Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s been raining here at The Gulch since midnight and got heavy during the afternoon, something the Weather Guys^TM says is supposed to continue until sometime Monday morning. More rain is forecast during the rest of the week, here and there.

I don’t think the climate doomsayers will be able to continue making the claim that we’re suffering a drought here in northern New England.

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This had me scratching my head until I remembered 1984 and the contradictory statements others have used to illustrate the absurdity of claims made by the Left such as Slavery = Freedom, just to name one.

An actual absurdity I came across is the media saying voting threatens democracy. Umm, excuse me?

This controversy starts with the election of 8 Republicans to a Michigan County Board of Commissioners the Washington Post took exception too, painting the election as the Right taking control of local government being a Bad Thing^TM.”

“The new commissioners, all Republicans, swore their oaths of office on family Bibles. And then the firings began. Gone was the lawyer who had represented Ottawa County for 40 years. Gone was the county administrator who oversaw a staff of 1,800. To run the health department, they voted to install a service manager from a local HVAC company who had gained prominence as a critic of mask mandates.”

The meeting was in January. The reporters were not present. But it ran pictures of the meeting taken by Evan Cobb, a freelance photographer from South Bend, Indiana. Maybe they interviewed him.

People elected an overwhelming majority of 8 new Republican commissioners (out of 11 commissioners) that the Jeff Bezos newspaper did not like. They made changes that the newspaper did not like, and so the Jeff Bezos Post said this threatened “the building blocks of American democracy.”

One of the changes made was to the county’s motto “that sat atop the county’s website and graced its official stationery.”

The 186-year-old county adopted that motto — Where You Belong — six years ago.

The new one is Where Freedom Rings.

Freedom must be a threat to democracy, too.

Anyone paying attention knows the Left hates freedom, otherwise why would they be trying so hard to stamp it out?

There’s more to the story about why the eight new county commissioners took the actions they did, including why they fired a number of long time county employees, the main reason being how they mishandled Covid, getting to the point where they saw residents as a threat to public health.

Read The Whole Thing.

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800 years of Climate Crisis.

To think they were driving SUVs over 800 years ago! Who knew?

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We’re seeing more fallout from the “Defund the Police” actions taken by a number of Blue cities. The latest highlights an attack that took place in West Hollywood where two “Safety Ambassadors” stood and watched the assault while police officers would have subdued and arrested the perpetrator.

In an effort to make citizens feel safe with fewer police, the city has deployed 85 unarmed security ambassadors on residential streets and in commercial corridors. Their presence is meant to deter crime, but they do not intervene at the sight of trouble. Instead, they are supposed to notify the police.

Business Owner Larry Block agrees with Reynolds that West Hollywood’s decision last year to cut its police force was a bad idea. Block told ABC 7 that the feckless security ambassadors are no substitute for police officers:

"Armed people can do something, they're intimidating, the security ambassadors walk around aimlessly, not really knowing what to do."

Another way to make citizens feel safe with fewer police is to allow all law-abiding citizens to be armed. When only criminals and police are armed, the citizens are defenseless and violent crime runs rampant. We see that in every Blue city with severe Second Amendment restrictions. Reduce the number of police and the crime problem gets worse, “Safety Ambassadors” notwithstanding.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where it’s raining to beat the band, it’s gonna rain for most of the week, and where even Monday is throwing in the towel.

Suicidal Teenage Girls

By way of Instapundit comes this:

One-third of teen girls in US seriously considered attempting suicide in 2021: CDC.

From the comments comes this punch line:

“Then they stopped listening to the CDC and Fauci and recovered.”

Seems like a reasonable explanation to me.

Friday Funny (On Saturday) - The Difference

Sorry, folks, but I got sidetracked and wasn't able to post last night. But fear not, this post corrects that oversight.

Years of experience have proven to me again and again the accuracy of the following illustration:

Thoughts On A Sunday

It’s a wet day here The Gulch, with rain forecast to fall all day. It’s been a dry month so far but today’s rain is expected to get the total close to what we normally see for April. At least it’s a soaking rain meaning there’s no flooding forecast to take place.

Being a rainy day I expect we’ll be inside all day – except for church, of course – so we have an excuse to not partake of any spring cleaning. Not that there’s much that really needs to be done with the exception of cleaning windows and screens, something that isn’t in the cards this rainy day.

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It’s hard to believe that my boating season starts in a little more than three weeks. All the arrangements have been made, bills have been paid, and the only things I’ll need to do before putting the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout back into the water is clean the cockpit and cuddy cabin, then load all of the gear – anchors, mooring lines, PFDs, cushions, and so on – then haul it to the town docks and launch it.

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I lifted this entirely from Instapundit because there’s no way I could make it any better with commentary of my own.

Dreadful news, which I feel duty bound to share. Activists in my mentions are trying to organise yet another boycott of my work, this time of the Harry Potter TV show. As forewarned is forearmed, I've taken the precaution of laying in a large stock of champagne.

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 21, 2023

She’s let everyone know just what she thinks of the ‘woke’ activists with that one tweet, i.e. not much. And why should she give them any more power than they think they have? It isn’t like they’re rational human beings. What they are is delusional narcissists who let feelz drive them rather than logic, reason, or facts.

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Who says there’s no such thing as justice even if it isn’t through the justice system?

BuzzFeed destroyed the media. The media returned the favor.

It was never a viable operation, meaning it never made money. Investors spent hundreds of millions of dollars ‘investing’ in a media operation that couldn’t seem to get its financial house in order. Then again it seemed more interested in sensationalism than actual news. It was this that led to its downfall, a fate it deserved.

However, there is a larger narrative implicated in BuzzFeed News’ collapse, and it inevitably returns to that decision to publish the Steele dossier. BuzzFeed News was a beautiful idea that failed, not just because of the financial model, but because BuzzFeed News itself could never differentiate itself as being more trustworthy than either its parent company or the rest of the media. Why not? Because by publishing the Steele dossier — which we now know to have been partisan bunk concocted and spread with malevolent intent — BuzzFeed immediately rendered itself the least trustworthy news organization in America.

The more arrogant they are, the harder they fall.

I, for one, will not be lamenting its demise. Now we have to see about the propaganda organs of the DNC like CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post….

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News reports that Joe Biden will be announcing his run for re-election has me dismayed considering his obvious and continuing mental decline. My ex works in the dementia ward of our state institutions and has been saying he exhibits many of the signs of dementia. (One of the WP Sisters got angry when I mentioned that, rebutting by asking “Did she or anyone else examine him? If not, how can anyone say that?”) I’d say working with dementia patients for almost 15 years gives her insight that the ‘man on the street’ doesn’t have.

I am not the only one questioning the wisdom of Biden running again. So is the Wall Street Journal. (This link is paywalled, but you can see much of what was in the editorial by going here.)

The White House is whispering that next week President Biden will announce his intention to run for a second term, though the polls say that even most Democrats hope he doesn’t. The public understands what Mr. Biden apparently won’t admit: that electing an octogenarian in obvious decline for another four years could be an historic mistake.

--snip--

But asking the country to elect a man who is 80 years old and whose second term would end when he is 86 is a risky act that borders on selfish. It’s impossible to know Mr. Biden’s real physical and mental state because the White House goes to great lengths to hide it. But his decline is clear to anyone who isn’t willfully blind. He rarely holds a press conference, and his words are as scripted as possible to avoid embarrassing stumbles that he nonetheless continues to make.

Different people age at different rates, but the risk of an accelerated decline for Mr. Biden is considerable. The chance that he could serve a full second term is hardly assured.

