed. So many people today seem to think that climate conditions they experienced during their youth were ‘normal’ and that what they experience today is abnormal. How many times have we heard stories about how “When I was a kid we had a lot more snow”? But back when the person was a kid they were maybe 3 or 4 feet tall, so of course there was “a lot more snow”. It’s a matter of perspective. Too many of the Climate Change faithful have no perspective, won’t question the claims of their fellow faithful. Even when presented with verifiable data disproving what they’ve been told they refuse to believe it.

And so it goes…

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where the snow has returned with a vengeance, the snow is already melting, and where we’re still getting closer to boating season.

Is It Time To Switch From Greenbacks to Goldbacks?

I keep coming across something called “goldbacks”, a currency that contains 24kt gold leaf in various amounts. The most recent mention I’ve seen was in the comments in Chris Muir’s Day by Day cartoon.

There are four five states that accept goldbacks as legal tender – Nevada, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, and my home state of New Hampshire.

I’ve seen them available in a number of denominations depending on how much gold leaf they contain, with the available denominations running from 1, 5, 10, 25, and 50. The 1 contains 1/1000th of a troy ounce of gold, the 5 contains 1/200th of an ounce, the 10 contains 1/100th of an ounce, the 25 contains 1/40th of an ounce, and the 50 contains 1/20th of an ounce. The five states have individual versions of these five denominations but the amount of gold contained in each denomination is the same.

Considering the state of our economy it might be time to consider buying goldbacks as it is highly likely the same amount of goldbacks will buy the same amount of goods regardless of the inflationary devaluation of the US dollar.

Am I shilling for those who are selling goldbacks? Nope. I am not going to link to anyone selling goldbacks nor am I going to suggest anyone. That’s something you can search for on the ‘Net by yourself. But one of the things I will say is that it is less of an expense if you can buy gold by the 1/1000th of an ounce, not having to shell out large amounts of cash to buy 1/10th ounce coins.

Have I bought any? I ain’t sayin’.

Will I buy any? None of your business.

Friday Funny - Safe Space

Thoughts On A Sunday

Another Sunday is upon us and it is also St. Patrick’s Day. It is also one day closer to Ice Out being declared on Lake Winnipesaukee which also means it’s one day closer to our boating season starting.

March Madness also starts as the brackets are being announced. Both University of Connecticut Men’s and Women’s teams made the cut which pleases the WP Clan to no end. (UConn is the ‘family’ school.) It will be interesting to see how well UConn will do, with the possibility that both the Men’s and Women’s teams could make the Final Four.

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Over the years we Granite Staters have had to deal with folks who move into our towns “from away”. They are usually made up of people from one of three groups – the Kindred Souls, the Drawbridge Folks, and the Back Where We Come From flatlanders.

The first group – the Kindred Souls – will move into a town and after a year or so you’d think they’ve lived their all their lives. They fit in because they were looking for a town just like they one they moved to. They don’t really want to change anything any more than anyone else living in their town.

The second group – the Drawbridge Folks – will move into a town and then want to “raise the drawbridges” to keep anyone else from moving in and they work to make sure nothing changes at all and get upset if anyone even suggests something new. Most of them mellow with time and even though they will never be one of the Kindred Souls, they do love the towns where they now live.

And then there’s the third group – the Back Where We Come From flatlanders – who will move into one of our towns and immediately start trying to turn it into a copy of the place they fled, bringing with them all the things that made their previous place of residence a hellhole. They are rarely tolerated and more often than not manage to piss off just about everyone in town including town officials, the Fire Department, the Police Department, the DPW or Road Agent, the School Superintendent, and all of their neighbors. They bring their prejudices, intolerance, condescension, and delusional ideologies, demanding that everyone else live they way they think everyone should live.

It isn’t just us in New Hampshire who have to deal with the third group. A perfect example of this in East Nashville, Tennessee where a Blue State flatlander moved in and the first thing they did was sue a neighboring butcher shop because the newcomer “can’t stand the smell of meat”.

Where is this flatlander from?

California.

Of course.

What would we expect from one of the Progressive Kalifornia anointed?

