Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been a 50-50 weekend up here at The Manse: Saturday being rainy with an inch of rainfall and Sunday being partly cloudy with cooler temperatures and a stiff breeze. Temps barely reached 50ºF today, the first day I really needed to wear a sweatshirt to stay warm when out running errands.

The fall colors are really starting to make their presence known, but they’re still patchy and the colors are muted. (I am not the only one to notice that.) However, it appears that’s only around this part of New Hampshire as friends and relatives elsewhere in the state say they are spectacular. It’s true they are running a couple of weeks behind schedule, at least according to the Weather Guys^TM. I have to agree with them as we are usually at peak or just past peak right about now, but we still see a lot of trees whose leaves are still green.

As I mentioned last week, the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout, aka The Boat, is coming out of the water in a week. BeezleBub and I will haul it out of the water, empty out all of the gear – cushions, mooring lines, anchors, transom light, boat hooks, paddle, PFDs, fenders, etc. - clean the cockpit, and then haul the boat to the boatyard for winterization and storage. And so another boating season will end.

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Oh, great! Just what we need…

Yet another way for our less than scrupulous citizens to collect insurance because their homes or businesses burned to the ground. In this case blaming the fires on the lithium-ion batteries in their EVs or e-bikes.

It is not uncommon for a business to burn legitimately, but there is always the chance it was an insurance fire—a way to get out from under a failing business. And not just a business. Homes too. I know that seems cynical, and my apologies. Many people lose much in any number of disasters. The flooding in Vermont this past spring was not as record-setting as advertised, but it was significant. It changed many lives, ended some, and washed out homes, businesses, and livelihoods.

Like the COVID response. The PPP Loans. Medical and bailout money fraud. The system increasingly lends itself to the means and opportunity to do better at someone else’s expense. The entire green energy net-zero movement also comes to mind. And with it, the volatile power cells upon which it stands—lithium Ion batteries. I had to get certified to handle them at the job I used to do. They are considered hazardous materials. They can start fires that take out freighters, trucks, and aircraft. Their ubiquity has taken cars, homes, apartment buildings, businesses, and lives.

Using them to start insurance fires seems logical, as “vehicles” for arson or to hide another crime. Instead of finding the body of the DNC staffer who leaked all the internal emails in a bathtub, they could leave him in his burning Tesla, even though he never owned one. No worries, the FBI is still convinced it’s not suspicious.

The “Gee, my house/business burned to the ground because my kid’s e-bike batteries ignited while they were charging,” claim will become the new mantra for those less than scrupulous citizens.

Then, there are the legitimate fires caused by lithium-ion battery pack failures to deal with.

Yeah, this is going to be fun.

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It looks like Elon Musk doesn’t think much of the “work-from-home” crowd because they’re “detached from reality”.

"How detached from reality does the work-from-home crowd have to be? While they take advantage of those who cannot work from home. Why did I sleep in the factory so many times? Because it mattered," Musk said, while drawing a comparison between remote workers to factory workers, restaurant workers, and delivery workers.

Musk's comments marked an abrupt pivot from a prior discussion about the affordability of Tesla's cars. After sharing his thoughts on remote work, he resumed the pricing discussion by saying, "So, I just can't emphasize again how important cost is."

Musk has made similar comments about remote work in the past. In May, Musk told CNBC he thought remote work was "morally wrong," and likened remote workers to Marie Antoinette's infamous "let them eat cake" remark.

The Tesla CEO's push for in-office work could stem from his own workaholic tendencies — like sleeping in the office — according to Walter Isaacson's biography of Musk.

His workaholic tendencies were also evident after he acquired Twitter last year — he announced in November that staff were expected to have 40-hour work weeks in the office. The company even transformed some offices into bedrooms, and a former Twitter executive went viral for sleeping on the floor to meet deadlines imposed by Musk.

I worked from home during the height of the Covid panicdemic, going into the lab only on those days I couldn’t do what work I couldn’t complete from home. While there were some upsides to work-from-home, the downsides outweighed many of them, the isolation being the worst aspect.

Once we were able to go back into work, I did, gladly. But corporate decided we could work a hybrid schedule from then on, allowing one or two days a week working from home. I will admit I do that, primarily to deal with data analysis, reports, and other paperwork that is part of my job. I find I can get it done in less time at home because I don’t have the distractions. So I work from home one day per week, usually a Friday, and am in the lab the other four days. It works for me, keeps me in touch with my fellow engineering geeks. (Yes, we can and do use electronic means for conferencing, in this case Microsoft Teams, but it isn’t the same as face-to-face cooperative work.)

Most of our software people work from home, particularly those who are across the country, across an international border, or on an entirely different continent. Then again, it seems many of the coders prefer to be ensconced in their basements, shunning daylight and direct human interaction, so coming into an office is a non-starter. (Yes, a stereotype. But it’s a stereotype for a reason.)

Some jobs lend themselves to work-from-home, so why not if there’s no issue with the employer?

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Despite its prestigious marque, it appears even Mercedes-Benz can’t sell EVs.

Like most government agencies, NGOs, and publicly traded companies, Mercedes-Benz has made a promise to be all-electric by 2030. The automaker intends to have every newly launched vehicle architecture be electric-only after 2024 and to gradually wean itself off combustion engines.

Unfortunately, the brand’s sales trajectory doesn’t appear to be cooperating. Despite seeing a surge of interest in its electrified EQ products initially, Mercedes has started having trouble moving EVs.

It’s been a growing problem for several brands that have started to pivot toward all-electric products. However, luxury brands seemed to have the edge in EV sales — as their customer base is more willing to be early adopters and typically has more disposable income.

Automotive News recently conducted a series of interviews with Mercedes retailers. Citing Edmunds data that shows Mercedes-Benz dealers took an average of 82 days to sell the brand's battery-powered EQ models in September (double BMW's 38-day turnaround rate while also being above the luxury segment average of 57 days), the outlet was hoping to shed some light on the matter.

Why M-B thought they would be immune to the lack of enthusiasm for EVs escapes me. Even luxury market customers aren’t stupid, understand the pluses and minuses of EVs, and will make the same decision customers in other automotive markets have made: EVs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where fall weather has finally arrived, the foliage colors are still changing, and where we all have to put up with yet another Monday.

Scientific American Gets It Wrong

Years ago I was a devoted subscriber to Scientific American, an excellent magazine that delved into science of all kinds and made it understandable to the average person. However, in the 1990’s the publication became less about actual science and more about political correctness. These days it seems about the only relation to science it has these days is the word ‘science’ in its name. Lysenkoism and ‘woke’ that has replaced the science that was the raison d'être of the magazine.

How bad has the decline of a once great publication become?

This bad: It accepted and published an article that dismisses scientific rigor, specifically when it comes to the efficacy of face masks in preventing the spread of diseases like Covid.

In response, [Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard professor of the history of science] claimed that “[t]he Cochrane finding was not that masking didn’t work but that scientists lacked sufficient evidence of sufficient quality to conclude that they worked.” She continues, “Jefferson erased that distinction, in effect arguing that because the authors couldn’t prove that masks did work, one could say that they didn’t work. That’s just wrong.” But Jefferson didn’t simply say that masks don’t work; he said there’s “no evidence” they work. The burden of proof should be on the side of those advocating a medical intervention. Without remotely having met that burden, Oreskes asserts that masks do work. Cochrane, she writes, “gave the false impression that masking didn’t help.”

