Thoughts On A Sunday

It was quiet around The Manse all weekend. Deb was away and BeezleBub was working. I was left to my own devices and focused primarily on yard work, with mowing the lawn and cutting back the sumac that has been invading the property for years. (Sumac is a weed, insidious and fast growing. It takes constant work to keep it at bay and prevent it from choking out all other growth.)

A lot of cutting and hauling took place, with a couple of trips to the town's brush pile to offload what I'd managed to cut. (Some of the grass clippings were also hauled to the town's compost piles.)This was in between a trip to our town's annual Household Hazardous Waste Collection Day and to one of the local service shops to have the new Ram pickup get it's state inspection sticker.

It wasn't a bad day yesterday despite the work I did. I have to admit that I was worried that the injury I experienced this past winter would be aggravated by the work, but there was nary a twinge. I do have to admit that it did limit how much I could get done as there are still some duties that I did not dare attempt as I knew I wasn't quite up to doing them yet. (Yeah, it's an excuse. But it's a darned good one and one I can use with BeezleBub until mid-fall at least.)

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It's summer, so where have all the kids gone?

In this overly neurotic society where helicopter parenting isn't just encouraged, but darned near mandated by the busybodies driven by the Precautionary Principle, the kids are “contained in structured, adult-led, often indoor activities where they are told what to do, what to think, and how to act.” They are no longer allowed unstructured outdoor play where they can let their imaginations can run free.

Is it any wonder we're seeing more kids with mental health issues?

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Are the unions finally getting tired of the Democrats?

Yup, without a doubt. Particularly when the rank and file see the Democrats making it more difficult for them to keep their jobs by making it more attractive for some industries to move offshore or regulating their jobs right out of existence. The push by Democrats for a $15 minimum wage isn't helping things either as the 'experiments' with it in places like Seattle and San Francisco are proving to make jobs go away.

As an aside, I know a lot of union members from a number of different labor unions and good portion of them aren't Democrats. They belong to unions because they have to in order to work. Many would leave their unions if given the choice. Is it any wonder Right To Work has been making some inroads into some of the Rust Belt states?

New Hampshire has failed to go RTW, with the first attempt vetoed by then-governor Maggie Hassan, a True Blue Democrat beholden to the New Hampshire State Employees Association (an SEIU union). The second attempt failed in the legislature, failing by a bare minimum of votes.

Maybe next time. After all we did manage to get Constitutional Carry passed during this year's legislative session, though it took a number of attempts before it finally passed. Maybe RTW will pass next time it's presented.

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Ah, yes! One of my favorite examples of how government can take something that has worked well for generations and f**k it up beyond all reason by regulating the hell out of it. What am I talking about?

The oft mentioned and commented upon gas can.

It is something I've written about on numerous occasions as I see it as the perfect example of why government should butt out when it comes to the little things...and maybe even the mid-sized things (but I digress).

This latest tale starts with someone running out of gas because their gas gauge was broken and they had to call the local gas station to come out with a can of gas.

The gruff but lovable attendant arrived in his truck and started to pour gas in my car’s tank. And pour. And pour.

“Hmmm, I just hate how slow these gas cans are these days,” he grumbled. “There’s no vent on them.”

Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress?

That sound of frustration in this guy’s voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work but doesn’t work anymore, for some odd reason we can’t identify.

I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.

Surely, the gas can is protected. It’s just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn’t have a vent. After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill.

Indeed.

I know I've spilled far more gasoline using the government 'approved' gas cans than I ever did in the four or so decades I used the old tried and true gas cans with vents. How much more gasoline vapors have been released due to more frequent and larger gas spills as compared to those released due to vents on the old cans? The latches on the new cans can be difficult to release and requires the use of two hands to do so while the old cans only required one hand. It is also far more difficult to control the flow of gas from the new cans as it surges and stops as a vacuum builds in the cans because there is no vent. (That's why I believe I see more gas spills than in the past.)

In this case the cure for a perceived problem was far worse than the problem it was supposed to cure.

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I like this idea from Iowahawk:

Let's have engineers invade a Diversity Trainer conference & force them to solve differential equations for an hour.

His tweet is in response to this bit of idiocy, something that greatly deserves all the mocking it receives.

This politically correct bulls**t has gone too far, takes up too much time, and has been shown to have little if any effect in regards to actual changes in regards to whatever The PC Powers That Be are trying to train people to avoid, be it microagressions, sexual harassment, LGBTQ issues, diversity, or whatever bit of PC lunacy they come up with next.

Leave me alone and let me get back to work so I can make the world a better place by inventing something new that makes everyone's lives even easier, thankyouverymuch.

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Why does the US, a First World country, have Third World cities?

Because the party in power in those cities (Democrats) made them that way.

Throughout the United States, I frequently come across what I call "third world cities in first world countries" - whether it is Detroit, Baltimore, or even my beloved New Orleans. These third world cities all have one thing in common: an absence of free and open markets.

There is a wide consensus amongst economists that economic freedom largely determines the wealth of nations and metropolitan areas are no exception to this rule. As Economist Dean Stansel, in his paper, "An Economic Freedom Index for U.S. Metropolitan Areas," states, “higher levels of local economic freedom are found to be correlated with positive economic outcomes.”

So regulating and taxing the heck out of businesses and business owners has a major negative effect on US cities that do so? Who'da thunk it?

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As if we need even more proof that California is committing slow-motion suicide, there's this:

California lawmakers pass 400% increase in gas taxes then give themselves free gasoline and cars.

Here is more evidence of California's decline:

California is in debt $1.3 Trillion. That means every citizen in California is in debt almost $33,000. That is, unless you just move out!!! This represents a significant debt burden even by international standards.

Not included are billions of dollars in deferred maintenance and upgrades to California’s infrastructure. To the extent California’s government has not maintained investment in infrastructure maintenance, it has passed this cost on to future generations who will have to issue additional debt to pay for this expense.

On top of that, California's AG has decided that the 'Calexit' secession effort can go forward. Even if it does happen, I still think that California should be broken up into different states as it is the coastal elite pushing for this. A lot of non-coastal California wants nothing to do with leaving the US as they are an entirely different political entity and identity than the coast.

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Twitter is losing almost $40 million per month and they can't seem to figure that the reason why is that they've pissed off half of their customer base.

There is an undeniable pattern of bias at Twitter, whose executives consider their political agenda more important than profit. Does anyone imagine that a company staffed by social justice warriors (SJWs) is a smart investment? Twitter management has effectively yielded control of the company to socialists, anarchists and other enemies of capitalism. Are you surprised that they’re losing nearly $40 million a month?

I'm not surprised in the least. If nothing else Twitter will be used as an example why SJW agendas should never be used as the basis to run a company. It will always fail.

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Oh, yeah, this will work out for them as well as that whole BLM kerfuffle worked out for Mizzou.

It appears the University of Michigan is hiring an administrator for Cultural Appropriation Prevention.

I have to ask whether the still to be named administrator will be preventing cultural appropriation only by white students or whether such appropriation prevention will be applied across the board? If I had to guess, I's say it is more likely to be the former rather than the latter. But that's just me.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where it's been a glorious weekend, the summerfolk have been well behaved, and the ice cream stands have been running flat out.

Net Neutrailty Debate Begins...Again

I have mentioned my co-worker before, he of many liberal outlooks gained by his many years in a college environment. There are a number of things that we disagree about and that we debate about, here and there, now and again

One of the latest topics has been about Net Neutrality and his take on the matter is that the Trump Administration is undoing “all of the good work done by Obama and his minions in the FCC.” I took a different tack, letting him know that much of the debate over Net Neutrality took place during the Bush Administration. It was the Obama Administration that screwed it all up.

My point to him was that putting Net Neutrality under Title II was the wrong way to go about it and that stripping the existing Net Neutrality rules was the right thing to do while he though we should tinker with it until “it was right”.

I admit that there are times when tinkering with some of the rules and regulations can fix some smaller and less intrusive problems with government regulations, but that when the problems are huge and would require tweaking over years or even decades that some times it is better to scrap the whole thing and start with a clean sheet of paper. Tweaking Net Neutrality is one of those huge problems that won't be solved that way. Here's why.

Net Neutrality is the good principle that a provider of information access service, a device, or a platform must be neutral regarding the content accessed or transmitted by its service, device, or platform.  In particular, Internet Service Providers must not discriminate between net traffic based on the content or originating website.  Also, they must not give preferential treatment to their own services, such as voice over IP, relative to their competitors. The principle of Net Neutrality was accepted and applied by the George W. Bush administration toward broadband ISPs.

