Travels with Gunther and Kara

Yeah…random stuff.

Not much new going on ‘round here so just a random assortment of stuff from the web, corona, old people, and what have you. No new wildlife to report.

Connie and Neil are both slowly improving from the Covid…the get-tired-really-easy thing is still going on and the GI-tract-just-ain’t-right thing is also still going on…but overall we continue to improve and are really glad to be out of Covid jail as we were calling it.

The weather here in Fort Myers has cooled off a lot…highs mostly in the upper 70s the last week and in the 60s and 70s next week…so we’ve got the windows and doors open and are enjoying the best time of the year in SW FL.

We got ourselves a bed for the spare bedroom on order…thank goodness for online ordering at Rooms2Go…but it’s not getting delivered until late February…guess there’s a lot of people buying furniture down here after moving in. The one we picked shows as in stock so maybe it’s just the delivery folks that are backed up. Last week after we were out of Covid jail we did get out and order a mattress and box spring to go on the aforementioned bed…they’re getting delivered on Wednesday but we could have had them as soon as the next day when we ordered it…so maybe the bed isn’t actually in stock and they are awaiting delivery…either than or Rooms2Go delivery is just inefficient.

After we ordered the mask we ran by Home Depot and got a bunch of assorted minor stuff for some projects…an additional light for the lanai so Neil doesn’t have to grill by flashlight, a 7.5 foot pre-lighted fake Christmas tree since there are no you-cut-em places down here and the ones in the lots got cut so long ago and are sitting around in the heat as they traveled to FL and sit in the lots…they look pretty scraggly and not worth hauling home. The fake one isn’t as nice…but it is what it is I guess.

I saw this week
where the Squad…ya know, those 4 ridiculously left women reps including AOC…anywhere they want Mr. Biden to cancel student debt completely. Now actually he can’t do this…he might be legally able to cancel federally owned student debt but even that is questionable…and the vast majority of debt is held by various financial institutions and not the federal government so that debt can’t be cancelled under the takings clause of the Constitution unless the government makes the financial institutions whole…which requires Congress to appropriate the money. Student debt is on the order of $1.6 trillion and at least $1.2 trillion of that is not government owned…so that’s another $1.2 trillion of money that we don’t have…and there’s simply not enough money held by the “rich” people to finance that sort of bailout on top of climate change bailouts, failed Democratic state bailouts, health care bailouts, USPS bailouts, and all the other bailouts the progressives are demanding.

But the real kicker…is that the 4 members of the Squad would personally benefit to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars.

And the cancellation would only apply to those people who have not repaid their loans. It isn’t the government’s fault they took on loans they couldn’t afford to pay…and it is simply unfair to wipe away the debt of the deadbeats while telling those who worked to pay off their student loan tough nuggies.

Speaking of progressive demands…so far Mr. Biden seems to be pretty much ignoring their demands for all the far leftists to be put into his cabinet simply because the progressives do not represent the majority of the people in the country and their agenda is just too socialist for the vast majority of the population.

President Trump gets routinely blasted for appointing conservatives to the bench and for mostly appointing white male people to his administration…so then why aren’t the WAMM up in arms over Ms. Harris appointing a 100% female communications staff. It isn’t that there aren’t qualified women…there certainly are…but appointing only women is misandry…which is the female equivalent of misogyny. Appointing only women simply because they are women is just as reprehensible as appointing only white males or only black males or whatever other group one might pick.

According to
this from the CDC…the actual Covid-19 infection rate is likely 8 times the reported rate. Now I’m not minimizing the threat of the disease but it does seem that with that being the actual infection rate the death rate is way less than 1%…and of the same order of magnitude as the seasonal flu. Again…I’m not comparing Covid to the flu as they’re distinct infections…but on balance it seems that we just might…might…be over reacting to the problem with shutdowns, middle seats being closed on planes, bars being closed and all the other economically harmful things various states and cities have done. Yes…we need to be careful but a Presidential administration and government has to take a lot of factors into account…deaths are bad obviously, as is overloading the capacity of the medical system to treat patients…but keeping people employed so they can pay rent, buy groceries, and pay the power bill also needs to be considered. It’s a hard problem…but too many people don’t realize all the factors that need consideration and government needs to make the best overall decision. 

Only in Seattle…
they’re slashing the police budget there…despite homicide levels being the highest in the past decade. Now I’m sure that there are some bad apples in the law enforcement business…just as there are bad apples in the progressive movement, lawyers, doctors, computer guys, car repairmen, and every other segment of life. I’m also sure that the vast majority of law enforcement doesn’t go to work in the morning hoping to shoot a person of color today…in fact I’ll wager that their two highest priorities are (a) to be alive and go home to their family at the end of their shift and (b) that they don’t have to shoot anybody because shooting people is generally not career enhancing and shooting a person of color is even worse. I’m not suggesting that all police shootings are justified…but in the vast majority of cases they turn out to be justified…and part of the trouble is that people of color commit crimes at a far greater percentage than their percentage of the population…FBI statistics bear out that his is true. As the 40s and 50s bank robber Willie Sutton said when asked why he robbed banks…”That’s where the money is”…perhaps some of the blame for people of color getting shot is because they commit crimes. Not all of them…and not every situation…but the “white cops just want to murder innocent black men” trope is simply not true.