In fact, 16 RCTs have tested whether masks effectively reduce the spread of viruses. Not one has found compelling evidence that they do. Two have found statistically significant evidence that masks are counterproductive—that they increase the spread of viruses—probably because masks are frequently moist or dirty, and people often touch them. As for non-RCT evidence, check out this chart by Ian Miller, which shows that mask-mandate and mask-free states registered almost identical Covid-19 case rates.

Surgical masks were designed to protect patients from having open wounds infected by medical personnel, not to prevent the spread of viruses. N95 masks were designed to protect workers from breathing in fumes, smoke, or dust. When N95s were worn in hospitals pre-Covid, it was usually to protect against the spread of tuberculosis bacteria, not to stop the spread of viruses. As an article on the National Institutes of Health website puts it, “Viruses are tiny. . . . Billions can fit on the head of a pin.” Bacteria are huge by comparison: “Bacteria are 10 to 100 times larger than viruses.” Trying to block a virus with a mask is like trying to keep mosquitos out of your yard with a chain-link fence.

Many of the health professionals I know, including my ex-wife, told me over and over again that the disposable ‘procedure masks’ were not effective, particularly against viruses. They were never made to do that. They were made to be used for the duration of a procedure – generally 20 to 30 minutes – and then disposed of. However, during the height of the Covid panic, people would wear these masks for hours, some times for day after day before replacing them. Respiratory illnesses other than Covid became rampant. Yet without one jot of evidence that masks work against Covid, mask mandates were issued. I have to think it was more of some kind of “We’re all in this together” move by the local, state, and federal governments even though masks wouldn’t make a difference.

All the ‘experts’ said masks, social distancing, and hand washing were the only way to prevent the spread. They were right on two out of three. (Don’t even get me started on the experimental mRNA vaccines that were less effective than claimed, not to mention the side effects which seem to be worse than the disease they were supposed to protect against.)

And so it goes.

Friday (Not So) Funny - It's The Economy, Stupid

I can't believe I did it again - assemble the post, insert the photo, preview the post...and forget to hit 'Publish'. It seems if I wait until the end of the day when it's time to go to bed that will happen. So from hereon out I will need to do this much earlier in the day. With that in mind and without further ado:

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been a busy weekend here at The Gulch, getting summer things put away, cleaning up around the house, getting winter things out of storage, and finally, making arrangements for the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout to be pulled out of the water and winterized for storage. I figure two more weeks of boating and my boating season will be done. My ‘summer’ will be over.

On the other hand fall isn’t turning out the way I thought it would. Our weather has not been fall-like, being warmer than usual (but not ‘summer’ warm). We haven’t been seeing the usually vibrant fall foliage colors, either. They have been rather muted, at least here in this part of New Hampshire. They have also been patchy, showing up here and there while other areas remain green. That isn’t how it usually goes.

While some are pointing to climate change as the cause, I think it has more to do with the Tonga-Hunga volcano eruption last year which has caused warmer than normal temperatures and well above average rainfall all over the world. That much higher than normal rainfall affects the fall foliage (as does below normal rainfall). One of the things that has had some foliage going from green directly to brown as been a fungus that has infected leaves on some of the trees, the fungus due to the very wet summer. It looks like this year’s fall foliage season is going to be a bust, at least around here.

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Why do the Woke support Hamas?

One has to remember the woke are delusional and are perpetually offended about everything on the behalf of others, even if those ‘others’ are genocidal terrorists who think the Nazis were too warm and fuzzy to finish eradicating Jews.

Here’s one example, a tweet posted by author Dylan Evans, since deleted:

It appears the Nazis went undercover after WWII and have now decided to crawl out of their subterranean lairs and try to restart the Holocaust.

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Talk about hypocrisy!

It appears a number of women’s rights groups are remaining silent about the rape and murder of women by Hamas.

Does this mean they endorse Hamas’ actions during the attack on Israel?

They claim to be “women’s rights” organizations, but so far, almost none of them have spoken out to oppose the rapes, murders, and kidnappings of Israeli women and girls.

Gee, don’t you wonder why that might be?

Is it because they are leftists before they are women?

It seems these days that too many leftists don’t really believe there is any such thing as women since they are no longer capable of actually defining the term ‘woman’.

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Due to today’s lengthy activities this TOAS post is going to a bit brief. I still have distaff duties to attend to before the day comes to an end.

As I mentioned at the top of this post, my ‘summer’ is coming to and end. As such, the following seems an appropriate way to close it out:

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the number of boats in the water continue to dwindle, the fall foliage isn’t up to snuff, and where we’re hoping for good weather this week so we can get a little more boating in before the boat comes out of the water.

Is Gaza Housing A Dying Culture?

Stuart Schneiderman delves into the the attacks on Israel by Hamas, commenting on a piece by David Goldman in the Asia Times which blames the horrific attacks upon a failing culture trying to assert itself.

After reading his reasoning, I have to say it makes sense.

David Goldman has rendered us an inestimable service by conjuring the ghost of a famed seventeenth century French statesman, Cardinal Richelieu.

Considering the strange things that are happening in the world today, getting a ghost’s opinion does not seem completely out of line.

Richelieu’s theory seems original. At the least, it is uncommon. It wants us to be aware of the danger posed by dying cultures. When your culture is dying, when your language is becoming useless, when you are about to be absorbed in a larger, more successful culture, you might think that you have little choice but to go to war.

Since war is the ultimate form of competition, a failing culture might resort to it in order to assert its putative greatness.

The Palestinians, at least those within Gaza and other refuges around the Middle East, have been stuck in what we now call a ‘doom loop’. Gaza has been a source and refuge for Islamic fundamentalist militants like Hamas for generations. The more power the militants gain the worse it gets for the the residents in Gaza.

Was the purpose of Hamas’ attack to inflict damage on Israel as part of a larger war, or was it a means of generating a lot of casualties in Israel and Gaza, the Gaza casualties to be used solely for solely for propaganda purposes? Seeing how previous Hamas propaganda has used staged scenes, old photos of previous actions as ‘new evidence’ of Israel’s inhumanity, or employed Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals ploy of blaming Israel for acts Hamas in fact committed.

As for Palestine, Richelieu remarks that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people. It was invented recently to cover up the simple fact that the Arabs who were displaced in the founding of the state of Israel were rejected by their fellow Arab states.

When Jews were expelled from Middle Eastern Muslim countries, Israel accepted them. When Arabs chose to leave the Jewish state after its founding in 1948, they were not accepted by other Arab states. Many of them ended up in camps.

If this refugee population cannot settle in Israel, it will need to find homes in other Arab states. And, according to Richelieu, the Arab states still do not want them.

Ironically, Arabs who remained in Israel after its founding in 1948 and became Israelis have done quite well, as well as any other Israeli citizen. I have no idea if they have any respect for their refugee relations, but if their reaction is like that of Arabs in the other Middle Eastern and northern African nations, the answer is likely that they do not. Are the attacks by Hamas a “last gasp” action of a dying culture, a culture that cannot survive without the support of other terrorist states?

Only time will tell.

Friday Funny - Gettin' Around Yesterday And Today

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been a busy weekend for yours truly. Today was Part 1 of our neighborhood fall cleanup – cutting back brush and removing dead limbs from nearby trees around the homes around The Gulch. This is an annual ritual of which I have been partaking since having moved here after selling The Manse a few years ago. It’s a good way to get things cleaned up, speak with the neighbors (many whom are here only seasonally), and get to know each other better.

Part 1 didn’t take long, maybe 2-1/2 hours, and we got to the things that needed to be done with little fanfare and no drama. The weather was cooperative, yesterday’s rains having ended by early morning and leaving dry and partly sunny conditions for the cleanup. It wasn’t all that warm, maybe 52ºF with a breeze, but it wasn’t unseasonably cool. It made for pleasant working conditions.

