↓ Archives ↓

Posts Tagged → kitchen

Potent symbol of freedom: A gas kitchen stove

Only in the purposefully chaotic and bizarre power politics of 2021 to 2023 do Americans discover themselves clinging not just to their Bible and their guns, but to the gas stove in their kitchen. Yeah, Ol’ Smoky is now a symbol of your personal freedom.

Why in God’s green earth is the federal government (and several state governments including New York and Washington) trying from several different angles (consumer protection regulation, legislation, and straight-up executive branch political fatwa confiscation) to eliminate stoves that burn natural gas?

Because of control! Of you! By the bureaucrats and the lawless control freaks in government!

They want you hooked up to the electrical grid matrix and completely dependent upon whoever controls that electrical grid. One false move by you, and -POW! – your power goes out and it won’t be restored until you delete that mean “right wing” tweet and stop attending that church down the street.

This debacle of bad governance and really bad government overreach is all because a gas stove provides Americans with independence from the electric grid. While the electric grid can be controlled with the flip of a switch or two, as can the power meters on our individual homes, a gas stove operates either from a huge natural gas main pipeline that takes a lot of effort to turn off, which effects multiple city neighborhoods, or from a large propane tank in the back yard.

Propane tanks for residences run from 100 gallons to 3,000 gallons in size, providing the careful homeowner with potentially several years of cooking and heating independence until a fill-up is needed. Hooked up to a non-stop 24/7 gas main, a home can heat and cook with a gas stove 24/7. And in fact, I have personally seen an elderly woman in my neighborhood huddled up in front of her gas stove to stay warm in the winter, while the electric power was down and unavailable. This ability to run your own kitchen and home disconnected from the electric grid is serious independence from control and monitoring!

And the control freaks hate it hate it hate it!

There is a good reason Barack Hussein Obama recently installed a 2,500-gallon propane tank at his luxury vacation beach front mansion on flood-proof Martha’s Vineyard Island. When you have a large propane tank and the power goes out, you can always run a powerful electrical generator off of that propane, as well as heat and cook with your gas stove. Some people even have the old fashioned style natural gas lights in their homes, and they work great! It is like whatever happens with the power grid doesn’t really apply to people with natural gas stoves. You are completely OK and independent.

Turns out, Obama did at least this one thing right in his life, although he won’t admit that he is a hypocrite about it, because the guy is constantly hectoring us about the evils of the propane gas in his tank. I say, if a serial liar Marxist Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama can have a gas stove and the huge propane tank out back to keep the stove fired up and cooking 24/7 off-grid, then an honest-to-goodness genuine red-blooded American like you can have one, too. Just on principle, no questions asked.

What is truly interesting about this subject is the bogus and openly fake “study” supposedly done by the Rocky Mountain Institute that the gas banners and book burners supposedly relied on for their screams of horror and outrage about “the dangers of gas stoves“. Click the link above and see for yourself. This is not a study, nor does it rely on real studies. It is a political brochure with pictures. The concerns that RMI lists are based on the improbability/impossibility of people sitting inside a gas-fired oven while it is on fire, and do not take into account ambient air dilution, stove top hoods and exhaust fans, or the risks from alternatives to gas stoves.

It is as if the only thing that RMI cares about are the potential risks (none of which are proven with actual long term study data showing a strong correlation between gas stoves and related health problems); they don’t even talk about the benefits of gas stoves. Not the least of which is that clean burning natural gas emits far fewer and less pollutants than coal-fired power from the usual electrical power plants where we get most of our electricity.

This gas stove banning business is all about bureaucrats directly controlling your home life, which means your personal freedom. They used a fake “study” by a 100% partisan and ideologically driven activist organization called Rocky Mountain Institute to “inform” their chums in the partisan and ideologically driven activist organization called the mainstream media, who in turn created the (fake) astroturf political target for partisan and ideologically driven politicians who don’t give a fig for the actual scientific truth or for you or for freedom.