Anyway…seems like slashing the police budget in the midst of a homicide pandemic…well it just seems stupid to me.

Facebook…well they’ve decided to just be Facebook and let their political opinions influence their policies.
According to this…FB has long had a hate speech algorithm that is race blind…in other words whether a particular post was hate speech and got banned was not racially influenced…it was language and meaning influenced. While we hate FB personally…that seems like a pretty good policy that would help eliminate all hate speech.

No more though. FB has gotten into trouble with the WAMM because they…shockingly…deleted some black user’s posts…because they were hate speech under the old algorithm. Not acceptable to blacks and the WAMM though…after all it’s only conservative white males that can possibly have hate speech. So the new FB hate speech algorithm will only go after the “worst of the worst” like blackface, Holocaust denial, stereotypes about Jewish financiers controlling the world, and other anti muslim, anti black, and anti LBGTQ posts. So in other words…it’s only the hate speech that progressives don’t like that will get banned…hate speech from their favored groups is just fine.

Another example of “do what I say, not what I do”. As we all know…the President has raised a whole bunch of lawsuits over mail in ballots, signature verification, counting procedures, and assorted other complaints about the election. Naturally…the WAMM and progressives have roundly condemned him for this.

Now personally I think that most of the lawsuits are BS and should never have been filed…but in America one can sue over anything and if a candidate wishes to sue over whatsoever that should be his right. We’ve seen all this BS ever since the election over whether the President would leave the White House willingly or not and frankly that’s just a bunch of hooey…there are enough certified EC votes so that Mr. Biden will be the next President.

What’s unacceptable is that the WAMM only chooses to condemn conservatives or Republicans who cry foul over elections. According to this article…the election for a retiring Democrat House member was originally called for the Republican candidate by 47 votes which triggered a mandatory recount. After the recount…the winning margin as certified by Iowa election officials was 6 votes and the Republican candidate was certified as the winner.

Under Iowa law…the losing candidate can contest the election and a panel of 5 Iowa state judges who would consider the matter and make a decision on who the winner is…which then could be appealed (presumably, the article doesn’t say) to the state Supreme Court. So…did the losing Democratic candidate do this?

Of course she didn’t…instead she is filing an appeal to the House of Representatives under the Federal Contested Elections Act…under this act the losing candidate can appeal to the House directly and the House will make the decision on who won rather than Iowa voters or the Iowa legal system. So…instead of following state law to contest the results…she is appealing to the Ms. Pelosi controlled House of Representatives who will almost surely find after their investigation that the election was corrupt and the Democratic candidate actually won.

So tell me again how interested in fair play the Democrats are?

So mathematicians…I’ve about decided that they have too much free time on their hands and spend it on completely useless information.

Recall my last post when we talked about the value of 𝛑…and how they wasted who knows how much computer power and electricity to calculate the value out to 50 trillion decimal places…despite the fact that 15 is plenty enough for NASA to calculate space trajectories and 49 is enough to measure the circumference of the known universe to the precision of the diameter of a hydrogen atom.

Not to be outdone by coming up with completely useless information…let me tell you about the Munchausen Number or more precisely the concept of Perfect Digit to Digit Invariant or PDDI. A Munchausen number is a number such that if you take each digit and raise it to the power of itself, then add the resulting values up you get the number itself. For example…

As you can see…such numbers exist but according to Wikipedia there are exactly 2 known examples in our normal base 10 number system as shown above.

I guess they’re cool and an interesting concept…but even mathematicians admit that they are of no use whatsoever for anything other than…gee whiz, we found some numbers that exhibit this strange property. So my question is…since they’re useless then why oh why would anybody waste mental cycles on inventing the concept or figuring out which actual numbers fit their useless concept.

Then there’s Anagram Arithmetic…again a useless concept invented by math people for no other reason other than because.

The example is composed of the numbers 11, 2, 12, and 1…and as we learned in probably first grade

11 + 2 = 12 + 1.

Yes…13 equals 13. But wait, there’s more as Ron Popiel used to say. Taking the above formula and converting it to the words instead we get 

Eleven + two = twelve + one

And here’s where the anagram comes in. As you may (or maybe not) know…an anagram is when you take letters in a word or phrase and jumble them around into another word…for example spot becomes tops or heart becomes earth.

You guessed it…if you anagram the words eleven and two you get the words twelve and one.

Not to be outdone…the math nerds came up with another example

Thirteen + twenty – one = (ninety/two)-ten – three

Yup…another example with a grand total of 2 examples in the English language…and yup again…completely useless.

So…why?

Second hand smoke…that’s when non smokers health and welfare is compromised by breathing in the exhaled smoke containing tar, nicotine and all those other harmful chemicals from the ever decreasing percentage of the population that smokes. Now I’m not really interested in whether the rights of the smokers should outweigh the rights of the non smokers to remain smoke free…that’s another debate…but I only bring it up as an example of progressive hypocrisy.

