Yeah…that would be the impeachment shoe.

Now…before I talk about that…let me state for the record that at least at our house we are completely not fans of the former President, think he’s a complete idiot, doesn’t deserve to be reelected, and will probably go to jail over at least one of his current indictments. That said…until he is *convicted* of insurrection by a court of law…the justice system in the US says that he is innocent until proven guilty, so he’s not at this point guilty of having participated in an insurrection and all the hubba-hubba about the 14th amendment being “self executing” is just that, a whole lot of nothing-burger.

We are also seriously not fans of the current President or his Veep and neither of them deserves to be reelected either…and when you get down to it a lot of the reasons that former doesn’t deserve to be reelected also apply to the current…but that’s not really the point of this discussion. 

Frankly…some of the policies of both former and current are just fine, and there are just as many policies of both that are just…not fine…but again that’s not the point so I will move on.

I keep seeing a lot of the liberal media talking about how there is no proof of anything involving current at the behest of his son and money…but then back when former was getting investigated and impeached…there was pretty much their side saying that there was no proof. And while we know now that there was actually no proof of wrongdoing by former…we don’t know that about current yet. However…there’s a lot of smoke but no visible flames yet…and it deserves being investigated to see if there is any actual evidence. Without being able to see *everything* the congress has gathered, it’s impossible to say where there is actual evidence or just muckraking…but really, it was the same last time…I distinctly remember how Schiff and his ilk kept saying “we have undeniable written proof and I’ll show it to you later”…but later never came.

Both sides in every recent impeachment (except for Clinton’s, which was a slightly different case) have a lot of innuendo about collusion, corruption, payoffs, the big guy, and don and on…and both sides have protested vehemently that there is no proof…and no evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors” as is required for impeachment. 

But ya know…here’s the deal. Impeachment is absolutely not a legal thing…because according to the constitution it isn’t a legal thing, it’s a throwing people out of office thing. And that my friends…makes it a political thing with political pros and cons and attempts to influence the voters in election season.  Now personally…every impeachment (including Clinton’s)…was doomed from the start as the House in all cases was held by the opposite party and the House is historically far less carefully considered evaluation and much more stick it to the other side than the Senate. I can’t recall if the Senate was controlled by the Democrats for Clinton…but there was clearly not a 2/3 majority who would vote to convict (and convict here is specifically not in the legal justice system definition) and for the former and perhaps current impeachment proceedings the Senate is majority of the President’s party so it’s not going anywhere anyway regardless of the 2/3 majority requirement. So…in my opinion…any impeachment of current is just as doomed as impeachment of former…and the House leadership knows this to their core…and are doing it anyway (or attempting to for current as I type this) and this makes it entirely a political tactic. And going forward…I predict that every President who has a majority House of the opposite party will get investigated and perhaps impeached…and none of them will actually go anyplace because of the 2/3 majority if not the Senate being the President’s party.

Now…I have no idea whether current actually performed any corrupt actions as either the Veep or the former Veep or the current officeholder…but it is clearly obvious to just about anyone with an IQ above room temperature that the rich and powerful get away with a lot of close to the line things and perhaps some over the line things because they’re the rich and powerful. It shouldn’t be that way…but I recognize reality when I see it and also recognize that reality isn’t going to change just because I think it’s screwed up. So…absent seeing all the evidence presented in an unbiased manner and having it analyzed, challenged, and cross examined in a non political manner (which is pretty darned unlikely overall) it’s impossible to say for certain…beyond reasonable doubt…that either former or current actually committed either a high crime or misdemeanor which warrants impeachment and removal from office or whether they committed an actual crime for which they could be indicted and convicted and sent to prison. It’s also not clear whether (as former says and the SCOTUS is considering) whether any President is shielded from prosecution for his actions while carrying out his duties…and I can see an argument to be made for the answer to that question to be either Yes or No…so I’m glad that somebody else has to decide that rather than politicians or media personalities.

I just wish all this BS would go away and the two parties actually do their job and run the country, compromise on difficult issues, and generally not be infantile jerks…but who am I kidding, that ain’t gonna happen.

On the other hand…I see from this
article…that once again our thoughts that no longer teaching civics in high school has led to the dumbing down of the American people and clearly they’ll let you write articles that (a) are completely wrong and nobody actually fact checks them and (b) prove my point about dumbing down. To wit…this article by Dawn Alcott makes the following assertions…that Nancy Pelosi “stepped down from her role as Speaker of the House at the end of 2022”…and “leaving the House without a speaker at the start of the new year”. So…looking at actual facts…it’s clear that Dawn just doesn’t know what the hell she is talking about. 

A Congress is elected for a two year interval…the current one is the 1128th and runs from Jan 3, 2023 to Jan 3, 2025…and the previous one was the 117th running from 2021 to 2023. The new House is sworn in on Jan 3 and the old one is dissolved…and the first order of business of the House is to elect a Speaker…this is historically been the leader of whichever party would have the majority in the new House. In the 117th this was Ms. Pelosi…but she did not step down as Dawn claims…her term office ended and thus she was (as of Jan 3, 2023) no longer Speaker in the same manner that a President doesn’t step down…his term office ends on Jan 20 regardless of whether a successor is sworn in on that date. And the House…well, it wasn’t leaderless either as the first job it has is to elect a speaker and the rules provide for who actually manages the voting for the new speaker…and whoever that is has zero authority to do *anything* except manage the election of the Speaker and deliver the gavel to whoever that is. 

