10/31/2026

New Nukes? - Part 2

As I promised last week, this post will be bringing forward information about the developing nuclear renaissance taking place, specifically in the US. While most news about this renewal in interest in nuclear power had dealt with the theoretical, it has now shifted into actual hardware and new plants being built. Despite what the proponents of renewable energy have been selling, renewables will never be able to meet our growing demand for electricity, particularly in light the ongoing development and construction of data centers. Since I doubt we’ll see new coal plants being built and natural gas fueled combined cycle powerplants are limited in some areas because there aren’t enough pipelines to feed them, that pretty much leaves nuclear. As I have mentioned both in other posts and comments, “This isn’t your grandfather’s nuclear power.” My post of last week delved into some of the why’s of the push for a return to nuclear power, but not so much the nuts and bolts or the progress that has been made to date. It’s time to fix that lack.

One of the bits of interesting news is that Amazon is funding the construction of a dozen small modular reactors at the site of an old coal power plant in Indiana.

Amazon is funding development of a proposed 960-megawatt nuclear plant in Indiana and would be the first customer to buy its power, the companies announced Monday. Utility company American Electric Power (AEP) would operate the plant. X-energy, which designs small modular nuclear reactors and went public in April, would supply the reactors.

The new power plant would consist of 12 Xe-100 small modular reactors and be located on the site of a demolished coal power plant just south of Terre Haute. The deal is the second commercial agreement between Amazon and X-energy, and it’s three times larger than the first, which was announced two years ago.

Amazon has invested heavily in X-energy, leading a $700 million Series C-1 round in October 2024. The two companies have said they ultimately plan to build 5 gigawatts of new nuclear generating capacity in the U.S. by 2039.

Unlike many newly announced power plants, these reactors would be connected to the public electric grid, though Amazon says the power would also serve its data centers.

I have a feeling that this will be a common scenario of those building such nuclear plants to provide power for data centers: selling the excess to the electrical utilities. Since Jeff Bezos’ Amazon is doing this, I have no doubt that Bill Gates Terra Power will use the same model to power his data centers. Call it a “twofer” with the data centers getting the power they need while also making extra money selling power to the utilities. And since these reactors are relatively small compared to the One Big Nuclear Plant of the past and are modular in design and construction, the time to build will be much shorter and the costs a lot less since all of the module components are built on an assembly line rather than being custom built one at a time.

It must also be understood that there isn’t just one reactor technology being used. Some use a more traditional U235 type fuel cycle, some are using pebble bed gas cooled designs, some liquid metal cooled reactor designs, some molten salt reactor (MSR) designs, and some liquid fluorine thorium reactor (LFTR) designs. The one thing they all have in common is that they are not just knockoffs of granddad’s Generation II reactor designs. One of the nice things about the MSR and LFTR designs is that they can use the ‘depleted’ fuel from old Gen II reactors to fuel these new reactors. That can help eliminate the need to store that depleted fuel for 25,000+ years as is done now. We have tons of such fuel sitting in storage casks waiting to be put to use.

A lot of this technology is no longer on the drawing board. It is being built. Some reactors using the new designs have been built and have reached criticality, meaning a self-sustaining nuclear reaction, proving that the designs work. Here’s a look at what’s being done in the US:


It’s not just the US forging ahead with new nuclear power technologies. Believe it or not Denmark has also been a leader in one of these technologies.


I don’t recall seeing this amount of work being done on nuclear power since the early 1960’s. Sorry, I don’t have any memories of the ‘excitement’ of nuclear power in the 1950’s since I was too young. But I saw presentations made at school assemblies about the promise of nuclear power while I was in elementary and junior high school. That there isn’t just one path to create a nuclear power renaissance is promising. That there are also some states, mine included, that want to see such a renaissance, to see a resurgence in the use of nuclear power to meet our present and future energy needs is also promising.

Let’s hope it all comes to be.
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10/30/2026

Friday Funny - Halloween: Vote For My House

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10/25/2026

Thoughts On A Sunday

It is fully fall here at the lake. The foliage is just a little past peak color and we’ve been seeing some overnight temperatures at or just above freezing. (No frost here at The Gulch yet.) Summer clothes have been swapped out for fall/winter attire more appropriate for the temperatures and weather. The Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout has been pulled from the water and I have emptied out the boating gear and done some cleanup and it’s ready for its trip to one of the local boatyards for winterization and shrinkwrapping. Then it’s back to The Farm where it will be until the start of boating season next May.

