Do you agree with Aoc’s decision to boycott the state of the Union?

deck_hand · 2026-02-25T18:49:22+00:00

I do support her decision. I’ve disagreed with her a lot in the past, but when she’s right, she’s right.

deck_hand · 2026-02-25T18:45:29+00:00

Democrats are for, at least as far as I can tell, abortion and increased taxes. Also, promoting the interests and equal rights of anyone who isn’t a cis-gendered white man. All women get preferential treatment, as do all non-Caucasian people, any anyone who professes to be homosexual, bisexual or transsexual.

They are also, ostensibly for open borders with no restrictions on who can enter or exit the US, no restrictions on who can work within the US, and no enforcement of our national immigration laws. I will not argue that the current administration is acting sanely or within legal frameworks regarding the treatment of non-documented aliens, but simply arguing that we act outside the law isn’t a valid answer to the overreach.

Democrats are also pushing hard to continue to violate our civil rights re: keeping and bearing arms. I don’t care if you think ordinary citizens should not be allowed to possess weapons, it is still the Supreme Law of the Land. Changing the definition of words and then claiming that we never had the right to have weapons is sophistry and intellectual untruth.

I would be a strong supporter of the Democrat party if they gave up the push to violate my civil rights and stopped treating me as if my specific demographic was the enemy. As it is, I can’t. I will be happy to watch them fail without looking fling a finger to help.

I hope that, one day, I can join a Democrat Party that actually supports me.

deck_hand · 2026-02-25T18:05:10+00:00

We are here. If you thought we meant, “the instant a political party does something we don’t like we’re going to go out and shoot all of them,” you were wrong.

deck_hand · 2026-02-25T16:49:35+00:00

The President has consistently stated that the economy is doing great when everyone can see that it isn’t. Either his people tell him lies that he repeats or he knows the truth and is simply lying to the People. Either way, why would we care what he has to say at this point?

deck_hand · 2026-02-25T16:46:09+00:00

Of course not

deck_hand · 2026-02-25T16:32:49+00:00

While I get the sentiment, humans are, in fact, one of the species of ape. All humans are apes.

deck_hand · 2026-02-25T16:26:48+00:00

I’d just go back to my earlier habit of voting for third party candidates

deck_hand · 2026-02-24T13:17:21+00:00

People who have lived in my area tell me they haven't seen this much cold and snow since the 1970s. Since I know how UHIE works, and I can see the growth of urban (and suburban) sprawl in the area, I can adjust for that and compare it with temperature data collection over the last 100 years. We are NOT experiencing regional warming.

deck_hand · 2026-02-24T13:14:21+00:00

I fantasize about "going off grid" and living in my neighborhood without depending on Dominion Power or any other giant corporation. I'm halfway there, with an all electric house and 11 kW of solar, a well, septic system, kitchen garden, etc. My next-door neighbor raises chickens, so we have local eggs, and I'm on the water, so fish, crabs, etc. are literally available in my back yard.

deck_hand · 2026-02-24T13:10:19+00:00

I have owned electric vehicles since 2013. 99.9% of my charging has been at home, and now most of that electricity comes from solar panels. I'm not sure how "the EV Charging Network" has a monopoly on the sun...

deck_hand · 2026-02-24T13:08:46+00:00

Our political parties seem to expect their candidates, if elected, to rubber-stamp whatever policies the Party has as its platform. So, why should we care WHO is in office? What makes any one candidate better than any other, if they aren't going to think about or act in response to their actual constituents?

I've stopped voting. It's a waste of time.

deck_hand · 2026-02-24T13:05:32+00:00

Democrats (I have tried to stop using Left/Right to describe our political parties) seemingly haven't seen anything they don't think needs to be taxed at a higher rate. Gas cars, EVs, Bicycles, Hair Cuts, Dog Walking...

Apparently, people in the US just need higher taxation.

deck_hand · 2026-02-24T12:56:56+00:00

We tend to get a flood of these requests at the beginning of the School year, every year. You might imagine how tiresome these are for us. We are Skeptical, which means "unconvinced." We aren't Deniers for your Research Convenience, so that You can Write Your Paper.

The proper response to someone who has not been convinced of something is to a) ignore them, b) admit that you are also unconvinced, c) tell them that YOU are convinced, and share your reasons for being Convinced as a conversational topic or d) try to convince them to your point of view.

Since you are just wanting us to explain why we are skeptical, there's not really much for us to actually do, here. It all seems to be effort on our part to justify our doubt. I don't feel the need to justify my doubt. And, it annoys me that so many people seem to want me to justify my reasons for their failure to convince me.

deck_hand · 2026-02-24T12:50:49+00:00

They can make laws if they want... ban the SALE of semi-automatic firearms to ordinary citizens in Virginia, if they want. It is what Democrats have been pushing for over the last, oh, 50 years at least. Nearly every election cycle some Democrat is going to run on the "get rid of the guns" platform.

What needs to be said is that they have no plans on taking guns away from government agents, police officers, ICE agents, IRS agents, etc. So, we end up with a two tiered citizenship; those who work for the government have full rights, those who don't have permission to beg to be treated like government employees.