Out in San Francisco…it has been illegal for years to smoke in public except in dedicated smoking areas and they recently passed an amended ordnance to prohibit smoking in apartments because of the second hand smoke being moved by the ventilation system into neighboring apartments…and I’m actually just fine with prohibiting smoking in apartments for the same reason it’s prohibited outside…those of us who don’t smoke are the majority and we have the right not to have our health compromised and our hair and clothes stink from smoker’s disgusting habit. However…in an “only in the liberal utopia”…or perhaps “only in the Peoples Republic of California” decision…the law prohibiting smoking in apartments to protect others does not apply to marijuana. Yes…despite the drawbacks of that particular form of smoking both medically and otherwise…and despite the fact that it is perfectly legal in the PRC to smoke the disgusting stuff…and despite the second hand smoke effects on the other denizens of the apartment building…only tobacco smoking is prohibited in apartments…smoking dope is perfectly fine and legal.

Only in the PRC I guess.

Things that might only be of interest to me. 

Last time we had the giant caiman and but it’s not the only really big creature from back in the past. Back in the Carboniferous period (whenever that was) they had some dragonflies like this.

And then there is the Megalodon…which was a shark that lived some 2.5 million years ago…and no, I have no idea what period that was…go google it if you care. Here’s a shot of the fossilized jaw of the Megalodon.

That little fish in the middle is a current era Great White Shark which gets 20 feet long and 5,000 pounds in weight with most females in the 16 feet range and males in the 12 foot range. The Megalodon…well it was some 60 feet long and probably 100,000 pounds.

Fifty one years ago this week there was an expansion in the internet…in a single day it grew by 33% to a total of 4 different sites. This is a map of the internet in 1969.

Speaking of really hard things becoming pretty much routine…

Today SpaceX conducted the 100th successful launch of a Falcon 9 rocket with (I believe) only 2 failures. Today’s launch was the inaugural launch of the improved Dragon cargo capsule to the ISS and used a first stage which has now flown and landed successfully 4 times…including the Demo-2 mission a few months back which was the first launch of the manned version of the Dragon to the ISS. After a flawless 8 minute ride to orbit the cargo is on the way to the ISS and the booster successfully landed on the SpaceX drone ship off the coast of Florida.

I know space flight is hard…and I also know that Elon Musk is pretty much an arrogant asshole…but he did build a rocket company that launches rockets routinely for a cost of about $62 million per flight, recovers the first stage booster which is then reused in as little as a month after checkout, and has a better success rate and lower cost per launch than either NASA or the other companies trying to commercialize space launches. Gotta give the twerp credit for that…although I can’t say the same for his car company as it is still heavily subsidized and in the long term electric vehicles aren’t really going to cut it until or unless somebody spends a metric buttload of money on charging infrastructure.

We all know what a black hole is I figure…but in the astronomy world there is this thing called a super massive black hole…I didn’t bother to look up the precise definition but you can…again…google it if you care.

Anyways…the largest known super massive black hole is named S50014+81…and it’s a long way from our solar system…but just how big is it.

Well…the picture below shows you the calculated/estimated size of this thing. It is about 40 billion times the mass of the sun and approaches the theoretical size limit for black holes that formed via the conventional accretion disk method…and it has a diameter of 1,580 AU or astronomical units. 1 AU is the average distance from the earth to the sun or about 93,000,000 miles. The three circles in the middle represent the size of the solar system depending on how you define our solar system but it ranges from 80 AU to 180 AU depending on whether you define the solar system as the largest orbit of a body in the system or several other definitions of the edge of the solar system and the beginning of interstellar space. In any of the cases…this super massive black hole is really, really big.

A little Christmas humor

I don’t mean to be a grinch, however…. to those of you who are placing Christmas lights/decorations in your yards, would you please avoid anything that has Red or Blue flashing lights together? Every time I come around the corner, I think it’s the police and I have a panic attack. I have to brake hard, toss my wine out the window, fasten my seat belt, throw my phone on the floor, turn my radio down, and push the gun under the seat. All while trying to drive. It’s just too much drama, even for Christmas. Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.

Then there’s
this video which shows you the hazards of launching fireworks during the holidays. Our friend Adrienne sent it along.

Interesting stuff found on the net.

I wonder why we really need step 6 in these directions.

Cyas.

I finally figured out why the Biden transition hasn’t started yet…and it’s not really either what the Ds or the Rs claim. The Ds claim it is because the President hasn’t conceded the election and is trying to steal it while the Rs claim that the vote was rigged and illegal votes were counted. Then there’s the whole brouhaha over whether the transition delay will “impact 10s of thousands of people with CoViD and result in many more deaths”, whether “National Security will be affected due to the delay in Intelligence briefings”, and “the President refuses to concede”…but I’ll get to those in a minute.

The actual fact is that Mr. Biden almost surely will be the winner but as of today (November 22) is not. Yes…most of the media pundits have “called” the election for him…but the last time I checked CNN, NYT, and politico.com aren’t the folks who actually get to make that decision…and based on their rather poor results in estimating (a) the turnout in favor of the President, the actual closeness of the election in an overall state by state Electoral College view; (b) the complete inaccuracy in predicting the “blue wave” where the Ds would take over the Senate and increase their majority in the House thus paving the way for the Green New Deal and a whole bunch of other tax and spend progressive demands; and (c) the overall political divide in the country…well, let’s just say I’m not sure that taking the media’s word for it is the proper thing to do.

