“The global climate change debate has gone badly wrong. Many mainstream environmentalists are arguing for the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons, and so long as they continue to do so, they put all our futures in jeopardy. (Political philosopher Thomas Wells)

I ran across the above quotation at a talk given by Dr. Judith Curry at the Global Warming Policy Foundation. I had never heard of Thomas Wells, and so looked him up. I like the idea that he is a philosopher, as his mission in life is to think, possibly even to think better than the rest of us. (Alex Epstein, who is in the links on this blog, is also a philosopher. At the end of this piece I am posting a video exchange he had with former Senator Barbara Boxer, using just a few words to tear her a new one.

Continue reading “Political Correctness as an intimidation tool” →

The above is not an active video, just a screen grab. The reason – it is on Ab’s Fakeotube at Fakeologist. Use this link to access the video. I have watched it, and posted about it too. I encourage others to do so too.

Continue reading “Ends and Odds” →

I was maybe 21 years old, which would be 1971, and I do not know how I came to be aware of a magazine called National Review, but I suspect it was my mother’s admiration for William F. Buckley, Jr., who had a weekly TV show called Firing Line. I was living on my own with two friends in a rented house, but was still in failure-to-launch mode. For some reason I decided to send a check for what (in those days), $7? to subscribe. I began receiving the magazine, and would be a regular subscriber for the next 20+ years. I think around 1990 or so, when I underwent a titanic shakeup in outlook, I dropped it. Now I am back.

Just a few memories about the magazine and Buckley:

Continue reading “Start at the back” →

The above diagram looks so simple. In residential and commercial construction, the most commonly used rise and runs for stairs are 7 and 11 inches. That yields a pitch line of about 33 degrees (32.7).  I have built two staircases for our house. For the first, to overcome a five-foot retaining wall that kept us from being able to circumnavigate the house, I consulted my son and using sine and cosine, he gave me the run and number of steps. See below.

Continue reading “The accountant builds a staircase” →

I have been unable to get anything but short snippets of an incredibly stupid speech given by Rep Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) on the day of the Solar Eclipse. Go to timestamp 16:16 to view the entire painful exhibition. The most disturbing element here is that Lee used to sit on the House Science Committee and the House Space Committee.

Around the same time, The View’s Sunny Hostin blamed the recent solar eclipse on Climate Change, along with the New York earthquake and the return of cicadas. This was too much even for host Whoopi Goldberg, who slammed her for discrediting the show. (Link)

And the beat goes on.

I have a cousin and we talk on a regular basis – she’s in Delaware now, but we grew up together in Billings, Montana. My dad called her “Punky”, a nickname she hated, so of course, I always use it. I am “Marky,” a name my mother would yell out the front door when dinner was ready. That was especially nice if I was talking to a girl I wanted to impress. She is constantly reminding me of the grades where I was held back a year, and I explain to her that the teachers were so fond of me that they wanted me around for one more year. That’s what my mom told me, and she would not lie to me. “How old were you when you finally got out of school?” another cousin asked. “I don’t know – 39, 40, somewhere in that range.”

Continue reading “Mansplaining, and cosmic justice” →