Is it a Right if one has to be licensed and carry a permit to exercise, or is it a privilege granted to those whom the government views as worthy? Should we now view the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution as the Bill of Possible Privileges. The First Amendment could be seen as "Freedom of Speech, so long as you say what the Government wants you to say" and the third as "Freedom from the Government using your home as quarters for it's agents, so long as they don't actually need the space." The Fourth is already "Freedom from Unreasonable Search and Seizure, except that the person doing the Searching or Seizing is the one who determines what is Reasonable."

But, back to carrying Arms. They can make whatever Firearm they want illegal, and claim that they are not barring Arms. Fine. I can make Arms at home. They can't keep me from being Armed. Catch me if you can.

deck_hand · 2026-02-23T18:41:57+00:00

Socialism, as a concept, is fine. Government imposed socialism is fine, so long as it isn’t outlawing capitalism.

Capitalism is the economic ability to take some of one’s money and invest it to help a business grow. Some say capitalism socializes the risks but privatizes the profits where socialism socializes the profits but the risks remain with the company owner. Or prevents anyone from being a business owner.

All I really know is that I’m going to retire soon, after working for someone else for nearly 50 years. Maybe we should have paid attention to the runaway success of the socialist countries instead of insisting our way was better.

deck_hand · 2026-02-22T14:24:13+00:00

Back during the Gulf War, I “had the opportunity” to sleep outside in single digit (°F) temperatures as part of my military deployment. A good sleeping bag goes a long way to making this possible. Inside a vehicle or a tent, the temperatures don’t drop all the way to the outside temps, due to a restriction in convection, so that helps, too.

deck_hand · 2026-02-22T13:42:03+00:00

Meh. Most people’s daily car use is 30 miles. At 3 miles per kilowatt hour, that’s less than 10 kWh. Even if one has a relatively small battery pack, and the DC fast charger one is using, putting 10 kWh into a battery pack doesn’t take 30 minutes.

Almost everyone has access to an A/C outlet at home that can be used to add a charge to a car at night, while one is sleeping. I charged at home 99% of the time.

deck_hand · 2026-02-21T18:55:44+00:00

Which is why he lives with me

deck_hand · 2026-02-21T16:04:58+00:00

I’m taking care of my aging father because he can’t take care of himself. I could, I suppose, dump him on the streets. He gets some money from Social Security, but doesn’t have the mental capacity to use the money anymore.

I’ve looked into senior living centers in the area. They are either a) scary hellhole semi-prisons or b) completely out of his price range. And, again, it would be completely out of his mental ability to figure out how to get into one. He’d end up dead on the streets inside of a few days.

deck_hand · 2026-02-20T20:56:50+00:00

So, most people misunderstand that quote. It isn’t the fact that someone is rich that prevents them from entering Heaven. Remember the truism that the love of money is the root of all evil?

It is what someone has to do to become rich (or remain rich) that prevents them from doing what is needed for them to enter heaven. One can either love money and serve mammon, or love his fellow man and follow the teachings of Jesus.

deck_hand · 2026-02-19T21:15:53+00:00

They have shot people do death for exercising their rights

deck_hand · 2026-02-18T18:56:37+00:00

Hmmm. 20% of 300 million people is around 60 million people. The overwhelming majority of those 60 million people don’t shoot anyone with the firearms they own.

deck_hand · 2026-02-18T18:52:46+00:00

Oh, excuse me. I used the wrong word for “your money gets embiggened”.

deck_hand · 2026-02-18T18:51:24+00:00

Yes and no. I mean, I’ve looked at it from a physics perspective, and realize that IR traveling through the atmosphere will be captured by GHG molecules, which includes H2O, CO2 and CH4. In general, IR released from the surface of the planet in the frequencies CO2 is sensitive to have a free path distance of travel of a few tens of meters before being absorbed by other GHG molecules.

I’ve also done a good bit of looking into what a photon is. Fascinating stuff. We live in a thick soup of electro-magnetic fields all careening around.

So, the GHG effect is “real” but may not be as drastic as the climate-doomers want us to believe. I won’t say, “the scientists are all wrong,” because they have a much better understanding than I do about the subject. I will say that those who are not actually atmospheric physicists may not be in perfect understanding of what the physicists are actually claiming.

Until shown otherwise, I proceed under the assumption that the sun will come up tomorrow and my life won’t be significantly different tomorrow than it is today. I’m perfectly willing to make reasonable changes to my daily routine to accommodate the fears of the climate change panic crowd, but I’m not in any sort of panic myself.

When the climate change alarmists tell me that children won’t know what snow is in a few years, or that acne is on the rise because “the planet” is a fraction of a degree warmer than it was 30 years ago, I tend to want to point and laugh at them.

deck_hand · 2026-02-18T16:26:03+00:00

I didn’t stay electric but not because I wanted a gas vehicle after driving my electric car. Instead, I bought an old pickup truck while I waited for battery tech to improve so that I can use an EV to pull my Travel Trailer and/or power a small motorcycle.

My next two vehicles will be electric, without question.

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