Saturday - July 02, 2022

Once Again, The One And Only Post

July 02, 2022

Nice concise synopsis of the W. VA vs EPA ruling in today’s NY Post.

Says what I said, but in a tighter manner. This is why I’m not a professional writer.

The Constitution set up a system of separated powers that envisioned Congress would pass the laws, the president would administer them and the courts would interpret them. Since the New Deal, Congress has shirked its accountability by increasingly giving unelected agencies the power to make decisions of vast economic and political significance.

In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, a 6-to-3 majority ruled that from now on Congress must explicitly grant such power. The court has stopped the hell-bent expansion of the runaway bureaucracy to create its own form of laws disguised as regulations. It will be up to voters to elect people to Congress who will take back that power.

The issue before the court was whether the EPA could force coal plants to either reduce the amount of energy they produce for public use or spend billions of dollars on new facilities using alternative energy sources. Either scenario would dramatically increase the cost of energy in the name of fighting carbon emissions.

The Obama — and now the Biden — administration pursued a sweeping climate strategy in which each agency is encouraged to adopt novel interpretations of federal law to fight climate change. As Chief Justice John Roberts noted, the EPA was claiming a right to reduce emissions using methods “that Congress has already considered and rejected numerous times.” In other words, the EPA was trying to replace the Rule of Law with the Rule of Bureaucrats.

I’d mention that Rule of Bureaucrats is a neutral way of saying Tyranny.

This is the best part IMO:

The Supreme Court moved further to stop this power grab than many observers expected. In his explanatory concurrence, Justice Neil Gorsuch laid out tests for future cases that courts can use to determine what constitutes a proper statement of congressional intent. He has effectively provided a roadmap for challenging other federal agencies on their expansive rules, whether it be requiring higher gas mileage in cars or the Federal Communications Commission’s net-neutrality regulation.

Let me be a bit snide ... What part of “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” don’t you understand?

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June 30, 2022

SCOTUS decision on West Virginia v. EPA


“And what do you want, little girl?” they asked me in my stroller.

”Fweeedom!
...
an wimited wegyoo a tory powa of un ewected bwanches of the gobba ment!

The TLDR version:

QUESTION PRESENTED
In 42 U.S.C. § 7411(d), an ancillary provision of the Clean Air Act, did Congress constitutionally authorize the Environmental Protection Agency to issue significant rules—including those capable of reshaping the nation’s electricity grids and unilaterally decarbonizing virtually any sector of the economy—without any limits on what the agency can require so long as it considers cost, nonair impacts, and energy requirements

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The decision below would thus allow EPA to decide what policy goals to pursue when structuring the electricity grid—as well as which other sectors to decarbonize, how much, and how fast. That type of power looks suspiciously like Congress shirked the fundamental questions and failed to “meaningfully constrain[]” EPA, while at the same time empowering EPA to assume Congress’s rightful role. Touby, 500 U.S. at 167. Even if Congress had enacted such a statute, this “sweeping delegation of legislative power” almost certainly could not stand.
Indus. Union, 448 U.S. at 646 (Stevens, J., controlling op.).

CONCLUSION
The petition for a writ of certiorari should be granted

FBO, FJB, FEPA

.. and now my poorly cobbled together bunch of links and quotes. You can read about this decision in many news articles, but you will have to strenuously apply the bias filter. Reading the actual decision, about 28 narrow pages of content, lets you see the truth. It also lets you savor just how thoroughly the EPA is getting smacked, and reminds you just how dirty and wrong the tyrant leftist Obama was (and how his blithering moron replacement is even worse). Please read it, please understand it. This Supreme Court decision has rescued the nation from ONE of the abysses it had nearly fallen into.

This is the money quote from Mother Jones, although I don’t think they realized this when they wrote the thing:

While potentially significant for climate change, the case had also been closely watched as one that could limit federal agencies’ power to issue broad regulations. The majority opinion invoked a controversial legal doctrine known as the “major questions doctrine,” which says agencies don’t necessarily have the authority to regulate on issues of “vast economic or political significance” unless Congress has authorized them to do so.

“Unless Congress has authorized them to do so.” And authorized needs to be spelled out in detail; do this but don’t do that. And this has not happened in this case, even after many years, so flush the whole thing.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/supreme-court-deals-biden-climate-agenda-serious-blow-epa-decision
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/06/west-virginia-v-epa-supreme-court/
https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1530/176915/20210429133443663_2021.04.29%20-%20West%20Virginia%20v.%20EPA%20Petition.pdf

insert media quotes here, Fox Business, Mother Jones et al, and opine that the court is now 3 for 3 with proper Conservative decisions in a week. Notice that Roberts wrote the majority, and that the 3 black robed commies were the dissenters because of stupid reasons and climate change.

but first give the cat her medicine and get something for lunch

... on why the lower court ruling was wrong :
“There was therefore nothing “minor” about “one of the most consequential rules ever proposed by an administrative agency.” App. 173a. How to address climate change and “who should pay” for solutions are matters “of vast economic and political significance.” App. 177a (quoting UARG, 573 U.S. at 324). Judge Walker noted the Court has not (yet) fully resolved “the nature of major questions and limits of delegation,” but he emphasized that the doctrine’s basic premise is sure: “Either a statute clearly endorses a major rule, or there can be no major rule.” App. 178a, 180a. And no party below made “a serious and sustained argument that § 111 includes a clear statement unambiguously authorizing” the CPP’s approach. App. 165a. Finally, Judge Walker explained that even if Congress “allowed generation shifting” under Section 111(d), it would have been an unconstitutional delegation because Congress did not “clearly require it.” App. 178a. Congress must decide “what major rules make good sense” and cannot shirk that duty by passing off critical questions to “the impenetrable halls of an administrative agency.”

