Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Thermostat follies

I did not lampoon the new federal recommendation from the Department of Energy saying that you should set your thermostat to 78 degrees in the summer, even though recommendations have a disturbing way of metastasizing into actual laws, particularly under Democrat presidents.

The Energy Star partisans at that agency also say that you should jack the temperature up to 82 degrees when you sleep, for the sake of -- what else? -- energy savings.

Talk radio legend Rush Limbaugh was among the people who did lampoon the new guidelines (on his show yesterday), and that made me happy. Whether this is a "perfect example of socialist government" I couldn't say, but I concur with Mr. Limbaugh's scorn for the idea that having a ceiling fan blowing on your face at night mitigates the discomfort of trying to sleep at 82 or 85 degrees.

While I do sometimes take an almost canine joy in having the wind blowing in my face, it's not ceiling fans that bring that joy. My air conditioning has been out of commission since early in May, and won't likely be replaced before next spring. Repair is not a viable option, given the age of the system and the Federal regulations outlawing R22 refrigerant by 2020. I make do with ceiling and floor fans, not to mention air conditioned public places.

With that as context, let me add that indoor temperatures in mid-Eighties and low Nineties don't make me feel virtuous; they just make me feel hot.


Friday, August 2, 2019

The new politics

Conrad Black offers an acerbic but spot-on analysis in the pixels of American Greatness:

"Andrew Weissman and the other fanatical partisans who conducted the so-called Mueller investigation and wrote the report of it, sent an infirm figurehead forward to defend their dirty work under withering examination before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees last week. They knew from the beginning, as the Strzok-Page texts confirm, that “there was no there there” on the bunk about Trump-Russian collusion, but spun the farce of the Mueller investigation out for two years trying to provoke Trump into an action that could be called obstruction of justice, and sold through the wall-to-wall Democratic chorus in the national media as a “high crime or misdemeanor” such as “treason or bribery” which the Constitution requires two-thirds of the Senate to be convinced of beyond a reasonable doubt to remove a president.

Obviously, as Trump did not take the bait, there was no chance of that, so the best they could do was to invent the preposterous notion that failure to “exonerate” the president of obstruction meant that the House of Representatives should pursue it through impeachment. It is such cynical nonsense they can’t get even the Democratic majority of the House to vote for an impeachment resolution, and are trying to substitute continued investigation in what is taintingly called an “impeachment inquiry,” to try to smear Trump enough to cost him reelection."