...[W]hen Obama was elected in 2008, he appointed his classmate and fundraiser Julius Genachowski as Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman.  Under the pretext of net neutrality, FCC crafted multiple regulations that made broadband ISPs almost unable to manage their own networks, and put their whole operations in the legal grey area.  Not incidentally, the robust growth in broadband providers’ competition that preceded Obama election stopped and many new broadband technologies (like WiMAX) became buried. For the first time in the history, Internet access prices started to rise!  But that was only a prelude to the real action.

That “real action” was writing the rules in such a way that the Internet was no longer an open system with “the FCC vested into itself total control over the whole Internet backbone, all Internet access (other than obsolete dial up) by all consumers, and all broadband and mobile ISPs. The order sprawls on more than 300 pages, never mentions “net neutrality” (except in the footnotes).”

I could go on and on ad nauseum but it's better if you Read The Whole Thing for yourself. Pay particular attention to the comments as they are even more informative that the post itself.

New Hampshire's Governor Makes The Right Move

I have to admit I have had mixed feelings about our governor, Chris Sununu (R-NH).

There are times when I wonder if he really is as conservative as I had hoped he would be. The recently passed state budget and his push for all-day kindergarten (funded by expanding gambling by way of Keno run by the state lottery) made me wonder if he was just a version of Maggie Hassan, former spend-thrift governor and now US Senator (D-NH).

Then there's this move by him that has me thinking that he is more conservative than he lets on. “This” is his move when he was asked if he would have New Hampshire sign on to the United States Climate Alliance, a state-level agreement to uphold the objectives of the Paris climate accord developed after President Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from that do-nothing accord.

Sununu hit it right on the head when he called the alliance “quasi-meaningless” and “more of just a political statement than anything.” When one thinks about it the alliance is nothing more than a means of virtue signaling writ large. As Sununu also stated, the alliance founders – the governors of California and New York – are championing the alliance as a means to “distract from their states’ shortcomings.”

One of my co-workers, a dyed in the wool liberal, decried Trump's decision to have the U.S. withdrwaw from the accord. I asked him if he had actually read the conditions and obligations the accord would impose and he said he hadn't. My response to him - “Then read the damn thing. You'll find it isn't what you've been told what it does or what it obligates the U.S. to do while at the same time allowing both China and India to dramatically increase their CO2 emissions.”

A few days later he came back to me and told me he actually spent the time to read it. He then stated that Trump was right to “get us out of that awful agreement.” Apparently his only knowledge of the contents and obligations of the Paris Accords were what he heard on NPR, saw on MSLSD and CNN, or from friends who were part of the same political echo chamber. They never made mention that the only nation that would have to greatly reduce their already reduced emissions and pay hundreds of billions of dollars to “fight climate change” was the U.S.

So my co-worker learned two valuable lessons from this: Climate change agreements that punish the only major nation that has actually decreased its CO2 emissions aren't worth the paper they're written on and; his favorite news outlets have been going out of their way to lie to the American public while also ignoring the truly important stories.

There's hope for him yet.

Thoughts On A Sunday

No post last night as it was a busy day and I realized I hadn’t written anything just as I was heading up the stairs to bed. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen now and then. This was one of those times.

Part of the day included a trip to the WP In-Laws as it had been a while since I had seen them, having been laid up over the winter and early spring. The trip also allowed me to show off the new Ram 1500. (‘New’ is a relative term as the truck is a 2014 model. The last time I bought a new vehicle was in 1995. Every one since then has been a used vehicle.)

Between my regular Saturday chores and the three-hour round trip for my visit little time was left to do anything other than feed the feline contingent here at The Manse and go to bed.

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Oh, yeah, this will play well in West.

North Korea has opened a tourism website. As the news article posits, what’s their catch phrase for the tourist trade?

“You’ll never want to leave — and may not be able to.”

I expect our Progressive brethren to sign up in droves so they can get first had experience in running a Stalinist state. The only problem I can see they might have is resolving the paradox of totalitarian rule that suppresses all religion and their support for a religion that is all about suppressing freedom, particularly the rights of women, believes in slavery, and has no problem killing anyone (including Progressives) because they are infidels.

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This observation by Ed Driscoll is spot on:

“You condemn yourself to a life of misery when you make politics your religion.”

This quote is in relation to an article he linked about how Trump’s election victory ruined a bisexual wedding.

The woman in the article needs and intervention, or maybe some time in her local mental institution to help her reconnect with reality.

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A friend at work slammed President Trump about wasting time and being so caught up in the Russia controversy that he hasn’t kept any of his campaign promises or accomplished anything. Not that he’s a supporter of Trump. He’s anything but, being an almost-progressive stooge. (I have been working with him and showing him alternative media outlets that don’t play to the line the DNC-MSM has been putting forth for over a year.)

I did mention to him that the whole “Russia controversy” is something only the DNC-MSM has been pushing and that most Americans are more concerned about health care. Russia isn’t even number two on their list.

But now I can point him to Trump’s actual accomplishments that the DNC-MSM outlets he usually peruses doesn’t (and won’t) cover. I will warn him that it comes by way of Fox News, but I can also point him to government websites that cover proposed and passed/signed legislation and executive orders that aren’t beholden to any news media.

President Trump has signed more than 40 bills and nearly 40 executive orders on everything from health care to energy, infrastructure and more.

While the previous administration turned to federal agencies to enact its agenda, President Trump has signed more laws to slash through federal red tape than any president in American history and has saved businesses up to $18 billion a year in costs.

A lot of those businesses mentioned above aren’t big conglomerates, but small businesses that were being buried under increasingly burdensome (and costly) regulations, eating deeply into profit margins and threatening their very existence. Most of those regulations don’t actually do anything except allow the government to intrude more deeply into business. They serve no real or needed purpose. (I can speak from experience as the small business Deb and I owned in the past became more troublesome to run because we had to spend increasing amounts of time and money dealing with government regulations paperwork. That meant we had less time to actually operate our business even as we saw our profits being eaten up by the costs of complying with all of those nonsensical regulations.)

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Due out in August: iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood–and What That Means for the Rest of Us.

With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults. Born in the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s and later, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps why they are experiencing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

With interactions becoming more electronic and less face-to-face, is it all that surprising that ‘iGen’ is suffering from the aforementioned anxiety, depression, and loneliness?

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First, the over-the-top municipal bureaucrats work to kill off kids’ lemonade stands, something kids have been doing for generations.

Now they’re making pet sitting illegal in New York City.

This is one of those “WTF?” moments. This is yet another example of government overregulation. Thanks goodness that type of asinine sickness hasn’t reached too far outside of the urban areas. (Yes, I know some suburban areas are doing the same stupid things, but most of them are located next to Big Blue Cities.) Were something that stupid happen here we’d see a major change in the makeup of the state legislature and a new occupant in the governor’s office.

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As David Starr asks, “A Jaguar SUV?”

My comment to his post dealt with the “British ‘movie bad guy’” and that they won’t use a black Escalade. Why not a Jaguar SUV?

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Despite all of the temperature data tweaking and ‘fixes’ to the climate models, none of them track what has actually been happening or been able to “reproduce even the most fundamental cycles.”

Under those circumstances how can anyone use to them to predict what the climate will be like 83 years from now. On top of that how can anyone in good conscience base policies and regulations upon those same defective climate models? Or are the warmists using the much abused Precautionary Principle as an excuse to push draconian measures ‘just in case’?

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I find the claim that 22 million Americans will lose their health insurance if the GOP health care reform plan passes to be disingenuous at best. But of course the media and pro-ObamaCare folks are playing it up to the max.

But one thing you never hear about are the millions of Americans who are paying through the nose for health insurance they cannot use. A family member is in that boat, paying $12,000 a year for insurance and a huge deductible ($6,000, if I recall correctly), meaning the family member has to shell out $18,000 before their health insurance kicks in. That’s thousands of dollars more than they had to pay prior to ObamaCare kicking in. Please remind me, what was the promise of ObamaCare again? Something about saving $2500 a year in premiums?

What has really happened is the 22 million Americans receiving health insurance through ObamaCare are having their insurance coverage paid for by Americans like my family member. They pay and pay and get nothing in return. In effect, they lost their health insurance but still have to pay. How many are doing so? If I had to guess, at least 22 million Americans.