The trusty RAM 1500 will be having a little more bodywork taken care of and then to one of the local mechanics garages to have the heating looked at and repaired. And then it will have its annual undercoating performed to protect it from winter road conditions (meaning the salt used to keep the roads from freezing up).

There will be some curtains that will need to be swapped out here at The Gulch, replacing sheers with thermals in order to help keep fall and winter chills in abeyance. There are also things that need to be moved in the garage to make it easier to deal with the winter weather once it arrives.

And we haven’t even reached Election Day yet!

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I found this on Instapundit earlier and found it intriguing for two reasons as it involves Elon Musk, one pro and one con.

The first paints Musk as a savior as ‘X’ seems to be the only thing keeping democracy alive in France.

The second refers to an “Elon Musk hit piece movie” that flopped bigly in movie theaters and has already been pulled.

It seems that some people only see him as an evil trillionaire who is enslaving the planet and others see him as a self-made trillionaire who is doing things people have only dreamed about doing, has made millionaires of many of his employees (even some of the janitors), and has even more ambitious ideas to expand humanity’s reach outside Earth’s atmosphere.

==++++++==


Yeah, this sounds right on the money.



Nothing more need be said.

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Yeah, this is going to work out well. NOT.

Ideologues Try Their Hand At Ordering Up An Electrical Grid Powered Only By “Renewables”

That sounds more like fever dream by folks who are seriously ill.

In my post several days ago on October 18, I recounted the story of how ignorant Chinese Communist Party ideologues in the late 1950s convinced themselves that they knew how to achieve limitless agricultural production by just ordering each community to produce large, arbitrary amounts of food. Do you want to double grain production? Then just plant twice as many seeds in the same acreage! The ideologues had no idea how agriculture actually worked in the real world. Within a couple of years, there was widespread famine, probably the largest in world history. Tens of millions died horrible deaths of starvation.

At the end of that post I noted that, here in the West, equally ignorant ideologues were engaged, actually for a few decades now, in ordering up an energy transition to replace electricity generation by fossil fuels with generation mostly by intermittent wind and sun. Today’s energy transition ideologues have a lack of knowledge of how an energy grid works that is comparable to the ignorance of the Chinese ideologues of agriculture. How is this one working out?

From some of the examples I have seen, I can say that it hasn’t been working out all the well. If you keep reading the linked post above it delves into one such experiment that hasn’t been working all that well because proponents didn’t do their arithmetic. What sounds good doesn’t always meet what the real world dishes out. They still depend on diesel fueled generators to meet their needs because the renewable system provides under a half of the power required. And so it has been in other places that have tried switching a large portion of their electrical generation over to renewables. But that doesn’t mean they won’t keep trying...and failing again and again.

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Something I have been seeing over the past year has becoming more prevalent, that ‘something’ being more people deciding that they no longer want to be held in thrall to Microsoft, and more specifically, Windows 11. While I never really cared for much for Windows, I didn’t particularity dislike it. In fact, I didn’t really have any real problems with it until Windows 11 showed up.

At work Windows has been the “go to” OS for most of our operations. Yes, we did use a version of Linux on some of our higher end instruments as the employed single board computers rather than just a micro-controller and we didn’t have to pay use Linux. But then Windows 11 came out and we found that a lot of our desktops and laptops couldn’t support it as it required more memory, a TPM ‘security’ co-processor, and a few other hardware upgrades. A lot of our computers that were only a few years old couldn’t handle Windows 11. What happened to those computers?

Most were returned to corporate IT for disposal, most likely meaning sold to third parties for resale on the used market. I expect most of those ended up having Linux installed by either the resellers or the new owners. Some of the computers were retained and had Linux loaded for use in the Engineering department for services and programs that didn’t require Windows to operate properly.

Out in the real world we have seen governments of entire countries decide they weren’t going to use Windows any more and have switched or are switching over to Linux. (France is one of those countries.)

One problem a friend has run across with Windows 11 is having to reverify their computer with their online banking and other apps after almost every Windows 11 update. That’s not a good thing.

Am I prejudiced in favor of Linux? Without a doubt. I have seen few downsides to Linux, at least for what I use it for. That there are Linux distributions out there that look and feel like Windows and can run Windows programs is a plus.

If Microsoft keeps angering the customers who depend upon Windows with their ‘changes’ that have made Windows 11 less than friendly, I expect to see even more people and businesses abandoning Microsoft for Linux.