The actual declarer of the “apparent winner” of the election is actually the head of the GSA…and there is precious little precedent or legal guidance on how the GSA head is to make this determination. Yes…she is a political appointee and likely doesn’t want to go against the boss…but from everything I’ve read after filtering out all the pro/con bias…she seems to be a pretty straight shooter and a lawyer who is trying to follow the limited guidance and precedent she has. She even talked to the guy who was in charge of the GSA in 2000 about when he gave his certification for the “apparent winner” which actually came in early December after the SCOTUS decision regarding the Florida recount.

So…all of those brouhaha claims above.

• Yes…the Covid will continue regardless of the transition and more people will get ill and some of them will die. However…the vaccine research and approval process will continue regardless and it will be approved when it is approve regardless of the transition. Since the President doesn’t have the legal authority to shut down the country completely or to order a mask requirement nationwide…public health is actually a state by state responsibility…it’s hard to see how having the transition start or not really affects the progression of the virus. Yes…Mr. Biden has appointed his new task force…but we’ve already got a task force and the guy pretty much running things is Dr. Fauci…who the Ds have held up for the past 6 months or so as the only Trump administration official who is actually doing his job and worrying about the pandemic. So…this one is just a bunch of posturing and spin.
• National Security won’t be affected. The new administration doesn’t take over until January 20…and delaying the Intelligence briefings until early December or so won’t really affect the ability of a Biden administration to execute National Security. The vast majority of the National Security apparatus is composed of career bureaucrats who will continue to function and do what they’re doing regardless. Besides…Mr. Gore didn’t get any briefings in 2000 until after the outcome of the SCOTUS case either…and while the 9/11 Commission said that the delay “may have contributed to the 9/11 attack”…they presented no actual evidence that it did or did not and could have just as easily said that Mr. Gore’s tie color may have affected it…and neither is particularly relevant.
• The President refuses to concede. Yes…he does…but again that is irrelevant. His term runs until Jan 20 and then ends regardless of a concession. The EC will meet and elect the new President in December regardless of the concession. Speaking of concession and poor losers…which the President most certainly is…Stacey Abrams has never conceded the GA governor election from 2 years ago either. So…another case of spin and posturing for the media.

My personal belief is that as soon as 270 EC votes have been certified by the states for Mr. Biden that the GSA will make the “apparent winner” determination and the transition will happen from there. As of today…11 states have certified their totals…4 for Mr. Biden and 7 for the President and the President is leading the EC count 63-35. No…I’m not saying that he will win or has won either…but most of the states that have certified are smaller states where the winner was pretty clear. Looking at the other 39 states…21 have Mr. Biden in the unofficial lead and 18 the President. You can look
here [Editors note: I normally hate the NYT and would never typically link to anything they write as they are a very biased outlet and lie/distort/misinform…but this is just a tabulation of actual verified results so hopefully they can at least report these numbers accurately and without bias. Besides…it was the only place I could find that has an actual EC tally to date.].  to get the updated count as we go on but another 21 or so certify by early December and another 7 by December 11…that will get us up to 40ish states by early December and my guess is the the 270 EC vote number will have been certified by then…and the GSA will name the apparent winner and things will move along.

So…take a deep breath and let the process play out…I know that is hard for progressives who are used to just stamping their feet an holding their breath until they get their way…but deal with it. America will survive the delay…and democracy will be preserved…although I keep wanting to remind progressives of a couple of actual facts.

• We do not live in a democracy. In a democracy everybody gets together and the citizens make the decision then the government executes the decision. The United States has never…ever…been a democracy. What it is…well, it’s a federated democratic republic…an organization of states with a Constitution that assigns particular rights to the states and the federal government, sets up the branches, and delegates powers granted to and denied to the branches. So get off of it already.
• We also don’t give a damn about the popular vote…never have. President’s are elected by the EC…which was a compromise that the founding fathers made in order to get a Constitution that could be ratified in the first place. Without the EC…there would not be a United States because the 10 colonies outside of MA, NY, and VA would have never ratified it since without the EC those 3 states would have elected every President they wanted based on population and the other 10 states would have no say. The EC ensured that all of the flyover states populated by chumps who cling to their guns and religion would be adequately represented in the Presidential election and that the President would need to win states sufficient to win the EC.

So…what else is new around Long Pond Road…easy answer…nuttin’.

Big Red is still in the shop getting fixed…2 of the under the hood wiring harnesses got snacked on by mice…we think it’s all done but our service rep left early Thursday and was off on Friday. He said we would get a call when it was done but nope…didn’t happen so we’re hanging around until Monday.

Neil picked up groceries from the Walmart pickup on Friday.

And that’s it.

Interesting things found on the net…both Covid and Turkey Day related…and some that are both…so ya get a mix today.

Things that might only interest me.

Where’s the biggest waterfall in the world? Most folk know that it’s Angel Falls or Kerepakupai Merú  in the native Pemon language meaning “the fall from the highest point”…it is located in the middle of nowhere in Venezuela…it has an uninterrupted plunge of 807 meters (2,648 feet) and a total height of 979 meters (3,212 feet)…it essentially flows over the side of a cliff…well the edge actually…of Auyán-tepui mountain in their Canaima National Park. Here’s what it look like…image from wikipedia.

