My introduction to real politics …

There is quite an interesting discussion going on below regarding elections, and I’ve had little to say due to my cynicism. This stems from my having run for office in 1996. Yes, I lost, but that outcome was not the real learning experience. My opponent was a nice lady who grasped some of the significant elements of campaigning that I did not. She understood, for instance, as she went door-to-door, that the important outcome of each encounter was not exchange of information. Rather, when she left a doorstep, she left the understanding that she was in agreement with the person who answered the door. That was a smart thing, and  as I would learn not even a bad thing.

You can call this inborn stupidity, but it was my first true foray into the electoral process, and I had a rather quixotic notion that I was carrying information to people who lacked my insight. I offered my views plainly. This created a rift, as there were a few issues that some people cared very deeply about. They become what we call a “third rail”, named after trains that run on tracks supplied by electricity, which is the third rail. You can safely ride the train and get to your destination, but touch that third rail and you die.

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The streak ends …

A little football talk here. I watch the Denver Broncos, as it is hard not to be involved with them. This entire city’s attitude and self-esteem are heavily influenced by Bronco success and failure. So be it. It is fun.

When they are winning.

They have now, over the course of two seasons, won sixteen games in a row by one score. Last year the head coach, Sean Payton, noted a much smaller streak at that time, and said that they could easily be 7-7 instead of 9-3. He knew about luck and statistics.

Yesterday in his post-game press conference, where they won by means of the incredible interception by Devon Key (seen above), they did it again. He said after the game that at 16 consecutive once-score wins, a league record, it is now part of the team’s makeup, and that it is his players that are making it happen. No more good luck.

And I thought … the streak is over now. They’ll be lucky to pull out another one-score victory for the rest of this season. They had better get better at scoring to have a better buffer at game’s end. They are at 7-2 now. Think … 7-10?

It just doesn’t work like that. Sixteen straight wins of any kind means be a very high caliber team. But no NFL team has had un undefeated season since the 1972 Miami Dolphins, 54 years ago (17-0).  In the NFL there are very good players on even the worst teams, so truly, any team can beat any other. Other factors, and coaching is a large part of it, determine who develops into a winner, and who a loser.

And, of course, some of those games are rigged. Last year when the Broncos pulled off an amazing fourth quarter comeback to beat the Giants 33-30, I thought … man, that score tells me something.

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“Bless us and save us,” said Mrs. Davis

Jim Smith is a local realtor who has a column that often offers solid practical advice about the real estate market and conditions. He is published in our local Denver Post, I am told, and several other places. Recently he offered a short column that is reprinted in full at the very end of this post. It is called Can Your House Keep You Safe During a Power Outage?

If you travel to that link, you will notice that he has drawn only one comment, that from me. That’s the nature of Substack, I think. A few people who are more savvy than Jim and I know how to poke through, and even make their living publishing there. I have a Substack location and have republished some of what I’ve written here, but comments and reads are rare. To make it into a go requires promotion, and I just don’t know how to do that. I just like to write.

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Election results …

There was an item on the long ballot I received here in Colorado that offered to voters the unique idea that sports teams in our schools should be populated as follows: Men’s teams are limited to those who are born with penises, female teams to those born with vaginas. Coed teams can have both.

I don’t know why we have to vote on this stuff other than to push back on an agenda being pushed from above. I suppose some district judge will quash the results. In case you don’t know, the courts are not the friends of regular people. They too are governed from above. Continue reading “Election results …” →

Climate Change: The End Game

I ran across the graph above in a paper I read over the weekend, PHYSICS DEMONSTRATES THAT INCREASING GREENHOUSE GASES CANNOT CAUSE DANGEROUS WARMING, EXTREME WEATHER, OR ANY HARM,  by Richard Lindzen and William Happer. Each man has an impressive CV, and the former is an Emeritus professor at MIT, the latter at Princeton. Of course, none of that means a thing if they are simply advocates who do not follow the scientific method, but in fact the paper is largely an exposition of that method with a complaint that climate scientists long ago abandoned any pretense of using it. They instead resort to “consensus”. In other words Lindzen and Happer assert that climate science is the result of “… opinions of government, consensus, 97% of scientists [long ago proven to be contrived], peer review, or is based on models that do not work, or cherry-picked, fabricated, falsified or omitted contradictory data …”

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Maya, Maya, wherefore art thou Maya?

We are scheduled for a meeting tomorrow with our homeowners insurance agent, who works for State Farm. I’ve been busy gathering data, and it has taken me places I did not know I would go. I won’t give our personal numbers here, but the keys to our insurance are two: our location, and the “replacement cost” that is used to calculate the face of our policy and our annual premium.

