Thoughts On A Sunday

Okay, here it is, the first post written on the Official Weekend Pundit Desktop since I’ve restored it’s function. It’s nice to be back to writing using my own computer rather than ‘borrowing’ my work computer to blog. Frankly, it’s more comfortable using my own computer because it is set up better than my work laptop.

It is Mother’s Day and I and the WP Sisters took the WP Mother out for lunch at one of our favorite eateries here in town to celebrate our Mom.

I am also one week closer to getting the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout out of storage so it can be prepped for launching.

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I agree wholeheartedly with this, and it’s something that needs to be repeated across the nation.

A BIGGER PAYCHECK THAN HE COULD HAVE GOTTEN IN SOME SERVICE INDUSTRY, TOO

Seeing how BeezleBub worked a hard job farming from the time he was 13, how it showed him that hard work is something that needs to be done, is something that helped make him the man he is today. He now owns his own side business and between that and his regular job he has earned enough to buy his own home.

He’s not the only one who has learned that lesson.

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One of the WP sisters showed me this campaign ad from Mike Minogue, a Republican running for governor in Massachusetts.



Frankly, I think it is a great ad.

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Is this really a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention over the past four decades or so?

DOJ Concludes UCLA Med School Racially Discriminated In Admissions Process

An investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) has found that certain admissions practices at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) constituted racial discrimination. The DOJ announced the findings of the year-long investigation via a press release on Wednesday.

Among the specific ways the medical school discriminated, the DOJ said that leadership adhered to the “dubious contention that patients receive the best care when treated by a doctor of the same race, rather than by the most qualified.”

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon accused the school of focusing on “racial politics” rather than training excellent doctors.

“UCLA’s admissions process has been focused on racial demographics at the expense of merit and excellence — allowing racial politics to distract the school from the vital work of training great doctors,” stated Dhillon.

“Racism in admissions is both illegal and anti-American, and this Department will not allow it to continue.”

It seems yet another California institution has to learn the lesson the hard way that you do not fight racism by being racist. I have to wonder how long it will be before the Left comes to understand that truth. Or will they hold on their ideological belief that the only way to make up for past discrimination is to discriminate against those whose ancestors may (or may not) have discriminated against them?

And the madness continues.

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I had to read this three times before I could comprehend it.

Houston Chronicle Publishes Non-alarmist Climate Op-ed

How did this get published? Someone must have slipped up.

Robert Bradley managed to get a climate op-ed published in the Chronicle after more than decade of being an unperson as far as the Houston Chronicle was concerned, his op-eds banned. From the time Trump was elected to his first term Bradley was banned because he refused to toe the “We’re=All-Gonna-DIE-Because-Of-Climate-Change” line. Actual science, data, and evidence were not welcome.

But things have changed.

My Houston Chronicle op-ed came out in the Print edition last Sunday. This breaks a decade-plus-long drought when the Progressive Left Chronicle ignored my submissions. A new editor with a more inclusive editorial policy (thank you Trump Nation), Evan Mintz, reached out to me after seeing my MasterResource posts critical of the paper’s bias and my documentation of the conflicted business editorialist Chris Tomlison. In any case, I was published online and in print.

There may be some hope for the MSM yet.

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather is being weird, more boats are being seen on the lake every day, and where yet again Monday is harshing our weekend!

More Computer Stuff

Well, I’ve got about two-thirds of the WP computer work done I’ve been working on over the past couple of weeks.

The main Weekend Pundit Linux desktop is up and running again and had most of the backup files copied over from the backup drive. I didn’t copy all files as I wanted to retain more free disk space. The older files I rarely access are going to remain on the backup drives.(I have three of those, one of which will soon be residing at my Dear Brother’s home as we both believe in at least one copy off-site just in case the worse happens.)

One of the Weekend Pundit Linux laptops has had the OS reloaded and configured. I have not yet restored the files via the backup drive because I want to make sure the installation is stable. The laptop required a new hard drive because the old one failed. It took a little time to figure that out because it wasn’t a hard failure, meaning that sometimes it would boot properly, then crash sometime later. At other times it wouldn’t boot at all. It seems to work fine now.

A week ago I delved into why it’s time to dump Windows 11. Nothing has happened to change my mind about this. In fact, I have been having discussions with the IT department where I work about switching over to Linux from Windows 11. This is not a new discussion as I have been making the case for the change for a couple of years now. The IT guys brushed me off back then. But lately that has changed as they have been seeing the same thing so many others have been seeing, particularly seeing just how intrusive Windows 11 has become. We also had issues with programs that ran well on Windows 7 and Windows 10 not running well or not running at all under Windows 11. Quite a few programs require new drivers to interface with outside equipment. Others require programming changes or a recompile to work properly. We didn’t have to do any of that for the computers we have that run Linux. (Yes, the Windows programs required a program called WINE to properly run in Linux.)