Whenever we see so-called “science” claims like this gas stove ban hype that cannot be challenged or debated with its proponents, then we know it is not science, it is propaganda.

Cling to your gas stove for dear life. Do not let go of it, do not give it up, and vote out of office any elected official who supports banning gas stoves. These are bad people, controlling people, who believe they know best how you must live your life. Even the life you live in your own kitchen, frying up chicken and plantains and sauteeing vegetables, all of which really do throw up a whole bunch of oily particles in the air that can get into your lungs. And believe it or not, this is a subject I know a lot about, because after finishing graduate school I took several courses on this subject at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and got “A” grades.

Take it from me, the RMI “study” is BS, the supposed health issue about gas stoves is BS, and I’m not even a doctor. Keep your gas stove, and toss out the RMI study and its claim that your gas stove is dangerous. Live free, my friends. Breathe that free American air and rejoice.

Obama installs a 2,500-gallon propane tank at his luxury beach front mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, and so should you

Just so we are all on the same page about what a racist disgrace Obama is, here he is happily posing with racist disgrace Louis Farrakhan. Don’t listen to anything Obama says, he is a racist dirt bag.

Happy Economy: Consumers & Local Banks vs. The World

The US economy is strong, and it has been strong since a flood of consumer confidence swept in behind a new president who ushered in to a miserable bipartisan vacuum a refreshing cleansing confidence.

Added to that confidence was –and very much is– a renewed pride in America, in being American, and in American-made products. By mid-2017 a sense of 1950s community once lost and now found again birthed a strong antidote to Obama’s “new normal” of slow American decline.

And we can’t just blame Obama. Yes, Obama hates America and did everything he could to destroy our nation from inside and outside. But he was helped significantly by ye olde typical career Republicans who saw money to be made in America’s decline, just as there was money to be made in its growth. But growth is harder, and why work hard if you don’t really have to, they reasoned. Either way, growth or defeat, the big money Republicans bought their many pet congressmen to safeguard their investments and stood by watching as they hit big on a global economy shifting from their American home turf to China, India, the EU, and other undeserving recipients of America’s health.

In fact, America’s veins were opened up and flowing out. Our life force was draining away, and a host of hungry nations were perched around us, like vultures, picking away at the juicy scraps that fell from our Rust Belt homes and boarded up churches. Both Democrats and Republicans were pumping away, pushing our citizens’ energy force, our very national being, into the waiting mouths of so many other nations. And so our American economy had sputtered, dying

That is, until Trump inspired US consumers, and the local banks they work with and rely upon to take what are big steps in their quality of life.

And so like a thing alive, the American economy has powered forward like it has not moved in decades. And why would the economy not be alive? Our collective economy is us, of us, an organic part of us and an extension of us. America has a sense of good health again, and so it follows that our economy is healthy again, too. And it is getting stronger, despite transparent and treasonous attempts to destroy our economy by the Democrat Party and everyone else allied with them, including the governments and industries of China and Russia.

It is sickening that an entire American political party will do everything it can to badmouth, damage or destroy America’s economy simply in order to artificially malign a president they oppose. The cost to America is enormous! Then again, this is the same political party that advocates for illegal invaders over American citizens, for law-breakers and against law-followers, that claims Social Security will be tossed overboard by the other political party and then does everything in its power to give all of our Social Security money to their new chums, the illegal invaders.

So yes, I guess destroying America’s economy and hurting the American citizens standing in the way is to be expected from the Democrat Party and their communications arm, the Mainstream Media.

One discrete sector of the national economy that is changing is the timber industry. When four hundred million (400,000,000 !) middle-income Chinese aspire to own the nice kitchens and hardwood floors that define comfortable life in America, a huge sucking sound can be heard ’round the world as unquantifiable amounts of natural resources are pulled in to that huge nation. And when the Chinese economy began to falter in early 2018, even before the tariff battle, the Chinese domestic demand for American timber dried up. We then learned in late 2018 that the red oak, residual ash, and black walnut that had been bringing us huge export revenue but which were then beginning to stack up in East Coast log yards were not once destined for Chinese factories re-exporting their finished goods back to America. No, those logs and lumber were being used up domestically in China, as China grew its own middle-income population. A population that is now up against the ropes and cannot buy American hardwoods that make pretty kitchens and flooring.