We learned all of this back in high school…because ya know, back in the day Civics was a required course so students would…actually be taught how the government works…but with the lack of that any longer we get people like Dawn who just blather on demonstrating their complete lack of knowledge.

Let’s see…what else I got.

I see that COP 28…ya know the climate change hand wringers…anyway they met in Dubai this week to discuss how to get rid of climate change (an actually impossible task) by eliminating carbon. I’ve never understood how all these rich tree hugger influencers can justify living in their big mansions and flying in their private airplanes to places around the world to debate climate change despite the way above average carbon production they’re personally responsible for…but ya know, that crowd believes in “rules for thee but not for me” I guess. Anyway…they’ve decided to “eliminate the carbon fuel industry by 2050 by legislating scientific progress and…although some of them labeled this point as heresy…actually increasing the amount of nuclear power energy production. They make no mention of exactly where the scientific progress in fusion power, better efficient solar panels, energy storage solutions for the power for when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing…but hey, they just say it will be so.

Now…I’m not saying that climate change is non existent or that it’s a good thing. What I am saying is that climate has always been changing over the 6 billion-ish years of the planet’s existence and it will continue to change. There has been an increase in global temperatures since the dawn of the industrial age…but that’s only been 200 or so years out of the 6 billion and we’ve only been able to measure temperature for about those same 200 years. While ice cores and their scientific analysis does present some idea of what the temperatures were like 3 million years ago…and despite the claims of the climate warriors to the contrary…it’s still a best guess at this point and while people and their cars, power plants, and all certainly have some effect on the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere…it’s not really possible (outside of idiots on both sides of the debate who ignore all evidence that doesn’t support their predetermined conclusion) whether people are a significant contributor, the major one, a minor one, or not at all in the overall scheme of things. And an even more important fact is that short of getting rid of about 2/3 of the 8 billion-ish people on the planet and their associated need for light, water, heat, and food…this isn’t a problem that is solvable. Realistically…the only long term solution that doesn’t violate the laws of physics is the development of fusion power. Fusion will provide essentially limitless power and there’s an essentially limitless amount of fusion fuel in the water in the ocean…but we’ve been 10 years from reliable commercially available fusion power for at least the last 30 or 40 years. Fusion is hard because of the conditions required to make it work. Fusion is expensive because of those conditions…and while we understand how to make fusion work in a thermonuclear fusion missile warhead…making it work in a controlled manner that can generate electricity for us is still a ways away. We’ll probably eventually get there…but all the climate warriors in the world can’t legislate scientific progress any faster than it’s going to happen. And in the meantime…COP kept talking about how the Chinese are on track to place in service more solar power in the next 10 years than the rest of the world combined (or some similar claim)…the same COP ignores the fact that China is continuing to build coal powered power plants at far greater rates than they’re building solar panels and they’re completely ignoring the carbon problem from those plants (both COP and China are doing this)…while demanding that the US and the rest of Western civilization essentially bankrupt their economies and industries to meet unachievable goals.

It’s a hard problem…and I wish there was an answer…but neither the “it’s not happening” people on one side or the “renewable can save us” people on the other side have a clue about what the answer is either. 

69…yeah, the number 69 so I guess this fits into math nerdery.

69 is the only number which when squared (4,761) and cubed (328,509) uses every digit from 0 through 9 exactly once.

And another bit of math nerdery…the number 115,132,219,018,763,992,565,095,597,973,971,522,401 is apparently unique. It is a 39 digit number that equals the sum of each of its digits raised to the 39th power.

Ok, enough of the math stuff…I’ve shown a similar image as these two regarding the amount of water on earth but keep seeing different ways of showing just how small the amount of water on the planet is. This first one…and the image credit is in the image…shows the total amount of water on earth (the largest sphere), the amount of liquid fresh water (the middle one) and the amount of liquid fresh water contained in lakes and rivers (the really tiny sphere about where Atlanta would be on the map…and all of this despite water covering 71% of the planet’s surface area.

This second one is a pie chart version of essentially the same data…I have no idea who did it though but found it on the application formerly known as Twitter.

Just goes to show how little fresh water there is.

This is the OmniVision OV6948…it’s the worlds smallest digital image sensor (like the ones in your digital camera)…it measures 0.575 x 0.575 x 0.232mm and is a 40 megapixel sensor (more pixels than in a lot of current top of the line digital cameras). I’m not sure what it’s used for…but it’s really tiny sitting there on a fingertip.

Just a couple of photos for you today…and both of them are old. One Neil’s photography forum somebody posted a thread saying to post your oldest digital landscape image…Neil submitted these two which both date from 2002. The first is from the area outside of Sedona AZ and the second is the Fantasy Island waterfall in Kauai…both were taken on their 25th anniversary trip to Hawaii via Arizona for a work meeting Connie needed to be at.

Cyas.