“REASONS FOR GRANTING THE PETITION
I. This Case Involves Compelling And Timely Questions Of Federal Law That The Court Should Resolve.

The Court has reviewed aspects of EPA’s authority to address greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act twice before. UARG, 573 U.S. 302; Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007). This case should be the third. In an “unprecedented intervention” into the previous iteration of this case concerning these same issues, the Court stayed the CPP even before the lower court had its say. App. 171a-172a. This extraordinary order signaled that the CPP’s legal framework hinges on important issues of federal law that EPA then—and the court below now—got so wrong this Court was likely to grant review.

Five years later EPA, the States, and the American people still lack resolution on these weighty issues. This case poses exceptionally important questions only the Court can resolve, and because further delay would carry serious and far-reaching costs, it should do so now.

A. This case presents unusually important questions about EPA’s power to unilaterally remake significant sectors of the economy.

The CPP was “one of the most consequential rules ever proposed by an administrative agency.” App. 173a. Even more expansively, the decision below gives EPA more policymaking power than ever before placed in an agency’s hands. In rejecting Petitioners’ (and EPA’s below) position that Section 111(d) focuses on what individual stationary sources can accomplish using demonstrated technology, the majority concluded that one portion of one definition is the only restraint on EPA rulemaking. App. 56a. That novel and atextual reading sweeps broader than the agency itself tried to go five years ago in the CPP—giving EPA power to reorder the utility power sector and mandate sweeping changes to any industry. Indeed, the majority insisted that EPA “tied its own hands” in the CPP by setting limits on the scope of its powers that Congress never required. App. 91a n.9. And it rejected concerns that its reading affords no limiting principle: As long as EPA’s purpose is pollution-reduction and it considers costs and nonair environmental and energy effects, even measures that fundamentally reshape the economy are all on the regulatory table.”

So what we had was a lower court deciding that the EPA could do whatever it wanted if the goal was to reduce “climate change”. And this decision was made AFTER the Supreme Court had blocked Obama’s CPP action, which the lower court IGNORED.

“If EPA can regulate from the perspective of “emissions” as a whole, App. 66a, not only is “planting trees” a possible “system of emission reduction,” App. 91a n.9, but nothing would stop EPA from requiring regulated parties to subsidize carbon offsets in any industry with a system it deems “best.”
The majority’s approach would therefore mean EPA could commandeer almost any greenhouse-gas emitting building, factory, or house through almost any mechanism. If this is not transformative power, it is only because (so far) EPA has stayed its own hand. “

... and now we get to the good part, the gist of this pudding, the high court’s awareness that this is extraordinary overreach by a faceless bureaucracy ...

“2. The incredible reach of the majority’s decision also makes this the right case to resolve whether and how Congress can ever delegate issues of this magnitude. The Court is clear that agencies may make “decision[s] of vast economic and political significance” only when clearly authorized by Congress. “

“Yet without the Court’s review, EPA and all affected parties will be in an even worse position this third time around: The D.C. Circuit sent EPA on a “multiyear voyage of discovery” to craft systems of emission reduction “without regard for the thresholds prescribed by Congress.”

... and on and on. Because the rules were poorly written, because Congress has not done it’s job, because the lower court - the DC Circuit, is probably a bunch of greenie tree hugging commies, go things ass backwards, ... the EPA winds up with god-like powers and can do anything without being answerable to anyone. And this cannot stand.

I urge you to read the decision linked above. Even if you have never read a court decision before, this one is mind blowing. It’s a soap opera in a way. It shows how coordination between a spurious leftist agenda, a weak court in the left’s pocket, a deliberate lack of action from Congress, and an under-regulated government agency with no oversight can assume the power to “fundamentally change America” by their own leave whenever they want. This is so wrong that it’s hard to even imagine that this is the actual situation, but it is.

If the Court ultimately holds that the D.C. Circuit misread the Clean Air Act, better to shift public debate as soon as possible to the entity that can and should act: Congress. There are many pathways to address climate change, often diametrically opposed, and the choices have significant and multifaceted consequences. Economy-changing issues like these require bicameral legislative solutions, not an agency going it alone.

“States like Petitioners have much to lose under the majority’s view. The policies we pursue to address climate change and how costs are allocated are serious issues, and the States’ contributions will vary significantly. Some States, for example, are blessed with abundant fossil fuel resources, while others have extensive industrial operations like steel mills and cement plants. States like these will almost certainly bear a disproportionate share of the massive costs that restructuring mandates would require. They should not face those consequences based on the decisions of an unelected and unaccountable agency.”

The SCOTUS could not make it clearer that this is the WRONG way to do things, yet this way is the Left’s way ... make a nebulous statement or a simple Executive Order, then hand it over to some agency to implement, then accept whatever that group comes up with as if it were law, which never gets questioned.

This is tyranny, and it shall not stand.

inJustice Kagan’s moronic dissent is typical leftist BS driven by feewings and their (no longer secret) desire for an all powerful unchecked government staffed by their leftist minions.

