Home solar energy.

You want your house to face south.  With big picture windows, facing south, to pick up sunlight.  You might need to buy a new house, or do some very heavy duty remodeling if your house faces the wrong way or lacks the necessary picture windows.  This works for me, on a sunny winter day my windows pickup enough warmth from sun that my furnace doesn’t run until the sun goes down.  While the sun is up it pours enough warmth into my house to keep it pleasantly warm all day.  No moving parts, no huge and leaky silicon solar cells, no DC to AC inverters, no battery banks, no deals with the electric company to keep my lights on after sundown. 

 You also want some big eaves to keep the summer sun out while letting the lower winter sun in.  You want your roof in a light color, not black, to ease the load on the air conditioner in the summer.  Here in North America the prevailing winds come out of the west, so you want some windows on the west side to open to let in some breeze.  And about the same amount of window on the east side that opens, so the breeze can blow right thru the house.  Some shade trees to shade the house in the summer are good too.

 Builders might keep these ideas in mind.  They don’t add much, if anything, to the cost of the house at the time it gets built.  They do yield a more comfortable and more energy efficient house.

You nuke Ukraine and we will nuke you back, harder

 That's what the United States ought to say to Putin next time he threatens to use his nukes.  For that matter, make it "nuke Ukraine or anywhere else".   Trouble is, if Biden said this, nobody would believe he meant it.  Everybody would expect him to chicken out in the clutch.  So we need a better president to make this work.

Puberty.

   Children are born with no feelings for or knowledge about sex. Other than the fact that young girls tend to hang with girls and young boys tend to hang with boys, little kids are unconscious of their sex.  This persists even though parents cut girls and boys hair differently and dress them differently.   It is not until maybe seventh grade, (14 years) that boys and girls begin to dance together, flirt with each other, date each other, and go steady with each other.  This change has been known for a long long time and is referred to as puberty. 

   Talking to kids about sexual matters before puberty is a waste of time; the kids don’t understand the talk.  Or misinterpret it to mean odd or harmful things the speaker cannot imagine.  After the kids go thru puberty then talks about sexual matters become understandable to them.  The kids may not grasp everything said, but at least they have a broad idea of what is being talked about. 

  Florida just passed a law forbidding schools to talk about sexual matters to kids in third grade and below.  That’s a good start, but I would make it kids in sixth grade and below. 

Supreme Court Leak.

    Leaving aside the intelligence supplied by the leak (court may dump Roe); the discouraging part is the existence of the leak and the leaker.  The leaker abandoned loyalty to the court, one of America’s oldest and most revered institutions, to merely serve the interests of the Democrat Party.  If an institution like the court cannot secure the loyalty of its personnel, what organization can?  Employees who place the interests of the Democrat party ahead of the interests of their employer, be it the court, the  armed services, the police, the lower courts, and more the nation is in deep trouble. 

   Many of the great things America has done over the years, winning wars, abolition, civil rights, huge engineering works, the moon landings, and more, were done by institutions, often against great opposition.  The institutions could not have succeeded if their personnel failed to support their institution, but instead had betrayed their institution to the opposition. 

   As to the issue at stake, overturning Roe vs. Wade, I am in favor.  Even though Roe has been the law of the land for 50 years, which ought to make it settled law, but hasn’t, I think it was a poor decision by a handful of lawyers on a matter that properly should have been decided by an elected legislature, either federal or state. 

Misinfornation, Disinformation, Malinformation or truth versus falsehood?

 Liberals having hissy fits over Musk’s buyout of Twitter keep talking about the terrible effects of misinformation, disinformation and now malinformation.   I don’t hear any talk about truth versus falsehood.  I think the liberals are whining about truth that does not support “the narrative”.  And they want those truths suppressed less they waken or even destroy the precious “narrative”. 

   Which is a lot different from what we expect of the media.  We want the facts of the case, not rooting for the Democrats.  We think any newsie who slants the news to favor the Democrats ought to be ridden out of town on a rail.

 

Detroit Iron

 Detroit is hurting.  Last couple of car postings, 20 hottest cars of 2022 and the like, were all foreign cars, mostly Japanese or Korean.  Except for single mentions of Corvette, nothing made in Detroit.   It didn’t used to be that way.  Ads and TV shows needing wheels now a days always show a nice Detroit car, usually a convertible, from the 60’s or 70s.  Never a Toyota or a Honda. 

   You would think one of the big three could pull the old tooling out of storage and knock off a few thousand classics from the old days and sell them.  AND, cars from the old days did not need semiconductors, except for a handful of simple ones in the car radio.

   Far as I can see, Detroit doesn’t make real sedans any more, just little econoboxes.  Closest you can come to a real sedan is a “crossover” SUV.  Crossovers are built on car chassis, the body extends the roof clear back to the rear bumper.  You don’t get a trunk, but you do get some storage space behind the rear seat.  Some models allow the rear seat[s] to fold down or come out to allow big stuff like sheets of plywood to fit inside. 

   The “crossover” name is historical.  The early SUV’s, Chevy carryalls and Jeep Wagoneers were built on pickup truck chassis, which yielded a big SUV that rode like a truck.  The “crossover” SUV’s built on car chassis are smaller, gas mileage is better and the ride is better.

War on Menthol cigarettes.

The Biden administration wants to ban menthol cigarettes.  They have not presented any evidence that menthol cigarettes (Kools) are any worse for your health than ordinary cigarettes.  The Biden people said that menthol cigarettes were favorites among the black community and outlawing them would encourage/force blacks to give up smoking. Speaking as someone who started smoking in college and smoked two packs a day for 20 years before giving it up, trying to force people to give up smoking is a lost cause.  The urge for a smoke can be extremely strong, far too strong to resist.  And, smoking tobacco has been legal in the US since Jamestown.  Trying to force people to give it up strikes me as tyranny, a specialty of Democrats. 

   I know, and they know, that smoking (with or without menthol) is bad for you.  Over the years a lot of people have given it up, and lot of people had not.  I think this country has bigger fish to fry than getting smokers to give up smoking.