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I’d like to see how the Democrats and SloJoe are going to explain away Trump’s on-the-nose prediction of what would happen if the US released $6 billion of frozen Iranian assets.

“[One] month ago Trump predicted the $6 Billion that Biden gave Iran would be used for terror attacks across the Middle East and specifically kidnapping,” conservative Jack Posobiec captioned a screenshot of Trump’s prediction on X. “This is exactly what we are seeing in Israel this morning.”

Biden released the $6 billion to Iran in exchange for the regime releasing five American prisoners it had detained for years.

Trump’s post, which was published on September 11, said, “Can you believe that Crooked Joe Biden is giving $6 Billion to the terrorist regime in Iran? That money [will] be used for terrorism all over the Middle East, and, indeed, the World. This incompetent FOOL is absolutely destroying America. He had the audacity to announce this terrible deal today, September 11th.”

“To pay for hostages will lead to kidnapping, ransom, and blackmail against Americans across the globe,” Trump added. “I freed many dozens of our people from various unfriendly countries and never paid a dime!”

I was not surprised at such a prediction as anyone with a bit of understanding of human nature knows that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it. That Iran knows it can kidnap and hold American citizens hostage for ransom means there will be more of this. Even as the Americans were released after Biden handed over the $6 billion, Iranian officials were detaining yet more Americans. I expect they’ll be demanding even more money. The same goes for Americans taken hostage by Hamas and Hezbollah during the attacks on Israel yesterday.

Yet another reason why the Dems and the Biden Administration need to be kicked out of Washington.

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Here’s another hit to SloJoe’s delusional view of his presidency.

Joe Biden: Media to Blame for Why Most Americans Don’t Feel Good About the Economy

Biden actually thinks things are better economically. But ask just about any American wage earner and you’ll get a different picture of the economy: It sucks.

The numbers Biden touted “shows it’s not as rosy as it first appears.”

It makes me wonder if we’ll hear SloJoe utter the phrase “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

All I know is my eyes have shown me that my money isn’t worth what it was at the beginning of the year and that my pay raise during the first quarter of this year was canceled out by inflation by the start of the fourth quarter.

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If offshore Big Wind is supposed to be so wonderful, then why does it require constantly increasing amount of subsidies to even get started even though it won’t provide the amount of power promised? Governors have requested additional funding because the cost of their offshore wind projects skyrocketed. Is the cost worth what the coastal states will receive in return?

30,000 megawatts. Wow, that’s a lot. Or is it? According to the American Public Power Association, as of February 2023 the U.S. had some 1.3 million megawatts of electricity generation capacity. So the 30,000 MW of new offshore wind would be an increment of something between 2 and 3% to existing nameplate capacity. And since wind turbines only function about 30-40% of the time (optimistically) when averaged over the year, the 30,000 new MW of capacity of offshore wind would really be equivalent to at most 9-12,000 MW of dispatchable generation, so will at best add about 1% to existing capacity, and even that at random times that would require backup to assure reliability.

But is the 30,000 MW of new offshore wind capacity even real? Yes, big subsidy numbers got put into the fraudulently-named “Inflation Reduction Act” of 2022 for the purpose of getting the offshore wind projects built. Lots of offshore wind projects in the mid-Atlantic and New England areas then got put up for bid, and contracts for construction of the turbines were issued. Can we get an update on that? Is anything actually getting built?

So far it appears the answer is ‘No’.

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Since I have been piling on pResident Biden, I figured I’d take one last shot before closing this edition of TOAS:

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather is now fall-like, the foliage colors are changing more rapidly, and most of us do not have to worry about Monday this week.

Green Energy Is Toxic

One more than one occasion I have stated that so-called Green Energy isn’t anywhere near as green as it’s many proponents believe. Most people have no idea what it entails to go green, assuming that just because such energy sources don’t use fossil fuels that they are automatically “green”. They aren’t even close.

Most of these green energy sources require metals and other materials previously used in small amounts. The extraction of those metals and materials have major negative environmental factors of their own that are worse than all of those ‘evil non-green energy sources’, i.e. fossil fuel, and more specifically fossil fueled vehicles, put together.

“According to the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, green energy technologies like wind turbines and electric cars often do require many more mined minerals than the present fossil fuels infrastructure,” The Daily Mail reports. “One electric car, for example, requires six times more metallic and mineral materials than a combustion engine car, MIT’s university team reports.

“And a wind power plant requires nine times more of these mined compounds than a traditional gas-fired plant,” The Daily Mail reports.

As a result, more green energy equals more mining and a need for radically improved waste disposal to avoid “business as usual” pollution.

This is something being ignored, particularly by the Biden Administration and the Watermelon Environmentalists. Is it that they are so focused on ‘saving’ the climate they are overlooking the unintended consequences of going green, or is it all about controlling people and the environmental consequences be damned? Seeing from past actions I am guessing it’s more the latter. Going green is merely the mechanism they’re using to take over.

However, there are millions of people who will disagree with the actions being taken by the faux environmentalists, particularly when they find out what the cost to them will be both to their wallets and their health.

Tens of millions of people — more than live in the entire state of Florida — are now exposed to toxic water runoff from metal mining, a new study has found.

The report lays bare the devastating impacts that can follow a reckless transition to 'green' energy, compounding the ecological damage wrought by over 150 years of drilling and mining for fossil fuels.

The researchers found that 23 million people worldwide, as well as 5.72 million in livestock, over 16 million acres of irrigated farmland and over 297,800 miles worth of rivers have been contaminated by mining's toxic byproducts seeping into the water.

This metal mining includes many so-called 'rare earth elements' essential to the manufacture of high-tech electronics, solar cells, wind turbines and all the batteries needed to store sustainable 'green' energy (and power electric cars and iPhones).

Many of these climate cultists chose to ignore how some of these materials are mined and extracted – child and slave labor – because it all takes place far away and out of sight. Therefore, it doesn’t exist as far as they’re concerned.

So much for their concern for human life or the environment.

Then there’s the NIMBYs who, in this case, might be the good guys.

Consider the case of Maine which has large hard rock lithium deposits. Do you think the die hard Down East Yankees are going to allow large swaths of Maine to be turned into a wasteland not unlike West Virginia during the bad old days of large scale strip mining? How many thousands of square miles of forests – a large carbon sink - would be devastated in order to ‘Save The Planet’? How much ground water would be polluted? How much are the Watermelon Environmentalists willing to destroy in order to get their way?

Friday Funny - Taking A Hike

Thoughts On A Sunday

I have been amazed at how quickly the days are getting shorter even though there’s nothing unusual about it. It has always caught me off guard seeing the sun setting earlier every day. I had hope we wouldn’t need to put our clocks back in November but it seems Congress can’t make up its collective mind. Almost everyone I’ve talked to hates having to change their clocks twice a year. It screws us up for a week or more every time we do.

It is time to start thinking about the coming winter, getting summer stuff stored away and winter stuff pulled out and ready. While winter is still three months away it will be here before we know it.

You know what else will be here before we know it?

Monday.

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During my errands today I notice a lot more color around as more swamp maples are turning as are the white birches – the maples turning red and the birches yellow.

Watching the local TV prognosticators they’re saying we’ll see peak foliage colors towards the second half of October. Some are saying the colors might be muted this year because of the higher than average rainfall. It’s the same when there is below average rainfall. So it’s anyone’s guess how good the colors will be this year.

Personally, I don’t think it will make any difference. It won’t keep the leaf-peepers away.

That’s fine with me.

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It’s time to start bombing Canada. This is the casus belli.

