1. Heres a thought- IGNORE bidens bullshit. Keep on doing what you are doing!

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2. My wife’s best friend isn’t a liberal. She is actually apolitical and clueless about anything political. She and her boyfriend voted for Biden based on “feelings” and news stories that made Trump look like a big meanie.

   She came to dinner with us on Saturday and was complaining about the increase in gas prices. I told her that she voted for Biden, and this was his doing. She tried to reply that “Oh, I don’t discuss politics.” I then replied that it doesn’t matter whether or not you do, this is the doing of YOUR presidential vote.

   Every four years, the press tells us how important it is that everyone vote, but they never explain how you should be an educated voter. Therein lies the problem. There are MANY people like her: people who vote without thinking about what they are voting for. Before we were married, my wife was just like her. She still is to a smaller extent. She hates the news and hates discussing politics. She says it is too depressing and stressful, so she avoids it because “It doesn’t affect me, and there is nothing I can do about it anyway.”

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   1. Consider all the people in blue states who were absolutely shocked this summer to find out that the couldn’t just buy a fully automatic machine gun and take it right home, even though they needed it right away.
      Most people tend to be ignorant of the important things until it affects them personally- and a lot of them still never learn.
      For instance, the French never quite picked up that “charging a mass of people with range weapons tends to be a losing tactic, no matter how much ‘honor’, ‘elan’, or ‘fire’ your soldiers have. You’d think after one 14th century battle, things would have clicked, but they were doing that crap up until 1917.

3. Re NM, our beloved governor MLG has been avowedly anti fossil fuel production since she was elected. There’s no surprises here to her administration, she wants this.

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4. I work O&G. I’m away from hone 26 weeks a year on average. One year between May 1st and September 1st, I had 3 nights in my own bed. You take the work when you can get it and and you bank the cash for when there is no work. Sone years are better than others.

   This has really pissed off a lot of people; welders, pipefitters, NDE hands, equipment operators, surveyers. Yes that includes D9 operators.

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5. I have no idea why people are surprised by this. The stance of the Democrat Party has been that any energy aside from wind/solar is ‘unsustainable’ and evil.

   The fact that wind and solar cannot fill our needs is not their problem, either. They just figure they’ll buy it from someone else.

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   1. They won’t buy it from someone else. They’ll kill people at the bottom until everyone left has enough to live on. That’s why they don’t want us to know about Holodomor.

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   2. I look at it like this.

      Oil, gas, coal … all fossil fuels are literally “stored solar” energy. Using them for energy is drawing on a “solar battery,” which is fine in the short term, but can’t be used indefinitely. You want a generator, not a battery, long-term.

      Long-term, we have the following energy sources available to the planet: solar (includes wind and hydro, as those processes are driven by the sun); gravitational (tides); and nuclear. (Geothermal is a combo of gravitational and nuclear.)

      Long-term, therefore, we need to work with this combination, and it would be nice to reserve the petrochemicals for things like, oh, plastic. But it will take time to get there, and when we do we will probably want the ability to make liquid and gaseous petrochemicals via electrochemical means – gasoline is a great fuel, oil is a great lubricant, and natural gas is great for heating homes, and all of that infrastructure exists.

      So we’d best get over our abhorrence of nuclear fission (there are far better designs out there now), get serious about fusion, and work on the electropetrochemical conversion technologies. Nothing else, long-term, will cut it.

      Keep in mind also the environmentalists will never be satisfied – wind turbines kill birds, solar fields disrupt local environments for desert wildlife, etc.

      1. I’m 100% behind new energy sources. However, after 10 years in R&D I can tell you increased costs and lower profits means R&D is the first to be cut and the Government can’t subsidize all R&D. We need low cost fossil fuel energy to make R&D cost effective and feasible.

         You don’t get from here to the Jetsons by taking a short cut through the Flintstones.

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         1. Agreed, of course.

      2. “get serious about fusion” — well, lots of governments have sunk oodles of money into that. The trouble, as Prof. Larry Lidsky points out (http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trouble-With-Fusion_MIT_Tech_Review_1983.pdf) is that thermonuclear fusion is just barely possible with extremely large machines, much larger and thus vastly more expensive than fission reactors. And contrary to marketing, those machines are in no way “clean energy” — they produce large quantities of dangerously radioactive materials, including in their structural elements. And the stored energy in the magnets makes them extremely dangerous (subject to substantial explosions) if the superconductivity cooling system were to fail.
         Bussard’s “polywell” system is a different matter, but that one is a system that doesn’t seem to get any serious investment.

         1. I agree with your points about typical fusion system concepts – they are large, expensive, dangerous and more of a rad waste hazard than conventional fission reactors.

            Thing is, their fuel – if we can get them working – is more abundant and readily available than for fission, especially if we can do D-D or H-D and not need T. (Breeder reactors and other waste-burner designs notwithstanding.) And the associated proliferation issues with fusion do include so-called “dirty bombs” from the waste, but don’t include atomic bombs. That for me is also a plus.

            1. True, but T-D is the only system that seems to be under consideration in the Big Government projects. D-D is far harder. H-D? Don’t know that one. Bussard mentions a nice H + 11B system that produces only fast alphas at fairly consistent energies — no neutrons — so you can generate electricity directly by capturing those charged particles. Neat, efficient, clean. But impossible in thermal fusion systems, the inherent losses mean no unity gain operation is possible. Possible in a Polywell, if it can be scaled up quite a lot beyond the desktop test units that exist so far.

               1. Hydrogen-Deuterium, simply for ease of getting half the fuel. I don’t know of a proposed reactor concept that makes use of it. H-H would be ideal of course, from an availability standpoint, and we have an operating practical example … but the scale-down is challenging.

                  1. I don’t see H-D as a reactor fuel. “Howstuffworks” doesn’t, not that its article is all that accurate to begin with. Neither does Wikipedia, though it does list esoteric options like ones involving 3He (and also the P-11B option).

6. The comments about NM and the Oil Patch are all correct. Her Imperial Highness Lujan Gresham stated from her election campaign forward that she wants oil, gas, and coal in NM to go away forever. She may be making poor-me faces in public (she and her administration in Santa Fe are cowardly and spiteful), but I can’t help thinking that inwardly, she is gloating.

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7. A 60 day moratorium on permits is not just stopping new wells. Oil, gas, well, any work that requires permitting has permit amendments, changes, or new permits getting filed all the time. An active project may have to get any number of new permits as the project goes on.

   This will not just impact new oil and gas leases, it will likely screw up existing wells.

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8. As for NM going 54% Biden, I have a bridge to sell you.
   What tipped NM (and two of our three congressional districts) were Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Las Cruces, each of which uses and trusts Dominion machines, ballot box stuffing, and any other method by which they can ensure the “right” person “wins.”
   Our district flipped red, in large part due to the previous occupant claiming to be a moderate and working with Trump (pissing off the libs) while walking hand in hand with the “Squad” (pissing off everyone else). There was not enough margin of cheat to ensure her win this time around.
   Even the reservations are getting pissed at Wuhan Lujan, and that is being felt down-ballot in any race that does not receive the special ministrations of the electioneering machine.
   I would wager NM probably (in an honest election) would go 55% red, 45% blue.

9. “Grandpa, how did people light their homes, before candles?”

   “Electricity.”

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