==++++++==


And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has been very nice, the foliage is till quite colorful, and where we don’t care if Monday is coming around again...at least this week.
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10/24/2026

New Nukes?

As I have mentioned here and there, I have been a supporter of nuclear power for a long time. While public sentiment about nuclear power became quite negative in the 80’s and 90’s and construction of new nuclear power plants ended decades ago, attitudes and opinions about nuclear power have been shifting. This is particularly true as new generations of reactor designs have come out and some, such as those used in newer US Navy nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, have begun operating.

While a lot of people have been pushing the use of ‘renewable’ energy sources, they have major drawbacks with some of them being that they are a lot more expensive than proponents claim, take up a considerable amount of land area for the amount of power they generate, are not readily dispatchable because of their intermittent and weather dependent operation, do not have the promised service life and require a lot more maintenance than promised.

The beauty of nuclear is that it is generally available 24/7/365 regardless of the weather, time of day, or time of the year. The one downside, at least to the old style Generation II reactors, was that they took a long time to build, cost a lot of money to build, particularly when “do overs’ are ordered by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission which requires changes to portions of the plants that have already been completed, and such changes could also mean that two reactors built side-by-side using the same design would not be identical because the NRC mandated changes. However the new nuclear power plant designs, specifically the reactor designs, are easier, faster, and much less expansive to build, with most of them being built in factories and trucked to the construction site for final assembly. These are the so-called Small Modular Reactors, or SMRs, that are the future of nuclear power. Another plus to these new designs is that many of the are what are called “Walk Away Safe” since those designs do not used a high pressure cooling loop and cannot melt down. Instead, they use a system that operates at atmospheric pressure and in a number of cases, uses convection to circulate the coolant rather than pumps. If there are no pumps, there are no worries about pump failures. (Yes, this is an overly simplified picture of the more modern reactor designs, but I didn’t want to get too deep into this during this post. It is something I will delve into in a follow-on post next week.)

The nice thing about these SMRs is that they can be built to provide a specific amount of generation capacity up to about 300MW. The smallest SMR design I’ve read about generates about 15MW of electrical power. The beauty of the wide range of capacity designs means they can be installed almost anywhere depending upon the need and surrounding infrastructure. The can be clustered together to provide a total output equivalent of the older Generation II plants, meaning 800MW to 1500MW. Or they can be dispersed across a wide area in various locations which would not require a lengthy and expensive construction timetable. It could be one reason some companies planning on building hyperscale data centers are investing billions to develop and build SMRs to power their data centers. Both Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have done so, with Gates investing in TerraPower and Bezos in X-energy. Excess electricity capacity can be sold to the utilities, assuming utilities don’t buy some of those same SMRs to add to their overall generation capacity.

One thing that helps as that we are seeing some states deciding their future is nuclear. New Hampshire’s governor, Kelly Ayotte, has been pushing for a nuclear renaissance here and sees SMRs as the way to go. Goodness knows we could use a less expensive means of generating electricity here.
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10/23/2026

Friday Funny - Taking Their Medicine

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10/18/2026

Thoughts On A Sunday

It was cold this morning here at the lake, though not quite freezing. No frost on the grass or plants or windshields was seen. Some of that might be because the lake water is still relatively warm which moderated the nighttime temps. A friend of mine in a town about 50 miles northwest of here saw frost on her lawn and plants. The low temp there was 21°F, so it’s no surprise she got some frost.

However, this morning did bring a nice sunrise with a cloudless blue sky and the fall foliage at peak with the full range of reds, oranges, and yellows among the greens of the pines and some of the ‘slow’ deciduous trees. I have been sending pictures of the fall foliage colors around New Hampshire to friends and colleagues in the UK and South Carolina. More than a couple thought they had been edited for more color saturation, but they weren’t.

Unfortunately, from here on the colors will start to dull and the leaves will start falling in greater numbers going forward. It also means cleaning out the gutters along the front of The Gulch in order to make sure they don’t get clogged with leaves. The gutters at the rear of The Gulch all have leaf guards installed since they are unreachable by any of the ladders I own. At least the gutters on the front only require a step ladder to reach them.

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Sorry, but I believe that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, to borrow an old phrase. To what am I referring?

Obama, Whose Own IRS Targeted the Right, Clutches Pearls Over Ilhan Omar Raid and Wow, That Was DUMB

Barack Obama just posted a lengthy defense of Ilhan Omar, solemnly lecturing the country about how the government must never selectively target people for their political beliefs.