The last thing we need is a poor clone of the old Soviet Union along our norther border.

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I know some insurers here in the US have been raising insurance rates on Electric Vehicles because the cost of repairs after an accident is so high as compared to old fashioned internal combustion engine vehicles. The costs are so high in some cases that at least one insurer in the UK has stopped insuring EVs.

John Lewis has stopped offering insurance to electric car drivers amid fears over the cost of repairs.

The department store’s lending business John Lewis Financial Services has put a temporary pause on customers taking out cover or renewing existing policies on battery-power vehicles while its underwriter, Covéa, analyses risks and costs.

Insurers are facing rising costs for vehicle repairs, which are eating into profits. According to the Association of British Insurers (ABI), vehicle repair costs rose 33pc over the first quarter of 2023 compared to 2022, helping to push annual premiums to record highs.

Electric cars can be particularly expensive to repair, costing around a quarter more to fix on average, compared to a petrol or diesel vehicle, according to Thatcham Research, the motor industry’s research centre.

Particular worries surround the batteries, which are commonly mounted on the floor of the vehicle. This placement can make it more likely that it will be damaged even in a minor accident such as mounting a kerb.

Can the same thing be all that far behind in the US? Damage to the battery pack on an EV can be a major expense to replace. Battery packs are often part of the structure of an EV and it doesn’t take much for one or more cells in the pack to be damaged, something that can turn the battery pack into a rolling incendiary device. Depending upon the vehicle the cost of a pack can run between $10,000 and $30,000. I can’t see insurers wanting to shell out that kind of money when a pack is ‘tweaked’ by running over a street curb.

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More and more people have stated they won’t take the next series of Covid vaccinations, particularly in light of mounting data that the experimental vaccines have major negative side effects and are not as efficacious in preventing being infected or reducing the spread. It seems SloJoe is pissed off that people won’t automatically line up to get the latest Covid vaccines.

In a Wednesday speech in San Francisco, President Joe Biden hammered Americans for shying away from taking any more shots for new coronavirus variants and for increasingly turning a deaf ear to discussions about vaccines.

Biden appeared at the Fairmont San Francisco Hotel in San Francisco, California, to deliver a short speech on America’s efforts on artificial intelligence for scientific research and medical applications. But at the outset of his little address, he went off on vaccines.

--snip--

The president then urged everyone to talk more about the need for this investment in research. And that led him to go off on vaccine deniers.

“And one of those areas — you saw what happened with regard to the crisis — health crisis that we had that cost us,” Biden exclaimed. “We lost well over a million people. And as time began to move on, you had more and more voices saying, ‘No, no, no. You don’t need to get that shot. You don’t need to be — get — you don’t need to.’

“And we have a new strain of COVID now, and we have answers for it. But I just would urge those in public life and both political parties or no political party to be cautious about the ac- — the sometimes inflammatory things you say about this, because people’s lives are at stake,” he railed.

When the vaccine may be as much as killer as the illness it is supposed to protect against, why would anyone take the gamble, particularly for a disease that has an overall survival rate of over 99%? How many Covid ‘deaths’ were actually people who died with Covid, but not from Covid?

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Speaking of Covid, it seems the newest wave of Covid hospitalizations has stalled despite expectations of a continuing increase. Instead the number of Covid hospitalizations has been falling.

In the week ending Sept. 16, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data show hospitalizations are down 4.3 percent. The number had been increasing since July, although the CDC's historical trends shows that hospitalization numbers were relatively low compared with previous increases in the virus—notably compared with a prior "surge" that occurred in the summer of 2022.

Meanwhile, the latest figures show that emergency department visits are down 19.3 percent and test positivity is down 1.6 percent. Deaths are up by about 12.5 percent, the data show, but that figure is also relatively low when compared with previous years.

The EG.5 variant, which has been dubbed Eris, accounts for about 24.5 percent of all cases, according to the CDC's variant tracker. FL.1.5.1, known as Fornax, is estimated to be responsible for about 13.7 percent of COVID-19 infections, the CDC figures show.

About a month ago, amid a steady rise in hospitalizations, some health officials suggested that it doesn't appear to be as bad as before.

While hospitalizations had increased, deaths had not. Whether that is due to the latest variant not being nearly as deadly as previous variants or to more truthful reporting of cause of death isn’t known, at least not by me. Only time will tell.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where we’re seeing a return to summer weather, the leaves are changing colors, and the number of leaf-peepers is expected to increase over the next few weeks.

Summer Is Gone And Fall Is Here...Or Is It?

As happens after every summer up here in New Hampshire, traffic has fallen to a fraction of what we saw prior to Labor Day. That is something we generally look forward to as it means we have an easier time getting around. We don’t have to deal with so many distracted drivers – those paying more attention to their phones or in-car entertainment systems than actually driving – that we see all too often with folks from away. Not that there aren’t New Hampshire drivers who drive distracted. I think we’ve all seen more than a few all throughout the year. But the incidents multiply tremendously during summer and most of the miscreants are not from here.

Another upside to the departure of summer traffic is that it is easier to patronize our local restaurants since they aren’t filled with summerfolk. There’s not much of a wait, if any at all, at our favorite eateries. One downside – most of the ice cream stands have closed with only a few still open and those will be closing on Columbus Day weekend. (Yes, we’re weird up here in northern New England because we like ice cream year round. For us it isn’t just a summer treat.)

Most of the boat traffic traffic on the lake is gone. It’s just the locals out there enjoying the good weather (and making up for the poor boating weather June and July). I have been out on the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout more in the past 4 weeks than I have during May, June, and July combined. I plan to keep up my boating until the end of October, weather allowing. There are more than a few foliage tour trips planned on the lake to get a view of the colors from a vantage point most the leaf-peeping tourists never see. And then the boat will be pulled from the water to be winterized and stored away until next May. For me and the other die-hard boaters here in the Lakes Region summer will finally be over.

It will be relatively quiet here for a couple of months, interrupted only by Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. The folks from away will return for winter activities – skiing, sledding, ice skating, snowshoeing, snowmobiling, pond hockey, and ice fishing. While there won’t be as many folks here as we see in the summer, there will still be quite a few. And with them will be the traffic and the crowded restaurants again. It is expected. After all we are a tourist area.

We’ll deal with the heavy snow, freezing rain, sleet, sub-zero temperatures, with wind chills to match. After all, that’s winter up here in New England. We’re used to it. We revel in it.

Once we get through winter we start preparing for the coming summer.

The cycle starts again...and we love it.

Friday Funny - Still A Potato

Thoughts On A Sunday

We’re one full day into Fall and already the temps have turned cooler. We’ve been in the 60’s and and might see the low 70’s later this week.

While running errands yesterday I notice the leaves on some of the swamp maples and birches are already changing color, the maples shifting to red and the birches to yellow. At the moment I am seeing these colors only here and there, but that will change soon enough. I figure it will be another three weeks before we start seeing the rest of the trees start changing.

I have no idea what the colors will be like this fall, particularly since the summer was considerably wetter than normal. If they are halfway normal I expect we’ll see a large number of tourists – so-called “leaf peepers” – visiting to take in the reds, oranges, and yellows that will replace the green. It also means the locals will be using the back roads away from the tourist traffic. The only downside will be the restaurants will be crowded, particularly since most of the summer places closed after Labor Day.

It’s one of the prices we pay for living in a resort/tourist area.

At least we’ll get a break between the end of foliage season and the beginning of ski season.

==+++==

“There can be only one.”

==+++==

Talk about irony:

It turns out a Kansas electric vehicle battery plant owned by Panasonic will be powered by a coal-fired power plant.

