The bean soup I made on Sunday has been steadily disappearing. It looks as if I'm now down to a single very large serving of it and I'm not tired of it yet.
(Now that I've said this, it'll probably change. Oh well.)
I had to wait about eight hours for the soup to cool down, though, before I could put it in the fridge. I shut the thing off after finishing my first bowl, and when I went back for another bowl three or four hours later, the soup was still hot enough to eat without reheating.
Yeah, I'm convinced this was a good thing to make. I won't need to make it again very soon, but I'm going to remember the best way to make it.
* * *
Y'think maybe Hitler didn't like jazz, or something? Michael Flynn discusses Nazi jazz regulations.
He finishes the post with some world-class snark: "That sort of nit-picky over-regulation has no place in a free republic and could never happen here."
* * *
It's not true but if it were, wouldn't that be a good thing?
On the plus side, this is progress: the AGW morons have started to accept reality. They've gone from "human carbon emissions are going to melt all the ice on the planet and we'll all drown!" to "human carbon emissions are going to delay the next ice age!"
Not "stop" or "prevent" but "delay". Yeah. Still, it's progress, because by saying this they're acknowledging that the warming they predicted isn't happening and isn't going to happen.
Alan Caruba on this nonsense.
The big problem with all of this, though, is that they predicate their models on the (false) notion that 100 PPM of additional carbon dioxide is enough to cause climate change. They maximize the positive feedbacks and minimize (or ignore) the negative ones, then scream at their models and tell us that if we all don't return to a 14th century economy we're all going to drown.
The problems with this are legion, of course. We know that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been much higher in the past than it is now, and that the CO2 levels lagged (rather than led) temperature changes. We don't really know how much of the CO2 that's in the atmosphere right now came from man-made sources, either, since it's impossible to tell one molecule from another. We assume the extra 100 ppm or so that's accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is man-made, but we don't know that.
Hell, that's a problem with the science, right there. (Sorry: "alleged science".) That's a mighty large assumption to make, that because CO2 was 280 PPM pre-industry that the extra 100-odd PPM we see now came entirely from man-made sources. To the extent that we understand the workings of Earth's carbon cycle, it might be more fair to assume that the real warming we've seen since the end of the Maunder Minimum and Little Ice Age have resulted in a reduction in the biological uptake of atmospheric carbon, and look for a mechanism that explains that. (Especially since "carbon lags temp" is well-supported by the ice core data.)
But climate "scientists" don't get the bucks for demonstrating how there's not a damned thing we can do about the climate. Governments want reasons to regulate and no one can regulate the sun or Earth's orbit or-or-or.
* * *
Windmills can't handle the wind. Yeah, that's good.
* * *
Girl Scouts aren't like those icky Boy Scouts!! They let lesbians be in charge of scout troops and they let confused boys in, showing that they're not a HATE GROUP! like the Boy Scouts are!
...so if your 12-year-old boy thinks he's a girl, he can get into Girl Scouts as long as he wears girl clothes and such. (No word in the article on whether or not men who identify as women can be "scout mistresses" or not. Probably "not", though, as what if the guy is a pedophile who is only self-identifying as female in order to get unrestricted access to young girls?) (Let's not be silly! That would never never never never never never never never never never never never never happen!)
* * *
This American Thinker piece gives me pause. Presented the way this article presents them, it actually does look as if Obama is following the Nazi/Fascist/Totalitarianist playbook.
* * *
Grau calls for an "Ogfest" in this post on making cheese.
* * *
DOOM!
* * *
Anti-freedom anti-gun people lose their shit over Weer'd's "Light a Candle" effort.
The people I know who are gun enthusiasts are HIGHLY educated and/or skilled people, hardly "beer guzzling, uneducated hillbillies".
...in fact, of the gun enthusiasts I know, I AM THE LEAST SKILLED AND EDUCATED.
One of them drives a truck for a living and I don't believe he went to college, but he built a helicopter and has forgotten more about machinery and machining than I'll ever be able to learn.
One of them is a robotics expert--very, very highly skilled and intelligent.
One is a lawyer who was quite high-up in the railroad business before opening a private office.
My Dad was the leading expert on latex paint chemistry for years; in fact he was instrumental in the development of water-based house paint.
Me? I know a bit about machines and electronics and have a bachelor's degree from a trade school.
Yeah, we're just a bunch of uneducated hicks and hillbillies. After all, we like guns!
* * *
Seniors facing hard times. Bad choices, bad investments, but also because the government is punishing those who saved for retirement by keeping interest rates in the toilet.
Well? The Fed is part of the government, like it or not; and they are keeping interest rates low because otherwise the government would go broke faster than you can say "we're running out of other peoples' money!"
Er, "past broke", that is, since it's already broke. You know what I mean: the unsustainability of deficit spending would become obvious a lot faster than it is already.
* * *
Well: this post has been interrupted twice since I began it: first by a post-meal ride on the motorcycle (since it was over 50° today) and then by the urgent need to get some f-ing food before I collapsed from hypoglycemia.
Lost to that latter trip was a discussion of how FDR's bullshit "New Deal" was made possible only by the imposition of the income tax and how it was all 100% socialism disguised as...something else, anything else, enabled by FDR and his socialist buddies not "letting a good crisis go to waste".
If I were any good at resarch, and had sufficient motivation, I might look into seeing exactly what FDR and his cronies did to bring on the Great Depression, thus making the New Deal and Social Security "necessary".
Paranoid? Perhaps--but my gut instinct is that the imposition of the income tax was one of the primary causes of the Great Depression and the things that we're told remedied it (New Deal etc) were possible only because the government had granted itself the power to impose such taxes. It had to amend the Constitution to do so, but it did.
Eh? "The war effort lifted us out of the Depression"? Feh. I don't completely buy that; that's pure Keynes, right there, saying that the US government spending all that money on war materiel is what ended the Depression. It might be so; but the true prosperity which followed WWII was due only to the fact that the industrial infrastructure of the rest of the world had been quite literally blown to smithereens.
The United States is the wealthiest nation only because it didn't have to rebuild after the war was over. "Broken window" fallacy: money that might have been spent on capital investment was instead spent on rebuilding everything. (Europe's disastrous turn to socialism did not help matters, of course.)
...and having only just gotten around a Culver's Deluxe double with large fry, my brain is still too confused to make any more sense than that. *sigh*
* * *
I absolutely hate this nonsense. I didn't have any sugar today; that bowl of soup should have been enough food for two hours' mild activity and I should not have gotten hypoglycemic, damn it.
"Should", however, does not pay the bills.
This is what I mean, though, when I say that the hypoglycemia has gotten more unpredictable. I suffer attacks less frequently now that I'm drinking diet pop, but it's harder to anticipate what actions will lead to an episode.
...and having just eaten all that food--the Deluxe double is not exactly finger food--I AM STILL HUNGRY because my hunger reflex hasn't caught up. Damn thing is not exactly "responsive"; I only started to feel hungry after I was on the way home from Culver's and had been hypoglycemic for at least fifteen minutes.
This lag tends to lead to overeating if one is not careful, and the overeating leads to indigestion and worse. I seriously feel as if I could eat another Deluxe double, though I know for a fact that I actually can't and would make myself sick if I tried.
What a pain in the ass.
* * *
At any rate, Bible study resumes tonight. I haven't read the lesson because I forgot what lesson we did last (the last session where we read anything was Dec 6, which turns out ot be 5 weeks ago. Dang).
I'm going to hit the shower before I go, so I'd better get off the computer.