After the decision just said that this kind of thing was the duty of Congress, not some agency, she comes up with

“The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decision-maker on climate policy,” Kagan wrote. “I cannot think of many things more frightening.”

And the agency is only expert at being political hacks and pushing the destructive leftist agendas. We can blame Bill Clinton for that.

Holy cats what a lying imbecile Kagan is.

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June 29, 2022

Tomorrow Is The End For Justice Breyer

Breyer, who notified President Biden in January of his intent to retire at the end of the current term, updated the president in a letter Wednesday, after the Supreme Court made it known that it will issue its final opinions of the term Thursday morning.

“The Court has announced that tomorrow, beginning at 10 a.m., it will hand down all remaining opinions ready during this Term. Accordingly, my retirement from active service under the provisions of 28 U.S.C. § 371(b) will be effective on Thursday, June 30, 2022, at noon,” Breyer wrote.

The final opinions of this session of the court will include West Virginia v. EPA, which may not sound like much but could be the biggest landmark decision in a decade, limiting the power of departments of the federal government to enact rules and develop policies that impact the nation with nearly the force of law, and are done without congressional oversight. IOW, the court might finally decide that outsourcing the government to un-elected and un-answerable faceless minions is not allowed, as such duties are the sole dominion and duty of Congress.

God I hope so; it would be about high time.

Katana Action Jackson what’s her name, the pro-pedophile AA gender appointee, takes his position in the next session. Assuming the Fauci Flu doesn’t get her between now and then. Fingers crossed.

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Fauci has the Fauci Flu “again” and is doing much worse this time. Even after taking the worthless treatment Paxlovid.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/anthony-fauci-says-that-hes-experienced-a-rebound-in-covid-symptoms-after-paxlovid-course/ar-AAYYDG0

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Pedophile pervert sex abuser rapper R. Kelly, 55, gets 30 years behind bars.

Good. Only took them THIRTY YEARS to put this scumbag away.

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Gosh, what a coincidental accident!!

California AG “accidentally” puts up website that doxxed personal info of nearly 4000 legal gun owners

https://www.infowars.com/posts/california-attorney-general-leaks-massive-trove-of-gun-owners-private-information/

Surely this can’t be at all related to the recent SCOTUS decision.

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June 28, 2022

OMG SCOTUS finds in favor of God!

Supreme Court backs coach in praying on field after games

The Supreme Court said Monday that a high school football coach who knelt and prayed on the field after games was protected by the Constitution, a decision that opponents said would open the door to “much more coercive prayer” in public schools.

The court ruled 6-3 for the coach with the conservative justices in the majority and the liberals in dissent. The case was the latest in a line of rulings for religious plaintiffs.

The case forced the justices to wrestle with how to balance the religious and free speech rights of teachers and coaches with the rights of students not to feel pressured into participating in religious practices. The liberal justices in the minority said there was evidence that Bremerton (Washington) High School Coach Joseph Kennedy’s prayers at the 50-yard-line had a coercive effect on students and allowed him to incorporate his “personal religious beliefs into a school event.”

Dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the decision “sets us further down a perilous path in forcing states to entangle themselves with religion.”

But the justices in the majority emphasized that the coach’s prayers came after the games were over and at a time when he wasn’t responsible for students and was free to do other things.

Hey Sonya, you mean this perilous path?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Horry Clap, considering this wise Latina is on the Supreme Court, she sure is a dumbass sack of crap with the constitutional knowledge of a earthworm.

And do you really have to guess who the 3 dissenters were?

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OMG2 are we seeing a slight return to sanity, even in deep blue New York?

NY Supreme Court: Only residents who are citizens may vote. AOC flips out!!

The New York State Supreme Court overruled Dem lawmakers and ruled that non-citizens can’t vote in local elections. The New York City Council approved the “Our City, Our Vote” bill in December.

It became law in January. The law [ allowed ] non-citizen legal residents, including those with green cards, to vote in municipal elections starting in 2023 but not in federal elections. Republican lawmakers quickly filed suit in Staten Island Supreme Court to block the measure and keep the voter rolls to only citizens.

City Council minority leader Joseph Borelli said: “Today’s decision validates those of us who can read the plain English words of our state constitution and state statutes: Noncitizen voting in New York is illegal, and shame on those who thought they could skirt the law for political gain.

“Opposition to this measure was bipartisan and cut across countless neighborhood and ethnic lines, yet progressives chose to ignore both our constitution and public sentiment in order to suit their aims.

“I commend the court in recognizing reality and reminding New York’s professional protestor class that the rule of law matters.”

Yet another instance of the lunatic left ignoring the rules to push their destructive anarcho-Marxist agenda.

How can you not understand that voting is the exclusive right of actual citizens? Oh wait, they do understand, they just don’t want to follow the rules. Kind of like that pesky Natural Born Citizen thing in the Constitution, which if followed would have denied Obama and Harris for running for office.



Relaxation with a bit of class

We watched the 2019 Downton Abbey movie last night, the one where the King and Queen come for a visit and the staff stage a subtle insurrection.

Tonight we’ll watch the 2022 Downton Abbey movie, where we learned that grandmama had a bit of a fling once upon a time, which caused her to inherit a villa in France many years later.

We washed down the watching with a couple proper perfect martinis, as I was finally able to score some Noilly Prat vermouth yesterday. There hasn’t been any around for over 2 years. Supply chain issues with France being resolved finally? One can hope. While it often costs less than the other vermouths, Noilly is simply the best. Sadly, I could only get a bottle of the extra dry, which is still very good, but the original dry is slightly better. Absolutely superb gently poured over oysters on the half shell, with some over ice in a glass with an orange twist.