And unless the Democrats decide that Kamala Harris is more of a liability than a help and replace her as Biden’s running mate, we could easily end up with Harris as President, someone who is nearly as clueless as Biden, but can’t use dementia as an excuse for her behavior. I think WRBA would have an extremely difficult keeping Cackling Kamala reined in.

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I have to wonder how the Climate Change faithful and watermelon environmentalists are going to explain this away.

New NOAA STAR satellite temperatures only show half the warming that climate models do.

An all new reanalysis of the STAR satellite data finds markedly lower temperature trends for the last 40 years. The big deal about this is that this third dataset suddenly supports the original UAH satellite data, not the other RSS system, and not the “surface thermometers” sitting near hot tarmacs and absolutely not the climate models.

The satellite data didn’t match the data from ground stations, many of those stations improperly sited or correction factors not properly applied or not applied at all. When a survey was performed by BEST (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures), it was found that pristine surface stations – properly sited and isolated from Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect – were not showing the temperature increases being seen at ‘dirty’ stations. The UAH satellite data mirrored the findings of the BEST survey, yet the Climate Change faithful ignored it as the data didn’t fit the narrative they’ve been selling.

Will we ever have enough data to end this climate version of Lysenkoism?

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Have you noticed that rich people, more specifically the rich Left, talk about how they’re all for being taxed more? However, when it comes to actually cutting a check, they’re a no-show.

I have long been bemused by rich liberals like Warren Buffett, who tell us their tax rates are too low. Really? Guess what: the IRS will cash your check! If you seriously think you aren’t paying enough taxes, or you actually believe the government spends money more wisely and effectively than you do, there is an easy solution. Write the IRS a check, I guarantee they will cash it.

Yet, strangely, I have never heard of a rich liberal doing this, even though most of these people are second or third generation beneficiaries who cannot comprehend how hard their ancestors worked to accumulate the wealth that they enjoy.

So, they talk the talk, but don’t or won’t walk the walk. It’s just another bit of virtue signaling as best I can tell. After all, it isn’t like they actually have to cut a check to the IRS, right? It doesn’t cost them a penny to talk about paying more taxes, does it?

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee where it’s raining, where we’re being a bit lazy, and once again Monday will be returning with its usual malice.

The "Get Woke, Go Broke" Virus Is Spreading

I have to wonder if the C-level executives of some corporations have been taking illicit drugs. What’s making me ponder this question?

How about sheer stupidity?

How many companies have made the decision to go ‘woke’ as a marketing strategy only to find out it backfires and causes them to lose market share?

The first one I became aware of, but was unlikely to be the first rather than the biggest at the time, was Gillette. Their disastrous ad campaign that denigrated men ended up costing them over $8 billion in sales and valuation.

The latest is Anheuser-Busch who thought it would be a great idea to use a trans-woman as the center of their ad campaign to capture younger customers for their Bud Light brand. While the popularity of Bud Light had been falling off, this ‘woke’ campaign may have killed it off. It may have killed off the career of the architect of the ill advised move, Alissa Heinerscheid, a marketing VP for the Bud Light brand. She’s taken a leave of absence and her position is being filled by Todd Allan for the time being.

Another example - retail chain Bed, Bath & Beyond whose very public dislike and denunciation of My Pillow magnate Mike Lindell seriously affected their already struggling bottom line. BB&B has closed 400 stores across the nation, including all but three of them here in New Hampshire.

Then there’s Disney which has seen falloffs in subscriptions to its Disney+ streaming service, box office failures of ‘woke’ remakes of popular movies, and falling popularity of some of its Star Wars spin-off series because they appear to be too woke for fans. Disney is also laying off staff, something it has never done before as best I recall.

It is doubtless there are plenty of more examples, big and small, of businesses who went woke, and then broke.

More of corporate America is learning the lesson of “Get woke. Go broke.” Pissing off a majority of one’s customer base in order to capture a small percentage of customers they might not have seems like an incredibly stupid move. Why anyone thought it was a good idea escapes me. The only explanation I can come up with is that either those who made the decision to do so were either off their meds, using illicit substances, have had too much of the ‘woke’ Koolaid, or some combination of all three.

Friday (Not So) Funny - Self-Inflicted

Anheuser-Busch is learning the lesson "Go Woke, Go Broke" the hard way.

Thoughts On A Sunday

NOTE: It wasn’t until Monday morning (5:47AM) I realized I had written my usual TOAS...but never posted it! I obviously got distracted and, thinking that I had finished writing it had also posted it. I was wrong. Sorry about that.


We had a preview of summer this past week with some warm sunny days in the 80’s, with couple of places seeing 90ºF. Windows in both The Gulch and the trusty RAM 1500 were open, the heat was off, and we made the best of the weather.

While there are still a few places showing piles of snow, primarily areas that receive no direct sunlight, those piles are almost gone. As best I’ve been able to determine there is no ice left anywhere on the Big Lake. I’ve certainly seen quite a few boats out on the lake, most of them being fishing boats – it’s salmon fishing season – hitting the spots where landlocked salmon might be.

The Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout – aka The Boat – is still scheduled to be returned the water early during the second week of May. I suppose I could have made arrangements to have The Boat removed from storage earlier, but since it would not really be used until early May why do so?

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Just when we think we’ve gotten past racial issues we find that descendants of victims of segregation are demanding segregated housing, at least to the level where they get to choose the race of their potential roommate.

The demand to allow "students of color" to elect not to room with students of other races was one of several such demands issued by a group of protesting students who aired their concerns about racism on campus during an ongoing sit-in. Syracuse Chancellor Kent Syverud spoke at the sit-in in a live-streamed exchange.

Calling themselves “#NotAgainSU,” this group of protestors is calling for the chancellor to resign if he does not sign a document conceding to the list of demands by Wednesday. Even before the given deadline, over 1,000 protesters have already petitioned for his resignation online.

Yet another group of students who have the mistaken belief that they run the show at their university.

I remember when ‘students of color’ demanded segregated housing at my alma mater a few years ago. The administration basically said ‘no’, reminding them that segregated housing was illegal, particularly on state property. They didn’t like the administration’s response and demanded the university ignore federal law and numerous US Supreme Court decisions. What would be next, demands to restore of some modern version of Jim Crow laws? Considering their ignorance of history, and particularly the history of the US Civil Rights movement, their demands were over the top and illegal as heck.

Maybe it’s time to remind them that they don’ run the show. Start with suspensions. If that doesn’t work, then expulsions. It’s time for college administrations to start doing their jobs and take back control of their campuses.

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There are calls for governments to start taxing wealth. Both national and state governments have considered doing this even thought there is plenty of evidence showing that so-called wealth taxes don’t work, don’t collect anywhere near what proponents claim they will, and have the added side effect that they have a negative effect on the economy of any place imposing them as the wealthy flee, taking their wealth with them.

Along with wealth leaving, so does investment. Why would anyone want to invest someplace where the government can decide they can tax “unrealized gains” meaning taxing the supposed increase in the value of an investment even though the investor hasn’t cashed out.

The latest ‘victim’ of the wealth tax?

Norway.

“A difficult choice has been made. I’ve moved from Asker, Norway, to Lugano in Switzerland,” Norway’s biggest taxpayer, and the largest shareholder of investment firm Aker ASA, Kjell Inge Røkke wrote to the rest of the board in an open letter last September. Mr Røkke, an industrial tycoon with an estimated net worth of Nkr 19.6bn (£1.5bn), is among 50 billionaires and millionaires to have left Norway over the past year as they were hit with higher rates of wealth tax.

