I am hoping to get out onto the lake late today after the weekend folk have departed. The observations about traffic that I made in yesterday’s post also applies to the lake, so when the weekenders are gone so is much of the boat activity on the lake.
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I have to add to yesterday’s post about traffic. I asked some friends and family members and dropped the question about traffic on one of the Facebook groups I frequent and without fail, every single response I got –
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I have to agree with Sarah Hoyt about this: It’s about friggin’ time.
One of the biggest mistakes made in US history was JFK’s executive order that authorized federal employees to unionize. (Some states had already done so for state employees.) Allowing federal employees to unionize was something that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and labor leader George Meany were against and warned about as they both knew it was inherently corrupt as it meant that the government was “negotiating with itself” when it came unions and that since the money paying for the wages and benefits came from the taxpayers and not the earnings as was done with labor unions in the commercial world.
However, that mistake may soon be corrected.
A federal appeals court lifted a judge’s order which originally prevented President Trump to end union bargaining for federal employees. The appeals court ruling will now allow the President to do so.
U.S. District Judge James Donato in San Francisco in June had issued the injunction blocking 21 agencies from implementing Trump's March executive order exempting many federal agencies from obligations to bargain with unions.This has been long overdue as it has been proven over the past sixty-plus years that FDR and Meany were right. The ‘negotiation’ process has been corrupt since day one.
Donato concluded Trump's order retaliated against unions deemed critical of the president and that had sued over his efforts to overhaul the government, including the mass firings of agency employees, violating their right to free speech under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.
But the 9th Circuit panel said Trump's order on its face "does not express any retaliatory animus," and it agreed with the Trump administration that the president "would have taken the same action even in the absence of the protected conduct."
The 9th Circuit panel included U.S. Circuit Judge John Owens, an Obama appointee, and U.S. Circuit Judges Bridget Bade and Daniel Bress, two Trump appointees. Another federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., had in May paused a similar order that had also blocked Trump's order.
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In meteorological terms, it’s a blink of the eye.
It seems that a number of Nordic countries are in the midst of an unprecedented heat wave with temperatures in the 30’s (Celsius), breaking records “going back to 1961.”
Umm, that’s 64 years which is nothing in meteorological time.
However, there are accounts of an expedition back in 1927 by a group of women trying to drive to the Arctic Ocean but they weren’t able to make it because “hot weather, melting permafrost and forest fires forced them to abandon their expedition.”
...the motor party journeyed to 270 miles north of the Arctic Circle, prepared for freezing weather. To their continued astonishment the temperature was never less than 90 degrees F (32ºC) in the shade.As best I’ve been able to determine most weather records go back maybe 200+ years, and then only in certain parts of the world. The British Royal Navy has records from the logbooks of their ships going back maybe 400 years, and again they don’t cover everywhere. So when someone says some weather conditions are “record breaking”, be aware those records only go back maybe 200 years, if that.
The intention was to reach the Arctic Ocean, but 40 miles of marsh country on the coast prevented this. An average of 210 miles a day was made on the journey, which was arduous in the extreme, and at one time the car had an actual race with death among the forest fires in Sweden over terrible roads.
Like I said, a blink of the eye.
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Another thing that has definitely been a scam being funded by taxpayer dollars is offshore wind farms. They are expensive to build, expensive to maintain, require much more maintenance than land-based wind, and don’t have anywhere near the service life of land-based wind. Not that land-based wind farms are much better as they have failed to deliver the benefits promised by the climate cultists. It’s not cheap. It’s not reliable. And it’s not dispatchable.
Now it appears the Trump Administration is going to “restore sanity” when it comes to the off-shore wind farm scam.
The Trump administration’s move to rescind all designated Offshore Wind Energy Areas (WEAs) in the United States is being characterized as a “major policy reversal,” but what it truly represents is a refreshing application of rationality in a field too long dominated by dogma, groupthink, and the wishful economics of green technocracy.Supporters keep playing up the “Energy is free” side of wind, choosing to downplay if not ignore the great costs involved with ‘collecting’ that free energy. The costs and subsidies for offshore wind farms are even greater than for those land-based wind farms and the cost per kilowatt-hour is quite high compared with ‘traditional’ power sources. Proponents push the low carbon footprint of wind, but choose to ignore the carbon output of the entire manufacturing, construction, maintenance, and operation chain and finding it isn’t nearly as green as is claimed. And then there’s the power factor which is defined as actual power produced versus the plate capacity of the wind turbines/wind farm which is somewhere around 30%. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear are much higher with nuclear being somewhere above 90%.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) announced the decision to rescind every single federally designated wind energy area on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf, which brings to an end the federal protection of more than 3.5 million acres previously targeted for “offshore wind development.” The scale of the reversal cannot be overstated: this is not a minor adjustment or a routine regulatory tweak. This is, in the words of the article, the effective “end” of offshore wind leasing in the United States—at least for the time being.
To understand the gravity and necessity of this move, let’s remind ourselves how we got here. The Obama and Biden administrations, along with their European counterparts, threw unprecedented support behind offshore wind, an industry that—despite the tidal wave of public subsidies—has shown a knack for floundering economically and technologically whenever taxpayer money is not propping it up. In fact, the very need for designated wind energy areas is itself an admission that offshore wind cannot compete on a level playing field; it requires the full faith, credit, and political muscle of government to exist.
Wind sounds nice, but the reality doesn’t come close to matching the promises made by its proponents. If it did, then taxpayer subsidies would be unnecessary and the costs per kilowatt-hour would be lower than the more traditional power generation sources.
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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the road traffic is high, so is the boat traffic, and where Monday has returned yet again to “harsh our mellow”.