A proper martini is made with gin. A perfect martini is served as cold as possible ... the gin, either Hendricks or Bombay Sapphire, lives in the freezer ... the Noilly Prat dry vermouth lives in the fridge ... glasses and cocktail shaker go in the freezer an hour beforehand ... ice made from quality spring water ... fresh queen size Manzanilla olives ... perhaps a dash or two of orange bitters or a twist of lemon peel if you like. The classic recipe is a 3:1 ratio of gin to vermouth, but this was developed when the available gin and vermouth were both low quality Prohibition-era stuff. A far drier ratio is 6:1 or even 12:1, which show case the botanicals in the gin you use.  But let’s face it, even the best martini is just a fancy rationalization to pretend you aren’t doing shots of straight grain alcohol.

Hendricks gin is outstanding when infused with some cucumber slices for a couple hours, either in a martini or a gin and tonic. And the tonic is the real stuff from Fever Tree.

Ah, it’s good to have a bit of class now and again and live the high-end life. For a couple hours.

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June 27, 2022

Project Update

Ok, we now have a bathroom faucet. Got a nice looking brushed nickel pump spout kind, in a modern squared off style. So the transitional/modern look is still working. It will be delivered in a couple days. And the Lowe’s Big Project discount plan is better than the HD plan; we get 5% off on everything we buy, whether it’s on sale or not. Every penny counts.


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I’m going to get over to the building permit office before they open at 8am Wednesday. Because I know the plumbing code guy Duane shows up there that morning. And I want a 100% definitive answer on this damn washing machine drain pan & drain line question, as it impacts EVERYTHING we want to do. Worst case, it’s a necessity (even though a drain pan & line isn’t in any of the plumbing codes or residential codes anywhere!), then we can’t do it, and our kitchen reno becomes simpler and far less expensive, and frankly, pretty but pretty sucky. Moving the laundry upstairs lets us rearrange everything in the kitchen, swap out a couple walls, add tons of cabinets, alcove off the fridge for a built in look, and lets me put a big ass hood over the stove which gets moved out of the damn corner and into a place where I can work.

And we have to have an absolute answer. I get Y/N from HIC guys I talk to, so who knows? But the code inspector ... his word is effectively law.


And this is how I’ve spent most of today ... looking at more than 400 faucets online, choosing more than 70, then giving it over to her to narrow it down to half a dozen, then pleasantly debating the +/- of each one. And the Fresca Fortore wins.

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June 26, 2022

Addendum To SCOTUS CCW Decision

I would like to point out the underlying reality behind SCOTUS’ concealed carry ruling the other day.

What it did was to throw out NY’s 1911 Sullivan Act. What’s the Sullivan Act?

No matter how little you know about government corruption, it’s a guarantee you’ve heard of Tammany Hall, which was the government of New York City in the very early years of the 20th Century. Boss Tweed? Yeah, you’ve heard that name too. The government ran the criminal gangs that they used both as a source of income ("10% for the Big Guy” sound familiar?) and as violent enforcers to make sure there was no opposition to whatever they wanted to do.

So in comes Sullivan, “doing something” to pacify the upset elites, while actually making things worse. That approach sounds awfully familiar doesn’t it?

Oh, BTW, Timothy Sullivan was in the late stages of syphilis at this time. Just a year or so later he would be committed to a mental institution, but he later escaped and wound up dead, cut in half on some train tracks.

The father of New York gun control was Democratic city pol “Big Tim “Sullivan — a state senator and Tammany Hall crook, a criminal overseer of the gangs of New York.

In 1911 — in the wake of a notorious Gramercy Park blueblood murder-suicide — Sullivan sponsored the Sullivan Act, which mandated police-issued licenses for handguns and made it a felony to carry an unlicensed concealed weapon.

This was the heyday of the pre-Prohibition gangs, roving bands of violent toughs who terrorized ethnic neighborhoods and often fought pitched battles with police. In 1903, the Battle of Rivington Street pitted a Jewish gang, the Eastmans, against the Italian Five Pointers. When the cops showed up, the two underworld armies joined forces and blasted away, resulting in three deaths and scores of injuries. The public was clamoring for action against the gangs.

Problem was the gangs worked for Tammany. The Democratic machine used them as shtarkers (sluggers), enforcing discipline at the polls and intimidating the opposition. Gang leaders like Monk Eastman were even employed as informal “sheriffs,” keeping their turf under Tammany control.

The Tammany Tiger needed to rein in the gangs without completely crippling them. Enter Big Tim with the perfect solution: Ostensibly disarm the gangs — and ordinary citizens, too — while still keeping them on the streets.

In fact, he gave the game away during the debate on the bill, which flew through Albany: “I want to make it so the young thugs in my district will get three years for carrying dangerous weapons instead of getting a sentence in the electric chair a year from now.”

Sullivan knew the gangs would flout the law, but appearances were more important than results. Young toughs took to sewing the pockets of their coats shut, so that cops couldn’t plant firearms on them, and many gangsters stashed their weapons inside their girlfriends’ “bird cages” — wire-mesh fashion contraptions around which women would wind their hair.

Ordinary citizens, on the other hand, were disarmed, which solved another problem: Gangsters had been bitterly complaining to Tammany that their victims sometimes shot back at them.