Record numbers of the country's richest residents have fled since the Labour-centre coalition increased wealth tax rates by 0.1 percentage points, costing the government tens of millions in lost tax revenue. The 50 high earners, with a combined net worth of more than Nkr 40bn (£3bn), make up more than the total number who have left the country for Switzerland since 2009, according to Norwegian newspaper Dagens Naeringsliv.

A number of nations have imposed wealth taxes in the past. Most have abandoned them because they had the opposite effect of that predicted by proponents. One of the last countries to abandon wealth taxes was France back in 2017 when it was found it lost more money than it ever collected in revenues.

What I find disturbing is the UK is considering a wealth tax...again.

It imposed such taxes back in the early 70’s and the British economy, already in the depths of a recession, collapsed. It wasn’t until Maggie Thatcher became Prime Minister and pushed Parliament to undo the crushing economic policies and confiscatory taxes that the British economy recovered. That the British are thinking of going back down that route again means they have forgotten the lessons they were taught the last time they tried it.

That California has been contemplating a similar move tells me they also choose not to learn from history, will make the same mistakes, something that could be the death knell for California’s already struggling economy.

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And that’s the new from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the summer weather has taken a step back to more normal spring weather, camps and cottages are being opened for the upcoming summer season, and where we’re waiting for our local ice cream joint to re-open.

Friday (Not So) Funny - "More Of The Alleged News In a Minute"

If only this weren't true.

Thoughts On A Sunday

It was during church services this morning that I heard someone say something I’ve never heard anyone say in church before.

“Has anyone seen a Slinky?”

A Slinky? Really?

Apparently one of our very young parishioners brought his Slinky with him to church and dropped it on the floor towards the rear of the church and it rolled down the slope of the floor towards the altar. His grandmother walked down the center aisle asking about the wayward toy. Said Slinky was eventually located six rows from the front and was returned to the young parishioner’s parents for safekeeping until services were finished.

Just when I thought I had seen it all…

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Is China the rising economic power that will replace the US some of the ‘pundits’ are saying it is, or is China a version of a Potemkin village writ large? Of the two, I am coming to believe it is more the latter than the former considering some of the signs I’ve been seeing.

A few of of those signs:

- A couple of trillion dollars of defaults in the real estate market, with Evergrande alone totaling just under a trillion all by itself.

- The so-called Zero Covid measures that shut down entire cities for months which also included major manufacturing, transportation, and financial hubs. The effects of those measures are still being felt

- Increasing government control of the economy which will eventually short-circuit the market feedback mechanism.

- More companies are moving their operations out of China to places like Vietnam, Thailand, India, and Indonesia, if not ‘reshoring’ operations back home.

Is the might of China built on shifting sands? Is it facade like that seen on movie lots?

Only time will tell.

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Why is it I figured Social Security would not be around when I finally retired?

Because I knew the funds needed to pay out benefits wouldn’t be there. That’s something I figured out over 30 years ago.

Unless there was an actual Trust Fund to pay benefits, there weren’t going to be enough people paying into the system to fund payouts. It was expected that our population would continue to grow which meant an increasing number of workers paying into the system to fund payouts. However, that expectation turned out to be incorrect as the population in the US is not growing at anywhere near the rate expected while at the same time the labor participation rate is dropping. That does not bode well for the viability of Social Security.

Anyone depending upon Social Security for their retirement income is screwed.

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Leave it to Joe Biden to destroy Title IX, and in turn, women’s scholastic sports.

The Biden Administration has really bought into the transgender craze. So much so that, in response to states trying to protect girls and women in sports, they announced a Title IX rule change yesterday. In the interest of being FAIR, there shall be no blanket bans of transgenders in sports.

SloJoe is killing off women’s sports in schools by making sure they will be unable to compete against ‘transwomen’ who are faster and stronger than biological girls. Despite claims to the contrary by many modern women, women aren’t as physically capable as men. We see the proof again and again in sports, be it in soccer, track, lacrosse, wrestling, gymnastics, MMA, and a whole host of other sports. Yet SloJoe and WRBA have decided to believe the hype from third-wave feminists and destroy women’s sports all in the name of ‘fairness’.

We don’t need that type of fairness since there’s nothing fair about it, period.

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And that’s the abbreviated Easter Sunday news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where Ice Out was declared this past Friday, boats have already been seen out on the lake, and where my boating season starts in 5 weeks!

EVs Ain't All That Once You Look Closer

Instapundit takes note of Kia’s new EV9 and finding it’s “not actually impressive.”

From the comments come this observation:

"But this is not bad: 'And will charge from 10 to 80 percent in under 25 minutes.' "

Really? I can go from 1% to 100% of fuel for my pickup in less than 4 minutes - 26 gallons of gas - and go well over 400 miles while carrying three other passengers and a half-ton of cargo.

The Kia - or any other EV - does not impress me at all. Twenty five minutes to go from 10 to 80 percent charge means that's 25 minutes I'm not getting things done. I don't have time for that. I'm too busy.

And these two:

...will charge from 10 to 80 percent in under 25 minutes using a 230-kWh Level 3 charger

...... Googles "price of 230 kwh level 3 charger" ......

You can expect to pay anywhere from $10,000 to $80,000 for a quality Level 3 EV charger, this includes installation and associated permitting costs. Of course, the exact cost will depend on a number of factors, such as the specific charger you select and the prevailing electrical rates in your area.

Followed by this one in response:

I think you'll find one of those 230 kwh level 3 chargers require 440V 3-phase. You don't see that in residential areas, at least not in the rural and semi-rural areas.

A 230KWH charger would require a 1000 amp service using a 220V drop. I know I wouldn't want to pay for one.

The more you dig into the realities of EVs, the more you realize EVs are not a solution to the alleged climate change problem being caused by cars and trucks. They are a smokescreen that ignores the very big negatives of EVs.

Thoughts On A Sunday

Yesterday was a sad day here at The Gulch.

One of the feline contingent, Cole, passed away yesterday. He was 17 years old and had been fighting a health issue over the past couple of months, but in the end he lost the battle. He died in my arms, with me telling him I loved him and that he was “a Gu’boy”.

He and I went through a lot together over the past 17 years, both joyous and saddening. He was comforting. He loved to cuddle, purring contently all the while. He would groom BeezleBub after he took a shower because “he couldn’t do it hisself”.

On weekend mornings he would wake me up, letting me know it was time to get up and feed the feline members of the household. (During the week I usually am up by 5:30AM. On weekends Cole might let me sleep in until 6AM, and sometimes even 6:15AM, but not much past that because the food dishes were empty and I, the Food Giver Person, needed to fill them.)

Be at Peace, Big Kitty. May your supper dish always be full and your bed always filled with catnip.

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I find it hard to believe that Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House, let alone a member of the House.

Her understanding of the justice system in this country, and of the Constitution as well, is abysmal. That she tweeted the following shows that she was never fit to serve in Congress.

...everyone has the right to a trial to prove their innocence.

Hopefully, the former President will peacefully respect the system, which grants him that right. (Emphasis added – ed.)

First, the accused doesn’t go to trial to prove their innocence. The trial is for the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The prosecution has to do that work. The defense is there to disprove the prosecution’s case.

Second, ‘the system’ Nancy references doesn’t grant any rights. Rights are inherent and are enumerated by the Constitution, and specifically the Bill of Rights. The system must work within that framework or it provides no justice, just oppression and tyranny.

What’s scary is that a lot of Democrats in Congress, state legislatures, and government believe the same thing as Pelosi.

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This is something I have understood for some time as I actually ran the numbers and they didn’t add up.

‘Wind Power Fails on Every Count’: Oxford Scientist Explains the Math.