...California transplant Natalie Castillo relocated to a spot in East Nashville, Tenn. Her new home is next to Roy's Meat Service, a butcher shop that has been at its current locale for years. The family's presence in the neighborhood dates back to the 1940s. However, Natalie and her partner have decided that they cannot stand the smell of meat, even though they chose to move next to a butcher shop. In true progressive California fashion, they are suing to force Roy's to close.

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What is Natalie doing in Tennessee? Well, the policies and people she voted for and championed have turned her state into an over-priced sewer lagoon. Crime is everywhere, and one cannot walk down the street without tripping over human feces or drugged-out humans.

Nothing is priced within reach, and even fast-food joints are closing up shop. You can't get a taco, cheeseburger, can of creamed corn, or a box of drywall screws in California without getting overcharged, overtaxed, and possibly putting your life in danger. To steal a quote from Barack Obama, people like her DID build that. Just because these approaches to government and life did not work in California, they have to work in Tennessee, right?

Frankly, I doubt Natalie will win her lawsuit (though she might if it was taking place in the Pyrite State). That’s not much different than someone buying a house next to an airport and then suing to shutdown the airport because of the noise. I would like to think the courts in Tennessee haven’t been corrupted by the Progressive virus and the court will kick the lawsuit as trivial with no merit.

Only time will tell.

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Every time I think Scientific American, a once great science publication, couldn’t become any more woke and irrelevant, they prove me wrong.

In this case, the latest proof is their newest foray into gender-based science analysis.

It is proving once again that actual science must bow to the narrative, first, last, always.

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Hey, let’s add to the stupidity of the American population!

From the halls of George Mason University comes this latest bit of woke stupidity being perpetrated upon us.

“Marriage fundamentalism” advances “white supremacy,” according to a George Mason University professor.

“I theorize that marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy,” Professor Bethany Letiecq wrote in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

“Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family,” she wrote.

What’s ironic about this is that “scholars say marriage benefits society, minorities included.”

So you have a woke feminist professor telling us yet another custom going back millennia is racist only when white people practice it? WTF?

This ‘academic’ needs to be fired and have her academic credentials stripped from her because she’s a ideologue, not an educator.

We need to end this woke bullsh*t now.

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It looks like the Left is finding out first hand what happens when you don’t lock up criminals:

More crime.

It is highly likely if the four criminals who committed a mass shooting in Philadelphia on March 6th had been locked up, the shooting that wounded 8 teenagers wouldn’t have happened.

It’s time for our Progressive ‘betters’ to relearn the lessons the rest of us never forgot – If you lock up the bad guys they can’t commit more crimes.

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One has to wonder what people in other countries think about America’s descent into ‘woke’ madness? I have seen a few videos and some blog posts opining that the US is now an insane asylum, one being run by the craziest of the inmates – the ‘woke’ Left.

They espouse ideas and narratives the people in other countries know are total unadulterated bullsh*t and they infect our children with that same virulent bullsh*t. They see our nominal leader is a clueless pedophile puppet sinking deeper into dementia who insults and abandons our allies while rewarding our enemies. These same leaders have made sure crime skyrockets by not prosecuting and incarcerating criminals while framing and imprisoning citizens who disagree with their bullsh*t.

Yup, America has become a lunatic asylum.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has been all over the place as have the temperatures, road repair season will soon be starting, and spring will be arriving soon.

Recycling Plastics Isn't Working

I was making my monthly trip to our town’s dump...er…Solid Waste Center, dropping off some recyclables and trash. The recyclables are the usual – paper, cardboard, aluminum cans, glass bottles, and plastic. It was as I was offloading the huge container of plastics that I remembered reading a post about recycling, specifically about recycling plastic, and how it isn’t really worth it. Surprisingly, the article was on the NPR website (dated two years ago). It was the last thing I expected – an article telling everyone that plastic recycling isn’t worth it - from a heavily left-leaning media organization. As they stated, recycling plastic is practically impossible and the problem is getting worse.

The vast majority of plastic that people use, and in many cases put into blue recycling bins, is headed to landfills, or worse, according to a report from Greenpeace on the state of plastic recycling in the U.S.