So gang violence didn’t drop under the Sullivan Act — and really took off after the passage of Prohibition in 1920. Spectacular gangland rubouts — like the 1932 machine-gunning of “Mad Dog” Coll in a drugstore phone booth on 23rd Street — became the norm.

So NYC’s first gun control act was a sham bit of virtue signalling pushed by a crooked political gangster boss who was pretty much insane by then from a sexually transmitted disease.



And it only took the Supreme Court 111 years to see through this BS.

https://nypost.com/2022/06/23/ny-gun-law-shot-down-by-scotus-spurred-by-rise-in-gunplay-in-1911/

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June 25, 2022

And In The News ...

Watching the turbo stupid reactions to the latest two Supreme Court Rulings.

• The uproar of the CCW decision, finding that New York has been playing dirty for over 100 years. No kidding. But the media and the commie politicians are acting like this is the worst thing ever and it’s the end of the world, and the whole country will become “The Wild West” with shootings going on everywehere.

Um, got news for you stupid people.

Nearly half the country, 24 out of 50 states are already permitless constitutional carry. Which means if you’re old enough, and not a criminal or a mental case, you can buy a pistol and carry it with you any way you want whenever you want. Without a permit. These states have not devolved into raging gun battle zones on every street corner. Several more states are considering becoming constitutional carry. Vermont has been this way since it became a state. Which was also when they outlawed slavery.

Nearly ALL the country, 43 out of 50 states, are Shall Issue states. Which means if you’re old enough, and not a criminal or a mental case, you can buy a pistol and carry it with you any way you want whenever you want. So there are 19 states (43-24) that issue CCW permits. Some require training classes.

Most of these 43 states recognize a large degree of reciprocity between other similar states. Which means you can take your gun in your pocket from one state to another without a problem.

Only 7 states have this now unconstitutional “proof of need” nonsense, and ALL of them have been run by leftists for generations. All of them are high crime areas, especially their major cities, in which the criminals (the majority of which are minorities) go about armed at all times, laws be damned.

So what this decision does is “level the playing field”, giving the law abiding citizens of those 7 states the chance to defend themselves against the armed and violent criminal masses that they live amongst. Sounds like “common sense” to me.



• The uproar of the abortion decision, finally finding that the Roe v Wade decision of 50 years ago was a crock of crap based on smoke and mirrors and feelings. And it’s now Double The End Of The World, although anyone with a brain cell has seen this coming for years, and everyone knew it was about to hit when the papers were leaked a few months ago.

Penumbras and Emanations aside, this is a 10th Amendment issue, and has always been one. State’s Rights. It is not, and never was a constitutional right.

So, what’s the upshot? 

Mainly, that the federal government is no longer on the hook to pay for the abortions of minority women who use it as a form of birth control. Gee, too bad. They’ll just have to practice abstinence, or use one of the many forms of birth control, just like everyone else. And pay for it themselves, just like everyone else.

I can triple chrome plated guarantee that abortion will not become illegal or unavailable in any urban ghetto area. Period, full stop.

And any state legislation with half a brain cell - gosh I hope we have one or two of those - will, instead of reviving dusty laws from 120 years ago that have been gathering cobwebs since 1972 - will write up some kind of bill and let their citizens vote on it. LET THE PEOPLE DECIDE; their bodies, their choice. I’d put this on the ballot every 3 to 5 years. I’ve written about this idea before. Maybe the focus needs to go below the state level, down to the county or city level.  Once again, I absolutely guarantee that there will be legal abortion available in every major and even minor urban area, and in every college town in the country. But it won’t be paid for by the federal government for special people any longer. Let the states decide if they want to fund that car on the gibbs gravy train.

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Bowling Blogging!

I don’t know why I bother for Summer League. We have fun, but we suck. We do have the highest total scratch pins though, but the situation is geared against us. We went 2-5 again, so we’re back in last place. Summer League is a loss leader, a “give ‘em a taste and they’ll want more” gambit, built so that the beginners always win, and then sign up for winter league where they’ll have their asses handed to them until they get better.

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Project Update

We’re starting to fill up the garage with the bits and pieces we’ll need. We haven’t bought much of anything yet, but we have found some pretty good deals.  We found a bathtub, but then found a lot of confusion around it. This particular model has a dozen or so sub-models, depending on the width, length, height, color, and which end you want the drain hole on. And there has been an odd variation in the prices; often with the left drain version costing a couple hundred more than the right drain version, or the same tub priced much higher at Lowe’s or Home Despot. So we got lucky and found the one we want for $200 less at HD this time, and ordered it. No delivery available, but the store isn’t far away, so off we went.

Got there, and of course had to look at flooring and tiles first. Another nice brand of flooring HD carries exists only online. Screw that; by the time the samples get here the sale will be over, and if an LVP brand doesn’t carry the full kit of edge trims, don’t waste your time. Next!

So looking at the tile display, and of course she gravitates to the fancy stuff, which is around $13-18 per square foot. And that’s the discount HD price; a nearly identical bit of tile from the fancy tile shops costs at least 3 times as much. But while dreaming, we found a cart piled up with boxes of tile marked down for quick sale. So we looked, and we liked, and the price was right. The same brand same style tile in other colors in $12.99/sqft. This one, a grey hexagon style, had been reduced 50% to $6.50/sgft. Then the stuff on the cart was marked down to $3.50. So we bought all of it, which is more than enough to do the bathroom floor. Matching baseboard trim tiles were marked down a similar amount, to a cart price of $2.50 each. So we snagged a box of those too. But when we got to the checkout, the girl used her scanner and entered the SKUs, and the price came up 89 cents. Hey, the computer is always right, right? So we got $13/sqft tile for 89¢/sqft. Score!!