Wind power has been historically and scientifically unreliable, claims an Oxford University mathematician and physicist, with his calculations revealing the government to be pursuing a “bluster of windfarm politics” while discarding numerical evidence.

After the decision to cut down on fossil fuels was made at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, the “instinctive reaction” around the world was to embrace renewables, Professor Emeritus Wade Allison, who is also a researcher at CERN, said in a 2023 paper (pdf).

Allison noted that because solar power is “extremely weak,” it was inadequate to “sustain even a small global population with an acceptable standard of living” before the Industrial Revolution.

“Today, modern technology is deployed to harvest these weak sources of energy. Vast ‘farms’ that monopolise the natural environment are built, to the detriment of other creatures. Developments are made regardless of the damage wrought. Hydro-electric schemes, enormous turbines and square miles of solar panels are constructed, despite being unreliable and ineffective; even unnecessary,” Allison said in the report, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

I have debated about wind and solar with true believers and in every case was able to demolish their arguments with the math, and I am not talking about high end math. It’s straight up arithmetic.

I once did a back-of-the-envelope calculation about how many solar panels it would take to replace the output of the Seabrook (NH) nuclear power plant, assuming the solar panels aren’t perfectly side-by-side and the storage needed was available in order to equal the 24/7 output of Seabrook’s 1300MW capacity – it would take ~120 square miles of solar panels. (This calculation assumes winter sunlight hours as we are above the 43rd parallel up here in New Hampshire). That means destroying 120 square miles of forests and the carbon-sinking those forests provide to replace the ~2 square miles taken up by Seabrook. It’s better and more environmentally friendly to build a new nuclear plant, and in the end, cheaper to do so.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice on the main part of the lake is gone, the winds have been helping to break up the remaining ice, and where boating season starts in 6 weeks!

The Continuing Politicization Of The Justice System

I have been seeing the coverage of Trump’s indictment, the commentary on TV, the various tweets and web posts, all of the “Yeah, we got him now!” and “The Dems have no idea what they’ve unleashed!” opinion pieces in the papers and on the blogs. I’ve read a lot of legal opinions from lawyers and legal pundits about the Manhattan DA’s actions (as well as his increasing inaction against violent criminals in his part of New York City).

It seems DA Bragg has gone out of his way to spin what was at best a misdemeanor into a felony, has ignored the statute of limitations, has withheld exculpatory evidence, while the media ignores a felonious misdeeds of both previous and present presidents and some of their associates that would have gotten anyone else thrown into a federal prison, particularly Republican anyone elses in government as well as average citizens.

The justice system has been increasingly politicized, is being pushed away from the restrictions of the Constitution as well as the enumerated Rights, trying to suborn federal and state laws by redefining them to mean something other than their original meaning, suborning the legislative process. The push to criminalize things that aren’t criminal, that are protected by the Constitution, and doing so for purely political reasons as a means of suppressing political opponents, be they individuals or groups, is the mark of an increasingly intolerant, oppressive tyrannical ruling class.

Is the Trump indictment a purely political move? In my opinion, it is. ‘They’, the Democrat/Progressive elites, will do everything they can get away with to maintain power by destroying Trump. It’s a gamble since it could easily backfire on them. To quote Obi Wan Kenobe “If you strike me down I will become more powerful than you can imagine.”

I do have to wonder if Trump is convicted an appeal will make its way to the Supreme Court, citing the flaws in the case, the ‘rewriting’ of laws that turned a misdemeanor into a felony sans any legislative action, willfully ignoring the statute of limitations, as well as prosecutorial misconduct and malicious prosecution.

And so the circus begins.

Thoughts On A Sunday

Winter reminded us that it isn’t quite done with us despite it being spring. We had some snow yesterday, though not much. We got about and inch and most of that accumulated on the bare ground (what there was of it), rooftops, and the remaining snow. There wasn’t much on the roads themselves as much of the snow melted when it hit the relatively warm pavement. We have a little more that might fall late Tuesday/early Wednesday, but again not much is expected.

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Though winter is trying hard to hang on, spring is starting to win out.

While out running errands this morning I saw a lot more open water on the big lake, a sign that the warmer temps and longer days are working their magic. The snow banks have been melting away, evidenced by the two at the end of my driveway having shrunk from almost 6 feet in height a week and a half ago to about half that height today.

It’s hard to believe boating season is a little over 6 weeks away.

==+++==

I got to some maintenance here at The Gulch, having to replace the gooseneck faucet on the kitchen sink. The failure of a push-on quick-connect coupler meant we had no water coming out of the faucet. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a replacement coupler from the manufacturer, something that would have taken me all of 5 minutes to swap out. From the costs of similar couplers the repair would have cost me all of $19. Instead, I had to shell out $179 for a complete gooseneck faucet assembly.

I wish I could say I was able to take care of it myself, having done so in the past, but I can’t. I found I couldn’t reach the large nut that secured the old assembly to the sink as the space under sink was taken up by the garbage disposal and related drain plumbing which made it difficult to find a position where I could reach the underside of the faucet. I had to call in reinforcements in the person of BeezleBub since he was smaller and could fit in the space I couldn’t. He swung by after finishing his day at the farm and in a couple of minutes we had the old faucet out and the new one in.

One thing I can say about my old home - The Manse - was that there was a lot more room under the kitchen sink which made it easy when I had to change out a faulty faucet about a year before we sold it.

==+++==

Is the electrical grid collapse being seen in Africa a precursor to what the Democrats have in store for us here in the US?

The problem in Africa is that the grid failures are getting even worse.

From Zimbabwe, where many must work at night because it’s the only time there is power, to Nigeria where collapses of the grid are frequent, the reliable supply of electricity remains elusive across Africa.

The electricity shortages that plague many of Africa’s 54 countries are a serious drain on the continent’s economic growth, energy experts warn.

In recent years South Africa’s power generation has become so inadequate that the continent’s most developed economy must cope with rolling power blackouts of eight to 10 hours per day.

What has driven this accelerating collapse of the grids in Africa?

Con artists...with government credentails.

So what do Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and South Africa all have in common? A couple of years ago, Zimbabwe agreed to a UN plan to mandate more renewable energy and move away from coal and natural gas. At roughly the same time, Nigeria signed on to the UN Clean Energy Demand Initiative and John Kerry showed up in person when Nigeria’s president signed the mandate. And as we’ve discussed here before, South Africa started its “transition” to renewable energy years ago, dumping $8.5 billion into the plan in a move the New York Times described as a “Breakthrough for the World.” A few years later, people are sitting in the dark with no heat over wide regions of each country. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence, right?

It was all done on purpose. Many of the same people who pushed this on Africa are trying to the same thing here. We’ve already seen some of the effects, with coal plants being shut down with no other sources replacing the lost power, natural gas plants being affected by artificially limited gas supplies, and a politically driven and irrationally emotional ‘ban’ on new nuclear power plants, even though the new generation reactors are better, safer, and less expensive to build and operate.

But wait! There’s more!

Do you know who isn’t worried about having enough power? China. They’ve been issuing construction permits for an average of two new coal plants per week for the past couple of years. China’s carbon output is more than double that of the United States, where the energy industry has been slashing emissions for years. And yet you didn’t hear a peep out of John Kerry and the rest of the climate hecklers who flew their private jets to Davos so they could scold everyone else. China can apparently do what they like because they’re a “developing nation.”

The Chinese are laughing their butts off at us right now. We’re tanking our own power grid and our economy to placate the climate gods. I somehow doubt Beijing is too concerned about potentially getting into a hot war with a country that can’t keep its lights on...

So we have been ‘making up’ for China’s expanding CO2 emissions by dismantling our electrical grid and crippling our energy production by being forced to change over to inadequate and unreliable ‘renewable’ energy sources? No wonder China is laughing at us.