--snip--

Can't help but notice he omitted the part where his own administration used the full weight of the intelligence agencies and Justice Department to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign and push a fabricated Russia collusion narrative that consumed years of American politics. The same man who green-lit the Crossfire Hurricane operation and watched the FBI cook the Steele dossier into something resembling an investigation now wants everyone to clutch their pearls over questions about whether Omar was actually 18 when her father naturalized.

So it’s only the Democrats that can do what Obama did to Republicans but when one of their own is investigated it’s somehow wrong? Really?

Yeah. Right.



‘Nuff said.

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

Rutgers Scholar Opposes Integrated Churches Because Black People May Vote Republican

Oh my Goodness! Black people voting Republican?! This just can’t be!!!

Black people should mainly attend churches with just other black people so that they keep voting Democrat, according to a Rutgers University professor.

Professor Ryon Cobb argues “while 84% of Black adults identify as Democrat or lean Democratic, that number hides what congregational diversity costs Black politics.”

“Among Black nondenominational Protestants, that figure drops to nearly 60%, with one in three calling themselves independents,” Cobb wrote in an essay for the Brookings Institution.

Cobb, an “inclusive excellence in research” scholar considers it a “loss” when black people vote Republican.

It’s obvious to me that Professor Cobb hasn’t bothered looking at history to see how the Democrat party no longer represents the working man and is still the party of racism, more specifically the party of the “soft racism” of lowered expectations and the belief that Blacks, Hispanics, and other racial/ethnic groups can’t possibly advance without their guiding hand. Far too often that “guiding hand” is used more to hold them back rather than help them advance. After all, if they do advance they may find that they don’t need the Democrat Party or its demeaning and totalitarian viewpoints and policies. Heaven forbid that Blacks ‘leave the plantation’ without their political leaders’ permission.

==++++++==


Tell us something we don’t already know.

Blue States Have Highest Electricity, Gas, And Taxes Across The Board

We are now less than a month out from the mid-term elections, and the single biggest theme that the Democrats have chosen to run on appears to be “affordability.”

How can this possibly be? We live in the age of immediate availability of information, let alone artificial intelligence to track down anything that might previously have been challenging to find. If you want a state-by-state comparison of costs for any particular thing, you can get it in a fraction of a second. The results are in: the Democrat-run states are less “affordable.”

The Democrats and Republicans propose opposite strategies for dealing with the economy. The Democrats advocate for higher government spending, higher taxes, and more regulation of business; and the Republicans advocate for lower spending, lower taxes, and less regulation of business. The states are the “laboratories of democracy,” where we get to see the consequences of disparate policies play out, and to evaluate the results. Neither party is perfect in implementing what it advocates, so there are always some complexities. But in the main it is easy to collect data that give a relatively clear picture of the results of Democrat versus Republican policies.

My home state is what some people consider a ‘purple’ state despite having a Republican governor, a Republican majority state House, a Republican super-majority in the state Senate and Executive council. Our Congressional slate is made up of Democrats, two in the House of Representatives and two in the Senate. (It is one of the ‘weird’ things about New Hampshire.)

We do have problems with high energy prices, much of which of the blame can be laid at the feet of the governor of the state directly south of New Hampshire, Maura Healey of Massachusetts, who made sure we would suffer a deficit of natural gas by blocking not one, but two different natural gas pipelines that would have brought abundant (and cheap) natural gas into New England from Pennsylvania. (By cheap, I mean US natural gas rather than the natural gas New England has to import from foreign countries at world market prices rather than domestic prices. The problem is that even with these foreign imports demand is outstripping the supply.) That certainly drives up both heating and electricity prices.

One thing we do not have that is a good thing are lots of taxes. We have no income tax. We have no sales tax. We have lowered business which actually resulted in an increase of revenues. Yes, we have high property taxes, but when one looks at the overall burden from state and local taxes are some of the lowest in the country ranking either 48th or 49th as it seems to vary a little from year to year. We have more people (and businesses) moving here.

Is it perfect here? Oh, heck no. It’s not even close. But as compared to the other states here in New England, all Blue states, we’ve got it good. As compared to Blue states elsewhere line New York, California, New Jersey, Illinois, and others, we’re golden.

Now if we could just solve the housing prices problem around here…

==++++++==


This next item is near and dear to my heart, that being LED headlights and just how awful they are. I certainly have a great dislike for them because they are just too damn bright and blinding. I do have so-called ‘night driving’ glasses which have yellow lenses which help cut down the glare, but they aren’t perfect.

