Changing Nature

In the early 1700s, settlers in the central valley of what would become the United States noticed that the Mississippi River would carry a much higher volume of water every Spring, causing flooding.

So they decided that they had to travel up to the head of that river, discover what was causing it to increase its volume every Spring, and prevent it from doing so, in order that the people downstream, and particularly in New Orleans, would no longer be inconvenienced and in many cases killed by the annual floods.

They discovered that the cause of the extra water each Spring was melting snow in Minnesota, and so they decided that the solution to their problem was to make it stop snowing in Minnesota. They spent the next hundreds of years attempting to make it stop snowing in Minnesota. They  failed utterly, of course, and that is why the Mississippi River still floods many square miles of land and drowns New Orleans every Spring.

Reality, of course, is different. Humans were more rational back then.

Rather than controlling nature, trying to make nature stop doing what nature had been doing for thousands of years, they decided to see what they could do to find ways to cope with what nature does. So they built levees along the river to contain the floods, allowing the Mississippi River to continue doing what nature intended for it to do, and to allow the human population to live comfortably with that reality.

The Earth has been getting warmer for 10,000 years, and we just recently noticed that. Really kind of hard to miss, what with ice caps coming all the way down to Washington, DC and then disappearing, but still…  A group of people have decided to become really alarmed about that, and I’m not going to say they are wrong, but their solution strikes me as out of touch with reality.

They are trying to stop the Earth from getting warmer. They are not seeking ways to cope with what nature is doing, they are trying to change what nature is doing. Is anyone proposing to do the current equivalent of building levees? No. They are trying to make the planet stop doing what the planet has been doing for 10,000 years.

More Evidence Needed

 A citation from LiveScience.com informs us that,

"Dotson Ice Shelf is a 30-mile-wide (50 km) chunk of floating ice seven times the size of New York City, located on the coast of Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica. It is part of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which has dramatically calving glaciers that could cause sea levels to rise by approximately 11 feet (3.4 m) if they eventually drive the entire sheet to collapse."

Since the ice shelf is presently floating in the ocean, the melting (or collapse) of the entire thing will not raise sea level by a single inch. Floating ice displaces precisely as much water as the weight of the ice, so when it melts, it leaves the water level unchanged. You can test this by putting some ice cubes in a glass of water and observing what happens to the water level when the ice cubes melt.

There is a theory, not mentioned in this article, that ice shelves serve to block the advance of glaciers, so if they are removed the glacier will advance quickly into the ocean and raise sea level rapidly and by great amounts. I have searched for any explanation or actual evidence which would back up this theory and have never found any.

Government at Work

I was notified that I can no longer log in to my Social Security account online using the username and password that I have been using for some fifteen years, as they are transitioning to a government-wide system at "Login,gov." The notice provided a link for me to use to create an account at the new log in portal.

I just spent almost fifteen minutes attempting to create that account without success. I can design and create websites, but I cannot create an account at Login.gov. 

It did accept my email address for the username, which is a seriously insecure method of entry into a sensitive account. The old SSI portal did not allow use of the email address for the username, and neither does Medicare, so the government is going to a new system which is less secure than the old one. Interesting.

The even more interesting part of the exercise came when trying to create the password. The only requirement is that it be twelve characters long and that it matches when you type it twice. Twelve characters is pretty short, and why does it not require a mixture of upper and lower case? Special characters? Numbers? Again, where is the concern for security?

In the end, it didn't matter, because it would not accept anything I entered as a password. We get the government we elect.

It Gets Even More Weird

I watched the first fifteen minutes or so of the NBC interview with President Biden during the opening hours of the Republican Convention. I don't recall an American President ever trying to steal thunder from an opposing party's convention before, and if he did so this time it was likely because a lot of people wanted to see if he would fall on his face.

Imho, he did, but that's just my opinion. It is clear to me that the emperor has no clothes, but is weirdly trying to claim that it is his opponent who is naked.

Indycar Redux

After watching Indycar spend a couple hours driving at reduced speed two weeks ago to save fuel, this weekend we watched Indycar driving 20 laps at even lower speeds to reduce tire wear. Management of the open wheel series has totally lost the bubble.

This week the race was touted as "The Million Dollar Challenge"  all winter and into the opening race of the season. Unfortunately, Indycar could not attract enough sponsorship money and was forced to reduce the winning prize to $500,000, but continued to tout the "race" as the "The Million Dollar Challenge," even during the "race" and while displaying the $500,000 prize amount on the screen.

The heat races were 20 laps long but, like the first race, announcers were telling us how slowly the drivers would be going in order to conserve. This week it was tire tread they were conserving because they were not allowed to change tires and the tires were predicted to last only about ten of the allocated 20 laps. 