$57 for the entire floor, instead of $750. And then we loaded up her SUV and got the heck out of there before somebody changed their digital minds.

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June 21, 2022

Hello BMEWS my old friend, I’ve come to post on you again.

Not a whole lot happening here. I got the letter from the contractor that the bathroom wall isn’t load bearing, so I forwarded that to the condo association. When they approve that, they’ll write me a letter that the work we want to do is OK by them, and I can give that to the building permit people.

Meanwhile we have a tub showing up in a few days. And we’ve found the toilet we want to get, and if I take a drive over to Somerset 30 miles away and pick it up from the warehouse, I can get it for half price. Worth it!!

OK.  So her sister was here for a couple days whipping our butts into action to get this place cleaned up and thinned out. We made a lot of progress but aren’t done yet.

I’ve got flooring samples coming, as there’s a light oak toned long SPC LVP we’re interested in. While cleaning up the garage - we found about half of it - I came across two spare floor tiles from the flooring the previous owner put in in 2007. It’s Armstrong, with a gigantic click-lock edge, and the stuff is made out of wood pulp. Sawdust. No underpad, and loud as all get out. Totally not waterproof either, as we found to our dismay a couple years ago.

So she’s working tonight, and took her wholesome dinner of salad and a couple hard boiled eggs. Bleh. So I made cornbread and a mess of blackened shrimp, extra spicy. Mmm, mmm, delici-mouse!

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Oh God, I just found out about RevoTile. It’s real tile, in whatever look you want, on click together waterproof plastic boards just like LVP. Put down an underlayment, snao the tile floor into place, and you’re left with perfect grout lines and the job is done in a jiffy. Grout lines are perfect, so just fill them in. Tired of your tile floor? It’s a floating floor, so just pull it up and put in something else.

Holy cow. I don’t want her to find out about this stuff. She’s already thinking about laminate or even hardwood flooring, as it turns out that at least part of the middle level is on plywood or particleboard sub-flooring. I can’t go through this aggravating and infinite process again, much less twice more.

https://www.flooringstores.com/blog/snap-together-tile-flooring/

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I’m following developments in the Uvalde shooting’s police response. Video has surfaced, along with recorded radio communications, that the cops were in the building, outside the door, heavily armed within a few minutes. And then THEY STOOD AROUND FOR OVER AN HOUR while children in the classroom just feet away were being murdered.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/06/21/texas-dps-officials-make-stunning-declarations-about-uvalde-police-response-to-school-shooting-n581888

Don’t just fire these worthless cowards. Hang them. But slowly. Tighten the ropes until they start to choke, half pull the trapdoor. And then leave them there for over an hour.

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[ sorry, snipping off old posts sometimes me to sses up the html. trying to stay on top of it ]

June 19, 2022

Happy Juneteenth. Get wasted, dip everything in mumbo sauce, and completely ignore the 360,000 soldiers in the Union Army who died to give you that freedom.

Meanwhile, this is important symbolism. Granted, it’s patent infringement of a product of the 1960s, and thus completely unoriginal. No comment.

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June 15, 2022

FAUCI HAS THE COVID

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/fauci-tests-positive-covid

Fauci is fully vaccinated and has had two booster shots.

Lot of good they did.

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Bowling Blogging!!

A minor miracle ... we won 5-2 tonight. We only had to give away 44 pins in handicap, and we were able to overcome that. While I was a bit under average tonight, the rest of my team was on or over average, and our opponents couldn’t get it together enough in games 1 and 2.

So yay us, and Go Team!

We’re probably still in last place, just a bit less pathetically than we were last week. It’s a start! Nowhere to go but up!

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Yay, it’s bowling night!!

No, I won’t write about flooring, or paint, or drywall. But I did order a bathtub. Which might sit in the garage for several months, but our approach is shifting to “buy it now before the price doubles in 2 months”.

Crap, we’re out of ice cream. Meh, maybe hit the grocery store on the way home, IF we get out before they close.

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June 14, 2022



If It’s Tuesday, It’s Bear Day Around Here

This was just a “little” one, a young bear but not a cub. Wifely saw a really big one a couple streets over last Tuesday, which crossed the whole road in just 4 or 5 steps. Welcome to the jungle.

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June 13, 2022

Back again, slightly.

More Project Stuff: LVP Flooring

We’ve been doing tons of research on flooring. Looks like we’re going to go with that snap together vinyl stuff, which goes by the egotistical name of Luxury Vinyl Plank. So we looked into it, and into it, and into it. And found that it comes in two kinds; one where the middle layer of the plank sandwich is made of a wood and resin material called WPC, which is a bit softer and quieter, and a stone and resin material called SPC. The SPC stuff is quite a bit stiffer and stronger, although the planks themselves are thinner. PSC flooring is much more dent resistant. The bottom of the plank comes three ways; bare naked for the budget stuff, or with a thin cork pad or one made of closed cell very firm foam called IXPE.

