Those Jan 6 hearings.

 I watched Fox News last night. They did not carry the Jan 6 hearings. Instead they spent the time trashing the hearings and the speakers there at. Some instant replay on ABC did not show much goodness coming out of the hearings.

Solar Panels just raise my electric bill.

 Home owners with solar panel roofs can sell the electricity back to the electric company, when the sun is shining of course.  Homeowners get paid the retail rate, 25 cents a kilowatt hour, for their meager contribution.  By rights they should only get paid the wholesale rate, 10 cents an kilowatt hour.  As it is, the power companies are required by law to pay a ridiculous rate for electricity that they don’t need.  The power companies are all paying staggeringly high mortgage bills on their real power plants.  They have to pay the mortgage whether the plants are running or not.  So the homeowner’s solar power does nothing for the power company, it just costs them money.  Which they have to recover from rate payers like me.

  Now the TV is telling me that Biden is lowering the tariff on solar panels to allow Chinese panels to be sold in the US.  We will be sending good US dollars to an unfriendly China to pay for solar panels that just raise my electric bill.  Lets go Brandon.

Gun Safety Rules

If you are new to guns and shooting you want to learn the four standard safety rules.  If you are an old pro you want to teach these rules to the newbies.

 

    1. Always treat every gun as loaded. 

    When you pick up a gun, even your own, check to make sure it is unloaded.  Open the bolt, or eject the magazine, or swing open the cylinder, and finally check the chamber for the presence of a live round.  Do this religiously and eliminate the old excuse “I didn’t know the gun was loaded”, used after a gun accident.  If you are going to clean the gun, work on the gun, dry fire the gun, do anything short of firing the gun, you want it unloaded, you don’t want an accidental discharge.  You heard of that fatal gun accident involving Alex Baldwin on the set of the movie “Rust”?  If Baldwin had followed this rule that accident would not have happened and his camera woman would be alive today.

2. Never point a gun at anything you don’t intend to kill. 

    Just in case you have failed on rule 1, this rule will keep you from killing someone or something by accident. 

3.  Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.  

       If you don’t press the trigger the gun will not fire.

4. Don’t fire until the gun is pointed at the target and behind the target is clear.

      Stuff (houses, people, pets, cars whatever) must not be behind the target.  The humble .22 Long Rifle rim fire slug will travel a mile.  More powerful rounds go even farther.      

Just pass something. Doesn't matter what.

 That's what I am hearing on the TV news.  They want something about guns passed, no matter what, just so long as the Congresscritters can say they passed something to prevent another Texas school shooting, even if it doesn't do anything worthwhile. 

Unexplained things from Jan 6

 There was that video showing people streaming into the capital building while a cop held the door open for them.  They showed that several times back just after Jan 6 but I have not seen it all lately.  I don’t understand that one at all. 

On the day after (7 Jan) both the Master of Arms and the Senate security chief resigned.  I have never seen or heard an explanation of that one.   Were these two men so ashamed of their performance that they wanted out, now?  Did someone in power like Nasty Pelosi or Chuckles the Schumer want them gone?  Something else?

The Democrats are planning hearings about Jam 6.  I wonder if either of those two questions will come up, and if they do (not very likely), what answers do we learn?

D-Day 6th of June.

On this day 76 years ago, the Anglo American armies landed on the French coast of Normandy and stood off a fierce German counter attack.  Then the allies drove forward and crushed the German armies in France, liberated Paris, and pushed into Germany.  This was a turning point in WWII, which had been raging for 5 years and had another year to go.  The Germans kicked off WWII by attacking and defeating Poland.  Then they proceeded to conquer Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. They drove the British into the sea at Dunkirk.  Fortunately the Germans never had the sea power needed to move their army across the English Channel. 

   At Churchill’s insistence, the British and the Americans were fighting the Germans in North Africa.  Churchill plainly saw that the British and American civilian populations would not put up with years of wartime privation without fighting the Germans.  Churchill sold his view to Roosevelt and Roosevelt ordered the American Joint Chiefs of Staff to prepare and execute Operation Torch, an amphibious landing in North Africa going up against the Germans, under Rommel.  This meant a lot of heavy fighting until Eisenhower and Montgomery surrounded the Germans at the site of ancient Carthage and took them all prisoner.  The Anglo Americans took nearly as many German prisoners as the Russians had taken at Stalingrad, a few weeks before.

  But, the North African victory was something of a sideshow compared with Russians and the Germans who were going head to head with armies of several million men each.  Not until the successful Normandy landing did the Anglo Americans confront the Germans with as big an army as the Russians were doing.

   Fortunately D-Day was a success.  It could have been a terrible failure.  Things were so touchy that Eisenhower, the supreme commander, man with the best view of the operation, prepared a short speech to give in the event that he had to withdraw the troops and accept defeat.  On the day before D-Day the weather was so bad that the Allied nearly canceled the operation.  One brave and sincere weatherman convinced Eisenhower that the weather would lift that night making the landings possible.  As it worked out, the Normandy landings, except Omaha beach, were successful, the troops got ashore, got their armor and artillery ashore and emplaced before the German counter attack got rolling.  Even blood soaked Omaha beach was secured in the end.     

My furnace is still firing, in June.

 June is supposed to be summer.  Must be more of that Global Warming.