The reason they are so awful? The inaction by U.S. Government to fix the problem. But it looks like the Feds are finally catching up with the rest of the world when it comes to making the use of LED headlights far less problematic.


While this change won’t fix the problem of those vehicles already on the road with ‘awful’ LED headlights, it will help solve the problem going forward...but only if they allow the needed changes.

==++++++==


And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the foliage colors are brilliant, the weather has been a bit cooler, and where Monday is coming around all to soon.
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10/17/2026

It Isn't Working As Intended, Ten Years On

Seeing this post about New Hampshire’s Hands Free Lawover at Granite Grok got me to thinking about it more than I have been, its purpose, and its utter failure to do what it was supposed to do, which was to reduce distracted driving. I don’t know if it’s been an issue of lax enforcement, an overwhelming amount of motorists ignoring the law which in turn makes it more difficult to enforce effectively, in inadequacy of the law, an unwise expansion of touchscreens in cars by automakers, or a combination of all of them. But we’re still seeing accidents being caused by driver inattention to the road, with too many of them being fatal. This is something brought up by Steve MacDonald in his Grok post:

Governor Margaret Wood Hassan signed New Hampshire’s hands-free device law in 2015. We told them it wouldn’t do what they claimed and might just make matters worse. After all, the research showed that people who got distracted still would, and people less inclined would be more often, as they tried to avoid detection.

The law prohibits drivers from using hand-held electronic devices while driving. This does not include styling wands, razors, or anything else you can hold. It also does not include interacting with embedded in-vehicle devices the size of iPads or anything else distracting, including passengers.

--snip--

Ten years later, there is no evidence it did anything but inconvenience safe drivers and jack up car prices, as every model had to have hands-free tech, even the sort that was more distracting than talking with a cell phone held to your ear.

Goodness knows I’ve seen numerous blatant violations of this law over the years with the worst being a fellow traveling south on I-93 with a tablet on his steering wheel he was using to watch video. I let him get far ahead of me because I didn’t want to be a statistic if he ended up causing an accident because of his inattention. Another blatant example I’ve seen again and again is people at stoplights texting and being so focused on their texting that they never saw when the light turned green and would sit there, oblivious to the fact that they were blocking the traffic behind them...or they didn’t care because their texts were far more important.

As I have written here and in comment threads, the auto industry’s move to touchscreens to control vehicle functions may have seemed logical from a cost point as the touchscreen eliminates most of the buttons, knobs, and switches which is convenient since just about everything in a vehicle is controlled by computers these days. But when those cost-saving moves add to the distractions experienced by drivers, then it can end up being more costly than any of the supposed savings, particularly in damage to vehicles and injuries or fatalities to drivers, passengers, and pedestrians. This has prompted some auto manufacturers to take a step back and return to those archaic buttons, knobs and switches because the touchscreens require a driver to take their eyes off the road in order perform a simple task on the touchscreen.

Yes, I did get a little off topic as the original reference was made to Hands-Free Laws, but those off-topic items did show that even if a driver wasn’t using their phone or tablet or whatever in contradiction to the law, there are plenty of other things inside a vehicle that multiplied the distraction problem.

In any case, I have to wonder about how other states have been handling their versions of Hands-Free Laws and if they’ve seen the same thing seen here in New Hampshire or are their laws working as they were supposed to work?
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10/16/2026

Friday Funny - Drunk Dupes Police Officer

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10/11/2026

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been a cloudy and cool day here at the lake. Things have been pretty low key today with our two most important things today being attending church and having a visit from my Dear Brother and his missus. About the only other thing the WP Mom and I did today was watch the New England Patriots play the Las Vegas Raiders down in Foxborough. The rest of the day was taken up with a little TV, some YouTube videos, and some reading. And seeing that I have Monday off I will likely be busy as all get out doing things I would likely have gotten done today.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, plans for pulling the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout out of the water are being made. I expect it will be safely ensconced at The Farm (the official name of BeezleBub’s new home) long enough to be cleaned up and all of the boating gear pulled out and stored away. Then it will make its way to the boatyard for winterization and shrink-wrapping before returning to The Farm for the winter.

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You would think that after all these years we would know how to bathe, and more specifically, how to take a shower. Apparently that is not always the case.