Just to make things a bit more complex, one of the LifeProof lines sold at HomeDepot, but actually made by Halstead New England, uses a closed cell foam layer they call ISOCORE. So it’s a kind of WPC, only without the W part. Other styles of theirs use an SPC core.
Lowe’s has their own house brand too, Smartcore, which is made by Coretec, the biggest name in the vinyl flooring universe. They invented the stuff back in the day. The best of the HD or Lowe’s LVP are good products and they cost just a few cents less per foot than the big name brands, but you can get the stuff easily and there’s no BS finding out the cost ... which is a real pain sometimes, and utterly common throughout the whole industry. Even online, you usually have to submit a request for a bid, and then they contact you. If I had to choose one, I’d go with the Smartcore Pro from Lowe’s. This is an SPC plank with a rubbery foam underpad, and it’s known that the locking groove is superior to what Lifeproof uses. $4.19 / sq ft. LifeProof is $3.69. For a 500 sq ft job, that’s a $250 difference for something you’ll walk on for 20 years. AFAIK, these planks only come in the standard 48” length, so if you want long boards look elsewhere.

And then there’s the wear layer on top, which is a super thin heat and vacuum applied layer of plastic that is infused with ceramic dust or even diamond dust. The thickness of this layer relates directly to the longevity of the plank: thicker lasts longer. For budget flooring the wear layer may be as thin as 6 mil, a mil being 1/1000”. Average flooring uses a 12 mil wear layer, the good stuff uses a 20 - 22 mil layer, and the commercial grade uses a 30 mil layer. And you also need a vapor barrier / underlayment, which is about 0.5 - 1.5mm thick. While much thicker ones exist, you can’t use them with LVP, because the snap connections will pop apart if there is too much give in the underlayment.

LVP comes in several edge designs as well. Most have a very slight bevel commonly called micro-bevel, but there are several steps up from there where the bevel is made more prominent. And they come in 4 kinds of surface texture, from a little to a lot, with the most expensive texture being this grain matched embossed thing, where the surface texture is matched to the grain look of the photograph of the actual plank of wood that is used for the appearance layer of the plank. Gee whiz.

We’re on some kind of concrete slab here as far as we can tell. Flooring concrete comes in three flavors as well: regular concrete, which is heavy, lightweight concrete which uses a lighter aggregate so it weighs less, and this stuff known as gypcrete, which weighs quite a bit less and uses powdered gypsum (wallboard dust) instead of sand. Some of them are notorious for chipping and cracking, which kind of negates their intended use as fire-proofing and sound deadening. But they were a big thing back in the late 70s, especially for condos. OTOH, the middle level of our place just might be on a plywood subfloor over a wooden support frame. Because that would have been an easy build, would have made construction access to the pipes simple, and would have saved money as it would allow just two pours to make this place instead of three. And we’ll never know until we rip up the current floor and look.

The subflooring material guides your choice of underlayment, as not every kind works with every material. And there are dozens of brands, all of which have several lines, and most of which are garbage. So if you don’t want to pay a buck a foot for bubble wrap, you go with either a rubber based one or a felt based one. And the vapor barrier always goes on the top side. The one I’m going with is a combination of synthetic rubber and felt, works on any kind of subflooring, and is made especially for vinyl flooring. 39¢ / sq ft, in rolls of 360 sq ft. Float it or glue it down.

And to make our research task nearly infinite, there are nearly 100 brands of vinyl flooring out there, and each brand makes 6 or more styles. Quite a lot of the better ones are seriously overpriced, and we’re not even looking at the high-end stuff. Middle of the road, but a small step or two up the quality ladder.

Looks like Coretec Plus if we go with WPC, or Coretec Pro Plus XL if we go with the long SPC planks. I really loved the Global Gem products, their two top lines are the best made stuff I found, but they’re very expensive, there is no warranty if you buy them online, and we have just one local dealer, the same guy who gave us a really high price on the Coretec.

I’m exhausted by this whole process. I’ve spent entire days online looking and learning. And I’m tired of it. But buy it now and store it, because the price is going to go up.

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June 8, 2022



Bowling blogging!!

We lost 0-7 this week, making our 4 week record 6-22. Total suckage. Dead last place. Oh well, summer league. I bowled well over average in all 3 games, but my teammates didn’t come close.

OTOH we gave away 161 pins in handicap to a team of newbies who have a vacancy. So that was hard to overcome.

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I’m tired today. Even though it’s a perfect Spring day, I think I’ll take a nap. No, it’s not the Covid again, even though my state of NJ is all ALL RED status for the past few weeks, as BA2.12.1 is now dominant over BA2 which pushed out BA1 (Omicron) and is about to be pushed out by new variants BA4 and BA5. And so it goes, around and around. Time to get back on the vitamins/supplement bandwagon, just in case. No, I’m just staying up too late and then getting up too early.

I’ve done as much as I can with the renovation project at this point, until I get some information from the building code inspectors and some kind of price guesstimate from the contractor. Still waiting on both of those.

The world continues to go straight the Hell, and now it looks like a major root cause is the lack of delivered urea products. Farmers need lots of it as fertilizer, and they aren’t getting enough, even at the wildly inflated prices. Truckers need it for this DEF stuff, which cuts their emissions. Union Pacific has cut back shipments to everyone. Go look up who are the majority stockholders there and at the urea factories. Same crew. Tinfoil hat conspiracy theory time, until it comes true as so many of them have in the past couple years.