Accordingly the American timber industry is going through a shake-up due to the way timber buyers invested and spent. The fact is that even as they close in China, new cabinet and flooring factories are opening up in several other Asian countries.

And so now on the battlefield it is the confident American consumer and her local bank officers standing strong against the evil political tide that seeks to reverse what has been accomplished, just begun really, since November 2016.  It is happy healthy family and local community versus a global colossus hungry for endless cash, endless money, endless wealth, at any cost, and a domestic political party hungry for power at any cost, even the cost of individual liberties and American success.

In this fight I put my money on the American consumer, not just because I think she is a tough and hard working bunch, but because I am an American. I want her– you, me, us — to win this fight.

Downton Abbey’s “field sports” Part II

Guess I shot from the hip, shot first and asked questions later, didn’t identify my target too well, or another euphemism you may enjoy applying to the lack of foresight I brought to yesterday’s analysis of Downton Abbey’s field sports.

Yes, I could have sneaked a peak ahead of the coming scenes, like many other avid watchers of PBS’s hit show do, but because I lack the time and the inclination to sneak anything, I just sat down in my easy chair and watched the show unfold last night without advance knowledge of its content.

My Sunday afternoon essay about the mediocre depiction of the field sports of Downton Abbey was written beforehand.

So, yes, there was a shooting scene last night, or more accurately, some scenes of wing shooting at driven partridge from bona fide shooting butts, using authentic guns and nice clothes, woven in and out of the story about the Scottish castle party.

But once again, there was more focus on the clothes on the people holding the guns than on the Purdeys, Rigbys, and other Best-quality side-by-side shotguns being used to down the birds.

In 1924, $150,000-then-equivalent Purdey shotguns do not get left with the menial help in the kitchen. They are fussed and obsessed over by their owners, kept locked in their rooms, cased with abundant hand-made accoutrements, labeled beautifully by their makers, and often proudly handed down from generation to generation and worn with traditional hunting clothes.

Scottish castles are loaded with arms and armor, and we barely got a peak at the edged weapons welcoming guests through the front door.

The wagons taking the hunters to the field were right, and a nice touch.  I have ridden in such wagons on traditional hunts, and they are today an unnecessary throwback.  But back then, they were a necessity through muck and muddy moors.

Shooting driven partridge from the butts was mostly done right, with gun loaders ducking to avoid being seen by the birds, and we did see some people bunched up waving white flags, but a real drive could have been filmed for full authenticity.  Actual dead birds could have fallen.  Smoke could have emitted from the barrels.  Etc etc.

Depicting the shooting sports in so briefly and so shallow a manner is the equivalent of dressing Lady Mary in a perfect 1920s top with modern hip-hugger blue jeans below. It is just wrong.  Don’t do that!

A lot of non sequiturs occurred last night that really deprive the Downton Abbey audience of a full appreciation of the English field sport lifestyle, which actually reached its pinnacle in the 1920s (when cheap skilled labor was matched with newly superior steel and modern technology to create firearms that even today still command huge sums of money, not to mention the introduction and propagation of Asian pheasants to the English countryside), the time we are watching in the show.

I am sorry to criticize you, Julian Fellowes, because Downton Abbey is otherwise a great show, everything we want it to be. 

Last night was disappointing, because the rich details of noble Scottish and English hunting rites should have been indulged.  As a student of English history, you are missing a great, even important opportunity here to dig into a meaty subject which your audience will surely enjoy, even if it involves G-U-N-S. 

Maybe in January 2016 we will get a more thorough treatment of a subject that may be missing from Mr. Fellowes’ life today, but which was a nearly daily ritual for the actual residents of Downton Abbey and their peers in the 1920s.