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Vigilantism, California-style.

Heavy rains caused potholes in Santa Cruz County, CA – potholes which the local government doesn’t have the funds to fix. The local government officials told the residents to “be patient” and have said the repairs could take more than a year to finish.

Residents got tired of the delay and the lack of solid answers so they decided to fix the potholes themselves.

Of course, the citizen led solution doesn’t sit well with government officials.

Of course not. The dysfunctional county government can’t fix the potholes because they don’t have the money. The roads are deteriorating faster than the county can repair them. The citizens are tired of seeing their cars and trucks being damaged by the unrepaired roads yet have been told by the county that they won’t be fixed any time soon. The citizens go out and fix them themselves. The county goes apoplectic and complains that “We can’t have people running out into traffic and filling up potholes by themselves. It just could end up impeding our efforts to actually fill more potholes if we end up getting sued because we’re letting people do this.”

They’re going to get sued if they don’t fix the roads, particularly if someone gets hurt or killed because they roads haven’t been fixed. The people are performing functions the county government can no longer perform and the people are being slammed for it.

This is a form of vigilantism I can get behind.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has been glorious, the boating has been great, and where we’ll be assaulted by yet another Monday.

Thoughts On A Sunday

The King is dead! Long Live the King!

Or in this case the trusty F150.

Yes, my trusty 14-year old truck is no longer here. After years of faithful service the body rust got so bad that it would have taken a minimum of $6000 to make it roadworthy. While the frame and mechanicals were all in great shape, both the bed and cab had extensive rust and after some thought both Deb and I came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth dropping that kind of money into a vehicle that wasn't worth that even if it had been in pristine condition. So it was time to find a worthy replacement.

The trusty F150 languished in the garage since January, trapped there for two reasons: I wasn't able to drive due to an injury that left me dependent upon others to get around and; the F150 failed its annual safety inspection (the rust) and couldn't be driven until the rust was repaired and was deemed safe to drive again. In May I started gathering estimates for the work and almost every shop told me the same thing – it wasn't worth fixing unless I was going to keep it for sentimental reasons. (I haven't been sentimental about any vehicle with the exception of my dear departed grandparents' 1960 Cadillac coupe as I remember so many trips with them in that land yacht of a car.) So it was time to find a replacement.

It took almost 6 weeks, but I finally found a truck I liked that was within my price range: a 2014 Ram 1500 4X4. I did all of the due diligence, checking websites like Edmunds, NADA, and Cars.com for reviews of this particular model, looking for any problems or issues. With very few exceptions, everyone liked the truck and sang its praises. That was enough for me.

So this past Tuesday Deb and I climbed into the trusty F150 for the last time, hoping the local gendarmerie wouldn't notice I didn't have a valid inspection sticker, drove it the 11 miles to the dealer who was taking it in trade, handed the keys over. Ten minutes later we had finished the last of the paperwork, the temporary license plate was in place, and Deb and I headed home in the trusty Ram 1500. Hopefully it will serve me as well as the F150 did and last as long, if not longer.

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This is disturbing on so many leevls I haven't a clue as where to begin.

You know a feminist really hates any human with a 'Y' chromosome when she publicly condemns her sons as rapists and sexists because they will no longer endure her constant emotional abuse. Not that they've actually done anything wrong. But she apparently hates the idea that she wasn't able to turn them into women with penises. Instead, they have done what anyone would under those circumstances – rebel. But wait, there's more!

Imagine what it must feel like to know if you ever end up in court your own mother is going to testify for the prosecution! When your own mom views your natural masculinity as "toxic," it's probably not going to foster a tight relationship or respect for her dearly held belief system. It's sad to imagine teen boys in that terribly awkward time trying to figure out who they are and what their passion is while this woman is flogging them in the newspaper for the sins of rapists (even though they never raped anyone). Lady, high school is hard enough. Maybe you should refrain from blaming the world's ills on your own flesh and blood. But that's just me.

It gets worse. It appears that Allard wrote an article several years ago claiming one of her sons was suicidal and yet she continues to write about him as being culpable for rape culture. She's done it again in a new article titled, “I'm Done Pretending Men Are Safe (Even My Own Sons)”.

Her problem isn't the patriarchy or rape culture. It has nothing to do with “toxic masculinity” or humans with a 'Y' chromosome. It has everything to do with the fact that she is a one mentally ill shithead who should have never been allowed to raise her kids. The only thing toxic in her life is her own delusions and that they've driven her to emotionally abuse her sons because they aren't girls. Normally I am not one that would suggest such a thing, but I think it's time for Child Services to do their job and get her kids away from this abusive excuse for a woman.

It's all about toxic feminism! Reading the comments to the linked post, just about everyone agrees her kids would be better off with someone else.

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The past few months have been like a flashback to the 1950's where Democrat Congresscritters are almost wetting themselves as they look for Russians under Trump's bed. They see them everywhere even when no one is actually there. Every time the DNC-MSM creams themselves because they think they've found the last little bit of evidence that will force Trump out of office it turns out to be a “nothingburger”.

I have to wonder who will end up being the Democrats' version of Tailgunner Joe McCarthy? So far no one wants to take that position. Considering what his downfall looked like I doubt anyone is in a hurry to fill that slot.

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There's deluded, and then there's deranged. This is deranged.

Silly reason why mother won't allow her son to accept a perfect school attendance award: “In this family you are not shamed for ill health.”

My question: Did he ever make fun of or shame anyone who didn't have a perfect attendance record? Somehow I doubt he has.

His mom has imbibed of the Progressive kool-aid. The only one that should be ashamed is her.

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Oh, Yeah! Let's bring back segregation! It worked so well the last time it was tried.

What makes this idea even more ludicrous is that it isn't even white people bringing up the idea, but black people. It's quite evident they never learned or were never taught the lessons about segregation in the South. If they see it as panacea to all their ills then they have chosen to ignore what's already happened in some of the self-segregated sections of cities like Detroit and Chicago. That's worked out so well for our African American brethren.

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I don't know why I missed this, but it's been out there for a month.

All my Progressive friends are members of the #Resist movement.  I am not a Trump supporter, but I'm not suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, either.  He's had mixed results so far.  Nothing outlandish, nothing crazy. I think he's accomplished quite a bit (both better and worse) for not passing a single piece of major legislation.  His bluster and hyperbole bug me, but that's just talk and Tweets.  I've seen and heard worse from regular politicians.  Yet it's these words that set off the #Resist people.  They go bonkers over every little thing!  It's fascinating.

Prior to the election, when it seemed Hillary was a shoo-in, they were treading lightly, saying nice things like "Whoever wins, we should unify after the election, the nation needs to come together."  Their hubris and expectation of a big win offered them the comfort to feel they could say this, with smug delight, to set off anyone who might consider Trump a viable vote.  These are the same people that spent 8 years complaining about Republican filibustering and 'obstruction' of the Obama agenda.  "Why can't the Republicans stop OBSTRUCTING when we want to get things done?"  Well, smarty-pants, that's how the system works, isn't it?  It's designed to prevent a tyranny of the majority, and your smug nonsensical philosophy is forcing tyranny down our throats.

Read the whole thing.

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This is something I've known since my high school years, over 4 decades ago. What is this something?

Women hate harmless men.

Many modern men have been propagandized to believe that modern women want nice, sensitive, empathetic guys who make them feel safe.

And then they are perplexed and frustrated when they eventually find themselves dumped, divorced, or relegated to the friend-zone for perpetuity.

The only time making women feel safe works is when a man protects them from a dangerous situation, doing so with action, be it as simple as showing their sidearm, wreaking violence upon a miscreant, or somewhere along that spectrum. (I have experienced that personally when three toughs accosted my then fiancee on the Tube in London. One ended up with a broken nose, the second with a dislocated shoulder, and the third, apparently smarter than his mates, decided to back away when he saw what had befallen his fellow thugs. The fiancee looked at me in an entirely different light after that, and I mean in a good way.)

Check out the post and particularly the included video of Dr. Jordan Peterson explaining why this is so.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where it's NASCAR weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, the lake is busy with lots of boats out there, and where I'm glad I can do most of my boating during the week.

Sometimes They Do Talk To Their Constituents!

It's not often one has a chance to spend time with their representative in state legislature. It's even better when you can do so at their home, or if there are some conflicting activities, on the phone.

In this case, I called my state representative to find out how things went during this year's legislative session. To say I got a not unexpected earful would be an understatement. (It was a lengthy and contentious session, so there was a lot to talk about.)