Turns Out There Really Is a Right Way to Shower

I am one of those adults who much prefers showers to taking a bath. Mostly, it has to do with the fact that it takes a lot less time to take a shower than to take a bath. I can generally perform all of the showering “tasks” in less than 10 minutes including turning it on, stepping into the shower, cleaning myself, shutting off the shower, and drying myself.

I am not going to delve into all of the recommended steps and how they should be performed, but I will say that I have been doing them for most of my life. But I am going to mention one that I didn’t expect:

Showering thrice a week is optimal, but seven times is the limit to avoid stripping skin of essential oils.

I will admit that I do not shower every day. I do skip a day now and then, so I’ll shower four, five or six times a week. Most of that depends upon the time of year as I may shower less often over the winter. However, when I was doing heavy physical labor back in my youth I showered every day, usually after work.

Every time I think there’s nothing new to learn, I find I’m wrong.

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The Winter Is Coming! The Winter Is Coming!

Yes, I know we’ve not even made it through the first month of autumn, but we do need to start thinking about the coming winter. Winter up here in New England can be harsh with lots of snow, sleet, freezing rain along with sub-zero temperatures and high winds that can cause problems with power outages and wind chill factors that are well below zero.

However, it seems that 19 states may be seeing heavy “snow blasts” this coming winter.

A recent long-range forecast model from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revealed a massive shift in the bands of heavy precipitation between December 2026 and February 2027.

That map shows a growing chance that the entire US East Coast will see above-average precipitation this winter, from southern Maine to the tip of Florida and stretching across the country into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas as well.

On the West Coast, California is also expected to see above-average precipitation this winter, which likely means feet of snow in the Sierra-Nevada mountains and other high-altitude areas out west.

I remember more than a few winters with heavy snows. One of them was when I still resided at The Manse where one winter we saw 150 inches of snowfall. We usually see an average of 60 inches. In any case I think we’ll be okay as we’re used to severe winters around here. The only concessions I will make will be ensuring I have enough propane on hand for the Official Weekend Pundit Portable Generator to operate for 5 days straight, dig out my tire chains in case I need them for the trusty RAM 1500 pickup, and make sure the winter emergency kit is checked and stored in the pickup as well.

Other than that I doubt I will need to make any additional changes to the usual winter preparations.

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When I first heard about this, I wondered if they had the age of the schoolchild involved wrong. But it turns out it was correct and it is disturbing to no end.

The Six-Year Old Psychopath

You may have come across this video of a 6-year-old who shot and almost killed his teacher:



--snip--

It seems this child was already lost at the age of 6. Can a child who clearly has been exposed to terrible parenting be saved if rescued at that age? I would say it depends. It depends on whether he’s a psychopath. Let’s just say I wouldn’t want him mainstreamed. But what to do with a child who’s already shown such a propensity for evil?

Listening to how this child acted and how he spoke he sounded more like a hardened street thug rather than a six-year old. It begs the question whether or not this is something he hears and sees at home. If so, it seems he’s been learning the wrong things. If not, then it has to be determined if the child is a murderous psychopath. Either way, this is scary.

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This is another thing I had to read more than once to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood what it said. What is “this”?

The City by the bay admitting it f**ked up?

You see what I mean?

Did you know the Mayor of San Fransisco is a jewish son of a Rabbi Democrat Capitalist? Yeah try and string that sentence together in another context. Anyway, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie blamed the city’s progressive politics for fueling its homelessness, drug overdose and business exodus crises, admitting in a new interview that the city had “lost its way.”

Lurie, who has made restoring San Francisco’s battered public image a priority since taking office, told CNN’s Dana Bash that his administration is taking a more hard-nosed approach to crime while working to make the city friendlier to businesses. But Bash pressed the mayor on why San Francisco needed a turnaround in the first place - prompting a blunt admission about the city’s far-left reputation.

“We lost our way as a city. We were focused on the wrong things and today we’re focused on common sense,” he said. “I mean, we got so, entrapped in our progressive values and talking about progressivism that, we weren’t taking stock of what was happening on our streets,” he added.

If Lurie is serious it may be possible that San Francisco can be saved from itself. If he can change the focus of San Francisco government and political policies in favor of “things that work” rather than those Progressive things that sound good but don’t work, there may be hope for the City By The Bay.