The report cites separate data published...May [2022] which revealed that the amount of plastic actually turned into new things has fallen to new lows of around 5%. That number is expected to drop further as more plastic is produced.

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Waste management experts say the problem with plastic is that it is expensive to collect and sort. There are now thousands of different types of plastic, and none of them can be melted down together. Plastic also degrades after one or two uses. Greenpeace found the more plastic is reused the more toxic it becomes.

New plastic, on the other hand, is cheap and easy to produce. The result is that plastic trash has few markets — a reality the public has not wanted to hear.

My town limits what plastics it does take in, that being the #1, #2, #5, and #7 plastics, and on top of that they can’t take any of those plastics if they are black in color as apparently the laser scanners used to determine the plastic type doesn’t work on black/dark brown plastics. Seeing the physical amount of plastic at our recycling center is mind boggling. About the only other recyclable material I see with that kind of volume is cardboard.

There is one plastic our town takes in that has a high recycling percentage, that being #6, also known as polystyrene or Styrofoam. Our town processes it on-site, reducing it from the solid foam we know to ‘ingots’ that are as hard as rock. The processing heats up the polystyrene and removes all of the air. The ingots are stacked on pallets and picked up once there are enough for a full truckload. Our town actually makes money from this operation. Our town also takes in polystyrene from a number of other towns in the state as it is the only one recycling polystyrene. So we make money from other towns’ Styrofoam as well.

Do we make anything from the other plastics collected at our recycling center? Yes, but not a lot. At least we haven’t had to pay to have the plastic hauled away. At least not yet. But that could change.

If the percentage of plastics actually being recycled keeps shrinking, then where does all that plastic actually go? Around here it likely ends up at our local trash-to-energy incinerator, burned to generate electricity.

What percentage of the #1, #2, #5, and #7 plastics our town collects are actually recycled? At the moment I have no idea. I have a feeling the answer to that will not be easy to determine, but if it is anything like that mentioned in the NPR piece then it’s less than 10%. The rest is incinerated to make electricity. That also means it is more expensive for that plastic to be collected rather than to be put into the regular trash and then burned like the rest of our trash in the trash-to-energy plant.

What about the rest of the recyclables like paper, cardboard, aluminum cans, and glass? Our town does pretty well with those materials, with one of them, glass, being recycled locally. This came about because the last glass recycling facility in the Northeast closed its doors years ago and glass became nothing more than trash. However, our town still collects it and crushes/grinds it to create gravel-like pieces of glass to be used as fill and aggregate for construction and road maintenance, saving the town a lot of money in gravel costs.

It is well past time for all of us to take another look at our preconceptions about recycling, and specifically plastic, to determine if it is worth the time, effort, or money to recycle plastic. If the numbers in the NPR piece are correct then it is a money losing proposition and does not help the environment as has been claimed. It might be time to admit recycling plastics doesn’t work and stop wasting time and money pretending that it does.

Friday Funny - Twilight Zone

The problem is that I don't have to imagine. The world is being run by dumb f*cks.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It seems winter is winding down early this year, at least up here at Lake Winnipesaukee. The big lake never froze over entirely and Ice In was late. (Ice In is declared when all 5 ports of call for the MS Mount Washington cruise ship are iced over.) I have no doubt that Ice Out will be declared any day now as one of the predictors, a small pond near the airport, was ice free this morning. Ice Out is usually declared about a week after the pond is ice free. This most often occurs in mid-April, but there’s no chance it will wait that long this year.

While this ‘barely’ winter is almost over, it does mean that our boating season is going to start a few weeks earlier than normal. While it is unlikely I will get the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout into the water any earlier, usually towards the second week of May, there are plenty of boaters who will get their boats in as early as it is practical to do so.

I just hope this means we’ll have a better summer and boating season than we did last year.

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I’ve seen signs of this, too, right here in my home town.

See the Future of Global Depopulation – a Giant Empty School.

While the post linked to in the Instapundit link above deals with a Japanese elementary school, school systems all over the world – and here in the US – are seeing a shrinking enrollment. Some of that is due to demographics as the number of children being born is declining. (Some of that is due to the shrinking number of families as fewer adults are getting married, let alone even dating.)

