Public Stuff

Because I Don't Want To Do Yardwork...

Public Stuff

by Andrew Meblin

Pete Hegseth was confirmed as Secretary of Defense (de-FENCE) on Friday, and Saturday, as the Oregon Ducks basketball team lost to the Golden Gophers of University of Minnesota, people I know were calling “Defense, defense” (DEE-fence, DEE-fence). It’s an American thing, I guess. I think I can recall a football player talking about DEE-fence decades ago, and receiving some shaming over it. I could be wrong.

Different kind of “fense.”

Adding insult to injury, the word DEE-fense was sometimes combined with the prevent, pronounced PREE-vent, but the PREE-vent DEE-fense doesn’t always work well. Because of this sportscasters sometimes said, “The PREE-vent DEE-fense doesn’t pre-VENT anything.” I think the defensive mode is now called “containment.”

I find it fun to intentionally mispronounce words. The child in me… Ever since I was nearly smote by my Covid-19 flavored Staphylococcus aureus infection and subsequent neurosurgery, I’ve found myself mildly (very mildly) fixated on rhyming words, often in totally simplistic meter. “Everybody is drinking that Vladimir’s bladder beer,” and other such nonsense. Stay tuned for some bizarre lyrics in months to come.

Wind Energy; Good or Bad?

I have heard that mooring one’s sailboat next to another vessel equipped with a wind generator is to be avoided. Apparently the blades often make a noticeable woofing sound that, depending on the wind speed, can be very annoying.

On a larger scale windmills on land are said to kill raptors (birds) as they cruise along looking for varmints to eat. How bad is it? Pretty bad, says the American Bird Conservancy. Millions of birds die from collisions with power lines, and almost a million die from being smacked by moving wind turbine blades. How do they know? People walk around the ground near the wind machines and pick up the carcasses. Worse, though, when dogs were used to find the dead birds, they found 2.7 times as many birds as the people did (of course they did – bird dogs!).

Anda, please excuse this blatant encroachment on your IP, to whit, this image.

BUT a study by MIT offers a different perspective, explaining that fossil fuel operations kill birds too, and house cats kill millions of feathery friends.

On the other hand, according to the Woods Hole ocean people, wind turbines do not harm whales. Ship strikes and fishing lines are the big dangers facing right whales, and humpback whales. The whale people are trying to get ships to slow down, and lobster catchers to mind their ropes and lines and nets.

Pacific Life, marine mammals, and life insurance.

You might wonder how a wind turbine could harm a whale. In the Pacific Life Insurance TV commercial whales jump into the air, but no video exists of whales leaping into wind turbine blades. I have read somewhere that the pile driving necessary to anchor the bases of the turbines to the sea floor is loud enough to cause death. Makes sense to me. There are other ways to affix wind turbine bases to sea floors, I am sure.

Why do we care? Because Donald Trump has just signed an executive order stopping new leases for offshore wind power stations, and this is guaranteed to piss off supporters of “green energy.”

As previously announced in these pages, I support a balanced transition to sustainable energy, wishing the energy folks would intelligently change over from massive coal and petroleum harvesting to wind, solar, and nuclear power generation. Imagine though, the degree to which the electrical power network will need extensive improvement and expansion to keep up. Given the difficulty in maintaining power transmission lines experienced by Pacific Gas and Electric in California, I worry.

Yeast

Here’s a cheery thought: yeast in a solution of water and sugar will produce alcohol. The alcohol eventually kills off the yeast. Yeah, their garbage kills off the yeast colony. Could that be a warning for us humans here on earth? Are we going to be killed off by our own garbage? Are micro plastics the human equivalent of alcohol affecting yeast? Personally, I’d rather drink alcohol than micro plastics.

Imagine the amount of CO² put into the atmosphere by the SoCal fires. As Bill Maher said, decades of the benefits of driving Priuses down the drain in one week.

Kid Rock and Girls Gone Bible and Village People

Where else would you expect to hear songs about men extolling the virtues of casual sex at a gym, drinking whiskey until dawn, and Christian prayer? At a Trump event, that’s where. The phrase “politics makes for strange bedfellows” is taken to the ultimate extreme here. Trump continues to shock people, but the rapid rate of fire of multiple projectiles is crazy. Gulf of America, Panama Canal back in our pocket, Greenland the 51^st state, all weird ideas from an odd man. Where will it get us?

Wow, just wow.

Trump Cabinet (Looks like America?)

One reader described our new Attorney General as “hot.” Maybe so. Much more photogenic than Merrick Garland she is. She is also no friend of gun owners, according to another reader. In Florida she supported “red flag laws,” which could be used to take guns away from people based on political persuasion. I am unaware of that ever happening, but ya never know.

Pete Hegseth, mentioned in the lede, is not my choice for Sec Def, but how bad can it get? Don’t answer that!

RFKJR for Health and Human Services? Wow! The thought of a US government leaning on food producers to get the bad stuff off our plates and out of our mouths seems good. Irrational banning of all vaccines, though not something the man has advocated for, would be bad. I do support the science, but whose science? And why does the science need a presidential pardon?

Tulsi Gabbard is up for Director of National Intelligence. Hillary Clinton called her “a Russian asset.” If we find out the truth I hope it’s that she isn’t. I like the way Gabbard speaks. Her voice is calming.

Are you sensing a theme here?

Vivek and Elon

That sounds like a Comedy Channel cartoon title. When Matt Gaetz was in the (brief) running for AG, one comedian said that Elon Musk and Gaetz being in the presidential circle was Alien vs. Predator. Not nice! Gaetz thankfully went away. Despite having a few weeks of practicing law before landing in Congress, the guy gave off incredibly creepy vibes. Worse, he got Kevin McCarthy ousted from the Speaker’s seat by collaborating with Democrats, which was precisely what McCarthy did to irritate the toothy Floridian.

Word is Elon and Vivek are rubbing each other the wrong way. Not THAT way, the other wrong way. No matter how wide the doorways are in the White House, I imagine no way in which both men’s heads simultaneously fit through.

Super Bowl

As I write this, the Washington Commanders have just lost to the Eagles of Philadelphia. KC and Buffalo are playing. I was hoping for the team-formerly-known-as-the-Redskins to play Taylor Swift’s team. That way it would have been the Commanders ‘n’ Chiefs. Go ahead, say it. Sorry.