6/19/2016

Thoughts On A Sunday

The distant roar of motorcycles has been what we've been hearing since last weekend. With the closing of the annual Motorcycle Week quickly coming upon us, the roar will fade away and become nothing but a memory until next year.

I have always been of two minds about Bike Week, both enjoying it and being annoyed by it at the same time. Then again it has always been a paradoxical event, between the flood of tourist money on the plus side and the traffic tie-ups on the minus side.

One down side has been the number of injuries and fatalities caused during accidents, with quite a few of them being car versus motorcycle collisions. They are as inevitable as the roar of hundreds of thousands of motorcycle engines. Some years we see very few. Other years, like this one, we see too many. I know everyone would like to find a way to keep those to a minimum, but there's only so much anyone can do, so the accidents will continue.

And so it goes.

****************

For all of his storytelling about small town life in Minnesota, you'd never know that Garrison Keillor is not a fan of small towns because of “their industriousness, their infernal humility, their schoolmarmish sincerity, their earnest interest in you, their clichés falling like clockwork — it can be tiring to be around.” No, Garrison, tell us what you really think.

I don't know about you, but I find that “tiring” experience to preferable to the 'right-thinking' condescension and inflated self-worth of so many living in huge suburbs and cities. So much of what they know just isn't so...and they don't care that they're mis-informed.

****************

First we have an ill informed NYT reporter writing about his 'temporary PTSD' fro firing an AR-15. (I doubt he actually fired one because what he describes and my own experiences doing so don't even come close to matching.)

Then we have Oleg Atabashian going one step further and reporting his experience firing a Daisy BB gun. (“Careful kid, you'll shoot your eye out!”)

Oh, the humanity!

****************

Turnabout is fair play, Dems. If the Democrat AG's go after AGW skeptics then the Republican AG's will go after the alarmists.

Of the two, who has done the most harm? It sure as heck hasn't been the skeptics.

****************

I find it interesting that one college with a student body that is 97% female and a California university with 36,000 students had no reported rapes in 2014 are still seeing protests and rallies about the “rape culture” that exists on the respective campuses.

That of 2200 colleges surveyed about sexual assaults on campus, more 1300 of them had no reported rapes. This is not seen as good news, but as evidence of a rampant rape culture. What's even more troubling is the 1300+ campuses that reported no sexual assaults are seen as “worrisome”.

Does that mean the people who see such a finding as worrisome do so because they believe all reports of sexual assault are being suppressed, or that college women on those campuses don't seem to realize that all sex, even consensual sex, is in reality rape?

These folks have got to get a life.

****************

David Starr asks the question - “What did the founders mean by the word 'militia'”

I also added my 2¢ worth in the comments, dispelling the incorrect interpretation of the phrase “well regulated militia”, something most people get wrong.

****************

I've always thought it was, particularly after they got all the bugs worked out.

Why the F-22 Raptor is such a bad-ass plane.

Frankly, I think they should start up production again because we don't have nearly enough of them (only 186 even though there were supposed to be 700 built and delivered) and it can do things no other air superiority fighter can do and the F-35 can not. Then again, the F-35 was not designed for the air superiority role, but as a strike fighter. (It is also not a combat air support aircraft like the A-10 despite the USAF's claims to the contrary.)

With both Russia and China getting ready to field their versions of Fifth Generation fighters and in large numbers, we need to get our proven fighter back into production.

****************

And that's the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the roar of motorcycle engines have faded away until next year, the number of boats on the lake is the highest it's been in years, and where summer starts tomorrow!