Some of the school enrollment shrinkage is due to more families homeschooling, a trend that accelerated during the Covid lockdowns. Some of the shrinkage is due to more parent enrolling their kids in private schools. But overall, the trend is downwards and it is expected that trend will continue.

As I mentioned above, I have seen that trend in my home town as school enrollment in our school system has been shrinking for at least 15 years even as our town’s population has been slowly growing.

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I had no plans of watching the horror show that was the State Of The Union address because I pretty much knew it was going to be more of a campaign speech and there was going to be a lot of bullsh*t spewed as if it were true. Yet despite my not watching it, I did hear some of it which merely confirmed my suspicions.

One of the claims the Joetato made was how much better the jobs market was, something I’ve known has been a claim he’s been making that anyone paying attention knows is not even close to being accurate. The only jobs part of the jobs market that has been doing well is the government sector, which doesn’t add to the nations GPD. In truth, the job market has been losing jobs.

Every month, the Biden regime’s job report is revised DOWN by 20-50%. It bears noting that it’s the government sector that continues to dominate the new jobs reports.

Rich Baris posts: “Another MASSIVE downward revision to the prior monthly jobs report. These people are lying to us, and covering their tracks a month later. We’ve now had downward revisions for 10/12 to 11/12 on the 12-month for nearly two years.”

Government statistics, once a tool to measure the health of our economy, are cooked and created – weaponized as a campaign tool.

Over the last 3 months the US economy has shed 1.87million full time jobs. That's the largest decline since the GFC, outside the covid lockdowns. pic.twitter.com/9h8JfSHtUP

— steph pomboy (@spomboy) March 8, 2024

Every claim made by Biden and WRBA must be looked at askance as so many of them have turned out to be good sounding prevarications that in no way reflect reality. This was just one of them.

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Just when we thought the media couldn’t be any more in the pocket of the DNC, they prove us wrong.

Only the MSM can describe the low turnout for Biden’s Georgia “rally” as “a very intimate setting” as if it were set in a cafe or roadhouse. What it was instead was a rally with a lot of empty seats.

That’s a hell of a lot of spin.

I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of that between now and November...and I’m already tired of it.

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I have to agree with Scott Johnson that 1976’s Network was a perfect movie.

Almost 50 years later I remember Howard Beale’s rant on TV, Beale played by the great Peter Finch. I keep waiting for one of the network talking heads to speak the truth much as Howard Beale did when he finally had enough of the bullsh*t.



This was then surpassed by his “I’m mad as hell!” rant that is a masterpiece and still rings true today.

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And that’s the (alleged) news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where most of the ice has fled, thoughts of the upcoming boating season fill our heads, and Monday once again comes around to give us a kick in the teeth.

Renewable Energy Is A Taxpayer Funded Scam

I will unabashedly admit that I am heartily sick and tired of the whole climate change and “green” energy scam that has been perpetrated against us. Pseudoscience and outright lies have been used for years in order to sell the public on the idea that we must make all kinds of sacrifices in order to “Save The Earth”.

One of those sacrifices?

Reduction of CO2 emissions here in the US to offset the exploding emissions generated by China. China’s emissions are many times that of the US, yet somehow it is the US has to make the ‘sacrifices’ to offset China’s emissions? Really?

That’s a ‘sucker’ move and the climate change and “green energy” proponents know it. We shouldn’t be crippling our nation and its economy to offset China’s increasing emissions.

I have to say the “green” energy scam has been one of the more effective cons played on the American public. According to the scammers, solar and wind energy were supposed to replace most of our traditional energy sources like oil, coal, natural gas, and nuclear. The only problem with that claim?

It’s a complete and utter lie.

We’ve seen other countries go all in on renewable energy and every single time that they couldn’t even come close and fossil fueled backups were required to meet energy needs. In at least two cases – Germany and the UK – those backups being fueled by coal. Yeah, like that’s going to help reduce CO2 emissions. (It didn’t help that Germany shut down all of its nuclear power plants, something that made no sense to me whatsoever.) We’ve been having similar problems here in the US.