==+++==

Since I’ve brought up the subject of electricity, I am going to delve into electric vehicles, and more specifically why they are more ‘smoke and mirrors’ rather than a solution to a problem that has been vastly overstated and oversold.

One of my biggest problems is something everyone notices and can’t deny – They’re too damn expensive. When an equivalent electric vehicle costs $15,000, $20,000, $30,000 more than an ICE or hybrid vehicle, and then add the cost of the support equipment – a fast charger, being but one – and you can add up to another $10,000 - $15,000 in costs.

Then there’s other issues like higher insurance costs, higher repair costs, and higher likelihood of the EV being declared a total loss for accident damage that if it had occurred on an ICE or hybrid vehicle would have been repaired.

And then there’s the “carbon footprint mythology”, the claims that EVs are no/low carbon when in fact they are nothing of the sort. It’s more virtue signaling and “economically debilitating and environmentally irresponsible.”

==+++==

This is a perfect example of “The legal profession [being] among the many institutions that have been subverted by leftism.” What is ‘this’?

The High Price of Low Bond for Lowlifes.

Jonathan Welch, the Detroit man who was released on a low bond after being charged with several felonies including torture, has now been charged with a fourth murder that happened prior to his original arrest in June.

This victim was 24-year-old Natayla Morse, whose head Welch allegedly bashed in before stealing her car and setting it on fire. The June arrest was for torturing his ex-girlfriend for 4 hours straight in the presence of their child.

Previously Welch had allegedly killed this same ex-girlfriend as well as his mother and step-dad and then killed Morse. Why was this guy released on such low bond ($10,000)?

There are plenty of examples of violent criminals with low/no-bond release from previous crimes committing more crimes, sometimes only hours after being released. When re-arrested, they are again released with low/no-bond.

Does anyone else think low/no-bond release is a stupid idea?

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the ice is breaking up, the snow banks are melting away, and thoughts of boating are coming to the forefront.

Not A Living Document

At first I thought it was just my imagination, the surly curmudgeon in me thinking “Everything is going to hell”, that thought being driven by what I’ve been seeing.

What is it I’ve been “seeing”?

An increasing disregard for the law and the US Constitution by the Left.

It has been increasingly apparent the Left has no use for the First, Second, Ninth, Tenth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Too many of them also think Article V can be ignored and that the Constitution can be amended by the courts, more specifically the Supreme Court because the Constitution is a “living document”. By that reasoning, any of the Articles and Amendments can be ‘reinterpreted’ to mean the opposite of their original intent by judicial decree. That means any our our rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights can be eliminated by judicial decree, something I think even the Left would see come back to bite them in the butt.

Some possibilities of ‘living document’ judicial amendments:

Reinterpret the Fourteenth Amendment so American citizenship cab be revoked, even the citizenship of natural born Americans. Non-citizens can be afforded all of the rights of citizens, including the right to vote. House reps could be apportioned by lot or by the majority political party rather than by population.

Reinterpret the Fifteenth Amendment to bar white males from voting as a form of ‘racial reparations’ to right previous wrongs.

Reinterpret the Fifth Amendment to make it possible to imprison political prisoners without benefit of trial. The Miranda decision could be overturned and the right to remain silent stricken. The government at all levels could take private property for any reason and tell the owners they’re out of luck because they won’t be compensated.

Reinterpret the First Amendment to outlaw some religions or to establish a government religion – Marxism, for example. Or they can squash the freedom of speech, something that already is being destroyed on college campuses, and if you don’t toe the government/Progressive line you’ll be imprisoned. Your right to protest will also be eliminated.

Reinterpret the Second Amendment so only the government/criminals will have guns.

Reinterpret the Ninth and Tenth Amendments so only the federal government had power and the states would have no jurisdiction at all.

Are these extreme examples of what could happen if the Constitution were truly a living document? Yes, but they are not something that wouldn’t happen. We’ve seen such tyranny before, even here in America before the Revolution. We see it today in other countries.

The first thing I think of when I hear the phrase “Living Document” is “Not worth the paper it’s written on”, be it the Constitution or federal and state laws. It leaves the decision in the hands of the judiciary and Congress and the state legislatures be damned.

What would such a “Living Document” version of the Constitution and the laws lead to outside of a tyranny?

Revolution, and a bloody one at that.

Thoughts On A Sunday

We had the slow-moving Nor’easter pay us a visit this past Tuesday which dumped up to 3-1/2 feet of snow in some parts of New Hampshire. Here at The Gulch we saw about a foot though other parts of our town saw 20 inches or more. The storm disrupted all kinds of things including school and the annual Town Meeting/Elections in a number of towns. My little town was one such, with Town Meeting/Elections postponed until March 28th.

Looking around this weekend you’d think the Nor’easter had been a small storm because so much of the foot of snow that fell has already melted away. The same can be said of the snow piles created during snow removal. The roof of The Gulch and surrounding homes are bare, the snow having melted away in a couple of days. Then again, March snows tend to melt away pretty quickly because of the warmer temperatures usually seen this time of year.

I have to wonder if last week’s snowstorm was my fault. After all, I did renew my lease for the boat slip where we berth the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout during boating season and asked the boatyard where I store it to have it ready by the second week of May. It’s the late winter version of washing your car in the summer – it rains.

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Watching the collapse of a number of banks, many heavily leveraged into both crypto-currency and being woke, does not fill me with the dread so many others are feeling.

This isn’t a repeat of the banking meltdown during the first years of the Obama Administration where banks were heavily invested in mortgage-backed securities, most of the mortgages being risky sub-prime, interest-only, and NINJA mortgages, i.e. ‘junk’ mortgages. Mortgages were handed out like toilet paper in a high-end restroom to people who really didn’t qualify for them, the banks having been pressured into doing so under the Community Reinvestment Act. When the toll of the recession started making itself felt, a rapidly increasing number of those mortgages defaulted because people couldn’t make their payments. Mortgage-backed securities collapsed and took a lot of investment banks, commercial banks, and other financial institutions with them.

The only thing that will be a repeat of last time is the unethical (and probably illegal) privatization of profits and socialization of risks. If these banks and other financial institutions make profits, their shareholders make money. But if those same banks and other financial institutions make bad investments or other financial moves, they are made whole by the the taxpayers. To all intents and purposes, there is no real risk to investors because Uncle Sugar will make sure they get paid. That isn’t supposed to be how it works. The American taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook for other people’s bad financial decisions.

==+++==

I find it interesting that a New York D.A. is going after Trump for allegedly paying hush money to Stormy Daniels and a number of other women. But when Bill Clinton did the same thing – in his case paying off Paula Jones – there was nary a peep from anyone about Clinton’s illegal act.

Former President Bill Clinton paid Paula Jones a whopping $850,000 to keep her quiet over sexual harassment claims — but was never arrested for it.

The case stands in stark contrast to reports that former President Donald Trump will be arrested on Tuesday for an alleged $130,000 hush money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016 over an alleged sexual encounter that the two had in 2006.

Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to charges over the payment in 2018 and was sentenced to three years in prison.

In 1998, the Washington Post reported, “President Clinton reached an out-of-court settlement with Paula Jones yesterday, agreeing to pay her $850,000 to drop the sexual harassment lawsuit that led to the worst political crisis of his career and only the third presidential impeachment inquiry in American history.”

Double standards much? But then that’s all we’ve come to expect from the Democrats these days.

==+++==

How do we correct deficiencies in Math and English in our schools? There are a number of tried and true ways to do so, but it looks like New York State is trying something different:

Lowering the minimum scores for proficiency in Math and English.