Except…it’s actually not the tallest waterfall in the world…the American Heritage Dictionary says that a waterfall is “A steep fall or flow of water from a height; a cascade; a cataract”.

So…what is the actual largest waterfall in the world? It’s name is the Denmark Strait Cataract…at over 3,905 meters it is 3 times as tall as Angel Falls and it carries 2,000 times more water per second than the flow over Niagara Falls of about 85,000 cubic meters per second…or about 17,000,000 cubic meters per second.

So…how come you’ve never heard of this waterfall? Simple…it is underwater. The Denmark Strait is the are between the east coast of Greenland and the west coast of Iceland and it is about 300 miles long and 180 miles wide and you’ve probably heard of it from the tales of the sinking of the HMS Hood by the German battleship Bismarck during WWII…that battle took place at the southwest/south end of the strait. 

As you can see in the picture below…the Atlantic Ocean is to the left and the Arctic Ocean to the right with a steep peak at the southern portion of the strait only about 2,000 feet deep which is pretty shallow as oceans go. As you know…in the Atlantic there is a current named the Gulf Stream with a northern extension known as the North Atlantic Drift that flows with warm tropical water from the Gulf of Mexico, around Florida, up the east coast of North America then at surface level both northward through the Denmark Strait but also through what sailors call the GIUK gap for Greenland, Iceland, United Kingdom gap…with most of the flow going north east of Iceland…and no, the GIUK Gap has no other name as it’s too wide at about 500 miles to be a strait.

So all of the water in the Gulf Stream…I couldn’t find the flow rate on google but it’s about 90 miles wide on average and flows at 5 knots or 5.625 nautical miles per hour or about 6 miles per hour. Figure it’s on average 2 miles deep to make the math easy and that’s 90 times 2 times 6 cubic miles per hour or 1080 cubic miles. Converting to cubic feet per second…that’s 0.3 cubic miles per second or somewhere in the neighborhood of 125 million cubic feet per second. The only problem with that inflow into the Arctic Ocean is that there’s nowhere for the water to go as the Arctic Ocean is essentially landlocked. Yes…some could sneak around the top of Canuckistan and southward through the Bering Strait…but that is a narrow and shallow strait so not much could get by there. Some could head north around the top of Russia but again the only southward possibility there is the Bering Strait. Some could go through the Davis Strait on the west side of Greenland and some could conceivably go around UK into the North Sea and thence through the English Channel to the Atlantic…but again both of those paths are pretty narrow and not all that deep. That leaves just one outlet for the water that the Gulf Stream is jamming into the Arctic Ocean…and that is southward at the bottom of both the GIUK Gap and the Denmark Strait…and that’s exactly what happens.

And you know…as Paul Harvey used to say…the rest of the story.

Another thing that might only interest me…pareidolia…an interesting concept of the human mind that lets us see images in random stuff…for instance the Man In The Moon illusion, the Old Man of the Mountain formation that used to be up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire at Franconia Notch, among many others. So…look at the picture below quickly and let me know what you see.

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So…what did you see?

Like most of us…the first thing you saw was some sort of clown/Mardi Gras mask face with eyes, nose, ears, and an open mouth.

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Then…maybe…you noticed that it is really just a strange view of a shark underwater…or maybe not.

Our friend Bill sent us this one…

Although…actually nurses probably don’t know how to set it up either. They know how to hook it up to the patient and adjust the controls…but setup and connection was almost surely done by the IT staff at the hospital…who were in turn assisted by the tech reps from the various companies that make the equipment. Nurses are good, Doctors are cool…but Medical Laboratory Scientists…i.e., the lab techs…are the true rulers in the field. MLSs are usually at least as good at analyzing test results and figuring out what the patient probably has as the doctor is since the MLSs live and breathe the lab tests every day.

And finally

and

Thanks Captain Obvious.

Cyas.

First up…congratulations to President-elect Biden…he won and although there will be some more ongoing court cases I don’t think they will change the outcome…the President will run into the same issue that Gore ran into years ago in that courts are unlikely to change the outcome.

So…what does the election mean? A few thoughts.

There’s no mandate or blue wave despite what you read in the news. Mr. Biden won the 4 swing states that gave him the 270 EC votes he needs by about 88,000 votes total with those states having about 15 million total votes cast…so he won those states by about 0.6%. While there’s been no final EC count yet due to several uncalled states…he will likely end up with 300-310 EC votes and the President about 230-240. I’m sure that the Democrats will declare the EC vote to be their mandate…but then this is the same EC that they have decried as being unfair and illegitimate for the past 4 years. Popular vote wise…he won by about 4 million with 150 million votes cast for a margin of 2.8% so even the meaningless popular vote doesn’t support mandate or wave claims.

The Democrats will end up losing 8 to 15 seats in the House and will most likely not take control of the Senate…so again…the predicted blue wave didn’t happen. There’s already a whole bunch of internal squabbling in the party over whose fault the results are…most centrist Democrats are blaming the progressive/liberal/Green New Deal crowd which I think is the primary cause but folks like AOC are claiming that it isn’t the progressives fault but rather the poor campaigns run by Democrats that lost.