His list of successes and failures:

State Budget – FAIL: (Still too fat and carrying over items from the previous spendthrift Democrat governor.)

Business Tax Reduction – PASS...sorta: (The two taxes, the Business Enterprise Tax and Business Profits Tax, have been reduced. However the aim by a number of Republican legislators was to eliminate them altogether. Maybe next time.)

Repeal the Interest and Dividends Tax – FAIL: (New Hampshire has no income or sales tax, but it does have the Interest and Dividends tax which doesn't affect wage earners but does effect retirees and prudent investors. There has been an effort to eliminate this for some years as it doesn't really help all that much in the way of revenues but does hurt some Granite State residents.)

Return To Biennial Legislative Sessions – FAIL: (Back in 1984 the citizens of New Hampshire were sold a pig in a poke, that being that a single ~6 month legislative session every too years was too long. Two annual ~3 month sessions would be better. The voters changed the state constitution to go to annual sessions and it's been all downhill from there. Now there is an annual ~6 month session which means legislators must put in twice the amount of time at twice the cost to the state's taxpayers, but not all that much more gets done than if there had been a single every-other-year session. The bill to return to that schedule died in committee...darn it.)

Constitutional Carry – PASS: (A permit to carry a concealed weapon is no longer required. New Hampshire has had Open Carry for years and this was the next logical step. Despite both Open Carry and Concealed Carry there has not been bloodshed on the streets nor 'OK Corral' style shootouts as predicted by the anti-2A folks. New Hampshire has one of the lowest violent crime rates in the nation.)

Tighten Election Law – PASS: (Same Day registration has been grossly abused, used by 'transient' residents with no real domicile in the state. This law is designed to stop that kind of abuse by making proof of domicile a condition for voter registration. It is expected the ACLU and LoWV amongst others will be taking the state to court on this one.)

There were a host of other items we discussed, including issues in our county. (The state representatives also serve as county delegation members to the County Commission in each county and vote on things like the county budget and taxes.) My representative has stated it's been a learning experience as this was his first session as a representative. He and 399 other members of the New Hampshire House had to slog through governmental inertia, back channel deals, the reluctance/refusal of state funded entities (like the University System of New Hampshire) to open their books while at the same time demanding more money, and a whole host of pigheadedness and ideological blindness to try to get anything done. At least he now has a better understanding of the swamp that is state government.

As my representative said, “Take this experience at state level, multiply it by 50 states, then add on the even greater swamp of government in Washington DC.”

Scary thought, ain't it?

Thoughts On A Sunday

The craziness of the Fourth of July holiday has faded away, allowing us a brief respite before this weekend arrived. While the crowds aren’t nearly as big as they were over the Fourth, they’re still here. In other words, it’s a normal summer weekend here in the Lakes Region. There’s a lot of boat traffic out on Lake Winnipesaukee, something to be expected on a beautiful weekend. (It’s one reason we rarely travel out on the lake during the weekend unless it’s first thing in the morning or late afternoon/early evening when there’s little if any boat traffic.)

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By way of Instapundit comes proof of something I knew way back when it was first put into place: Obama’s Cash For Clunkers was a complete waste of time and taxpayer money. It also had a net negative effect on car sales as compared to if the program had never been implemented.

One must also remember that the Obama Administration pushed for the closing of car dealerships as part of the automaker bailout (Chrysler and GM) because “there are too many dealerships.” The problem is that a good number of those dealerships slated for closing were selected based not upon their sales but upon the owner’s political leanings. A lot of very successful and prosperous dealerships saw their franchises ended because the owners did not identify as being with the correct political party (meaning they were Republicans and therefore not worthy of retaining their businesses).

Cash For Clunkers was an unmitigated disaster. Then again most politically motivated economic programs have no relation to economic realities and end up doing little to help the economy and, worst case, end up having negative impacts on the economy and the wallets of consumers.

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Though over a year old, this piece by Richard Fernandez stands as a warning to both tyrannies and self-deluded democracies (in this case, the EU). It boils down to one simple principle:

…people, under pressure to conform by culture leaders, often told public lies to get the pollsters and thought police off their backs, even as they nurtured largely undetected private resentments inside them. Over time, two divergent perceptions would emerge: the public lie would determine how the regime thought about itself while the private truth contained the real, but hidden data.

When both the public lie and the private truth are exposed, the government falls, sometimes violently.

How does this apply to the EU, a nominal democracy? The elite have been telling themselves and the citizens lies in order to fit a narrative, one that has now come back on them in spades.

It's becoming evident that the European elites failed to understand how explosive the migrant issue was until it detonated full in their face. Now it is in the midst of a crisis which could literally bring down the European Union. Why didn't they see it coming? Because they believed their own Narrative, even when they should have suspected it was a lie of their own making. If the PC Western elites are overtaken by a cascade similar to that which collapsed the Soviet Union, the ultimate irony will be that the very migrants which they had counted on to create the Curley Effect will turn out to be the engine of their own destruction.

As one of my favorite movie characters said, “Welcome to the party, pal!”

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I’ve known this for years.

If you believed the DNC-MSM, it appears Trump had a bad time at the G20 summit. But if you read the foreign press you get the impression that Trump kicked ass.

When you get better coverage of US national news from newspapers like the Telegraph rather than the New York Times or the Washington Post, you know they’re in trouble.

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It appears the experiment with school vouchers in Chile has proven to be a success. Of course I expect school voucher opponents to use the “But that’s Chile! It won’t work here,” line even though there’s plenty of evidence here in the US that proves that it does.

One commenter had the best take on this: “If vouchers didn’t work nobody would bother opposing them.”

Indeed.

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The Party of Peace, Love, and Tolerance strikes again.

In this case yet another “unhinged” liberal staked out a Harley Davidson dealership in Iowa in an attempt to kill US Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA).

Why is it that all of those attempting to kill members of Congress come from the Democrat Party, “unhinged” or not? The Left talks about all of the violence going to be committed by the Right, but the only ones actually committing the violence come from the Left. Projecting much?

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Want a preview of what single payer health care is like? Well here you go.

A million patients a week cannot see a GP.

Doctors said they were working “flat out” but under “unsustainable” pressure, leaving “worrying” numbers of patients without any help.

The NHS figures show the number waiting at least a week to see their GP has risen by 56 per cent in five years, with one in five now waiting this long.

The pressures left 11.3 per cent of patients unable to get an appointment at all – a 27 per cent rise since 2012. This amounts to around 47 million occasions on which patients attempted but failed to secure help from their GP, forcing them to give up, try again later or turn to Accident & Emergency departments.

It’s expected to get even worse. Is this something we really want to do? I doubt we’ll be able to do it any better than either the British or Canadians, and certainly not any less expensively.

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Step back: I’m a professional journalist!

And they wonder why the people hate the media.

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Helicopters…with frickin’ lasers.
It’s about time.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where summer has settled in, the summerfolk are enjoying themselves, and where the time to go back to work has come around again all too soon.

Not What We Think Is Happening?

As much as many on the Left think that the parochial ways of non-urbanites will die away to be replaced with the values and mores of the enlightened Progressives (which resemble those of an overindulged and spoiled child), there is a flaw in their thinking and it all comes down to one simple thing – demographics.

In a comment to a post on PJ Media about Trump's visit and so-called Good News/Bad News for Poland opinion piece, one reader points out that the cultural divide between the Urban Elite and non-urban deplorables is not what some people think it is. Reader “Hornspe” uses a personally witnessed example from Paris that illustrates that division.

When a relatively homogeneous society implodes demographically, it is all well and good to draw data from the averages, but many of these European cultures are quite polarized. I was in Paris four years ago when many of the rural folks flooded into the city to express their anger about gay marriage. The French Government made it sound like an invasion, turned out huge numbers of police, shut the train stations etc.

Buses arrived with thousands and thousands of pleasant, friendly people and their children. I have never seen so many kids at a political rally. You would have thought it was a picnic (which it also obviously was). Someone unfurled a banner on top of the Socialist Party HQ that was unkind to the French President. That was the extent of the horror.

I would guess Europe is full of these people. Traditional Europeans who no longer participate in the post-modern cultural life of their country, and do not live like dissipated urban Leftists who eschew "bringing children into a broken world" in favor of being able to pay the rent in central Paris or London, and because kids don't fit in a 60sq/m flat.