Yeah, that’s going to work out well for the kids who are struggling to become proficient.

New York will change what it takes for students to reach “proficiency” on state math and English language arts tests, calling last year’s lower scores the “new normal.”

A scoring committee that reports to the Board of Regents said Monday that they must take into account the results of last year’s tests for students in grades three through eight to determine whether schools are showing improvement from year to year. On Thursday, the committee wanted to clarify that they must also reset scores because the tests will have new performance standards.

Last year some schools posted shocking results — in Schenectady, no eighth grader who took the math test scored as proficient. And the scores for the third through eighth grade tests throughout the state were much lower in 2022 than in 2019, a result no doubt of the absence of in-person learning during the first year and beyond of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lowering the minimum scores doesn’t fix the problem. It hides them. How the Board of Regents thinks this is going to help anyone escapes me. What it’s going to do is push more kids out of the public school systems and leave the kids stuck in the public schools nowhere to go, nowhere to get the help they need in order to become more proficient.

Yet again, the “state” pushes a policy that pushes everyone to the lowest common denominator, i.e. equity.

==+++==

From comments I posted elsewhere in the net come this, something that is becoming ever more important in light of SloJoe’s ill advised push to make washing machines even worse in their ability to actually get clothes clean:

As I have commented elsewhere and in public, increasing energy efficiency reaches a point of diminishing returns, sometimes quicker than most people realize. Whether one is talking about lighting, heating, appliances (washing machine, clothes drier, refrigerator, dishwasher, etc.).

My employer went through an efficiency upgrade program in our facility a few years ago, changing all of the lighting over from fluorescent, sodium vapor lamps (for outside) and incandescent lamps to LED lighting, replacing 40 and 50 gallon electric water heaters with point-of-use demand heaters (including timers to disable them when the building is unoccupied overnight), using automatic switches to turn interior lights on only when rooms are occupied, increased ceiling insulation, and replacing seals on exterior doors and windows.

Our electrical usage for lighting decreased by over 30%. Our heating/cooling costs dropped by 20%.

While we could have done even more to reduce energy usage, we had reached the point of diminishing returns, that point where any additional monies spent would not see a return on investment, costing us more than anything we would save.

It isn't much different with the washing machines that SloJoe wants to make so efficient that they won't work. We saw this already during the initial Energy Star push for energy efficiency. It got to the point where the machines used a fraction of the water and electricity of pre-Energy Star machines...but clothing was coming out of those machines as dirty as when they were put in.

Consumer Reports tests all kinds of appliances and there was an issue the then-missus and I read through that had tested a plethora of Energy Star rated machines because we were in the market for a new washing machine. For the first time in their history they couldn't recommend any of the 35+ machines they tested because none of them were able to clean the test loads of dirty clothing CR used to evaluate machines. With one or two exceptions, none of the machines provided enough water to get the interiors of the test loads of clothing wet. If the clothing isn't wet, then it isn't getting washed.

It looks like SloJoe wants to go past even that level of 'efficiency'. The machines will cost even more money, will not last nearly as long as old machines, and you'll still have to wash your clothing by hand.

Spending a lot of money for a minuscule increase in energy efficiency doesn’t make sense on any level, particularly if that increase energy efficiency comes with a large decrease in the ability of that more energy efficient appliance to do what it’s supposed to do.

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where temperatures are going to in the 50’s this week, where preparations for the new boating season are already being made, and where the snow is rapidly melting.

What's The Problem?

The first step to solving a problem is admitting there is a problem. The second and most important step is identifting the problem.

Yeah, I'd say we've identified this particular problem.

Something To Ponder

This certainly sounds true. If it is true then we have something important to talk about, don’t we?

Thoughts On A Sunday

I don’t know about you, but I am not really having any issues with the switch back to Daylight Savings Time, at least not yet. While some folks have said we won’t have to do this anymore as we’ll be staying on DST for the foreseeable future, the only reference I have seen to this change deals with year-round Daylight Savings Time legislation being stalled in the House.

I hate the twice-a-year change which really serves little purpose these days. Some of this dislike is due to New Hampshire (as well as Maine and Massachusetts) being on the extreme eastern side of the Eastern Time Zone. We should probably be in the Atlantic Time Zone and remain on Standard Time year-round. More than a few studies have shown the time changes cause a number of physical and psychological problems for a week or so after the change.

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We have another big storm headed this way, something the Weather Guys^TM are calling a “slow Nor’easter”, with the snow starting sometime late Monday and continuing until Wednesday. At this point they are predicting 12 inches of snow here at The Gulch, but as is usual, they are hedging their bets by telling us local snowfall amounts may be higher.

I’ll be all set to go as the tank on the trusty RAM 1500 will be topped off, the Official Weekend Pundit Generator will be pre-positioned, and the various snow removal implements checked and within easy reach.

As this is supposed to be heavy snow, a number of officials are warning homeowners to remove any snow remaining on their roofs as the added snow load from this storm could cause them to fail. I don’t have to worry about that as most of the snow on our roof is gone.

What’s going to make this storm even more problematic is that Tuesday is Town Meeting/Election Day for a number of towns here in New Hampshire, including mine. I’ll be spending all day at the polls, performing my duties as an election official. This won’t be the first time we’ve run elections during a snowstorm and it won’t be the last. It will mean that I won’t be home to shovel the snow or run the generator should the need arise during the day.

Such is Town Meeting in New Hampshire.

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At least one liberal has come to see the light, particularly when it comes to the January 6^th “insurrection” that wasn’t. And now she’s apologizing for believing the BS.

Writes Naomi Wolf:

There is no way to avoid this moment. The formal letter of apology. From me. To Conservatives and to those who “put America first” everywhere.

It’s tempting to sweep this confrontation with my own gullibility under the rug — to “move on” without ever acknowledging that I was duped, and that as a result I made mistakes in judgement, and that these mistakes, multiplied by the tens of thousands and millions on the part of people just like me, hurt millions of other people like you all, in existential ways.

But that erasure of personal and public history would be wrong.

I owe you a full-throated apology.

I believed a farrago of lies. And, as a result of these lies, and my credulity — and the credulity of people similarly situated to me - many conservatives’ reputations are being tarnished, on false bases.

The proximate cause of this letter of apology is the airing, two nights ago, of excepts from tens of thousands of hours of security camera footage from the United States Capitol taken on Jan 6, 2021. The footage was released by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson.

While “fact-checkers” state that it is “misinformation” to claim that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi was in charge of Capitol Police on that day, the fact is that the USCP is under the oversight of Congress, according to — the United States Capitol Police.

This would be the same Congress that convened the January 6 Committee subsequently, and that used millions of dollars in taxpayer money to turn that horrible day, and that tragic event, into a message point that would be used to tar a former President as a would-be terrorist, and to smear all Republicans, by association, as “insurrectionists,” or as insurrectionists’ sympathizers and fellow-travelers.

The deeper we dig into the January 6^th Insurrection hearings the more it becomes apparent that they were an excuse for a witch hunt, something Naomi Wolf now sees to be the case.

Now if some of the other ‘sleepers’ will awaken to this truth.

What makes this even more poignant is the revelation from the Chairman of the Select Committee on January 6^th, Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., claiming the panel never analyzed the blockbuster footage Fox News aired this week.

So they were using only cherry picked video for their hearings and didn’t look at any of the exculpatory videos as they should have. But then that wouldn’t have fit the narrative and have worked worked against the aims of the witch hunt.

==+++==

Just when I thought the Biden Administration couldn’t be any more clueless, they prove me wrong. The latest bit of buffoonery?