... in California, where politicians now require all new homes to have solar panels, all new cars sold in 2035 to be zero-emission, and all the state's electricity to come from carbon-free resources by 2045.

They're getting results, but not good ones: California's cost of electricity increased three times faster than in the rest of America.

People in Washington State pay about 11 cents per kilowatt-hour. In Oregon, 13 cents. In California, now almost 30 cents.

Do they at least get reliable energy for that? No.

The big problem with wind and solar power, of course, is that they don't work when the wind doesn't blow or the sun doesn't shine. Sometimes that happens when people most want heat or AC.

Increased use of "renewables" is why blackouts are more common in California. Bloomenergy says there were over 25,000 in 2019 -- thousands more than the previous year.

"We failed to predict and plan," said Gov. Gavin Newsom. Right.

Instead, they embraced unscientific green fantasies.

Requiring all new homes to have solar panels is a big reason California has the most expensive housing in America. The average house costs almost $800,000.

And let’s not even get into wind which has turned out to not be all that great either. Between service life and maintenance intervals being shorter than promised, capacity factors being less than a third of the plate capacity, and the fact that wind farms can take up a lot of land area for the amount of power the generate. The same can be said for solar, if not more so.

Read The Whole Thing.

Friday (Ironically) Funny - Environmentalism vs The Environment

Some folks need to be shown the difference between the two because they ain't the same thing.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It seems winter has fled, whether for but a couple of weeks or until next winter is unknown. I know it has been a disappointing winter for me, not seeing the temperatures or snowfall we usually see during a New Hampshire winter. Some will say “It’s climate change!” even though if one goes a little over 150 miles to the west of us you’ll see winter has been normal – cold and lots of snow.

We haven’t been seeing the usual winter weather patterns – coastal storms driven by the jet stream which give us the Nor’easters which dump a lot of snow and pull a lot of frigid air down from Canada. Instead most of the systems we’ve seen this winter have swept in from west to east, generating a lot of snow from the Sierras through the Great Lakes, but fizzling out by the time it reaches New England. It has also pulled warmer air in from the South which has given us spring-like weather a couple of months earlier than usual.

I do have to wonder if this means I might be able to get the Official Weekend Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout into the water a couple of weeks earlier than usual. (See? There’s always an upside to something like this.)

==++++==

I keep seeing stories about CNN and every time I do my first thought is “They’re still on the air?”

The once-great cable news station has deteriorated, particularly after it’s founder, Ted Turner, sold it to Warner Brothers in 1991. It is a shadow of its former self.

A number of its offerings such as its CNN+ subscription streaming service crashed and burned. It didn’t help that CNN went full left and become more about telling viewers what to think about the news rather than just reporting like they used during its Ted Turner days. Is it any wonder they’ve been shedding viewers like cats and dogs shed their fur in the spring?

“CNN is trying to keep up with the news landscape and become a digital-first provider,” a source said. “It makes sense for them to pursue anchors who have already established a presence there — especially if TV becomes history in their portfolio!”

--snip--

Something tells me CNN is going the way of the Hindenburg.

Yeah, hence the “crash and burn” I mentioned above...though to be accurate, the Hindenburg burned then crashed.

==++++==

First, it’s “White Rural Rage” is a danger to Democracy. Now it’s “White Rural voters”. I wish the Left would make up its mind.

Forget the deplorables. What we have here is the REAL threat to our Democracy. Which is, drumroll please, the rage of the white rural voters.

No, I’m not kidding. That’s according to two very VERY liberal writers, one of whom used to write for the Washington Post. Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman wrote a book titled: “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.” Isn’t that such a darling title? Well, Paul wrote an op-ed for MSNBC in which he informs us that the real danger to this country is because of the rage embedded into the psyche of the WHITE rural voters.

--snip--

Because they used data in their book to make their case, this must mean it’s true that those of us who live in, or grew up in rural areas as I did, and have the audacity to be WHITE, are the very real threat to our Democracy. The two authors appeared on MSNBC last week and you REALLY need to watch, but also keep throwable things out of reach.