If three pair of urban Leftists have no kids, and two pair rural traditionalists have 3 kids, the average is 1.2 kids. This doesn't mean the society is failing (particularly in a world of increased automation) it means the people with the really bad ideas are voting themselves off the island.

Leftism is a memetic disease. It kills its host's next generation. It is like the Black Death. It may wipe out a quarter of the population, but the death will be concentrated in the cities. If the Left is self-selecting out, let them. That's not the end of their civilizations but their renewal.

Do you have the data which falsifies this hypothesis? I can conceive that there might be demographic data cut by political or better, cultural viewpoint (since I think when your choices run the spectrum between Sanders and Clinton, if you like Trump you just quit showing up). Were that data to show this demographic collapse across the whole spectrum, that would suggest I am wrong.

I am taking a shot in the dark here, but I'll bet you'll find that Hornspe isn't wrong. And the speculation applied to Europe would hold true here as well. Many of the families I know in non-urban areas across this country have two or more kids. The single-child or childless couples are rare outside of the blue urban areas. (There aren't nearly as many Progressives outside the blue islands which may be one reason why the birth rate may be higher away from those blue islands.)

While all of this speculation is based upon anecdotal evidence, it would not surprise me in the least that the difference in birth rates is there. Whether or not there is any actual census data which shows the difference between urban and non-urban birth rates as well as differences between Left and Center/Right birth rates is something I do not know at the moment. It's something worth looking into.

If Hornspe's speculations are correct, a number of cultural and political problems are likely to address themselves as the Progressives remove themselves from the gene pool as they do not seem to reproduce in any great numbers, if they reproduce at all. But in the mean time they can cause a lot of damage if we don't counter their efforts to destroy the very things that define us as Americans.

Thoughts On A Sunday

The long Fourth of July weekend is here, though the Fourth isn’t until Tuesday. Deb and I head out onto the lake at 10AM yesterday, hoping we’d beat the heavy boat traffic and be back in in an hour.

It didn’t work out that way.

It seems a lot of other folks had the same thought we did, making for a lot of wake driven chop, lengthy lines waiting to get through the Weirs Beach Channel, and then rain showers to cap it off. A leisurely 1 hour jaunt on the lake turned into two hours constant vigilance, rough water, aching knees, and a sweat/rain-soaked tee shirt.

Yet we still enjoyed it. A paradox, I know, but even a bad day out on the lake is better than a good day at work.

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The ongoing battle between the DNC-MSM and President Trump continues, with the duo of Scarborough and Brezenski seeing just how low they can go. They and their colleagues keep hammering at Trump as if they were back in high school and they show themselves to be the bullies, but their target stands strong and is not cowed by their tactics.

Is it childish? Yup, no doubt. But sometimes ‘childish’ is the only thing that gets through to these self-important defenders of the Leftist faith.

In the meantime Trump is getting things done while the DNC-MSM is focused on Trump’s tweets, remarks, and family. He has them totally suckered. Then again he’s manipulated the media for years and it comes to him as naturally as everyone else breathes.

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Those of us in the technical field understand things about the Internet that those outside the field rarely think about. That’s understandable. Most folks just want to know that it will work when they need it.

But too many, even in the tech field, have little if any understanding of the dangers that go along with the conveniences of the ‘Net.

As more things become connected to the Internet, more things can be controlled via the Internet, for good or bad.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes a reality, the vulnerabilities mount. Would you like it if someone could control all of the systems – lighting, heating/air conditioning, TV, appliances, the locks on your doors – from outside of your home? That’s what the IoT has as a major downside. While some of these things are quite convenient for a home owner, they have to understand the downside. (It’s one reason we have no such connections of anything to the Internet.)

As utilities and other infrastructure use the Internet for command and control, the ability by cyber-warfare hackers to shut down or damage that infrastructure increases. (None of that stuff should be ever be connected the Internet. They should be fully insulated from any Internet connections of any kind. While they would use the same kind of network structure as the Internet, they should be totally independent with no access from the outside.)

As one of the aforementioned engineering geeks, I am fully cognizant of the risks. It’s one reason I don’t have a smart phone. (I still use flip phone, something that can’t be hacked, or at least not as easily as smart phones.)

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It is one thing to not understand economics. There’s nothing wrong with that. But if someone with no such understanding figures they know better about how things should be run, doing things like artificially raising the cost of a commodity – labor is a commodity – and there being no fallout, then they are deluded. Such is the case with New Hampshire House Representative Timothy Horrigan.

After a post about McDonald’s installing ordering/payment kiosks in its US stores, Horrigan commented to the post, trying to use Switzerland’s McDonald’s franchises as proof that a $15/hour minimum wage won’t affect the costs of food, citing the “Big Mac” Index.

One thing Horrigan missed (or chose to ignore) is that they use ordering kiosks in Switzerland, just as they do through parts of Europe (France was where the first kiosks were installed some years ago, if memory serves). The McDonald’s franchises there have fewer employees than US franchises do, hence a skewed Big Mac Index.

Oops.

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I have to agree with David Starr on this: the F35 has turned the corner.

As the various problems have been sorted out, the F35 has turned from a very expensive dud to something that is making everyone sit up and take notice.

Let’s hope it turns out that it will be everything it was promised to be. If it does, it will be one kick-ass plane.

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Which state will default first- Connecticut or Illinois?

That’s a tough one to call, but I’m leaning towards Illinois.

Connecticut won’t be far behind, particularly in light that another corporate heavyweight, Aetna, is pulling up stakes and moving to another state. This follows on the heels of General Electric’s departure for Boston last year. Connecticut’s hostile tax code and business atmosphere has endeared it to no one and both businesses and the wealthy are leaving in droves, taking any tax revenues with them.

Illinois will fall first because they’ve been doing this for years longer than Connecticut and haven’t been able to pass a budget in three years. They’ve also had to stop selling some lottery tickets because they can’t guarantee they can pay off winning tickets. At least Connecticut can still make those payments…for now.

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OK, how do they explain this?

Phoenix, Arizona drops its sanctuary status and crime drops…unexpectedly.

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Any chance to play to the narrative that “We’re all gonna die!” if we don’t do something about climate change is used to prove the CAGW scenario. However, it’s one thing to take a catastrophic weather event to prove a point and yet another to turn a molehill into a mountain.

In this case a gust of wind was turned into a tornado in Hamburg, Germany. What’s worse, it was picked up by the international press even though there was absolutely no evidence such a tornado took place.

But it fits the narrative and that’s all that counts.

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Hey, SJW`s! Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you! You need to hear this:

With free speech comes consequences.

And here’s something else you need to know – Both the freedom of speech and its consequences also apply to you.

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Another note to the CAGW faithful: Too little CO2 is worse than too much. Of course “too much” CO2 is a matter of opinion.

As we’ve been seeing the increased CO2 has been beneficial, with increased greening of once barren areas, better crop yields (all while requiring less water), and apparently less severe and less numerous hurricanes. All of this is the opposite of what the CAGW faithful have been claiming. They have also been saying a major climate catastrophe will occur by 2100 if we don’t do something now despite even the best estimates showing that if we eliminated all anthropogenic CO2 the difference between CAGW climate models and ‘fixed’ CO2 models show such a small difference as to almost be lost in the noise. Yet we’re supposed to spend trillions of dollars on a problem that isn’t really a problem? We’d be better off spending that money on getting us out to other planets.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the summerfolk are here in droves, the lake is busy, and where we’re looking forward to our Fourth of July cookout and fireworks.

Thoughts On A Sunday - Abbreviated

This will be a somewhat abbreviated TOAS post as I was busy with a number of tasks both inside and outside The Manse today and just finished the last of them (it's 9:34Pm EDT as I write this). Between running errands, trying to clean up the garage and sort through items – some to the “Throw it out” pile and others to the “I may need this but it's likely to be thrown out too” pile – all in preparation for putting The Manse on the market, it's taken a lot of my time over the weekend. It's time for us to downsize as it no longer makes sense to keep the house we've called home over the past 12 years. It's too big and the yard work is no longer easy for me to take care of (not that it ever was due to the steep slope of the property upon which The Manse sits).

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I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the national news because it has become quite boring, repetitive, and even more disturbing to me, predictable. The propaganda division of the DNC, aka the MSM, are devoting far too much time trying to tear down the president while ignoring everything else going on around the country. The only exception to that being stories about tornadoes, heavy rains with flooding, or brush fires, all of which have been caused by Donald Trump withdrawing the US from the Paris Accords. (Yes, it is sarcasm. I wouldn't think I would actually need to tell any of you this, but better safe than sorry.)