I was first triggered by seeking a quote from Allstate, the only other insurer now operating in the front range, the so-called “foothills” on the eastern face of the Colorado Rockies. State Farm used the number $350 psf (per square foot) in determining our premium, Allstate used $240, and said we needed far less coverage than we were getting from State Farm. As insurance goes, that doesn’t matter much, as Allstate charges a much higher rate per 100K, but set that knowledge aside. The information we got from Allstate was useful. The difference, it appears, is that State Farm applies its $350 number to our entire square footage, where Allstate uses a lower number for basement footage, one-third of our square footage, which is far cheaper to replace.

That in mind, I got on the Internet yesterday to seek out some quotes, knowing we are redlined so that most insurers cannot write policies here. But they do not know that right away when we encounter their sales mechanism on the tubes, so they will, at the outset, give us honest numbers.

I came across Farmers Insurance, which does not write policies up here, and its agent blindly went through the data gathering process, and after coming up with a replacement cost of $285 psf interrupted the process and said, my words, “Hey, wait a  minute. We can’t write a policy for you. You’re in the fire zone!” I said yeah, I knew that, I told your person that. He advised have a nice day.

Why are so many people concerned with the kind of day I should have?

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Spahn and Sain and pray for rain

I recently came across a sports person on the radio who said that there is a “conspiracy theory” about that claimed that the LA Dodgers had tanked the baseball National League championship series to allow the Milwaukee Brewers to go to the World Series.  The reasoning behind it is that there is going to be a baseball strike in December, and stadiums may be closed to any games for a long period thereafter. Behind that looming strike is a dysfunctional game behind which a few wealthy teams dominate the sport while the rest subsist – not in poverty- but in minor league status. They only exist to allow the wealthy teams competition during the regular season prior to the fall extravaganza. What better way to counter that argument than to have two small-market teams in the 2026 Series!

Indeed, I am told, 2015 was the last time that a small market teams made the World Series, the Kansas City Royals. I had to look that up. I do remember the 2016 World Series, where the Chicago Cubs defeated the Cleveland Indians, and I and others here have written quite a bit about scripted sports. To me, that series appeared to have been rigged.

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Climate “science”: All the Helen’s agree

This post is written with a mutually shared understanding, or perhaps not “mutual” or “shared”. The Climate Change movement is powerful, backed by unseen forces and controlling scientists, pundits and the media, a mass public relations apparatus, and Donald Trump. (Did you really think that a true “denier” would be allowed in that office?) Trump is allowing us a pause, to get dissidents (“deniers”) to relax while the PR machines is subtly spreading the message that the movement is in retreat. It is not, and while I don’t know the future, I suspect it will kick into full gear in 2028, when Trump is retired and a suitable replacement is enthroned by the presidential selection process. The means of achieving their ends remain, as always, coercive and violent, though a velvet glove is currently in use.

Dr. John Clauser won the Nobel physics prize in 2022, sharing the prize with others for work in “entangled photons.” First, since the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the IPCC and Al Gore in 2007, around the time of the infamous Hockey Stick, and also  to Barack Obama in 2008 for the mere act of getting his sorry ass (s)elected, the Nobel Prize has been sullied in my mind, making all selections suspect. Perhaps physicists are held to higher standards than those receiving the politicized Peace Prize. Secondly, I do not know what “entangled photons represent. Reading AI, it tells me that untangling them leads to very good encryption.

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Psychopathic authoritarians, or just mundane bureaucrats?

I have a practical outlook regarding the behavior of certain public figures. But first I want to quote from Joseph Sansone, M.S., PhD, a psychiatrist, who offered a statement submitted to a Dutch Court in the case highlighted in this link. It is a case filed in the Netherlands, and Bill Gates and many others are named defendants. They are accused of using the covid vaccines as a means of pushing hidden bioweapons. I’ve no doubt they are guilty. The problem is that we don’t have justice, so no court will find  them so.

I have my own outlook on lies and lying liars in the public sphere. Joseph Sansone, M.H., PhD, has filed what I think in our country would be called an amicus brief to the Netherland proceedings. He is not part of the lawsuit. He says that the defendants in this case are “psychopathic authoritarians”. That’s a name dreamed up by the psychiatric professions, probably listed in the DSM-5. I imagine members of his profession voted on it, with a majority of psychiatrists deciding by a show of hands what is a disease, what is not. By this means we also have ADHD, bipolar disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, intermediate explosive disorder (which I would have guessed relates to diarrhea), and a host of others. All made up. But I want to quote Sansone on this:

Psychopathic Authoritarianism is the systemic elevation of power, control, and domination above truth, empathy, liberty, moral integrity, bodily autonomy, and human dignity. It is the collective manifestation of traits identified as the Dark Tetrad,  sadism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. On a systemic level, these traits operate together with fear and coercive control to produce obedience, conformity, and subjugation of persons to institutional authority and may include a callous disregard for human life.

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