Category: Guest Contributors

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 16MAY2023 – Poem for Today

photog Ed Brault, Guest Contributors , ,

INVICTUS

BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 13MAY2023 – Report from Texas

photog Current Events, Guest Contributors , ,

There is a lot going on in Texas right now. We have an invasion across our southern border that is flooding the state. Abbot can only send so many busses to NY and Chicago.
We have some of the highest property taxes in the country in spite of a budget surplus.
We have a GOP majority in both houses (In name only) because a RINO representative convinced all of the democrats to support him for speaker of the house in exchange for putting democrats in charge of the most powerful committees. This, along with his RINO cronies, makes him unbeatable. As a result, almost no republican priorities get acted on.

I am concerned about Dan Perry and hope that Abbot gets him home as fast as possible. But I don’t think it is on the top of most Texan’s concerns.

 

 

(Editor’s Note:

Thanks for that report Chemist.  That RINO situation sounds awful.

photog)

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 11MAY2023 – Tone Deaf

photog Chemist, Current Events, Guest Contributors , , ,

Mark Twain once said that history doesn’t always repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

I think we may be seeing that rhyming with AB InBev and Budweiser.

I believe it was in the late 1980s that Tomkins PLC, a British conglomerate, bought Smith & Wesson.

They did not understand the US market, or the firearms market or firearms for that matter.

They proceeded to make a number of missteps, not the least of which was to be the only major gun maker to sign on with Clinton’s AWB, HUD restrictions and other anti-second amendment policies.

This led to reduced market share and loss of revenue and negative profits. Things got so bad that the US company Saf-T-Hammer bought the company for $45 million – a fraction of what Tomkins paid.

Now we have the spectacle of InBev, a Belgium company, who purchased Anheuser-Busch a few years ago. InBev clearly does not understand the US market as demonstrated by their partnering with a transsexual to try to sell beer to American blue collar workers.

Bud light sales are down over 25% and a country star recently couldn’t even give it away at a concert.

Now the disease appears to be spreading to other AB brands including Michelob and Budweiser.

 

I wonder if things will get so bad that, like Tomkins, InBev ends up dumping AB at a massive loss.

Truth be told, it would not hurt my feelings.

Guest Contributor – TomD – 27APR2023 – Comments on Feasibility of an “Electric” Navy

photog Guest Contributors , , ,

“This essay is in response to this post” Want to Know How Out of Touch With Reality the Greens Are?”  where there was a congressional review of the idea of all military vehicles being electric.

photog” 

 

It’s worse. Just heard some of the testimony and the idiot is talking about an all electric Navy by 2030.

Thar is so far beyond current technology as to be beyond fantasy. The current peak of battery tech resides in a Ford pickup and contains around 110 kW hours. This is approximately the equivalent of 140 HP hours or 14 HP x 10 hours or some equivalent multiple. The Ford pickups have proven worthless for towing any load more than a few miles.

The current US Destroyer, the Arliegh Burke class, is powered by 4 gas turbines with a combined out put of 78,000 kW, or about 105,000 HP. That’s just propulsion, in addition there are generators on board totaling 21,000kW for misc electric power. So we’re talking about right at 100,000 kW of power generation onboard.

If they get into wartime mode, I’d expect they would need the great bulk of that. A Ford PU battery would power that for around 3 seconds, 1000 Ford PU batteries would push it for an hour.

But a deep water war vessel has to be self reliant for weeks. Even just patrolling at cruise speed, the power requirements must be in the 20,000 kW range. Your hypothetical 1000 Ford batteries would power it for 5 hours then.

And you may think you’ve heard of what happens in a battery fire.

Lets say that battery tech has increased 50X, allowing an Arleigh Burke to do it’s normal 5100 mile cruise at 20 knots and you pull into some South American port on your last couple of kW and looking to recharge 4,400 megawatts hours. And that powered by windmills that aren’t working right now. Yeah, right.

Charging at sea? How’s that going to work? The replenishment boat is running on batteries too.

We are no longer a serious nation. We’ve collapsed into a silliness and stupidity forced on us by, what?