I guess they can’t help themselves, demonizing rural white people as if they are the cause of all the ills being suffered in the urban blue areas, particularly because they refuse to vote for Progressives.

Yeah. Right.

==++++==

Might ‘liberal fragility’ explain why liberals do what they do?

Liberals really are extremely fragile people. This helps explain why they need “safe spaces” with cuddly stuffed animals, grief counselors, and warning labels against “microaggressions.”

The latest evidence is a completely unironic and totally un-self-aware piece in the New York Times about the anguish of liberal law professors having to teach constitutional law at a time when the Supreme Court leans right. It’s so upsetting that some professors are moved to tears and can’t conceive of continuing. The New York Times thinks this is actually “a crisis.”

I think they need to “man up” or “grow a pair” or whatever it is they call it these days because from reading the rest of the article and linked columns tells me that far too many of these Progressives were coddled and never learned how to deal with adversity, even such ‘adversity’ that most people would merely shrug off and continue doing what needed to be done. No tears required.

==++++==

Have you ever wondered why college tuition is so high, having risen at a rate well above inflation? This may be one reason why: Yale University employs nearly one administrator per undergrad.

Other colleges and universities have ratios running between 1:1 like Yale, and 1 administrator to 4 undergrads for others like the University of Florida. Both ratios are far too high.

==++++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice has been disappearing, the temps are going to be in the 50’s, and where I don’t care (this time) that Monday is coming back again.

Gun Free Zones = Sitting Duck Zones

I find it hard to believe this debate is still going on, that being that banning guns from some areas – school grounds, shopping malls, public areas – will prevent gun violence. Yet we see again and again these “Gun Free Zones” become targets for those wishing to kill as many people as they can without worrying about being stopped by an armed citizen. The most recently updated stats dealing with Gun Free Zones and school shootings show an interesting correlation.

It’s tragic; people are tired of seeing the senseless loss of innocent lives in educational settings. Despite mounting gun control laws on the Federal and state level, school-related shootings continue to rise (2023 being the highest year yet, with 388 school shootings in only six months). Regardless of political affiliation or thoughts on well-regulated militias and the right to bear arms, one thing is clear; what we’ve been doing for the past forty years isn’t working.

Each school shooting incident in America reflects one thing, children are vulnerable. Schools tend to be easy targets while simultaneously producing mentally ill individuals with an unstoppable intent to harm others.

Unfortunately, we still have a lot to learn about school shootings. There are a lot of unanswered questions. But what we can do is investigate the changes between societal shifts and legislation over the years and spark meaningful conversations about stopping school shootings. Of course, the clock is ticking down to the next horrific headline, so we need to start these meaningful conversations now.

For more than a few mass shootings the people doing the shooting weren’t legally allowed to own or carry guns. Many others were ‘known risks’ – people whose family, friends, and others knew the shooter was ‘not right in the head’ well before they went on the attack. When it comes to school shootings one of those commenting on the linked post hit the nail on the head:

Three common factors in most (not all) of these rampage killings:

1. A broken home.
2. Shooter had been a victim of bullying.
3. Psychotropic meds like SSRIs and antipsychotics.

This list came from the book How To Make A Monster: A Sensible Look At Rampage Killers.

In “How To Make A Monster”, Paul Glasco performs a true root cause analysis of rampage killers - sometimes referred to as "mass shooters". The book looks at how broken homes, being bullied, and children on psychotropic drugs can affect personalities as young people mature. Previous killers from shootings such as Columbine, Virginia Tech, Las Vegas, and Parkland are broken down based on these causal factors.

Imposing nonsensical “Gun Free Zones” with no way to actually enforce them, though most law-abiding gun owners will not carry their firearms in those areas, is not the way to prevent mass shootings. If there were armed guards in those zones to protect the people in those zones, that would be one thing. However, that is rarely the case and that in turns means everyone in those zones is in a “Sitting Duck Zone” because they have no means of defending themselves, at least not legally. All these zones do is guarantee more casualties.

It’s time to rethink Gun Free Zones and do away with them.

PS - One last thought that seems true to me:

Friday (Not So) Funny