It’s been years since I was in San Francisco, the last time I was there being 1996. Back then things weren’t all that crazy and SF was one of the places to be. However, over the past 30 years it has deteriorated to a place most folks don’t want to visit, businesses and residents have been leaving, and nothing seems to work anymore. (Two friends of mine who escaped from San Francisco years ago for the freedom of New Hampshire stopped going back there to visit friends and family because it was too depressing to see the city where they were born and raised turned into a Third World s**thole. They took to the New Hampshire way of doing things not too long after they arrived here.)

Of course, the mayor will have to fight the Leftist establishment and the Progressive lock on California’s state government to make progress, but who knows what will happen at the November elections. Maybe California could end up with a Republican governor.

==++++++==


And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the foliage colors are approaching peak, the weather is cooperating, and where I won’t have to deal with Monday this week...
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10/10/2026

Random Thoughts While Out And About

I took a ride around some of the local towns with my 92-year old mother, something she asked to do to “just get out of the house for a while.” It was certainly a nice day for it with blue skies, some wind here and there and cool temperatures. All in all, it was a great day for taking a ride.

While it is fall the fall foliage colors are still developing here in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire and probably won’t be at peak for another week. However, that didn’t diminish what foliage we did see with a lot of reds and yellows mixed among the leaves that are still green. Traffic wasn’t all that bad, particularly once we got off the main roads and onto the back roads that still got us where we were headed even though they were a more roundabout way of getting where we were going.

Like the main roads, the back roads were festooned with campaign posters for state offices in the legislature – the House, Senate, Executive Council, and Governor – and federal offices – two House seats and one Senate seat, all of which will be voted on this coming November 3rd. (I have to admit that the TV ads have reached the point where I no longer hear or see them as it’s the same campaign rhetoric over and over and over again, ad nauseum.)

There were plenty of leaf peepers out and about. (Leaf peepers are what we call foliage tourists up this way.) Unlike the summer tourist, most of these folks are well behaved and cordial. They want to drive around and look at the landscapes bright with reds, oranges, and yellows of the leaves. Certainly the local restaurants and hotels are loving the influx of tourists. Though not quite to the level we see in the summer, there are more than few up here in the Lakes Region and large quantities of them up the White Mountains and North Country where the foliage is at peak.

I have been considering pulling the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout out of the water sometime over this coming week. The weather is expected to be rather nice and will give me time to remove all of the boat gear and give the boat a good cleaning before I have it winterized and shrink-wrapped for the winter. There are still a lot of boats in the water from what I’ve seen at the local marinas, but not for much longer.

One thing I did notice during our trip around the area – gas prices have fallen a bit more. Towards the end of our trip today I stopped by my go-to gas station and filled up the gas tank of the WP Mom’s car and paid $4.06 per gallon. That’s down 5 cents from last Wednesday.

I did have to put on the heat here at The Gulch the other morning to take the chill off the inside. Not that I needed to leave it on for very long, but it had reached the low 40’s outside overnight and the heat was on just long enough to get the temp inside up to 69ºF. It took less than 15 minutes and then I shut the heat off. I will have to do that every now and then until we get into the consistently colder weather.

And so it goes.
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10/09/2026

Friday Funny - And They Say We Don't Listen

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10/04/2026

Thoughts On A Sunday

There have been two big events for the WP family that have taken place over the past few days. The first?

On Wednesday BeezleBub closed on the farmhouse he bought here in town.

The second?

It was 21 years ago yesterday when I adopted BeezleBub as my son. It was one of the best days of my life and I am very happy that I’ve been able to be his dad.

Today was the day that BeezleBub picked up the trailer for the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout from the boatyard. It will reside at his new house until we pull the boat from the water in a couple of weeks and it makes the trip to the boatyard for winterization and shrink wrapping. Then it will return to BeezleBub’s to be stored for the winter.

A lot of boats have already been pulled from the water as can be attested to by empty slips and a lot of boats on trailers waiting at marinas and boatyards fro winterization and storage. However, there is still plenty of boating activity seen on the lake. From prior experience it is likely lake area residents enjoying the lake and the coming foliage colors without having to worry about summerfolk being out on the lake, too.

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I saw this over at Instapundit 10 days ago and it took me a while believe that it wasn’t a joke. Kamala Harris is really that clueless.



To quote the late great Kevin Samuels, “You can’t make this s*** up!”

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I’ve been having discussions with folks about high gas prices and many of them are surprised when I tell them prices were higher about 4 years ago. They didn’t believe me. I showed them a picture on my phone taken at a gas station in my area from about 4 years ago showing the prices or Regular gas and diesel and they saw that the prices back then were indeed higher. (I wish I could post pictures here on Blogger, but I still can’t as something is still broken and Blogger has been absolutely no help in fixing the problem. However, I can embed posts from ‘X’.)