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Sometimes people need to be reminded that if existing laws have problems, more often than not they can be corrected by legislative action. The newest jurist on the US Supreme Court offers his dissenting opinion on a case that the Supreme Court just ruled on in a 7-2 decision, and addresses this issue in a forthright and clear manner. Writes Justice Neil Gorsuch in his dissent in the Perry v. Merit Systems Protection Board mentions the plaintiff took the convenient action rather than the correct action:

Anthony Perry asks us to tweak a congressional statute—just a little—so that it might (he says) work a bit more efficiently. No doubt his invitation is well meaning. But it’s one we should decline all the same. Not only is the business of enacting statutory fixes one that belongs to Congress and not this Court, but taking up Mr. Perry’s invitation also seems sure to spell trouble. …

Mr. Perry’s is an invitation I would run from fast. If a statute needs repair, there’s a constitutionally prescribed way to do it. It’s called legislation. To be sure, the demands of bicameralism and presentment are real, and the process can be protracted. But the difficulty of making new laws isn’t some bug in the constitutional design: it’s the point of the design, the better to preserve liberty.

Indeed.

(H/T GraniteGrok)

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The Left is constantly screaming at us to “check our White Privilege”, but maybe it's time for the Left to check their Anger Privilege, or so writes Sultan Knish.

If you want to know who has privilege in a society and who doesn’t, follow the anger.

There are people in this country who can safely express their anger. And those who can’t. If you’re angry that Trump won, your anger is socially acceptable. If you were angry that Obama won, it wasn’t.

James Hodgkinson’s rage was socially acceptable. It continued to be socially acceptable until he crossed the line into murder. And he’s not alone. There’s Micah Xavier Johnson, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Dallas, and Gavin Long, the Black Lives Matter cop-killer in Baton Rouge. If you’re black and angry about the police, your anger is celebrated. If you’re white and angry about the Terror travel ban, the Paris Climate treaty, ObamaCare repeal or any leftist cause, you’re on the side of the angry angels.

But if you’re white and angry that your job is going to China or that you just missed being killed in a Muslim suicide bombing, your anger is unacceptable.

Then again, if the Left didn't have double standards then they'd have no standards at all.

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I remember when Portland, Oregon used to be a pretty nice place. Now it has poo-flinging leftist Antifa scumbags and a homegrown terrorist who likes killing people on a public bus. I wonder how far it will have to go before the Progressive mayor of Portland will crack down on these fascist s**theels? How many will have to die at their hands or how many city blocks will have to burn before the idiot in charge stops worrying about offending the antifa thugs and their ACLU buddies? This is Portland Freakin', Oregon, not Detroit, Michigan.

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And that's the (greatly abbreviated) news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where a long Fourth of July weekend is on the way, the grills will be ready, and where time on the lake will take precedence over all other things.

Testing A Gun Myth - Gangsta Style

I know I've heard the claim about how “gangsta's” can't shoot straight when they hold their pistols “gangsta style”, meaning they pistol is rotated 90º so it is parallel to the ground rather than perpendicular to it. That may indeed be the case. However legendary marksman Jerry Miculek decided to put the myth to the test, comparing normal shooting with “gangsta” to see if the 'can't shoot straight' claim is true. This is what happened:


Miculek, who holds numerous world shooting titles and records, had a couple of issues with “gangsta” shooting, the two biggest that his aim was off axis to the right and that he couldn't see any other target that might be to his right because his hand was in the way.

Another 'myth' I've heard is that with some semi-auto pistols, the “gangsta” style has another drawback, that being the ejected brass hitting the shooter in the face after each shot, something that would certainly affect one's aim. It may look cool on the street and on the TV or movie screen, but in real life most gangsta's wouldn't be able to hit the broad side of a barn. Then again, most gangsta's don't practice shooting regularly like many legal gun owners do, and they certainly don't practice anywhere near as much as Jerry Miculek.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It was the last day of the 94th Annual Motorcycle Week here in the Lakes Region. For the most part the weather has been cooperative with only one day of rain during the nine days of rally.

By the end of the day the roar of motorcycles will fade away as the 300,000+ bikers head home after another successful Motorcycle Week ends.

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It has cost Wesleyan University $400,000 after it arbitrarily shut down a fraternity on campus even though it had fully complied with a mandate handed down by administrators.

It turns out the real reason for the fraternity's attempted expulsion by the university president?

He wanted their property. It was an underhanded land grab, not a punishment as the administration had said.

It seems kleptocracy exists even at vaunted universities.

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I don't think the NYT has thought this one out.

The New York Times published an editorial about the need for mass deportation of native-born Americans because they don't live up to Ruling Class expectations.

Really, and just who will deport them all? Considering a vast majority of those Americans they think should be deported are well armed, with many being combat veterans, as well as red states rebelling against such a thing, it would be an opening salvo in the Second American Civil War.

Thinking more on this matter, I have to wonder whether 'deportation' is merely another word for moving the so-called undesirables to concentration camps and deporting them by way of a crematorium's chimneys? Seems this was tried in Europe and it didn't turn out so well for those behind such 'deportations'.

It's time for us to end the existence of the cancer that has become the New York Times. They are consistently showing themselves to be enemies of the American people, being nothing but a propaganda organ for the ProRegressive Left.

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The vitriol and incipient violence from the Left has been making it's presence known here in the Granite State, with both Democrat lawmakers and Progressive special interest groups excoriating and trying to bully both the Republican majority legislature and the Republican governor into giving them what they demand. They seem to have no issue with twisting the truth, trying to paint legislation that's supposed to help minorities as legislation that will leave them lying dead in the streets, or using religious bigotry to try to paint a state official as some kind of monster because of some religious postings by a 3rd party that had absolutely no connections to that official. (Then again it was this same religious bigot that helped damage the state's education system, all in the name of 'fairness', in a lawsuit which then obligated the state to adequately fund education, 'adequate' being defined by this same religious bigot. Of course he didn't send his kids to public school.)

We've had a Democrat state representative state she's felt homicidal against Republican legislators, particularly male Republican legislators, then tries to play the victim card when she's called out for her violence-laden rhetoric. Then she went over the egde when she found out the shooter in Alexandria who targeted Republican representatives was a white male, then changed her tune when she found out he was a Bernie Bro.

I could go on and on and on, but it's the same story over and over again. And should their bleatings and rhetoric turn someone towards violence against Republicans, they'll either try to explain it away or blame the victims for getting in the way of Progressive ideology, as if that's all that's needed to excuse murder.

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

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Despite the ongoing hysteria about America's withdrawal from the seriously flawed Paris Accord, something would obligate America to all kinds of economy damaging actions while allowing China and India to continue down the path unrestricted air pollution and CO2 emissions, there are actual scientists who still do not buy into the CAGW scenario. Not one of them is a political scientist. They are actual scientists with decades of research and data analysis experience who say the whole thing is overblown and serves no purpose other than raking in millions, if not billions of dollars in the way of research grants.

The do not deny that the climate has warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age. Such warming would be expected. But to attribute it to a single factor, anthropogenic CO2 is both misleading and willfully ignorant.

Who are this miscreants of science?

Richard Lindzen, Emeritus Professor, PhD Mathematics. Was a professor of Atmosphere Physics at MIT.

Harrison Schmitt, PhD Geology

Will Happer, Professor Emeritus, PhD Physics, Princeton University

Neil Frank, PhD Meteorology

Roy Spencer, PhD Meteorology, University of Alabama, Hunstville

And I'm going to add another that a commenter suggested adding, that being Dr. Judith Curry, PhD Geophysical Sciences. Until recently she was the chair of the Earth and Atmospherics Sciences at Georgia Tech.

These aren't some unknown hacks from research institutes no one has ever heard about. Two had worked for NASA in the past (Schmitt and Spencer). These aren't lightweights in regards to climate science by any means, but they are seen a heretics or deniers because the don't agree with the so-called consensus. But they are doing exactly what they should be doing by questioning the consensus because, as anyone versed in science knows, consensus isn't science. Consensus has been wrong may times before and will be again. Even Albert Einstein knew consensus wasn't science, once stating “It doesn't matter if ten thousand scientists agree with me. It only takes one to prove me wrong.”

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We had the opportunity to head out on to Lake Winnipesaukee early this evening with two of BeezleBub's co-workers from the farm. While there were still a few boats out on the lake as we departed the cove where we berth The Boat, most had left the lake by the time we were making our way back to port. While breezy out on the water, it was calm, meaning no real chop or boat wakes out there. It made for a pleasant two hours with family and some new friends.

