Category: American wilderness

Start at the back

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:

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The accountant builds a staircase

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.

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Congresswoman Lee: The moon’s a balloon, dammit. Not a gas ball.

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.

Mansplaining, and cosmic justice

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.”

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The 97% consensus, and the demise of already-corrupted search engines

We here at POM know that among climate scientists there is no 97% “consensus” that Earth is getting warmer and humans are causing that warming. But we can also see that a wall was being built around the propaganda spewing out of IPCC, NASA and other places. Soon to be used following the 97% thrust was the term “denier”. 

97% serves a useful purpose in terms of propaganda – it signals to people who are not paying attention that the work has been done, case closed, no need to think or investigate. It’s a deliberate tactic used because the work has not been done, the case is not closed, and indeed people of intelligence need to think and investigate. 

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Isaac Newton on head butting

A long long time ago I knew a guy in Bozeman who worked in the campus bookstore, let’s call him Roger. It was at least five years after 911, as I had a blog at the time and did not start this blog until 2006. I mentioned to him that what we saw on 911 violated Newton’s laws of motion, and therefore could not have happened as we saw on TV.

He got very pensive on me, and said that experts, real experts, within that university were pondering Newton’s third law of motion in light of the events of that day. Do you get that? “Experts” in the engineering department of Montana State University were afraid to speak up about what happened that day. They would probably  lose their jobs. That’s how I interpreted Roger’s thoughtful comment.

  1. An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force.
  2. The acceleration of an object depends on the mass of the object and the amount of force applied.
  3. Whenever one object exerts a force on another object, the second object exerts an equal and opposite on the first.

These are called “laws” and not hypotheses, not theories, meaning that in our world they always work. The have not been disproven.

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Easy listening while Waiting for a Chinook

The painting above is titled “Waiting for a Chinook” by Charles M. Russell (1864-1926). He was a great artist who lived in Montana. My dad, who grew up in Great Falls, Montana, dispelled any mythology about him, saying that he would sell his doodles in bars in exchange for drinks. But man could the guy paint. Here’s what another favorite artist of mine, Ian Tyson, had to say about Charles in his unduly sentimental song, The Gift:

God hung the stars over Judith Basin
God put the magic in young Charlie’s hands
And all was seen and all remembered
Every shining mountain, every longhorn brand
He could paint the light on horsehide shining
The great passing herds of the buffalo
And a cow camp cold on a rainy morning
And the twisting wrist of the Houlihan throw

The “Houlihan throw” is a cowboy on a horse roping a calf.

By the way, a “Chinook” refers to warm winds blowing off the western slopes of  our Rocky Mountains – having grown up in Montana, a good old Chinook was a sign of warming – a cold spell ending, snow melting, spring on the horizon. Willard Fraser, once mayor of the town I lived in, Billings, complained that the official stationery of the city had “that damned cow” on it. He ordered it changed, saying it had scared off too many tourists.

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Pockets of intolerance

I had a brief conversation with a fellow yesterday at our local gym, no names. Let’s call him Roger. He is an avid biker, and recalled that once on a long and tiring ride, he found himself in Boulder Colorado, known locally as “The People’s Republic.” He was parched and needed both some hydration and to refill his water bottle to complete the remaining fifty miles of his ride.

We once lived in Boulder, very close to the King’s Sooper where on March 22, 2021 they held a fake mass shooting. 21-year-old Ahmad Al Aliwi Al-Issa allegedly fired 33 bullets in the confines of that store before being shot in the leg and frog-marched out of the store at 3:30 PM. Since none other than jazz musician BB King reminded us that “all police and judges are Freemasons”, it is safe to assert that the event was staged, and that the use of the number “33” was used to signal to all insiders that it was indeed fake.

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A note to Mr. Tipton

Dear sir:

I do not know where you live (nor do I want to know). I do not know anyone who might read and forward this message to you. But here’s a shot in the dark.

Two things are not in my nature – hatred and vengeance. Of course, in the years since 1987, such thoughts have occurred to me, but you should take great comfort in that those who were harmed that night in March of 1987 merely wanted their lives back. Even Jimmy, who lost 15 years of his life, wanted nothing more than to breathe the air and walk about freely, playing his guitar and living off his justly earned court settlement. We are good people, I suppose you could say, but not unusual people. Most are like us, living their own lives, wanting peace and a little prosperity. Concepts like revenge, even “justice”, are not on our agendas. Life offers neither, and the former, revenge, is only satisfying to actors in TV and movie dramas. In real life, it is self-defeating and empty. It is a tainted effort that harms everyone, giver and receiver alike.

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Winter is coming, and other stuff

I rarely publish graphs. It’s been my experience that people for the most part do not know how to interpret them. It must be some specialized teaching that comes about in post-graduate studies. Graphic interpretation should be taught in grade school forward, but is not. Here’s one to ponder, however:

That is a rough cut, I realize, as I cut the page out of a book and scanned it. But here is the important content. The graph is a representation of Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperatures for the last 10,000 years, which we call the “Holocene Interglacial period.” Climate alarmists, steeped as they are in lies and propaganda, have changed the Holocene from an “interglacial period” to an “epoch,” in other words saying that humans have interrupted the normal cycle of events, and that the Holocene, due to warming, will continue on now, in perpetuity. That is scientific trash.

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