What I really think is that overall the country really prefers divided government since the USA is mostly a center to center-right country. Having one party in complete control of legislature and executive would just give free reign to the nutcases in each party to implement policies that aren’t mostly center-ish. Control of the Senate in Republican hands will likely force Mr. Biden to have cabinet choices, legislative efforts, and judges that are a lot closer to center than Ms. Harris, Warren, and AOC will demand. That’s a good thing. Control of the Senate will also put the kibosh on idiotic ideas promoted by the far left like court packing and term limits for SCOTUS…which again is a good thing since it would just result in tit for tat counter idiotic ideas when next the Republicans are in charge…and it will also kill the statehood idea for Washington DC and Puerto Rico as those are just Senate packing ideas. DC doesn’t have the land area or tax base to realistically be a state…and Puerto Rico should be given the opportunity to become independent or a state if we’re going to make a decision on them; the referendum which barely passed only had statehood as an option. Me…I think it’s time to let Puerto Rico go independent much like the Philippines did…and rather than statehood for DC they should be assigned to MD as a congressional district and to MD (or VA to split the idea) for Senate voting. Originally, both VA and MD gave parts of their land to become DC…but the capital was only built on the MD side and the VA land returned to VA…that’ why the District is diamond shaped on the eastern side and river shaped on the western side. The issue is that the Constitution says that Senators and Representatives are assigned to states…so it would take a constitutional amendment to achieve this goal…and while amendments are deliberately hard to produce I think an amendment that did this would pass…because it is fair to the voters in DC but doesn’t really give either party a political advantage. It would put one more almost guaranteed House seat in the Democratic column but allowing them to vote for one of the Senate races in both MD and VA seems pretty fair and not politically advantageous to either side to me overall. However…this idea requires common sense and the ability to compromise which are both in scarce supply in our politics these days.

Mr. Biden said yesterday that it’s time to heal…in my idea he should issue a preemptive pardon to the President and should lean on NY to leave it alone as well…both in the interest of moving forward and in the interest of not having his entire term taken up by endless coverage of legal battles…especially as Mr. Biden has skeletons in his closet as well (Hunter Biden and Tara Reid for instance). At this point…it would be almost impossible to seat an unbiased jury for any proceedings against the President…because there aren’t any potential jurors who haven’t already made up their minds.

Let’s not forget my prediction placeholder from back on Aug 19…I’m still not ready to get into detail for that one yet but the thoughts that led me to establish that placeholder are still valid in my mind

I wonder too whether Mr. Biden hasn’t just taken the progressives for a ride. After he clinched the nomination…he said and did a lot of things that sounded progressive…but Really wonder how much he actually believed and would do what he said. He could not have won the election without the support of the far left voters…so he needed to say whatever he needed to say to get them to come out and vote. However…throughout his time in the Senate and as VP…he has a reputation as a negotiator and bipartisan let’s get some of what both sides want…we won’t know until later but I personally think that he will be a lot more that way than the out there with the Green New Deal crowd.

Will he solve the corona? I know he’s made all these grandiose statements about what he will do…but by and large what he’s said he will do is pretty much what the current administration has already been doing…largely public health is more of a state responsibility. Whoever the President is…he can’t order a national mask mandate…it isn’t within his power. I grant you…he will sound a lot more presidential than his predecessor but I’m not convinced that anything material will change. The corona will be with us until (a) we get a vaccine, (b) we reach herd immunity, or (c) it runs through the susceptible population and dies out on it’s own as pandemics (Spanish flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola, et. al.) have in the past. That’s really what it will take…and none of the hand waving that “I’ll immediately solve this problem” means anything. What Republican control of the Senate means is that any relief stimulus bill will likely not include extreme bailouts for blue states that have mismanaged their finances and given far too many gold plated pension plans to their workers. I’m happy if NY and CA want to overspend their income and need to raise state taxes to support their welfare pyramids…but states who have been fiscally wiser like FL should not be punished by having our federal taxes bail them out…if NY is out of money then NY needs to raise state income tax or state income somehow.

One thing I believe will happen though. I think the Republicans will to the large extent give Mr. Biden the respect of the office that was so lacking from the other side the last 4 years. Decades ago…once a winner was declared the country got behind him and he was Our President…not the Republican’s or Democrat’s President. Sadly…and to our detriment that is no longer the case…and it seems the past 4 years have been the worst of it. It started during President Obama’s administration…but even though the other side was against him by and large they gave him the respect the office deserved. Round these parts…we will do just that until Mr. Biden demonstrates he is not worthy of it rather than de line to do just because.

Let’s see…what else.

We’re headed off to the Elks tonight for a wine tasting…essentially a nice food spread and a bunch of wine to sample. Most of our wine these days comes in a box…they have improved tremendously over the last decade or so and many of them are quite tasty and last a lot longer than a half consumed bottle does in the fridge.