While the weather forecast doesn't look promising for Monday, we will get more than a few opportunities to make it out on to the lake later this week. It is, after all, summer (or will be come the 20th of June). We've got to take advantage whenever we can.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the weather has been sunny, cloudy, hot and humid, where almost all of the motorcyclists have gone home, and where we look forward to our next jaunt out on the lake.

It's Time For Concealed Carry Permit Reciprocity

Considering so many states have liberalized (the old fashioned meaning) their gun laws, with some not even requiring its citizens to have permit in order to carry a concealed firearm (my home state is one of them), I can see the wisdom of passing legislation to make reciprocity – a CCW permit in one state would be honored by all other states – a reality. It's something that should have been done years ago. It already exists in regards to driver's licenses, so why not permits to carry?

While some will make the argument that the two are not the same thing, one has to remember that driving is not a right, but a privilege. Bearing arms is a right. We've certainly seen enough US Supreme Court decisions in the past decade or so that have certainly proved that the Second Amendment means what it says. So why shouldn't there be reciprocity for something that is a constitutional right?

Some may bring up the point about the Constitutional Carry states not having permits and how to handle reciprocity, but even my home state still issues concealed carry permits just for that reason as some states have reciprocity agreements with their neighbors. New Hampshire has reciprocity with 28 other states.

Should Congress pass such legislation and the president signs it, I expect the howling from the anti-gun lobbies and organizations will be deafening. They will trot out the usual “Shootout at the OK Corral” scenario and the use “rivers of blood in our streets” ploy in an effort to misinform the public. In every state that has changed from 'may issue' states to 'shall issue' states those same claims have been made. Yet those scenarios have never materialized. The same claims, though much louder and more forceful, were also used in those states where constitutional carry was made the law. Again, nothing happened...except that the violent crime rates went down.

It's time to make concealed carry reciprocity a reality.

Thoughts On A Sunday

This weekend signaled the start of Motorcycle Week here in Lakes Region of New Hampshire. With the weather looking to be sunny and warm almost all week, I expect we'll see a very large turnout. I have already seen large groups of bikers as they've made their way here to the big lake, with may of them taking advantage of the many amenities.

As many motorcyclist we have already seen, the bulk of them won't start arriving until this coming Thursday. From that point on it will be wall to wall motorcycles until they start their departures next Sunday and the following Monday.

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This concept for a hybrid air taxi looks pretty cool. Almost as cool as the 'electric VTOL jet' I linked to a few months ago.

Of the two, give me the VTOL jet any day. But the air taxi is still cool.

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While the ever present and screechy “But guns don't solve problems, they cause problems” anti-2A crowd blathers on about armed citizens being a danger to us all, here's a personal account from one of Skip Murphy's sons, a former Marine, who stopped an incipient robbery at a convenience store by walking from the back of the store and next to the checkout counter, allowing the miscreants see the 9mm Sig Sauer on his hip.

He didn't have to pull his weapon. The mere sight of gun and his attitude, being that of a Marine, motivated the miscreants to put down the merchandise they had taken, put it down on the counter, and leave.

No gun play involved. No shootout at the OK Corral. No one being hurt. Just a man with his sidearm, an attitude that showed he knew how to use it, and an incipient criminal act ended before it started.

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Hey, I only believe in the Constitution when it affects me, or so it seems Bernie Sanders believes since he seems to think that there should be a litmus test for a potential office-holders religious beliefs before they would be allowed to serve in any capacity. There's only one teeny tiny problem with that proposal.

Article VI, Section 3 of the United States Constitution states:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Oh, too bad Bernie. That pesky US Constitution getting in the way of a politically/religiously correct totalitarian state...again.

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Is the fifth time the charm?

It looks like voters in Puerto Rico will be deciding whether or not to become a state. The previous four attempts failed, but seeing Puerto Rico's present financial state, no one seems to know how the vote will go this time.

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Oh, yeah, this is creepy indeed.

Guys Reveal The Creepiest Way Girls Have Hit On Them.

You may think it's only the guys that have lame come-on lines, but you're wrong. Some of these are totally cringeworthy.

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If you need a means of describing Portland, Oregon, use this – Like San Francisco or Berkeley, but with less tolerance for non-progressive ideas, more violent 'antifa' thugs, a large dislike of freedom of speech, and a close-minded authoritarian as mayor. Oh, and it isn't hilly like San Francisco.

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Uh-oh. This is going to upset the “science is settled” warmists.

I find it interesting that there are 20 new peer-reviewed papers out there that posit climate change has been driven entirely by solar changes and not anthropogenic CO2.

I can hear warmists heads exploding in rage because, after all, everyone knows we evil humans are the cause of all climate change over the past few thousand years, even on Mars!

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the rumble of motorcycles can be heard, the really warm weather has arrived, and where I am anticipating a post-work jaunt on the lake tomorrow.

An Astute Observation

By way of Fred Reed comes this observation from none other than Robert E. Lee:

The consolidation of the states into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it.

Never have truer words been spoken. As Fred writes in response to Lee's observation, “The man was perceptive. Amalgamation of the states under a central government has led to exactly the effects foreseen by General Lee.”

It used to be solutions to state problems were either handled by the state affected, or the state directed the federal government in regards to the help it needed. Those days are long gone>

Today it's a “one size fits all” solutions handed down by Washington DC even if the solutions don't apply to specific states. An illustration of one of the silliest solutions to a problem that really only affected one region in the country can be summed up in two words: flush toilets.

You may think I'm being facetious or playing the wise ass, but I assure you I am not. Since some time after 2001 the manufacture and sale of flush toilets that were not low water use toilets has been illegal. Under EPA regulations, flush toilets cannot use more than 1.6 gallons of water per flush. This was done to help save water, which makes perfect sense for arid and semi-arid parts of the US like California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada. But to apply it across the board doesn't. In fact, many of those low flush toilets cause problems when used with older sewer and septic systems because there's not enough water being used to make sure the 'effluvia' moves along to where it is supposed to go. That more than one flush may be necessary to get the waste from Point A to Point B is well known to those who have had the misfortune to replace an older toilet in their home with one of the new 'efficient' flush toilets.

Kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

Another observation made by Fred:

In, say, 1950, to an appreciable though imperfect extent America resembled a confederacy. Different regions of the America had little contact with each other, and almost no influence over one another. The federal government was small and remote. Interstates did not exist, nor of course the internet, nor even direct long-distance telephone dialing. West Virginia, Alabama, Massachusetts, New York City, Texas, and California had little in common, but little conflict arose since for practical purposes they were almost different countries. They chiefly governed themselves. The  proportion of federal to state law was small. 

It is important to note that regional differences were great. In 1964 in rural Virginia, the boys brought shotguns to school during deer season. Nobody shot anybody because it wasn’t in the culture. The culture was uniform, so no one was upset. It is when cultures are mixed, or one rules another, that antagonism comes.  Such shotgun freedom would not have worked in New York City with its variegated and often mutually hostile ethnicities.

Regions differed importantly in degree of freedom, not just in the freedom of local populations to govern themselves but also in individual freedom. It made a large difference in the tenor of life. If in Texas, rural Virginia, or West Virginia you wanted to build an addition to your house, you did. You didn’t need licenses, permits, inspections, union-certified electricians. Speed limits? Largely ignored. Federal requirements for Coast Guard approved flotation devices on your canoe? What the hell kind of crazy idea was that? 

Indeed. And here's where Fred and I are on exactly the same page:

Democracy works better the smaller the group practicing it. In a town, people can actually understand the questions of the day. They know what matters to them. Do we build a new school, or expand the existing one? Do we want our children to recite the pledge of allegiance, or don’t we? Reenact the Battle of Antietam? Sing Christmas carols in the town square? We can decide these things. Leave us alone.

States similarly knew what their people wanted and, within the limits of human frailty, governed accordingly.

As Fred observes, democracy works pretty well at the small scale. I see it all the time in my home town. The townspeople decide how much the town will spend and on what, or what local ordinances they want to add or do away with.. The same goes for the school system. No input from the federal government is required or wanted. We know what we need and more importantly, what we don't need. To think that some faceless bureaucrat can have any understanding of what we need or want is ludicrous at best and deranged at worst. To think that we are a monolithic society where 'solutions' can be applied with a broad brush approach is the height of delusion (with a huge portion of arrogance thrown in). That type of approach creates more problems that it solves, pissing off a lot of people in the process.