Wait. Tires that can only go ten laps? Indycar has descended into comedy land. It turns out you have to drive even slower to save tire wear than you do to save fuel.

No spectators were to be seen because there are no grandstands for them to sit in. This  "race" was held at a private club. You can imagine the setting of a HOA with a privately owned, 3.6-mile race track. You're right; it costs $5 million to join.

Indycar did sell ticket packages to hang out at the HOA club house for the event - for a whopping $2,000. When they failed to sell out, they dropped the price to $500, and issued refunds to the folks who had paid the higher price. Teams were pleased, since even they had been forced to spend $2,000 just to bring guests to the track for the weekend.

We did get some very pretty views of the Southern California desert mountains, views that were far more breathtaking than was the "racing."

Saving Fuel

After watching an exciting and highly competitive Formula 1 race on Saturday, I tuned in on Sunday to watch an utterly delusional exercise in St. Petersburg, Florida which was advertised as an Indycar race. The only suspense was waiting to see if the announcers would have a heart attack over what they seemed to think was all of the excitement they were party to.

The green flag was dropped to start the race, and on the first lap we are told that the drivers are “saving fuel” (driving at less than full speed) so that they can complete the race with only two pit stops. I’m still trying to get my brain wrapped around the concept of racing at less than full speed. Three days later, I still do not grasp the concept.

The race is 100 laps and the cars can go 30 laps on a tank of fuel. By driving more slowly, they can stretch that to 33-34 laps and complete the race with only two pit stops for refueling. Of course, that means not trying to drive faster than any of the other cars, which is called “racing,” but… So it was indeed Indycar, but it was not a race.

That means I am sitting there watching 27 cars saving fuel and listening to the announcers being very excited because their favorite driver is “hitting his fuel numbers.” No one crashed, at least, because no one was going fast enough to lose control of his car. The only danger of a crash would be if a driver fell asleep.

Indycar has two kinds of tire: a “soft” tire which is faster initially but wears out sooner, and a regular tire that is harder and has less grip but lasts a lot longer. In this “race” there was no discernable difference, no matter how much the announcers pretended there was a “crossover point” where the black tire became faster than the green. Even at the end of segments, when cars were pitting for fuel, the soft tires were just as fast as the hard ones, which is what happens when you don’t drive hard enough to wear the tires out.

Finally, Indycar has a “push to pass” button, which the driver can use to gain an extra 50 hp (about 7%) for a brief period. The downside is that it uses more fuel, so in this race they were unable to use it very much. They start with 100 seconds allocated, and at the end of the race no driver had less than 60 seconds remaining. Most drivers had 90 seconds unused. Quite simply: they could not afford to go fast, could not afford to actually race.

Patrick Mahomes versus Lamar Jackson

The popular and almost universal meme of Patrick Mahomes versus Lamar Jackson is sheer and utterly stupid nonsense. They are never, ever on the field at the same time. Reality is that it is Patrick Mahomes versus the Baltimore defense and Lamar Jackson versus the Kansas City defense.

Welcome to 2024

I don’t know if the 2020 election was “rigged.” I do know that a number of issues have been presented which suggest that it may have been, and that federal courts have declined to formally examine the truth of those issues. Examination of those issues in court could remove any doubt regarding the validity of the 2020 election, and for some reason federal courts have chosen not to do that.

I don’t know why these courts do not want to examine these issues and validate the election, but I have to wonder. Why do you see smoke and not want to find out if there is a fire? Or see smoke and deny that it is smoke?

Meanwhile, valid or not, the 2020 presidential election was categorically not held in accordance with the constitution of this nation.

Three years earlier, on Jan. 6, 2017, Jeh Johnson, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, appointed by outgoing president Obama, announced that, in response to Russian electoral interference (which didn’t actually happen), he had designated U.S. election systems as “critical national infrastructure.” This move placed the property of 8,000 election jurisdictions across the country under the control of the DHS.

Article 2, Section 1 of the constitution says, with respect to the election of the president that, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…” Amendments have changed the manner in which the vice president is elected, along with some other details, but no amendment has altered that portion of that declaration.

The constitution unequivocally declares that the manner of the election, the details of how it is to be conducted, are the province of the legislature of each state. But in 2017 that was changed, and the power to control the manner of the presidential election was transferred, not even by an elected government official, but by an unelected bureaucrat, to the federal government.

It was not transferred, as might be expected, to the Department of Justice, but to the Department of Homeland Security, where it remains to this day, in direct violation of the constitution.

Why was this allowed to happen in the first place, and why has it never been challenged? How, given that it is still in force, can we possibly claim that our presidential election, rigged or not, is even remotely valid? Welcome to 2024, where nothing is what it appears to be.