Biden’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm praising China’s response to climate change. China’s ‘response’ to climate change?

Increasing their already large carbon dioxide generation by building and bringing more coal power plants online. They are already the largest emitter of anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the world and are working hard to emit even more.

Somehow I doubt Granholm meant to praise their response...or is totally ignorant of the facts when it comes China’s environmental record, particularly when it has anything to do climate change.

There is very little that an American should find praiseworthy about China. The Communists are lying, thieving, secretive, paranoid, oppressive, murderous thugs.

But Biden’s Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm couldn’t stop praising Communist China during a recent interview at the annual SXSW conference in Austin, Texas. Granholm showed her admiration for the Butchers of Beijing for the way they’ve shown the world how to deal with climate change.

--snip--

The problem is that China doesn’t give a whit about climate change. They care about appearing to do something about climate change.

In fact, China is building more coal-fired electric plants at three times the rate of the rest of the world combined.

That our own Energy Secretary has fallen hook, line, and sinker for Chinese propaganda isn’t surprising. Biden’s cabinet members have a particularly hard time hiding their misplaced enthusiasm when it comes to China.

What else can you expect from an administration bought and paid for by China?

==+++==

In last week’s TOAS I mentioned the plans to ‘geoengineer’ our way out of climate change by affecting the level of insolation – the amount of sunlight entering the atmosphere – as one means of doing so. However, there’s something the proponents of doing such a foolish thing have chosen to ignore, that being the concern that rich nations will be controlling the amount of sunlight while ignoring the input from, or the needs of, poorer nations.

Concern grows over rich nations controlling sunlight.

Radical climate interventions — like blocking the sun’s rays — could alter the world’s weather patterns, potentially benefiting some regions of the world and harming others.

That possibility, climate scientists say, means any research on such methods must consider those risks and involve the countries that already bear the greatest impacts from a warming planet.

“If you’re actually talking about actively deploying technologies to alter the climate, then you need to engage all of us in the discussion,” said Andrea Hinwood, chief scientist at the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi, Kenya. “And that means those who are the most vulnerable to these effects need to be able to have a say.”

The push for inclusive research comes alongside growing interest — and debate — over solar radiation management, a little understood way to avoid catastrophic climate change by injecting sunlight-blocking particles into the stratosphere or changing the density of clouds.

Such control could also be used as a weapon in the wrong hands, those wrong hands being those who have no problems justifying their actions as being “for the common good”. Such justifications have been used in the past to excuse all kinds of horrifying actions, including genocide.

It is my opinion that none of this should even be considered until we have a much better handle on the atmospheric physics that drive our climate. Anyone who says they understand those physics to the point they where they understand the semi-chaotic system that is our climate is either deluded or lying.

==+++==

And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where it’s sunny and warm today, will be snowing to beat the band on Tuesday, and where tomorrow will be used to get ready for everything happening on Tuesday.

From The Archives

As I do from time to time I peruse the Official Weekend Pundit Archives to see if there’s something I should do a follow-up post on. Other times I find posts I wrote years ago that surprise me, mainly because I find it difficult to believe that I wrote something like that. I sometimes feel like a fraud, as if I plagiarized it in it’s entirety because I doubt I could write something so prosaic or profound or humorous. Yet there they are.

The post below dates back to January 2012 and covers two topics I have to deal with now and then, both with my job and in my life – Diminishing Returns and the always fascinating Perceived Risk.

Note: A little over 11 years have passed since the original post. Unfortunately the links below are now dead.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

One of the most difficult concepts that many people have problems understanding is that of diminishing returns. This applies to many different areas in our lives and in our society. I don't know whether it's a lack of education, a failure in their upbringing, or something inherently lacking in the people themselves. Perhaps it's a little of all three.

Going hand in hand with this concept is one that has many of the same roots - perceived risk – something that has driven some folks into action to get the government to “Do Something!” about something that is a minor issue at best.

In case you're wondering, however briefly, how this particular subject came up, it was during a discussion at work about this post from FuturePundit dealing with the declining return on investment from electrical power efficiency.

My employer is always looking for ways to reduce our energy usage, something that appeals to the frugal Yankee in me. Over the past five or six years a number of measures have been taken to reduce our electrical usage, including the use of more efficient lighting at all levels, timers on our existing electric water heaters to shut them off when no one is in the building, on-demand water heaters replacing the older tank-type water heaters as they wear out, more energy efficient refrigerators (used for both food and for storage of certain manufacturing substances...though not in the same refrigerator!), and motion sensors to shut off lights in rooms when no one is in them, just to name a few of the improvements undertaken. All of this has helped reduce our electricity usage by over 20% as compared to 6 years ago. Will further investment reduce our electrical usage any more than it has? Sure it will, but (and it's a big 'but') we won't see anywhere near the savings we already have unless we spend a lot more money than has already been spent. We have reached the point of diminishing return. We'd need to spend many times more than we already have in order to achieve a small fraction of the savings already made. From a financial point of view the return on investment makes no sense, meaning further investment in this effort will not result in energy savings equal to what was spent to achieve them. Or put more simply, we'll spend more than we'll save. It's not worth it.

OK, back to the subject at hand.

We've seen more than a few times where some project has reached its original goals, whether it's a cleanup of some Superfund site or the closing of a municipal landfill. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the contaminants were cleaned up or the landfill might leak 0.001% of the liquids or decomposition products from the landfill. But for some folks that isn't good enough. They want 100%. Never mind that achieving that last little bit will cost as much, if not more, than what has already spent. Never mind that it will likely be the taxpayers footing the bill. Never mind that in the end it won't make one bit of difference. The project has blown past the point of diminishing returns and spending any additional money won't help...other than to make the folks bitching about it feel better. (It would be cheaper to give them some mood-elevating drugs to do that than wasting taxpayer dollars to 'fix' the last little iota of the problem.)

We see this lack of understanding about diminishing returns in all kinds of places and situations. It is also where the problem with perceived risk comes into play.

One of the biggest disservices ever perpetrated upon the public is the notion that life should be totally risk free. This meme started some time in the 1960's. (Yes, I know drives to improve safety started long before that, but the 100% risk free crap started in the late 60's/early 70's.) There's nothing wrong with reducing risk. But to think life can be made 100% risk free is ludicrous. It can't be done. But that doesn't stop people from trying to do so anyways. I wouldn't mind that so much if those same people understood the difference between real risk and perceived risk. The problem is that they don't and because of that lack of understanding money is wasted on slight risks while major risks are ignored.

An example:

Which entails more risk to life and limb: Driving a car or flying on a commercial airliner?

The answer is, of course, driving a car. (There were over 32,885 traffic fatalities in 2010, with many times that number of injuries. As an aside, that number is the lowest number of fatalities since 1949 despite more miles being traveled then ever before, giving us the lowest fatality rate ever. [Update: In 2021 there were 42,915 fatalities, the highest number since 2005] .) But people perceive flying as more dangerous. Yet how many fatalities have the been in the US due to commercial airliner crashes over the past few years? None. A person is far more like to be injured or killed driving to or from the airport than they are by flying on a commercial airliner, but they're more afraid of dying in a plane crash. It's all perception, not reality.

Let's try another:

One person lives near a nuclear power plant. Another lives near a coal-fired power plant. Which one is at a higher risk of cancer, injury, or death?

The answer is the person living near the coal-fired plant. The effluvia from the smokestack and any runoff from the ash pile are a far greater hazard than anything coming from the nuclear plant under normal circumstances. Yet people perceive the nuclear power plant will cause them to get cancer and other illnesses. Even after the Three Mile Island accident there were no increases in cancer or other radiation related illnesses. (Some initial studies stated there were, but review of those studies by the CDC found some creative editing of the health statistics to 'prove' the case. Once all the raw data was reanalyzed those alleged increases in cancer cases disappeared.)