And the saga continues…

Friday Funny - Angels

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been a soggy weekend up here at the lake with occasional breaks in the clouds allowing us to see some blue sky. Not that I’m complaining.

I’ve been busy inside The Gulch repacking items from big boxes and containers into smaller ones that fit through the attic door in one part of The Gulch and the hatchway/stairway in another part of The Gulch. The bigger boxes were too heavy for one person to safely handle, and the bigger containers were too big to fit through the attic entrances, or too unwieldly or too heavy for one person to handle, or both. Much of what made it into the attics came from the storage unit I emptied out at the end of March. (I still have one box sitting in the garage at the ex’s house that I will be taking care of during this coming week.)

I did make quite a bit of progress but I am nowhere near done. I still have to go though the garage to winnow out stiff we no longer use. Some of that is cookware which hasn’t been used in years and will make its way to our dump’s “Goody Shack”. From what I’ve been told, stuff like that won’t be sitting there long as it seems to be one of the more popular types of items people are looking for. Some of the rest of the stuff we no longer need will either be recycled or dumped as trash. I am trying to make room in the garage so I can rearrange things which include moving some shelves to make room so I can park the trusty RAM 1500 in the garage. I can’t do that at the moment because about a foot-and-a-half of the rear of the pickup sticks out which means I can’t close the garage door.

I am now a couple of steps closer to getting the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout back into the water. The first step was paying the winterization and storage fees and the second step was scheduling a pickup date when BeezleBub and I will tow the boat to his place so we can perform final prep which includes any cleanup required, installation of a new fire extinguisher, and loading all of the boating gear – mooring lines, anchors, PFDs, cushions, and other items - back into the boat. Once that’s done all I will need to do is put on the new registration stickers on the bow and it will be ready to launch. What day that will be is something BeezleBub and I will need to discuss.

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As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about dumping Windows, here’s a video that covers Germany’s decision to ban Windows 11 because of the privacy issues that Microsoft ignores.

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Since I mentioned recycling above, I figured it might be worthwhile to link this post at Instapundit which in turn links to another blog posts that gets into the economics of recycling.

It looks into whether recycling is worth it. I can certainly see where recycling some materials like metals – iron, steel, copper, aluminum, etc. - makes perfect sense. But what about plastics? Are all of them worth recycling or only certain ones? What about glass? Paper? Cardboard?

My little town used to do single-stream recycling, meaning that for the most part everything went into a single dumpster. The only thing we required going into a separate dumpster was cardboard because it otherwise took up a lot of space in the dumpster and partially full dumpsters would be hauled away, but we still had to pay the cost of a full dumpster being picked up. Even so, single-stream recycling cost our town far more than anything we might receive for our recyclables.

Once our town changed over to separate-stream recycling, meaning certain plastics went into one place, paper into another, paper into another, cardboard into yet another one, and glass into another. (We don’t except all plastics.) Aluminum beverage cans went into yet another place, but other aluminum cans – cat food cans, for example – and tin cans went into another. Steel and iron went into other very large dumpsters. We also started accepting Styrofoam as we could process it on-site which greatly reduced its volume.

Our town went from losing money, meaning our tax dollars were paying the cost for recycling, to making money which means our recycling system was paying for itself as we received full value for our recyclables and we didn’t have to pay to have them hauled away.

Other towns will charge their residents to dump their trash and recyclables, usually requiring their cars or trucks to be weighed coming in and going out. This determines how much they pay as the fees are based upon the weight of the materials deposited. Cities, big and small, likely do curbside pickup of recyclables. That is usually paid for either through taxes or through the purchase and use of the properly colored bags.

There is no perfect system that covers all recyclables and does so profitably. Some recyclables have no market or must be paid for separately only to be landfilled because of that lack of a market.

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Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me in the least.

France: New Real Estate Browser Extension Provides Immigration, Insecurity, and Islamization Data Directly to Property Listings

A French website and real estate browser extension for Chrome is promoting an unusual data offering, which includes information on immigration levels, insecurity, and Islamization rates — all factors that real estate buyers may want to take into consideration before they make an investment.

The OVMF assigns various scores “automatically in real estate ad photos,” according to the company behind the extension, which is free and collects no data from its users, according to the website.

The OVMF also promises to highlight certain facilities in the area or neighborhood, which some real estate buyers may want to be aware of, such as asylum accommodations, troubled QPV districts, and the number of mosques in an area.

The OVMF site appears to have an enormous amount of data, such as the number of migrants in accommodation facilities, the number of different religious groups, and immigration levels for each neighborhood.