This is something I also saw on Instapundit recently and it addresses some of the gas price issues.



Yes, this is California and prices still aren’t as high today as they were 4 years ago despite its efforts to make sure it will be a dwindling supply over time.

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

White Paint is Racist

My first thought was somebody must be off their meds or has escaped from a mental institution. But this appears not to be the case as Associate Professor Wendy S. Walters at Columbia University has actually written about this.

According to Professor Walters, there are “black transwomen murdered with alarming targeted frequency”. When she saw the walls of her children’s school, she felt “apprehension” and wrote, “I could not stop thinking about the walls. I said to myself: They are so very white.…”

Oh The Horror!

A less sensitive person might assume that white is the most reflective color and painting walls white maximizes the effectiveness of natural and artificial light. But that person is probably a white racist who drinks milk, lives in a house with white walls and has never even thought about the targeted campaign of mass murder against “black transwomen” by Sherwin-Williams.

What gets me the most is that other people are taking her seriously. Really? White paint is racist? This is effin’ ridiculous.

It’s getting to the point where everything is racist. But if that’s the case, then that means that nothing is racist, right? The folks that believe this tripe need to give it a rest because this has slid from the sublime to totally and inequivocally insane.

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It seems Hollywood is about to prove that they’ve lost their ‘mojo’ if what I’ve heard about Tom Cruise’s latest movie is true.

Tom Cruise’s Global Warming Propaganda ‘Digger’ About to Lose $100+ Million

Based on several reviews, even from leftist critics, Tom Cruise’s Digger is a shrill, unsubtle, 129-minute attack on those of us who dare to use oil to better our lives.

And it’s about to lose a fortune.

--snip==

“Endless speeches, most involving the horrors of Climate Change and how dern evil oil is. Cruise’s Digger gets an extended close-up where he rants, raves and reveals the truth about oil and culture,” warns Christian Toto. “We need it. We crave it. We’ll risk everything to burn it. So this is all our fault.”

“Digger is bloated, dull, obvious, utterly lacking in self-awareness and, yes, exhausting. Would you want to spend two hours with grown men screaming at the top of their lungs?” Toto asked.

Yet another ‘message’ movie that no one wants. Hollywood has indeed forgotten the lesson from the late 60’s to mid-70’s, that lesson being “No one wants ‘message’ movies. If people want to be preached to they’ll go to church.” Moviegoers avoided those movies like the plague. Studios lost money. Studios stopped making ‘message’ movies and started making movies that people wanted to watch again.

I just have to wonder if what’s left of Hollywood will learn that lesson again in time to save themselves. If I had to guess, and I do, I’m going to predict that they won’t.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where the leaves are turning color, die-hard boaters are still out on the lake, and where Monday is showing up prematurely.
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10/03/2026

Educational Spending In New Hampshire - Who's Keeping An Eye On The Ledgers?

While the topic upon which I am pontificating about tonight is more New Hampshire-centric than it might otherwise be, I think it has some relevance in other states, too. To what am I referring?

Education funding.

I will not be getting into the bits and pieces about how it is handled in New Hampshire as there is already debate enough about it going on and there is one ballot question related to it that will be addressed during the election in November>

Instead, I have some questions for the school systems in New Hampshire that had some pretty large budget deficits over the past school year. One community, Claremont, has a $5 million deficit. Concord’s school budget deficit was almost $17 million back in February of this year. Yet another town, Milton, is also reporting that it has a $2.5 million school budget deficit.

Just what the heck is going on in these communities that is causing such large deficits? Haven’t there been any audits that show where the money has gone? When an audit of Windham’s school was performed a while back it showed all kinds of vulnerabilities which could lead to misspent funds. I have to ask just how often such audits are performed in our towns and by whom? My town’s school budget is around $32 million for the present school year. I’d like to make sure it is being spent properly and that we aren’t overpaying on some line items. I’d also like to see whether what are normally “Nice To Have’s” haven’t been morphed into “Need To Haves” when they really aren’t. That goes for our municipal budget as well.

Considering that the school budget in most towns ans cities are between 60% and 70% of all municipal spending, ensuring the spending of those funds is being handled properly is paramount.
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10/02/2026

Friday Funny - Dirty Old Lady

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