You couldn’t make this stuff up even if you tried.

A new electric vehicle battery factory in Kansas is demanding so much energy that the state is delaying the retirement of a coal plant to make sure the facility has enough power. https://t.co/gU3LACRuT0

— Cowboy State Daily (@daily_cowboy) September 22, 2023

Panasonic broke ground on the facility last year. The Japanese company was slated to receive $6.8 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been pouring billions into electric vehicles and battery factories as part of its effort to transition America away from fossil fuels.

The Kansas City Star reports that the factory will require between 200 and 250 megawatts of electricity to operate. That’s roughly the amount of power needed for a small city.

In testimony to the Kansas City Corporation Commission, which is the state’s equivalent of the Wyoming Public Service Commission, a representative of Evergy, the utility serving the factory, said that the 4 million-square-foot Panasonic facility creates “near term challenges from a resource adequacy perspective,” according to the newspaper.

As a result, the utility will continue to burn coal at a power plant near Lawrence, Kansas, and it will delay plants to transition units at the plant to natural gas.

Here, it’s anathema to power ‘green’ industries with coal-fired power plants. In China, almost all green industries are powered by coal-fired power plants. The only difference is that since China is an ocean away and the factories (and power plants) are out of sight and some of the labor in the factories is slave labor, it’s perfectly fine with our domestic Greens and their ‘woke’ brothers and sisters.

But use coal-fired plants here and those same folks talk about murdering the planet.

What a bunch of hypocrites.

==+++==

The war on agriculture continues.

We’ve seen actions taken by the courts in the Netherlands working to destroy farms because the Greens demanded elimination of fertilizer use. No one ever bothered looking into where the food would come from if farms were put out of business/destroyed on the behalf of the lunatics. Farmers rebelled, protesting and starting political action that ended up throwing out members of their respective parliaments who supported such actions.

Now many of those same type of people have decided a war on beef is the only way to save the planet...for their masters.

‘‘For those of you who don’t know my home country, The Netherlands is a tiny country in North-West Europe and when I say tiny, I mean tiny.

For reference, the state of South Dakota alone is 5x the size of my entire country.

We might be small in size, but we’re big at one thing. And that’s farming.

Farming is the backbone, not just of our economy, but of our nation’s history, identity and culture.

The foundations of modern agriculture in the Netherlands were laid in the early 1500 and oftentimes farmers who are alive today come from families whose farming history dates back hundreds of years.

As a result of this, we are now amongst the world’s most lucrative, productive and technologically advanced farmers in the world.

In fact, after you guys here in America, we are the second largest exporter of agricultural products in the entire world and the largest exporter of beef in the European Union.

It’s not an overstatement to say that we together, The United States of America and The Netherlands, feed the world.

For now. Because Unfortunately the most powerful people in the world, want to stop us.

So let me tell you a real life cautionary tale. Let me tell you about what exactly has been going on with the Dutch farmers and what prompted them to go out and protest.

In 2019, a group of environmental activists sued the Dutch government, claiming that Dutch natural reserves were under threat because of a so-called ‘nitrogen crisis’ and that the Dutch government violated Dutch law and European regulations by failing to sufficiently protect nature.

The speaker, Eva Vlaardingerbroek, went into detail about what happened and how the farmers fought back. She also talked about the same thing happening here in the US.

As the saying goes, Read The While Thing. There’s also a YouTube video of Eva addressing the issue. It’s well worth the time.

==+++==

One a few occasions I have mentioned how my town has been handling the explosive growth of Short Term Rentals (STRs), also know as collectively as AirBnBs.

I live in central New Hampshire in an area known as the Lakes Region. It’s a summer resort area that attracts people from all over the Northeast. It turns out AirBnBs have been popular which has led to some issues between the owners/renters, neighboring home owners, and town governments.

Different towns have handled a number of different ways. For instance, my town allows them but regulates them and requires STR owners to apply for permits which include a number of requirements.

One of the problems we were having is that we didn’t always know who owned them or who to contact if there were problems. The regulations included requirements for providing contact information. They also required inspections to insure the properties were safe and to verify information provided in the permit applications.

Some towns imposed draconian regulations that made it difficult to offer STRs. Some tried to ban them outright which led to at least one lawsuit that went all the way to the New Hampshire Supreme Court.

A town adjacent to mine is now working its way through the minefield of regulating Short Term Rentals. Hopefully it will look closely at how other towns are handling them, seeing what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t work.

I wish them luck.

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather is more fall-like, a few leaves are starting to turn color, and where thoughts of raking leaves in the future are intruding.

The Newest Member Of The WP Family

I did make mention in an earlier post that I visited the local Humane Society to find a new companion for the last surviving member of the WP feline contingent, Pip. I didn't post a picture of the newest member, Bailey, because I want to make sure he would be a good fit and would get along with Pip before I did so. That question has been answered as he has made himself at home and gets along with Pip. I know the latter because yesterday the two of them got into a rousing game of "Can't Catch Me!".

So, without further ado, I present the newest member of the Weekend Pundit feline contingent, Bailey:

Friday Funny - All Too True

OK, I screwed up again...but this time I kept thinking that yesterday was Thursday. Imagine my surprise when I logged into work this morning only to see that it was Saturday, not Friday. So, without further ado:

Thoughts On A Sunday

A tropical storm called Lee paid us a visit yesterday, though here in central New Hampshire we saw gusty winds with a little rain here and there and not much else. That wasn’t the case on the seacoast both here and in Maine which experienced higher winds, rain, and rough seas. I wish I could say there were no injuries or fatalities, but I can’t as winds caused tree limbs to fall, in one case killing a man whose car was crushed. There is a little cleanup to take care of here at The Gulch, mostly leaves and smaller branches to pick up, something that won’t take long at all.

It is still windy here though the skies are clear. I’m hoping to get out onto the lake later today after the winds diminish a bit more.

==+++==

So the whole “misreading a major law of physics” kerfuffle comes down to the use of “unless” rather than “insofar as not” somehow changes Newton’s First Law of Motion is actually “much ado about nothing”.

As one commenter here wrote:

What I gather from reading the comments, Physics is better described by mathematical formula than by words.

Words are imprecise and change over time.

Indeed, particularly when translating from one language – Latin – to another – English – where the vernacular doesn’t always translate well and the meanings change over time.

==+++==

Last week I wrote about how kids in high school aren’t nearly as well educated or prepared for adulthood as I and my contemporaries back in the 60’s and 70’s. It appears I’m not the only one who’s noticed people are stupider than they used to be.

I had a conversation with Irish about this kind of sh*t a short while back and the next day it dawned on me that because I am reasonably intelligent, I automatically expect most people I see are too.

This gets disproven multiple times on a daily basis anymore.

Not only are people unintelligent anymore, they are downright f*cking stupid.

It’s gotten to the point where I am questioning how they even function in society.

Then I realize that society is already completely f*cked up and now I know why.

People are illiterate, ignorant and it is very rapidly approaching the point that there is literally a good chance that civilization will collapse because of it.

They absolutely do not have the most basic knowledge that even children had fifty years ago.

Like where food comes from, how to read, count, or problem solve.

As he also mentions, this is being done on purpose. This observation was followed by this:

It looks like it’s all part of the plan by Progressives to eliminate the middle class and create a new feudal society.

==+++==

The absolute gall of the White House to direct the media to “ramp up scrutiny” of the Biden impeachment inquiry.

So Texas Bush RINOs have failed to impeach AG Ken Paxton, and twice RINOs with communist Democrats failed to convict and impeach Donald Trump when he was president. But [now] that Biden is under scrutiny, it’s suddenly all bad and stuff. Biden is instructing his media lackies (sic) to ramp up scrutiny of the Biden impeachment inquiry.