I have a feeling this will spread well beyond France. I expect we’ll see something like this in the UK and Germany next and for the same reason.

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

Neighborhood Watch Signs Taken Down For Being Expressions Of Exclusion

Yes. You read that right. I even checked it three times just to make sure I hadn’t misread it or that it was some kind of typo.

Neighborhood watch programs help prevent crime. But preventing crime is racist.

Excuse me? Preventing crime is RACIST?? What kind of woke B.S. is this?

Consequently, as the New York Post reports,

A woke Michigan city shelled out a staggering $18,000 to rip down hundreds of neighborhood watch signs after lawmakers branded them racist.

Neighborhood watch signs are “expressions of exclusion,” according to Ann Arbor Mayor Christopher Taylor.

Yeah. Right.

I wonder if there’s something in the water causing this mass delusion? What’s the cure for this kind of asinine reasoning?

Maybe we have to nuke it from orbit just to make sure…

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where the rain is playing hide-and-seek, spring cleaning is continuing apace, and where Monday is coming around to screw up the weekend…again.

Is It Time To Dump Windows?

As any of my dozen or so readers know, I have spent time restaging two three of the Weekend Pundit computers. One failed due to delaying some updates that ended up ‘breaking’ the boot sequence on my Linux desktop and laptop once I let them install. If nothing else I learned not to let updates build up and then do them all at once. The most recent one had both a hardware and OS failure, it being an older PC running Windows I hadn’t used for some time.

I was able to restore both Linux computers after making sure I had pulled the important data from them by booting to Linux via a USB key and backing up all of the data from both machines onto an external hard drive. One of those I was able to ‘repair’ using the ‘Restore Boot’ function on the USB key. However, I still had to restore some things from the backup. The other Linux machine required me to reload the OS in its entirety. The process was painless and with a few small unimportant exceptions, I didn’t lose any data, and that was restored from the backup I made. While I have only been using the restored Linux computers on a limited basis as I verify everything is running properly, I haven’t seen any issues with either machine.

The old Windows PC, however, had a number of problems, with the biggest being Windows acting up, particularly after a set up updates were downloaded and installed. After struggling with his machine for some time I decided I had spent enough time trying to restore Windows and blew away the installation by installing Linux. So far, I haven’t seen any issues. While I was researching fixes to ensure I was taking the right path I came across a number of videos that looked at Windows, specifically Windows 11, and outlined why you might want to consider dumping Windows and installing Linux.

One of the big issues brought up is that Windows 11 is quite intrusive, storing private data from your computer on their servers and doing so in unencrypted files. It has also been moving away from users paying for and owning the copy of Windows on their computer and finding out they are only renting it. This is something Linus Torvalds, the ‘father’ of Linux, has been warning us about for over 20 years. Then to add insult to injury it turns out that Windows 11 updates have been increasingly causing computers to crash and users to lose files:



And then there are the changes to Windows mentioned above that are “making it mandatory” to switch from Windows to Linux whether you want to or not:



There are several different flavors of Linux to consider. I use two different versions of Linux -Linux Mint on two of my desktops and Ubuntu on another desktop and my laptop.

Linux Mint is very Windows-like in appearance and function which would make the switch from Windows to Linux a little less difficult. There’s also another Linux distribution known as Zorin OS, the version of Linux that HP ships with the computers it sells to folks who don’t want to deal with Microsoft that is also very Windows-like in appearance and function. (A note: Both Linux Mint and Zorin OS use Ubuntu as their base.)

Linux offers a lot of free software that provide the same type of programs as that used on Windows. There are a number of Office suites out there that I have found to be every bit as functional as Microsoft Office. They may not do everything Microsoft Office, but probably 90% of the users would never notice what these Linux programs don’t have compared to Microsoft Office.

I have used both LibreOffice and OpenOffice and have found them to be very good. Both will open just about every type of Microsoft Office file. I also found that LibreOffice can open both old WordPerfect and Lotus WordPro files with no problems. (I used Lotus WordPro for a lot of years because I didn’t care for Microsoft Word as it didn’t have the functionality of WordPro. I still have a lot of old WordPro files!)

Another thing that you may find attractive is that Linux can run many Windows programs. Many Linux versions require installing something called WINE which allows Linux to run those programs. There are a few Linux versions that can run Windows programs without WINE.

When it comes to accessing the Web, just about every web browser out there has a version that runs on Linux. (I use both Firefox or Brave on my Linux machines.)

Okay, I could keep beating the drum for making the switch to Linux, but that would get boring pretty quick. But keep in mind that both individuals and some businesses and corporations have been making the changeover. That ought to tell you something right there.

A Note: I forgot to mention something about Linux that might get you to try it: You can boot to Linux on your present Windows machine from a USB key. You don't need to install it to try it out!

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