Meanwhile, China, FJB, January 6th, and all the corrupt out of control aspects of our governments. Not to mention the Fed printing money as fast as they can, devaluing our fiat currency even more, rampant fuel prices that are only going to get worse, and the most asinine and destructive policy decisions to come out of DC in more than a century. Meanwhile, mass shootings nearly every day, and crime reaching apocalyptic levels. Good thing the Left defunded the police and the Soros DAs won’t prosecute because raycis.

Climb any summit and take a look. What you’ll see is a path this nation is being dragged down by the most dissolute concentration of human beings ever produced on these shores… a route that at its terminus is the “pit of man’s fears.” That pit is where they’ll dump us unless we defeat these terrible people.

America’s troubles aren’t from “We the People.” We the People are decent, law-abiding folk.  We’re working jobs and raising our kids.  We’re good neighbors.  We play between the lines, as they say.

We’re being crushed, increasingly daily.  Inflation climbs, while energy shortfalls cause gas and grocery store prices to soar, stretching family budgets.  How far off is the breaking point for tens of millions of people living paycheck-to-paycheck?  Biden just shrugs and blathers. 

Maybe I should take a nap for a decade or three. Drew Van Winkle.

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June 6, 2022

Project Update

Our hopefully-someday contractor came by this afternoon and verified that the privacy wall across the middle of our bathroom is NOT load bearing. We talked about joists and stud wall and lapped joists and all that good construction guy talk, and he convinced me. Reaching up into the ceiling through a hole that a can light was in, and then taking pictures, was proof of the pudding. There is no joist lapping. And the privacy wall was installed underneath the 70s style double drywall ceiling, which served as a firebreak. These days there is fire resistant drywall that is mold and dampness resistant, and thus perfect for bathrooms.

Turns out our joists are 2x10s, each of which runs about 22 feet from end to end. While this is a bit long for an unsupported span, it’s perfectly fine for a span with some support partway along it. And this is where my confusion came from. Because the cross wall under the middle of the joists is only load bearing for 80% of its length. Which is weird, but this whole condo park is weird.

Joists are long wide boards laid on edge that support the floor above them. Since we live in a downstairs unit, we’re on concrete slab, so there are no joists below us. But in our ceiling we have joists, which support the unit that’s above ours. Ok, it’s above half of ours, as we have a truss roof over the lower and middle levels.

A “span” is a length of completely unsupported boards. It’s like a bridge. You’ve got support on both ends, but air in the middle. While a 2x10 is a bit small for a 20 foot span ( the rule of thumb is that the length of the span in feet, divided by 2, is the actual height in inches of the joist board, which is then rounded up to the next larger size of lumber IF you want a robust floor. That round up is not mandatory though. Consider a 22 foot run. 22 / 2 = 11, so you’d use a 2x11 joist. Except they don’t exist, so you use a 2x12, the next larger size. And the closer you space them, the stronger support they make, and thus can be run a little longer. So a 2x10 joist network, spaced 12” on center, can be a bit longer than a 2x10 joist network spaced 16” on center.

A span supported by one or more walls somewhere in its length actually counts as 2 or more spans. So if you use a 24 foot long joist, but put a stud wall under it at the 13 foot mark. what you have is actually 2 spans, one 13 feet long and the other 11 feet long. That’s what we have on one side of our unit. But on the bathroom side that same length has two walls under it; one about 70 inches from the left end, and another about 56” from the right end. Which leaves the bathroom in the middle, about 9 1/2 feet long. So the privacy wall abut 43” inches in really isn’t doing anything and isn’t seriously load bearing, even though it is in line with the wall on the other side which is load bearing, and is even cantilevered outside our unit to support the balcony of the upstairs unit. That’s the weird part.

But for us, the happy bottom line is that the privacy wall can safely come out, giving us an open line of sight and another 4” of floor space.

Not to mention that his photos prove that the privacy wall was installed AFTER the ceiling went in, and is below the double layer drywall with a gap between the layers that functioned as a fire resistant ceiling back in the 70s. Which means this wall stays up by habit, and is mounted gently with some really long nails. The soffits may be the same way. And they might come out as well. That will make the bathroom look mega bigger. Yay!!

Ok, time to fire up the grill and char me a nice tri-tip steak that’s been marinating for 2 hours now. Woo hoo, I get to use my new super accurate high end instant read grill thermometer.

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June 3, 2022

But, but, but, I thought we were supposed to believe the science!

In California Bees Are Now Fish

A trio of judges in California said on Tuesday that bees can be legally classed as a type of fish as part of a ruling that brings added conservation protections for the endangered species.

“The issue presented here is whether the bumble bee, a terrestrial invertebrate, falls within the definition of fish,” the judges wrote in their ruling. And, they concluded, it does.

Genus or penis, California is always in favor of changing it.

Does this mean I’ll need a fishing license to use my can of bee spray?

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OMG, Now We Even Have Transgender Weather

Pacific hurricane Agatha crossed over Mexico and is now tropical storm Alex. This conversion was done at no cost whatsoever, proving that gender reassignment surgery is much less expensive in Mexico.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Tropical storm warnings were issued early Friday for much of the Florida peninsula, Cuba and the Bahamas as a system that battered Mexico moves through the Gulf of Mexico, bringing threats of heavy rain and wind for the weekend.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami said the storm once known as Agatha in the Pacific Ocean will be known as Alex in the Atlantic Ocean basin.

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GET ME OUT OF HERE ...

Posted by Drew458     on 07/02/2022 at 07:31 AM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
• Comments (331) • Trackbacks(3)  Permalink •  

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