President Biden’s White House has told America’s news organizations — including CNN, the New York Times and Fox News — to “ramp up their scrutiny” of House Republicans “for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Tuesday ordered an impeachment inquiry into the president’s alleged involvement in his son Hunter Biden’s business deals in countries such as China and Ukraine.

The evidence for the inquiry into Biden’s alleged wrongdoing is far stronger than any evidence brought forth during the two impeachment attempts against Donald Trump. Not surprising considering so much of the evidence in one of the attempts was a fabricated. But now that the tables have turned and it’s the Democrat who is the target it’s a whole different scenario.

Yeah, that’s going to go over well.

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where we escaped the worst of Tropical Storm Lee, cleanup was easy, and where the dreaded “M” day has returned all too soon.

EVs Aren't All They're Cracked Up To Be

Anyone who’s been reading this blog knows I am not a fan of Electric Vehicles. From both an engineering and environmental viewpoint they don’t make any sense. That goes double once we start looking at them from an energy, safety, and performance viewpoint, too.

The last thing that really makes me dislike EVs even more is that SloJoe and WRBA have made the decision for everyone that we must abandon the internal combustion engine in favor of a technology that isn’t better, is more expensive, doesn’t perform nearly as well, is not good for long distance trips, and is awful for hauling freight (even electric pickup trucks perform abysmally). Then to add insult to injury, the nation’s electric grid won’t be capable of charging all those mandated electric vehicles. (It’s barely capable of meeting present day electrical demand. Adding terawatts of more demand without increasing the generation and transmission capacity is suicidal for our nation’s economy as it will bring the grid to its knees.)

The always elusive “They” are trying to sell EVs on the basis that they’re good for the environment, that they don’t contribute any of that evil CO2 into the atmosphere, and that everything will be sunshine and roses if everyone uses them.

Too bad it’s total B.S.

It’s true EVs don’t emit CO2 directly. Instead, it’s all indirect, between what is generated when the various exotic materials that make up vehicles are collected, processed, and used to manufacture the parts and components that go into building them. There is the CO2 generated by the power plants that make the electricity used to charge them. There’s also the CO2 generated when the the battery packs are manufactured and recycled.

Then there’s the environmental issues starting with the mining and extraction of the minerals used manufacture the lithium-ion batteries and electric motors. Then add in the use of child and slave labor to mine the cobalt needed for the batteries and EVs aren’t looking as good as the proponents keep painting them to be.

There’s also environmental issues when the EV batteries are recycled. While the processes for lithium-ion battery recycling are slowly getting better, they are still nowhere near where they need to be in order to be cost effective and environmentally friendly.

Another issue that should make those considering buying an EV is the cost of repairs, particularly after an accident. Too many are considered a total loss for damage that normally be repaired if the vehicle wasn’t an EV. Many times it is the battery pack that is the reason why the EV is totaled, it being the weak point of most EVs. (It’s also why insurance companies are raising insurance rates for EVs.) All it takes is one damaged cell in the pack to make the pack a possible incendiary bomb. Considering many battery packs are also an integral part of the EV’s structure, and ‘tweaks’ to the pack’s frame due to an accident can damage one or more cells. All it takes is one to go into thermal runaway and the pack will ignite and the EV will burn. (We’ve seen that more than a few times on the news, haven’t we?) We know from such fires that there is no putting them out using the usual firefighting methods. In many cases fire departments will protect surrounding cars and trucks, homes, and vegetation from catching fire and let the EV burn.

I can also get into the problems EVs have with immersion in water, particularly salt water, which causes the packs to short-circuit, something that has happened again and again in areas prone to flooding.

Yet another downside to EVs, again dealing with the battery pack, is their poor performance once the temperatures fall below freezing. Cold temperatures cause the battery packs to ‘lose’ capacity. The chart below shows the loss of battery capacity for a number of EVs at 32ºF as compared to the capacity at 70ºF.

Click on image to embiggen.
However, as one commenter to this post mentioned, “The chart above shows performance at 32ºF, not 52º or 72º colder (-20ºF to -40ºF). Knowing Li-Ion batteries as I do (part of my job), batteries will at best have 1/3rd the capacity at temps that low...if they will operate at all.”

That means in places like here in New Hampshire, or upstate New York, or Minnesota, or Wyoming, or Montana, or Alaska, or in Canada, EVs will be all but useless during winter. That isn’t generally a problem with internal combustion engined vehicles. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to entrust my life to something that won’t work when I need it to.

EVs as they stand now don’t make sense. Hybrids do, but not EVs.

Friday (Not So) Funny - Getting The Definition Right

That Awful Day

The calendar says it was 22 years ago.

The heart says it was yesterday.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It was a bittersweet day yesterday as I undertook the task of finding a new companion for the last remaining member of the Weekend Pundit feline contingent, Pip. She was left alone with the passing of Cole back in April and Minnie in May. She had never been a ‘solo’ cat, having been brought into the family with her brother Henry, joining the other members of the WP feline contingent. She’d always had other cats with her in both The Manse and here at The Gulch. After Cole and Minnie’s passing she was alone for the first time in her life...and wasn’t dealing with it very well.

She wanders around the house, calling out to her buddies, trying to find them. It happens every day, many times during the day since Minnie and Cole have been gone. It’s been heartrending to listen to.

I knew she needed a new companion, but it took some convincing for the WP Mom to buy in. I also consulted with vet, getting some confirmation about what I should be looking for – a male cat, neutered, at least 5 years of age and good with other cats. Prior to my trip to the Humane Society I did quite a bit of searching online at their website and the websites of other animal shelters, looking at cats waiting for adoption. Fortunately one of them had a number of kitties that matched what I was looking for. So I went to that shelter yesterday, spent a couple of hours with the cats, and found the one I was looking for. An hour after that and I was on my way home with Pip’s new companion, Bailey.

Their first meeting went as expected – Pip came downstairs to see who was meowing away. She saw Bailey and froze. She backed away and went back upstairs. The second meeting went better, with nose-to-nose distance, a few sniffs, and then them going in different directions. The consequent meetings were what I call ‘walk by’ encounters, acknowledgment that Bailey was there, but that’s about it.

I think they’ll work out.

==+++==

My question is whether this was due to incompetence or was it done on purpose? I’m betting on the latter because without it the data wouldn’t support the narrative.

Massive errors in FBI’s Active Shooting Reports from 2014-2022 regarding cases where civilians stop attacks.

The FBI report states that only 4.6% of active shootings were stopped by armed civilians. However, the actual stats say it was closer to 35.7%. That’s one heck of an error. Last year alone it was around 41.3%, and if active shootings in gun-free zones are ignored, it’s closer to 53.5%.

So why the discrepancy?

Evidence compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center shows that the sources the media relied on undercounted the number of instances in which armed citizens have thwarted such attacks by an order of more than ten, saving untold numbers of lives. Of course, law-abiding citizens stopping these attacks are not rare. What is rare is national news coverage of those incidents. Although those many news stories about the Greenwood shooting also suggested that the defensive use of guns might endanger others, there is no evidence that these acts have harmed innocent victims.

The FBI reports that armed citizens only stopped 14 of the 302 active shooter incidents it identified for the period 2014-2022. The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include those it deems related to other criminal activity, such as a robbery or fighting over drug turf.