Neil needs to take Li’l Red off to the Mazda dealer Monday for an oil change…we’ll be in the midst of Tropical Storm Eta being off the Florida Keys but here in North Fort Myers we’ll just see some rain (4-8 inches over Monday and Tuesday) and winds in the 30s with gusts to the upper 40s late Monday evening. Not much of a deal to us although those on the coast might see some localized storm surge as it passes. We’ll be fine we think…we’ll put our blow-around-able stuff from the lanai into the garage today, we have bottled water, a generator, gas for the generator, and plenty of toilet paper and food. From talking to our neighbors…during the past 2 hurricanes that actually made landfall near here in the last decade or so…there was no flooding at all and the neighborhood never lost power since all our lines are underground and the transmission lines aren’t really much susceptible to storm damage due to their height off the ground. It is the intermediate distribution lines that get trashed by falling trees and Magnolia Landing has it’s own substation directly from the feeder lines then underground in the neighborhood. We do need to run down and pick up a few groceries today though…although there’s nothing critical.

We did have a new visitor to the pond out back this week…as the weather has gotten colder up in the Arctic north of Jacksonville we have seen most of our old faves…2 of our 3 gators, Great Egret, Great Blue Heron, and Try-color or Louisiana Heron…but this week we had a female Anhinga. Anhinga are in the same family as cormorants are but are larger…about 15 pound turkey sized plus their neck which as you can see is long and snake like, very similar to the loon. Frequently when swimming Anhinga have their whole body submerged and just their head and neck out of the water. The fawn colored neck and breast is the female as compared to the all black male…both have the black and white checked wing pattern.

Interesting things found on the net.

You may have seen the “World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party” yesterday…this is the annual Georgia-Florida football game that is always played in Jacksonville. Anyways…Georgia lost…badly…which gives them 2 beat down losses for the year and likely puts Florida into the SEC championship game against Alabama in December. In recognition of the outcome of the game…

The Georgia coach is Kirby Smart…who used to be the defensive coordinator for Nick Saban at Alabama…and while he’s an outstanding defensive guy he really doesn’t know beans about offense and in our opinion doesn’t really know how to be the head coach either.

Our friends sends us a lot of our funny images these days…here are a few regarding 2020 via Cat…

And finally…the best of the bunch so far…

Cyas.

Or…as Bette Davis once said “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

I can’t be the only one tired of both the rampant lying by both sides in today’s election…and I wish that it would be all over after today…but it just won’t.

No matter who the eventual next President is…the other side will likely be rioting…or I guess it would be peaceful demonstrators if the President is reelected or armed right wing anti government militia if he isn’t…at least that’s the way most of the media and WAMM will present it.

In addition…we very likely won’t have a winner today due to counting of absentee/mail-in ballots…and there will be more hue and cry, not to mention dozens of lawsuits filed…over the counting of ballots. I’m guessing that most of these will be filed in federal courts or will eventually make their way there…and I really wish that the SCOTUS would issue some guidance to lower federal courts regarding election laws.

Looking back at the most recent couple dozen cases that made it to federal courts and eventually the SCOTUS…with each side winning some and losing some…I saw an article this week that analyzed not who won and lost but what the decisions actually did…and to me it looks like that article was right. SCOTUS…and Chief Justice Roberts in particular…is attempting to keep the court out of politics. The Chief Justice…in addition to worrying about interpreting the laws and deciding cases…also worries about legacy…or how people will look back on the Roberts court.

Overall…the decisions have pretty much all ruled that states are in charge of election laws and that federal courts have no jurisdiction. This is precisely what the Constitution says in Article II Section 1

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…

This section specifically says that states appoint electors and federal courts or the Congress have no say in the matter.

Further…the decisions have been that state courts have the authority to intervene in election laws. Now to me…that seems wrong as the above Section 1 quote says as the legislature thereof may direct…and by strict reading that means that the state legislatures and specifically not the state courts or state executive branch have this sole power. However…the Chief Justice is pretty much a fan of stare decisis which says that previous court precedents should be respected in adjudicating similar cases…and while I can’t find the right web page again…some years back Justice Ginsburg authored a majority opinion in a case that essentially said that by the word legislature in the above section it really meant state government and not specifically the legislature. She was a loose constructionist…which means that she (and her colleagues) are authorized to interpret the meaning of the words as opposed to just reading what it says. Anyway…I personally disagree with the loose constructionist idea and thinks that the Constitution says what it says…no more and no less…and that legislature means legislature. However…since there is precedent that says it’s the state government then unless SCOTUS overrules the precedent which they did not have enough votes to do after her death and before Justice Barrett was sworn in…that is the precedent and the Chief Justice is enforcing the precedent.

As I said…I don’t think the precedent is right but I can see the reasoning of the court so far. What this means…likely…is that any case that makes it to federal court will be essentially turned back by SCOTUS as “not the federal court’s job” and returned to state jurisdiction where state courts can override the legislature. Again…I don’t think that’s right either…but whatever.

What I’m really going to hate is that…and we know this will be the case…both presidential candidates will launch multiple lawsuits over whatever the results are today. Progressives will scream “every vote must count” at the top of their lungs and conservatives will scream “follow the state election laws on deadlines”. I can really see some validity to both points but…and you heard it here first…the media will inevitably describe these lawsuits differently. Mr. Biden’s suits will be labeled in the media as “heroic defense of democracy, the one person one vote principle, and the opposition to voter suppression”…the President’s will be labeled as “attempts to steal the election” and “a refusal to have a peaceful transfer of power”.