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

Fifteen Years

It was fifteen years ago today that my dear brother started this blog. Fifteen years. That's quite a bit of time.

That has brought about over 5300 posts, between here at Blogger and two other hosts when we used Moveable Type as our blogging platform. We covered everything from war, politics, plain damnfoolishness, insanity, climate change, elections, mostly true stories, tragedies and triumphs, peeks into small town life, things profound, things simple, movies, music, books, births, deaths, pets, travel, philosophy, "what if" scenarios, the media, the East Coast, the West Coast, everything in between or so-called "Flyover country", guns, fascism, political correctness, science, pseudoscience, liars, thieves, con artists, 'true' believers, good people, bad people, outright effin' evil people, and a whole host of topics that I could go on and on about for pages and hours on end. In any case, you get the picture.

In all that time the world has changed, as has our country. Some changes have been for the good. Too many changes have been anything but good. We've seen groups of our fellow citizens deluded into thinking that everything is our fault. We've seen others work to prove them wrong. We've had political leaders who thought they didn't need to follow the rules because they knew they were better than us because they were smarter than the rest of us, then they found out they were wrong. We've seen attacks on freedom of speech all in the name of "tolerance". We've watched as government sanctioned kangaroo courts stripped college students of their rights all in the name of "fairness". We've watched as people were shouted down as racists by people who were indeed the "racists in the room".

But many of us haven't given up hope. It's one of the reasons this blog still exists. And while I haven't been as prolific in posting as I once was because life intruded, I still post. I still offer my opinions. I still try to point out things that are both wrong and right about my home state and my country.

Here's to another fifteen years.

Thoughts On A Sunday

We have reached (or will soon reach) a couple of milestones here at Weekend Pundit, one blog related and one season related.

First, on June 8^th it will be the 15^th anniversary of this blog. It was started by my dear brother, partly as a means of resurrecting our old Geocities website, World Domination, Inc. (Our motto was “Subjugating humanity one individual at a time.”) It was started here at Blogger, then migrated to another host – Blogmosis – and then to yet another, courtesy of GraniteGrok, and then back here to Blogger. In that time there have been over 5,300 posts, with approximately 3,200 of them here on Blogger alone.

While I do not post nearly as often as I used to, I still post at least twice a week, mostly on weekends (hence the apropos name “Weekend Pundit”). Life intruded and other activities took precedence, reducing the amount of posts from daily to two or three times a week. I have no doubt that the level of posting will vary now and then, but I am still plugging away, adding my 2¢ worth on topics of interest (at least of interest to me).

Second, our boating season has officially started with the launch of the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout, aka The Boat. BeezleBub swung by The Manse after work early Friday evening with his semi-trusty F350 to tow The Boat and trailer to our town docks. By 8PM The Boat was tied up at its summer berth, ready for a spring/summer/fall of boating. The weather was cooperative early this afternoonn, meaning I was able to take The Boat out on the lake for an hour for its shakedown cruise, making sure everything worked and that nothing leaked.

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Is the US education system producing a society of “Smart Fools”?

Yes, says Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg.

...Sternberg sounded an alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society. Sternberg, who has studied intelligence and intelligence testing for decades, is well known for his “triarchic theory of intelligence,” which identifies three kinds of smarts: the analytic type reflected in IQ scores; practical intelligence, which is more relevant for real-life problem solving; and creativity.

As the saying goes, Read The Whole Thing.

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Who says there's nothing new under the sun?

The combination of a modern ballistic fabric and a good old fashioned mixture of corn starch and water may be the answer to light weight body armor.

It was an Air Force cadet who came up with the idea, then presented it to one of her Air Force Academy professors.

[Cadet] Weir's idea was to combine anti-ballistic fabric with what's known as a shear thickening fluid to create a less heavy material to use in body armor. She demonstrated the principle to [Professor Ryan] Burke by combining water and cornstarch in a container and asking the professor to jam his finger into the paste-like goo.

"I jam my finger right into this bowl, and I almost broke my finger! Hayley's laughing because I've got this finger that I'm shaking and I'm saying, 'You know, that's pretty impressive stuff.'"

Once they had the proper combination they tested it at a firing range, using both 9mm and .44 Magnum pistols against the armor. None of the rounds penetrated the ¼ inch design. Considering the new armor weighs a third of that of contemporary body armor, it could be a real game changer.

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Reported by way of the Instaprof, it appears one of the first effects of America's withdrawal from the Paris Accords is being felt: Oil prices are falling.

The real, measurable impacts of Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement are going to be few and far between, but the first one we’ve seen thus far has been a drop in the price of oil. This won’t hurt Trump with his voters: market participants think that the U.S. will now pump more oil, leading to long term lower oil prices. . . .

Let’s not give the White House too much credit here, though. The Obama administration, for all of its gesturing towards renewables, was remarkably friendly towards the shale industry. The recent growth we’ve seen in American production is the result of innovation and falling costs in shale drilling, rather than the rolling back of regulations.

But perceptions matter to markets, and Trump’s announcement yesterday has further strengthened analysts’ belief that this Administration will do everything it can to help out America’s oil and gas industry (even though the natural gas boom is responsible for knocking Old King Coal off his throne in the U.S.).

Russia is paying close attention to U.S. oil production these days, and the CEO of the state-owned oil company Rosneft, Igor Sechin, publicly expressed concerns that surging American supplies could overcome petrostate efforts to cut production and push prices back up.

To quote the Professor Reynolds “That would be terrible.”

Heh.

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This certainly falls within the realm of something Glenn Reynolds has stated more often than not, that being “I'll believe it's a crisis when the folks who keep telling me it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis.”

Moreover, many voters don’t see Democrats acting like people who believe we’re facing an extinction level event. For instance, why aren’t we talking about adding hundreds of new nuclear power plants to our energy portfolio? Such an effort would do far more to mitigate carbon emissions than any unreliable solar or windmill boondoggle –certainly more than any non-binding international agreement. Maybe there are tradeoffs, who knows.

Read the whole thing.

Skip Murphy shows us an image about the Paris Accord withdrawal that sums quite nicely why President Trump pulled the US out of that P.O.S. Agreement.

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And speaking of a crisis, remember when all of the warmists warned us ad nauseum that we'd see an increasing number and more powerful hurricanes because of AGW? I certainly do. All kinds of dire predictions were made about how bad it would be. But what's the reality?

There have been no increases in either the number or intensity of hurricanes.

In fact, the number of hurricanes has been decreasing, an 'inconvenient truth' for the warmist camp. But they will claim, if they haven't already, that the problem will develop some time in the future. That's what would be called a sucker bet because we know at some point that will be true....just as it was in the past. We've had more hurricanes and more intense hurricanes in the past which most folks would take to mean we'll likely have them again in the future. But attributing this 'future' to AGW is disingenuous at best, and a con game at worst.

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Steve MacDonald has coined a new phrase that is quite fitting for defining “pseudo-intellectual leftists that can be used in polite company”: Intelleftuals.

It's so good that it really doesn't need to be defined because it defines itself. I think I'll be using it from now on.

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Considering where this took place, it is not surprising to me at all. The only surprise was how long it took for someone there to actually come out and say it.

Apparently for some of the oh-so-tolerant Leftists in Seattle it is taboo to be friends with a Republican. One Seattle city council member has boasted in public that “she doesn’t have any Republican friends.” Isn't that special?

Kshama Sawant wasn’t having any of that. She stood up and said Burgess wasn’t speaking for her with this “our Republican friends” stuff. Because, she assured the crowd, she doesn’t have any Republican friends.

Yay, cheered the crowd.

Now it’s hardly surprising that Sawant, a socialist, isn’t having GOPers over for mint juleps. But it’s pretty unusual to my ears for a politician to boast that her tribalism excludes even the possibility of warm feelings toward political opponents, even as humans.

What I find ironic about Ms. Sawant's claim is that there is a heavily Republican neighborhood in the district she represents. Does she answer their phone calls or e-mails if they have questions about Seattle 's policies, spending, or other governmental duties? Or does she act just like Democrat Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter who has declared on more than one occasion that the Republicans in her congressional district aren't her constituents? If I had to guess, I'd say it's probably the latter.

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And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where it's feeling more like October than June, the rain has returned (again), and where for once I don't mind going into work on a Monday because the weather is so cool and rainy.