An analysis by the CPRC identified a total of 440 active shooter incidents during that period and found that an armed citizen stopped 157. A previous report looked at only instances when armed civilians stopped what likely would have been mass public shootings. There were another 27 cases that we didn’t include where armed civilians stopped armed attacks, but the suspect didn’t fire his gun. Those cases are excluded from our calculations, though it could be argued that a civilian also stopped what likely could have been an active shooting event.

It’s easy to redefine the incidents such that it eliminates most of them. That’s disingenuous. It changes the analysis, minimizes the contribution of armed citizens stopping active shootings. It sounds like this was done as a means of confirming the biases of the gun-grabbers rather than providing actual data.

==+++==

For some time I thought it was just my incipient old fogeyism kicking in as I observed that high school students don’t appear to be as well educated as the ones during my days in high school – the early 1970’s – and are nowhere near as ready to live in the adult world as we were. But it turns out I’m not the only one to have noticed that, so maybe I’m not as much of an old fogey as I thought.

Unlike the past it seems a lot of STEM majors can no longer do calculus. That’s surprising considering “back in my day” I took calculus during my senior year in high school. That was true of a lot of the engineering and physics students when I was in college. This tells me our schools aren’t doing nearly as good a job of educating our kids as they used to. It appears they are too busy indoctrinating our kids or pushing a transgender agenda or increasingly interfering with how parents raise their kids.

Across the country, more students are placing into pre-college math, reports AP’s Collin Binkley. “At many universities, engineering and biology majors are struggling to grasp fractions and exponents.”

“We’re talking about college-level pre-calculus and calculus classes, and students cannot even add one-half and one-third,” said Maria Emelianenko, chair of George Mason’s math department.

Even softball quizzes appropriate for grade school produce appalling results.

--snip--

You can see why grades need to be abolished in both college and K-12.

What do you expect of a society that regards both merit and math as racist?

This is but one reason I worry for our nation’s future.

==+++==

It turns out that wind power isn’t cheap despite claims by the Greens to the contrary.

Who’da thunk it?

==+++==

Are Toronto and San Francisco on parallel paths?

If the latest real estate sales figures are any indicator, they might be.

New data shows that Toronto’s real estate market is being flooded with hundreds of condos. Investors are bailing out, getting out while the getting is good.

It’s a question of which city’s real estate market will collapse first.

==+++==

First, it was Holocaust deniers. Then it was Election deniers. Now, it’s Volcano deniers.

Hunga Tonga exploded deep on the ocean floor in 2022, a once-in-a-lifetime massive geological event that spewed incomprehensible volumes of water high into the Earth’s atmosphere. Never have satellites observed such; never have layers of the atmosphere been studied for chemical and other impacts caused by the volume of atmospheric water and aerosols. Climate scientists warn that this volcano will warm the planet and disrupt rainfall patterns. Amid record temperatures and flooding in 2023, climate politicos howl about human-caused calamity while avoiding the impacts of Hunga Tonga.

This volcano is such an elephant-in-the-climate-change room that NASA seeks to ignore inconvenient truths. Of course, science instructs that volcanic sulfur, water, carbon dioxide, and organic matter can all impact climate dramatically (even unto the extinction of dinosaurs). A political ideology blindly focused on greenhouse gases has no time to set aside dogmatic blinders for critical scientific assessment. That assessment is extremely revealing.

The impacts of HTHH were so substantial that scientists were required to develop a new technique simply to measure its height. It caused “puzzling ripples” through the atmosphere that have never before been observed, “leaving experts stumped,” according to Nature. The volcano’s water plume increased stratospheric water mass by 13% and stratospheric aerosol loads five-fold.

According to Space: “[T]he Hunga Tonga cloud burst not only through the troposphere but also ascended through the entire stratosphere, only plateauing at the altitude of 35 miles (57 km), way into the freezing and dry layer known as the mesosphere. This makes the Hunga Tonga volcanic cloud the highest ever observed.”

--snip--

Scientists who don’t know how much Hunga Tonga has impacted current conditions are trying to learn by observation; most climate alarmists register warming by human hand through their fear prism, and so turn away from this volcano like a (real, not anthropomorphic, gain-of-function) plague. NASA connects current warming to human activity with no scientific links whatsoever. The agency should stick to polluting space recklessly with techno-detritus rather than gaslighting an epic volcano. Hunga Tonga does provide a scientific connection to support a causative explanation for both current warming and flooding trends: extraordinary amounts of water in the atmosphere, like a giant terrarium, together with a five-fold amplification of stratospheric aerosol loads.

That amount of water injected into the atmosphere – the troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere – will have little if any major effect, but small increases in a trace gas will have major effects? So say the Climate Change faithful.

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the rain has returned, the summerfolk are sparse, and where Monday has returned too early.

New Mexico Governor 'Temporarily' Suspends Second Amendment In Albuquerque

Here comes one of the most egregious violations of our Constitutionally enumerated rights, in this case the Second Amendment: New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has banned open and concealed carry in Albuquerque.

Why?

To deal with the gun violence.

This beggars the question “How does disarming law abiding citizens stop criminals from shooting other people?”

Another question: Does the governor really think the US Supreme Court is going to let that slide?

Oh, that’s right. Today’s Democrats don’t believe in the Constitution any more, at least when its restrictions work against them.

The governor said she expects the order to face legal challenges but that she believed she needed to act in response to recent gun-related deaths, such as an 11-year-old boy who was shot and killed outside a minor league baseball stadium earlier this week.

“When New Mexicans are afraid to be in crowds, to take their kids to school, to leave a baseball game — when their very right to exist is threatened by the prospect of violence at every turn — something is very wrong,” Lujan Grisham said in a statement.

The suspension was classified as an emergency public health order, and applies to open and concealed carry in most public places, excluding police and licensed security guards. The restriction is connected to a threshold for violent crime rates met only by the Albuquerque area.

--snip--

So, what happens when the crime rate does not go down, because the vast majority of the shootings are by people who do not lawfully own the firearm, meaning no background check. Darn sure haven’t gone through the process of obtaining a concealed carry permit. Who fired the shots at the baseball game? No one knows at this point. No arrests, no person of interest. The only thing they know was that it was road rage and it was a newer black Dodge Durango SRT.

I’m betting the crime rate will go up because now the law abiding citizens are unarmed in public and the criminals know it. If that is indeed the case you know the gun-grabbers will blame the guns and not those wielding them. They will ignore the fact that criminals don’t abide by the law which is what makes them criminals. They will ignore the fact that they made it easier for criminals to commit violent crimes. They will continue to blame the tool rather than the person wielding the tool. They are using this as a workaround to the Constitution, using “public health” as an excuse. That’s not much different than using that same excuse to silence people asking uncomfortable questions about Covid-19, treatments, vaccines, and precautions.

Which of our Constitutional rights will be the next one to be circumvented as part of an ‘emergency’ public health order?

Friday Funny - Bad Driver

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s the last weekend of summer, at least as far as the tourist season is concerned. I did make it out on the lake yesterday after a friend and I cleaned the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout (something it desperately needed). While we weren’t out very long – maybe 45 minutes – it was enough to make us realize we really didn’t want to be out on the lake with all of the other boats. I usually don’t go out onto the lake during the weekend because of the heavy boat traffic. It usually makes for a lot of wake-driven chop and a rough ride.

I will be getting out on the lake again on Tuesday – I’m taking the day off – when all of the summerfolk and their boats will be gone, a least until next weekend.

I expect most of my boating will be taking place over the next 6 or 7 weeks since I didn’t get much of a chance to head out onto the lake nearly as much as I had hoped during June, July, or August – weather played a big part in that lack of boating – so making up for it seems like the thing to do...weather permitting.