Do we really believe that if the President loses he isn’t going to leave office voluntarily on Jan 20? Of course he will…but I keep seeing articles saying that he won’t leave and will have to be forcefully evicted by the Secret Service or some other unnamed law enforcement personnel…but that’s just a bunch of BEP in my view. Is he going to do everything he can to achieve victory including file lawsuits? Of course he is…but so is the other guy…and let’s call a spade a spade and not try to spin the litigation differently depending on who filed it.

I think it’s going to be very close…and that the polls are off…but that’s just me.

You probably saw the outrage in the media about how the group of Trump supporters in trucks surrounded a Biden campaign bus on the freeway, attempted to force it off the road, and crashed into one of the vehicles in the Biden convoy. Well…I encourage you to go and look at the video. I didn’t see any attempts to force the bus off the road…just a bunch of idiots harassing the other side. The supposed crash…after the video was reviewed by the local law enforcement…well they said that it appears the white vehicle (which was the Biden one) swerved into the black truck (the Trump supporter) which would make it the Biden vehicle’s fault. Neither driver has filed a report or complaint and local law enforcement hasn’t talked to either as of today…but local law enforcement is also not pursuing anything at this point since according to the video the widely media reported attack on the Biden vehicle appeared to be the other way around.

Let’s see…what else is going on. Big Red died last week…wouldn’t start. We had it towed to the dealer and. They’re figuring out what’s up with him…more on that once we know more. The batteries are bad at minimum but he would crank but not start even when we jumped it so there might be something more than that involved. We did get the batteries replaced in Nowheresville, WV in September of 19…but we ended up with cheap batteries from the auto parts store since the Dodge dealer there didn’t have the right ones. They claimed the ones they put in were “the same”…we didn’t really believe that but had no choice in the matter at the time and since they seemed to work fine for the past year had not replaced them with the correct ones.

And up in the state of Virginia…apparently the
law doesn’t matter any more. In downtown there’s a traffic circle on Monument Avenue in Richmond that has a statue of Robert E. Lee on a horse…and naturally the BLM and WAMM want this statue removed because it is “an affront to people of color”. Now I’m not going to argue the merits of having a statue of the man or not…but let’s not forget that the nation’s capital is named after a slave owner and he’s got a really tall obelisk named after him located in a prominent place on the national mall. I’m also not going to argue that racism either exists or no longer exists…frankly there’s a lot of nuance in both that question as well as numerous monuments throughout the country…nor am I going to argue the merits (or not) of reevaluating historical figures based on today’s morals and norms as opposed to those that existed 100 or 200 years ago…because again there’s a lot of nuance in that discussion.

What I am going to argue is that the law…well it’s the law and you don’t get to change it just because.

See…the statue itself was paid for by non-governmental funds, the pedestal it sits on was paid for by non-governmental funds, and the land it stands on was private property as well. Back in 1890…after the statue was installed…it, the pedestal, and the land were deeded over to the state by the original owners…and in the deed issued to the state it specifically says that the pedestal and statue must be maintained by the state “in perpetuity”…that’s what the deed says. The state agreed to maintain the land and statue…period. 

So along comes BLM, George Floyd, the NAACP, and the WAMM…and they decide that they don’t like this statue since it offends them…so the newly elected Democratic governor issues an executive order that it be torn down. Naturally…conservatives didn’t like this and a group of residents along Monument Avenue filed a suit to stop the governor from just ignoring the provisions of the legally executed and agreed to by the state deed. Last week…a state judge ruled that the statue can be removed by gubernatorial order because “enforcing those deeds would be in violation of current public policy” and “the restrictive deeds are not enforceable by this court”.

So…in the state of Virginia…one can have your legal deed overturned because the state doesn’t like it (or you) any more. Doesn’t matter that deeds are legal documents regarding the ownership of property…doesn’t matter what a previous state administration agreed to…if the new guy doesn’t like it…tough, it doesn’t count.

BEP folks.

Interesting things found the net.

Since we changed the clocks back from DST over the past weekend…

I did see one article that claimed that DST was “killing us” as if what time our clocks said has any actual effect on the health and welfare of humans.

There’s a lot of truth in this one.

Does everybody remember the first iPhone? This is a picture of it…Apple eventually paid this company to buy the trademark from them.

Down in LA (that’s Lower Alabama) where Neil is from…there’s this dish named succotash…this cartoon perfectly captures how disgusting it is.

Grilled chicken.

How your smart watch evaluates your exercise.

This is a Himalayan monal, is the national bird of Nepal…it is a member of the pheasant family…quite a striking bird.

I thought this was interesting. You’ve probably heard of a thing called Pangea…it was a super-continent back that existed from about 335 million to 175 million years ago. All the dry land on earth came together into Pangea before eventually separating due to tectonic plate drift and giving us the continents we have today.

What you might not have known…is that Pangea was just the last super-continent…nobody in our house knew that there had been more than one super-continent back through history…Pangea was actually the last of 10 super-continents that existed on the earth…the earliest one was Vaalbara about 3.6to 2.8 billion years ago through Ur, Arctic, Atlantic, and 6 more of their brethren down through Pangea. Anyway…a cool little tidbit we didn’t know. The shot below shows where current countries was locate on Pangea.

And finally…

Cyas.