Over the years it seems to me the the perceived risks have received far more attention (and money) than actual risks. Efforts will be made to reduce risks that have little actual impact, but large risks will be ignored.

For instance, the NHTSA wants to ban the use of cell phones and other electronic devices by drivers of cars and trucks. All kinds of efforts are being made to codify that ban in to law across the nation despite the fact that the actual percentage of accidents caused by these distracting gizmos is unknown. The perception is that these devices are leaving a swath of death and destruction along the highways and byways of the nation to rival those caused by drunk driving. The NHTSA reports that 3092 traffic deaths were caused by distracted driving in 2010. That's one out of every eleven fatalities. How many of those were due to cell phone use or texting? The NHTSA doesn't actually say, though the article linked implies all of them were (but there was no actual number cited). The implication is that this is a major risk and that the government must “Do Something!' even though the actual risk is quite small. (Update: There is a lot more data on distracted driving accidents, mainly due to drivers trying to use their smart phones when they should be paying attention to the road. Some years have seen more ‘smart phone’ distracted driving accidents than DUI accidents. That’s why many states have so-called “Hands Free” laws on their books to address this problem. My home state of New Hampshire is one of them.)

But will the government spend a dime on something like removing homes from flood plains or barrier islands, obviating the need to constantly pay out to rebuild them again and again after they are destroyed? (Disclaimer: The gubmint did do that after the Mississippi River floods in 1993, relocating a number of towns to higher ground because it was cheaper to do so rather than paying out the flood insurance claims again and again and again and again, ad infinitum.)

Or will money be spent on things like crumbling roads and bridges, things that endanger us all? We must remember incidents like the Mianus River Bridge collapse on I-95 in Connecticut, the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis, or the Nimitz Freeway collapse during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 , all of which killed and injured motorists. (The Nimitz Freeway collapse occurred because necessary upgrades to the highway support pylons were postponed.) How many other others are out there waiting to happen because we haven't spent the necessary funds to reduce a very real risk? Maybe this is due to the opposite of perceived risk, where people see no risk and therefore think nothing needs to be done, yet the risk exists and is higher than many of the perceived risks people waste time and money dealing with. How much did these real incidents cost compared to what it would have cost to fix the problems in the first place? Do I really need to answer that?

The people need to learn how to discriminate between real risk and perceived risk, and to understand the relationship to diminishing returns. Otherwise we will continue to ignore real risks and waste ever more money on things that are minimal risks at best.

Thoughts On A Sunday

The latest snowstorm to visit us departed last night, but not before depositing around around 14 inches of heavy snow. It helped that neither the WP Mom or I had to go anywhere yesterday. About the only thing I had to do was shovel snow from around the trusty RAM 1500 and pull some of the snow down from the roof. We were fortunate as there were plenty of others who had to venture out, some of which experienced misfortune in the way of traffic accidents, including one of our little town’s plow trucks. (Fortunately no one was injured but the plow truck did suffer suspension damage.)

The size of the snow banks in our neighborhood is daunting as we are literally running out of space to put the snow. I didn’t think we’d had that much snow, but the evidence can be seen right outside The Gulch’s front door.

And to think I made arrangements to rent the boat slip for the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout just last week.

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Yeah, like this is going to work out well.

Solar Geoengineering 'Only Option' to Cool Planet Within Years, UN Says.

Messing with the insolation level for Earth to ‘cancel’ out warming will have all kinds of effects, with some of them being catastrophic. Yet there are actually some folks who think this is OK because it will “Save The Earth”. Not that Earth needs saving as it has been both colder and warmer on Earth, even during the last 12,000 years, and the Earth did not become uninhabitable.

At least the UN isn’t proposing anything other than studying the prospect at this point.

Research into sun and heat-deflecting technologies to tackle climate change are proceeding at a rapid pace around the globe, prompting the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to investigate their potentials and dangers while stating that these controversial interventions are humanity's "only option" to quickly cool the planet within years.

In a report published by UNEP in February, an independent panel describes what’s currently known about so-called solar radiation modification, also called solar geoengineering, and concludes that, despite its great potential, it's not viable or even safe right now. Nonetheless, amid growing calls from governments to find an emergency brake for climate change—and ongoing, independent efforts to develop solar geoengineering technology—the UNEP is calling for a full-scale global review of the tech and eventual multinational framework for how it should be governed.

My only problem with such geoengineering is that they really don’t know what the effects will be. I have to wonder if proponents understand what the unintended consequences could be.

Ask any atmospheric physicist and they’ll tell you Earth’s atmosphere, and by extension its climate, is a semi-chaotic system. How does anyone factor in the chaotic elements of the atmosphere in order to come up with an even semi-representative model of what will happen? We certainly haven’t seen that with the climate models the so-called ‘climate scientists’ have been using to push their agendas. They haven’t even come close to predicting what is happening and were dismal failures when tested by hindcasting - using the models to ‘predict’ climate starting a few decades or a century ago and seeing how the predictions match the data of what actually happened – which fills no one with even a modicum of understanding with any kind of confidence that these same folks will have any understanding of what their efforts will reap.

If they trigger a premature Ice Age will their only response be “Oops! We didn’t think this would happen. Sorry!”

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Watts Up With That has been posting a tutorial addressing reliable versus intermittent power generation. It deals with the issues of ‘traditional’ power generation systems – coal, natural gas, hydro, biomass, and nuclear – versus intermittent power generation systems – solar and wind – and the problems with providing power where and when it’s needed. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.

This two-part post is a follow-up to Robert Bradley’s recent IER article, “Wind, Solar, and the Great Texas Blackout: Guilty as Charged.” His article discussed how regulatory shifts and subsidies favoring Intermittently Variable Renewable Energy (IVRE) producers resulted in prematurely lost capacity, a lack of new capacity, and upgrade issues with remaining (surviving) traditional capacity. These three factors–“the why behind the why”–explain the perfect storm that began with (or was revealed by) Storm Uri.

It seems it’s primarily folks who have little or no understanding of how electrical grids work and the delicate balancing act required to keep the grid up and running in order to meet demand are the ones pushing solar and wind. Their ignorance, honest or willful, drives them to push for renewable energy in place of reliable and well understood generation systems. What’s worse is that when it is shown the renewable sources aren’t reliable and add to grid instability, their answer is to push for even more renewable sources as if they will magically fix the problem...which only makes the problem worse.

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Last week I wrote about how social media is hurting our kids.

Legal Insurrection has a follow-up, focusing more on how social media is contributing to the mental illness epidemic among teen girls.

When impressionable teenage girls become ensnared by social media, the real world being subsumed by social media – a make believe world that tantalizes, beguiles, tempts...and lies. Is it any wonder those same teenage girls can be wrecked emotionally and mentally by such a place?

A big story last week was the partial release of the CDC’s bi-annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which showed that most teen girls (57%) now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36% in 2011), and 30% of teen girls now say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19% in 2011). Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller.

As one commenter to the LI post asked, “By “mental illness epidemic,” are we including the trans craze, or… too soon?”

It is a legitimate question because it seems much of the ‘trans craze’ is hawked heavily on social media. It is a major source of influence among teens and many of the ideas and memes being pushed there are damaging to the mental health and well-being of our teens.

Limiting teens’ access to social media is one possible means of reducing this epidemic, something we can no longer ignore.

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And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where we’re still moving snow, Winter Break is ending, and the kids have to go back to school tomorrow morning.