==+++==

Today’s Day By Day addresses something Biden, WRBA, and the rest of the Progressive elite have either forgotten or ar trying to forget, that being the American people are armed better than the military with better weapons. Counting just the hunters in 5 states alone means there is a potential army of 3 million, making it the largest army in the world.

They should take the warning Admiral Yamamoto gave to the Japanese High Command about not invading the US because “There will be a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

If it ever came down to a civil war because of the increasing usurpation of the government, a government bent upon eliminating our Rights, we must keep this in mind:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

For those of you who do not remember (or ever knew) the contents of the Declaration of Independence, that’s where the quote above came from.

Best that we keep it in mind and make sure those trying to turn us into Banana Republic dictatorship understand that as well.

==+++==

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. In fact, I’ve been talking about this again and again.

New study suggests global warming could be mostly an urban problem.

The Urban Heat Island Effect has been skewing temperature readings for decades. Correction factors were applied, but rather than using earlier readings from nearby stations out of the range of UHI effects to generate a correction factor. Instead, readings from the ‘pristine’ stations were averaged with those within the Urban Heat Island. That made the pristine station readings artificially high while dropping the UHI readings. The effect was that the temperatures went up.

The study delves into the UHI problem as well as one other factor being devoutly ignored.

A new study published in the scientific peer-reviewed journal, Climate, by 37 researchers from 18 countries suggests that current estimates of global warming are contaminated by urban warming biases.

The study also suggests that the solar activity estimates considered in the most recent reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimated the role of the Sun in global warming since the 19th century.

It is well-known that cities are warmer than the surrounding countryside. While urban areas only account for less than 4% of the global land surface, many of the weather stations used for calculating global temperatures are located in urban areas. For this reason, some scientists have been concerned that the current global warming estimates may have been contaminated by urban heat island effects. In their latest report, the IPCC estimated that urban warming accounted for less than 10% of global warming. However, this new study suggests that urban warming might account for up to 40% of the warming since 1850.

The study also found that the IPCC’s chosen estimate of solar activity appeared to have prematurely ruled out a substantial role for the Sun in the observed warming. When the authors analysed the temperature data only using the IPCC’s solar dataset, they could not explain any of the warming since the mid-20th century. That is, they replicated the IPCC’s iconic finding that global warming is mostly human-caused. However, when the authors repeated the analysis using a different estimate of solar activity – one that is often used by the scientific community – they found that most of the warming and cooling trends of the rural data could actually be explained in terms of changing solar activity.

The Climate Change faithful choose to ignore any information that contradicts their narrative. To hear them tell it the Earth’s climate was stable and unchanging until we came along and invented the Industrial Revolution. But we know different, know that climate changes and shifts all the time, sometimes over a short period and other times over millennia. Sometimes it’s a small change and other times it’s large. But it changes, constantly.

That the sun has an effect on weather, climate, the whole shebang, and not just on Earth. Surface temperatures on Mars have been varying, in some cases tracking with changes on Earth. Unless the aforementioned Climate Change faithful are going to make the argument that all of those Mars rovers are causing the temperature changes on a planet whose atmosphere is already 97% CO2, the only other thing Earth and Mars have in common is light and radiation received from the sun. (With one exception, the Mars rovers sent by NASA are solar powered. One, the most recent one – Perseverance - is nuclear powered.) It would be interesting to see how they would make the case.

The real question is how long it’s going to take for the Climate Change faithful to try to discredit the study or ‘disappear’ it, then cancel...er…punish those with the audacity to question their dogma.

After all, they can’t have people doing actual science contradicting the narrative.

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It looks like there is another victim of Covid that has been overlooked. In this case, it’s a health care provider, MaineGeneral Health, who fired nurses who refused to take The Jab during the height of the Covid pandemic. It is now asking them to return because they are so short-handed.

Nurses and other health care workers at MaineGeneral Health, one of Maine’s largest health care providers, were unceremoniously fired two years ago if they refused to take the experimental mRNA injections touted as COVID-19 preventatives.

Some of those workers were even slapped with misconduct charges for refusing to comply with the mandate, many were later denied unemployment benefits, and no requests for religious exemptions were honored.

Now, one of the nonprofit hospitals that left some employees jobless and without recourse to Maine’s unemployment insurance benefits is sending text messages to the same employees it cast aside practically begging them to come back to work.

“You were once a proud member of the MaineGeneral team. Would you consider rejoining us? We would be pleased to discuss options with you,” the MaineGeneral Health Recruitment team said in a text message to former registered nurse Terry Poland.

“As you know, nearly 2 years ago MaineGeneral had to comply with a state mandate for COVID-19 vaccination. We lost a number of great employees as a result, including you,” MaineGeneral said.

“MaineGeneral has eliminated the COVID-19 vaccination as an employment condition,” MaineGeneral said.

I hate to say this, but MaineGeneral is getting its comeuppance. That it has the gall to reach out to those nurses it fired because now they need them, acting as if nothing happened despite its vindictiveness. Did they really expect those they cast out to come rushing back into their embrace? Considering MaineGeneral’s actions damaged many of these nurses’ lives, leaving some unemployable, why would any of them want to go back to an employer who did this to them?

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where summer hasn’t quite ended yet, plenty of summerfolk are making the best of this last weekend of summer, and where I don’t have to worry about Monday coming too soon...at least this week.

Demography Will Become Destiny

Via the Instaprof comes this tidbit: “As the Manhattan Institute’s Zach Goldberg has noted in his research, the increasing divergence between the Democrats’ elites and proles is getting harder to manage.”

Could this be the reason why more Democrats have been taking a closer look at their anointed leaders and beginning to ask questions about them and their intentions? The Democrat elite seem to think that their usual voting bloc – Blacks, Hispanics, and ignorant white young adults – will always vote the way they want them to and for those they want them to vote for. But it appears they can no longer make that assumption as an increasing number within that voting bloc are abandoning the Democrat Party as they no longer see the party is working on their behalf...if they ever did.

The Democratic coalition, which seems so powerful now, is actually tremendously unstable, filled with groups whose interests are often in direct conflict. Arguably only a shared loathing for Trump has sustained them for the past eight years. But at some point, whether in 2024 or afterwards, they will not have Donald Trump to kick around anymore. And then many groups in the coalition will have difficult choices to make.

In particular, given current trends, the younger white members of the coalition will either have to content themselves with visibly subordinate roles in the party, front for policies that work explicitly against their interests, defect to the Right, or give up politics entirely.

--snip--

...the most notable contradiction in the Left’s coalition is the continued and disproportionate control of an overwhelmingly white, wealthy, and highly educated faction over an increasingly multi-racial, poor, and less educated constituency. The largely white overclass elite have kept the peace by distributing massive amounts of welfare, federal jobs, legal hiring preferences, and other benefits to their largely minority client base. But with America’s debts spiraling out of control and virtually every institution captured already, it is unclear that the continued growth of this largesse is sustainable. The Kulaks (the American middle class, and in particular the white middle class) have been blamed for all of America’s failings and have been drained of almost all influence and power. There simply aren’t enough other middle-class Americans left to fleece.

It doesn’t help that the middle-class American demographic is shrinking with a lot of that shrinkage due to Team Biden and the Democrat elite purposefully crushing them. It seems they have forgotten the Thatcher axiom: “Socialism works until you run out of other people’s money.” (One has to remember the Democrats have been devolving into Socialists, particularly after the boost LBJ’s Great Society ‘reforms’ picked up where FDR’s programs left off.) Just turning on the printing presses doesn’t solve the deficit problem, something everyone is going to learn soon enough if we don’t turn away from this destructive path we’re on.

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